Deth

I’ve been wanting to throw these in someplace for a while now, but much of the spring the weather has just been pretty uncooperative for outside stuff. The times when the weather’s been cooperative at all, we’ve chosen to do a street parking programmed WOD together. Today Molly had to do a different one and me, we wanted to do the programmed one together outside on a different day, so I’m holding off on that.

I was going to come up with either sandbag burden carries or farmer carries but happened to decide to look at the programmed sandbag WOD for next week and guess what? It actually had burden runs and clean and toss overs! Both these movements make great use of the sandbag, I feel that you get the fullest benefit.

I ended up using the 75 pound sandbag. The run was more of a walk the first few rounds as I preferred not to crash and burn considering it was a twenty minute AMRAP and also that my ankle was a bit wonky today. I did manage to mix in some running in the later rounds. It never felt difficult, temperature wise it was a bit warm for my liking, but there was a nice enough breeze, and it was drier than it has been, so it was more than manageable.

I did the power clean and toss overs over an old laundry hamper in the backyard, which is about as high as a box would have been but much easier to bring out to the alley. Typically, with the toss overs, I do them over a PVC pipe in the rack, so I can make it higher and worst-case scenario is the pipe breaks. I didn’t feel like taking the rack apart and bringing all 300ish pounds of it outside and reassembling it in the backyard. (Yes that’s sarcasm.) The basket served its purpose just fine, and the white provided a good contrast to the green grass. These were surprising pretty easy for me too using the 75 pounds of gravel. The slowest part was finding the handles on the bag by feel, since there was not a good way to control how it landed.

Don’t get me wrong, I love using the barbell, and it’s perfect for really building strength and I will love dumbbells if they ever become available for us to buy, but the sandbag is different. Being an odd object and all, it’s much closer to what you would do in real life, where things aren’t perfect. How many times do you have to pick up and move something heavy that’s similar to a sandbag. Bags of soil for us, the pea gravel that we bought for the sand bags, the sand we took out of them to give to the grandkids, all come to mind just within the past couple of weeks. Let’s not forget about the mulch we bought for around the flowers, is another yearly example of areal life application of an odd object.

I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again. The sandbag has really been an outstanding addition to our fitness tools. It doesn’t take up much space and has tons of versatility. Most importantly to me at least is it transfers directly to real life situations.

We’re limited by space, or I’d love to have some other odd objects to play with! I am definitely grateful that we have what we do have. We really are fortunate in that way.