Sandbags are an underappreciated tool for helping people achieve improvements in their stability, strength, and overall movement patterns. While the idea of sandbags might be an ancient one, some tracing back to Egyptian times, the modern evolution and thought of the use of the tool is very new. The value of training with sandbags appears to be for those athletes wanting functional strength, agility, and reactive ability.

Old-time strongmen, wrestlers, and martial artists came to the use of sandbags through different means. One of the great curators of physical culture, Brooks Kubik, summed up the unique benefits of sandbags, “You feel sore as you do because the bags (sandbags) worked your body in ways you could not approach with a barbell alone. You got into the muscle areas you normally don’t work. You worked the ‘heck’ out of the stabilizers.”¹

This chapter focuses on the sandbag as an essential and unique tool in the rehabilitation and training armamentarium of clinicians and trainers.

On a foundational level, training with a sandbag functions the same as many other strength training mediums using variables such as load, volume, density, etc. However, using the sandbag like a barbell or other free weights poses problems and doesn’t allow us to maximize the unique attributes of the sandbag.

Most pronounced is the fact that the sandbag is not going to micro load. Placing a heavy emphasis on the load variable is going to limit progress and building progression in training. What the sandbag doesn’t allow for in micro loading, it more than makes up for in expanding our ability to use a wider array of training variables.

The most prominent of these training variables is instability. The primary focus of sandbags in history has been their ability to challenge stability in several different mediums. While some may think the instability of the sandbag only comes in the form of the sand shifting itself, the sandbag actually allows us to expand the concept of instability into four primary concepts.

These four concepts help us create an environment where we can have instability be as progressive as load, volume, and density. It also allows us to address one of the major, but missed, goals of instability training: movement accuracy. While it is true that instability training does improve the neurological system and trains the smaller stabilizers of the joints, what may be one of the most profound benefits of instability training is challenging movement accuracy.

These are elements that reflect varying levels of instability, strength, and challenging of our natural kinetic chains that create efficient movement. While recent research has demonstrated that unstable surface training may not provide any benefit to strength or core development,² there is very strong evidence that unstable implements and body positions can achieve these goals.³

Why doesn’t unstable surface training create the changes in core and overall body strength and stability that we once believed? One reasonable conclusion is that unstable surfaces are not incremental and therefore cause the body spending more time in trying to maintain posture than producing force. In fact, in a review of unstable surface training literature, Behm and Colado stated, “ground-based free-weight exercises with moderate levels of instability should form the foundation of exercises to train the core musculature.”⁴ The key in this description is “moderate.” Too much instability can result in the individual using the startle reflex in response and retarding movement education.

The Squat Press Out (Fig. 24.1) teaches the client not only how to move in the squat pattern but also how to create appropriate tension. Greater core activation and the use of the latissimus dorsi help create better movement through greater core stability. The concepts of proprioceptive neuromuscular facilitation teach us “proximal stability creates distal mobility.”

The pressing out motion is rather specific to the sandbag; having experimented with other implements, the effects are not the same. This is due to the shape, weight distribution, and leverage the sandbag creates. We will discuss the deliberate creation of the right tool shortly.

Once good squatting patterns are developed through the Press Out Squat, we can change holding position and change to the Bear Hug position to apply
more load and not rely on the counterbalance of the weight as greatly. As the client can perform five repetitions of the Bear Hug Squat (Fig. 24.2) with half of their body weight, they have developed enough full body strength to move to the Front Load position.