300 LB Sandbags

As regular readers of this blog and a few others know, I've been obsessed with 300-lb slam balls for some time. The thing is, there's only one company I know of which makes slam balls that big, Iron Company. And while I have no reason to doubt that Iron Company makes first-rate equipment, their slam balls are expensive. The 300-pounder costs $1608 on Amazon, over $5 a pound. I got a 45-pounder and a 100-pounder from other companies for about $1 a pound. Including free 2-day shipping. I've searched and searched for some other company that makes slam balls as big as 300 pounds at any price, with no success.

There is another option which I've actually known about for a while: sandbags. Sandbags made for people to exercise with get much heavier than 300 pounds.

The real question is: why has it only been the past day or so that I've actually thought about getting one?

Here's a short video of a guy doing the same thing with a 300-pound sandbag as a person would do with a 300-pound slam ball:



If you want to get all picky and insist that it's NOT the same, because that bag is not round: there are other sandbags which are much closer to round. And I'm not even sure how valid that complaint is. There are sandbags with handles, and I'm not getting one of those.

Searching for a 300 lb sandbag is a totally different experience than searching for a 300 lb medicine ball or 300 lb slam ball or 300 lb dead ball. When you search for the ball you find almost nothing which has to do with a ball anywhere near 300 lbs, and what little you find about 300 lb balls is about that extremely expensive option from Iron Company (Which, again, is a very fine product, I'm sure).

When you search for a 300 lb sandbag, the difference is night and day: you instantly find many, many links, and many, many videos showing people working out with 300 lb sandbags, and, in short: mystery solved.

A sandbag designed to be filled with 300 pounds of sand and then lifted and dropped and tossed about for purposes of exercise, seems to run about $100 on Amazon, give or take. Sand not included.

Sand appears to run about 5 to 15 cents a pound at places like Home Depot. 300 pounds of the extra-fancy 15-cents-a-pound sand would total $45. Total cost: maybe $150 or less total for a 300-pound bag ready to be exercised with. Plus one trip to some place like Home Depot. Which means that, by looking into something I actually already knew about, looking onto it for about 2 minutes, I've already found about 1458 reasons why 300-pound slam balls are not offered for sale everywhere I look.

Okay then. Sandbags it is. Unless I suddenly become very wealthy, which of course would be nice. But you know what? Even if I were extremely wealthy, 1458 bucks would still be 1458 bucks. I'm just sayin'.