6 TRAINING TIPS FOR THE HEAVY BAG
Practice your power, good technical habits and bad intentions on heavy bag.
The heavy bag, when used properly, is an efficient and useful piece of equipment for developing power.
Unlike your sparring partners or pad holder, bashing the heavy bag won’t hurt its feelings. Take advantage and practice your bad intentions on it.
Here are 6 tips, when applied will dramatically improve the quality of your training. Like everything else, develop these into habits.
Don’t do them sometimes- do them all the time.
Visualize Your Opponent & Specific Targets - Simple and logical, but most people don’t do it. Always visualize, during bags, shadow boxing and even pads. You’ll improve your accuracy and reinforce correct movement patterns. If not, you’ll likely pick up bad habits and mess up your angles.
Keep Your Hands Up After Combos - Some people throw shots on the bag, then drop their hands, walk around, zone out, then start again. Don’t do that. Concentrate. Focus. Push past that boredom and impulse to have constant breaks. Would you do that in a fight? Then don’t do it on bags!
Use Your Defenses - Make sure to add defense to your game. That’s why it’s important to visualize and see your opponent fighting back which makes you defend. Practice defending and counter striking with power on the bags, and make sure your offense and defense working in conjunction with each other.
Maintain Crisp Technique Throughout The Entire Round - It’s easy to lose focus on technique while hitting the bags. Be aware of your technique the whole time. This will train your mind and body to only settle for the absolute best technique you can do- always. During a fight when you’re tired it’s easy to turn sloppy. That is, unless you have a habit of focusing on technique in all aspects and circumstances in the gym including bags. Nothing less than the absolute best you can do should be your motto during training. Focus, Focus, Focus!!!
Work Through The Boredom To Build Mental Grit - The bags are the best for this: No pad holder yelling to motivate you, no opponent trying to take your head off to motivate you. Just you and the bag, for minutes at a time. If you can stay enthusiastic and busy the whole round with not much arousal you will develop mental grit to keep pushing during your fights.
Hit With Full Power - Take advantage of the bags and get your power conditioning from them. Besides pad work and fighting, you don’t have an opportunity to hit with full power, thus developing full power. If you’re a sprinter who jogs most of his training, you ain’t going to be fast. You need to SPRINT. In this case, bang the bag as hard as you can and try push past your limits. This includes speed; of course, while maintaining technique.
Check in and make sure you’re working on these fundamentals, and keep improving little steps at a time!
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