Weight Training with Maximum Effect

People have been lifting weights, both for exercise and as a competitive sport, for thousands of years.

Back in the 1970's, weightlifting suddenly became much more popular with the widespread adoption of Nautilus machines and similar devices.

A Nautilus machine only allows the weight to move up and down in a straight line. This makes it much easier to lift the weight, since all of a person's strength can be concentrated on making the weight move up, with no effort needed to stabilize it.

The point of competitive weightlifting is to see how much weight you can lift under certain conditions. The point of weight training is to strengthen your muscles. The conditions of the lifting can and should be adapted to that end. For a while, some people who lifted a certain weight on a Nautilus machine assumed that they were able to lift the same amount with free weights. Eventually, however, people noticed that someone who bench pressed 200 lbs on a Nautilus could not necessarily bench-press anywhere near 200 lbs with free weights. People began to appreciate how much strength was necessary to hold the weight steady, in addition to the strength required to lift it. And so many people went back from Nautilus machines to free weights, because the point of it all, as they saw it, was not to see how much weight they could lift, but to make their muscles as strong as possible. And this would be done, they understood, by doing exercise which was more difficult, not easier.

At some point, I do not know whether it was before or after the advent of the Nautilus machine, some people noticed that objects such as heavy balls, kegs, stones, sandbags and so forth, can give a more effective workout, pound for pound, than conventional free weights, because they are still more difficult to lift because they have no handles.

(Would it make the workout even more effective if the objects to be lifted were made deliberately slippery? Hmm. I'm going to think seriously about that question and get back to you about it.)

Some people, on the other hand, seem to completely miss this point, because they manufacture and exercise with things such as sandbags with handles, or medicine balls which are partly hollowed out to make room for handles.

Many people who work out with sandbags which have handles on them, and with Nautilus machines, are in far, far better physical condition than I. Still, I believe I have noticed a very basic and important principle which they have not noticed. And I'm far from the only one who believes this.

I got a 45-pound slam ball, a medicine ball designed not to bounce, and a 100-pound slam ball, and for quite a while I wondered why I found so few medicine balls heavier than 100 pounds. I think I may recently have found the answer: people use sandbags for heavier weights. A lot of people. I've found all sorts of sandbags designed to hold as much as 200, or 300, or 400 or more pounds of sand, seen all sorts of videos of people working out with sandbags of all of those weights.

I ordered a 400-pound sandbag from Amazon. This does not mean that Amazon will ship me something weighing 400 pounds. They will ship me a bag designed to hold up to 400 pounds of sand and be slung around and dropped and thrown without leaking any sand. Obtaining the sand and putting it into the bag will be my responsibility. (Home Depot seems to be the place to get the sand.)

Actually, what I'll be getting from Amazon is 2 bags, one inside the other. The inner bag holds the sand, the outer bag holds the inner bag, and both bags have multiple zippers and velcro flaps, and sand leakage doesn't seem to be a big problem. I hope not.

This also does not mean that I think I will be able to lift a 400-pound sandbag right away. Maybe I can, maybe I can't. However, I definitely can put 25 pounds of sand into a 400-pound bag, and I definitely can't put 400 pounds of sand into a 25-pound bag. I figured getting a 400-pound bag was more sensible that getting a 25-pound bag, and then a 50-pound bag a little later, and then a 100-pound bag a little later than that and so forth.

And I also want to see whether I can lift a 400-pound sandbag with no handles. I don't think I could lift one up over my head right now, but it would be really interesting to see whether I could lift it up off of the ground.