About Punching Bags

Although the origins of the punching bag are in Western boxing, this basic tool of teaching hand-to-hand combat has gone worldwide and is in general use by most schools of martial arts/sports. Today, the punching bag comes in a wide variety of specialized shapes and sizes, all meant to improve a fighter's conditioning and ability to hit.

Identification

The punching bag is the fundamental piece of training equipment for boxing and has been borrowed from that Western martial sport and adopted by many other martial arts/sports around the world. It is a bag meant to make a good target for punching, combining enough weight to provide for resistance training with enough give to not injure the boxer's hands and wrists.

Types

There are three ways to divide punching bags: shape, mounting and filling. Considering filling, punching bags are either regular (typically, but not always, rag stuffing), water-filled or air. The shape alters the purpose of the bag. Double-end bags are small balls attached to the floor and ceiling by tethers, meant more to train movement and speed than hard hitting, while the duffel-bag-like uppercut bag is used for training with infighting techniques. All bags are mounted in one of two ways: regular (strung from the ceiling) or freestanding (mounted on a weighted base on the floor). So you can have a regular-filled, free-standing heavy bag or a regular-mounted, water-filled teardrop heavy bag.

Significance

Water-filled heavy bags absorb blows better than regular-filled bags and thus protect the hands and wrists better, but many boxers do not like them precisely because that extra give doesn't feel "realistic."
Bag shape is useful for working on particular aspects of boxing. The classic heavy bag is a great all-around training tool, but you cannot land a solid uppercut on it. That is where teardrop and uppercut bags are useful. Freestanding punching bags that offer human-shaped targets are popular for the realism they offer.
Floor mounting generally changes the movement of a punching bag. A bag hanging from the ceiling usually swings on a pivot, but floor-mounted bags usually bounce to and fro on either a spring or a bungee tether and provide a more erratic and elusive target.

Benefits

Training with punching bags is the best way to learn boxing (or any other martial sport) alone, and they are a key element of any training program. A good punching bag workout will bring together practice with footwork, head movement, point defense and constant punching, and punching a heavy bag is a form of resistance training. The result is a workout that can become as hard and as physically demanding as you make it.

Warning

Always work on heavy bags with at least hand wraps, but preferably hand wraps and boxing gloves. The hands and wrists were not built for hitting an 80 to 120 lb. heavy bag for six rounds every day. Working out with a punching bag barehanded guarantees eventual injury.