[ Where does sand come from? The beach! Here is a beautiful sunset, looking just north of the pier here in Cayucos. Photo by ]
Training sandbags are a great way to throw some serious weight into your workouts without breaking the bank. Spend around $20 on a couple bags of pea gravel and a beat up army duffel bag, and you will have yourself a beast of a weight that will keep you busy for quite a while.
Putting it all together is pretty simple:
Dump the pea gravel (75 pounds) into the bag. If you are a true savage, you can dump two bags of gravel into the duffel bag and have a 150 pound sandbag.
I use a cable clamp to close up the bag. This way you can add or remove weight to your heart’s content.
I have heard several methods for adding and removing precise amounts of weight: Filling ziplock bags with sand, then duct taping them, putting several of them into large contractor bags… I get irritated just thinking about having to do all that. It sounds way too difficult. Here’s what I do:
I found an empty yogurt container and filled it to the brim with gravel. I then dumped the gravel into a larger container on a scale. As luck would have it, one yogurt container full of pea gravel weighed in at 2.5 pounds!
I then dumped three more yogurt containers of pea gravel into the larger container and made sure that it weighed 10 pounds, since I expect the scale to be more accurate at 10 pounds than 2.5.
There you have it! Just scoop gravel in or out to get your desired weight, then close it up with the cable clamp.
If you plan on throwing your sandbag, you might want to close up your bag with a couple zip ties wrapped with duct tape. Cable clamps are well made, but I wouldn’t trust them to hold up to a serious impact. With that said, I use my sandbag for cleans, presses, and carries, and the cable clamp has held up like a champ.
Try it out and let me know what you think!
(Thanks to Ross Enamait’s Sandbag Construction Kit pdf for the pea gravel suggestion.)
[...] Make Your Own Adjustable Training Sandbag [...]
Great stuff here. I’ve been thinking about throwing together a sandbag per Ross’s instructions as I’m a big fan of DIY equipment and working out at home.
Darrin-
Thanks for your comment. If you have a local army surplus store, check and see if they have any blemished or damaged duffel bags. The one I show here had a torn strap (which I was going to cut off anyways) and they gave me $5 off after I asked for a discount.
You will love your sandbag, I’m sure. It has become my favorite workout implement. And by making it adjustable, the options are pretty much endless: strength, conditioning, power, etc. all with one piece of equipment.
-Ian
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