Shadow Boxing vs Heavy Bag – Which One is Better For You?

shadow-boxing-vs-heavy-bag

Boxing is a very effective sport to exercise the body and relieve stress. For those who have just started playing the sport, two commonly chosen methods of practicing the technique are shadow boxing and heavy bag. However, many people often wonder about the effectiveness and effects on the body of these two exercises. So shadow boxing vs heavy bag, which is the most effective?

Let’s find out now!

What Are The Differences Between Shadow Boxing And Heavy Bag Work?

Normally, shadow boxing is imagining yourself of the opponent standing in front of you and performing technical moves. It acts like a warm-up and reflex training exercise for the body.

Heavy bag punching is exercise with sandbags. It is a very useful sport to train the body and relieve stress. This exercise requires a sandbag or an object shaped like a sandbag and weighing about 30-40 kg; the practitioner will constantly attack the sandbag.

What are The Benefits of Shadow Boxing vs Heavy Bag

Shadowboxing

Shadowboxing is an extremely basic practice in fighting sports, boxers has to practice through this exercise, but not everyone understands its importance. Why is Shadow Boxing so important?

Shadowboxing helps you practice the most basic and characteristic movements in moderation, like a warm-up.

Compared to other warm-up types, Shadowboxing also does wonders for the cardiovascular system and blood circulation function at the same level. The main difference is movement when you practice, one side is just pure jogging, and on the other, you are making the necessary technical moves. 

In addition to acting as a warm-up exercise to help blood circulation and smooth joints, Shadow Boxing also helps learners “review” when performing the most basic attacks of the martial arts they are studying. Over a long period of proper shadowbox practice, the muscles will automatically remember correct movements and eliminate excess postures. 

With Shadow Boxing, the practitioner will most appropriately perform his technical movements, choosing his strategies and movements and effectively adjusting them. Remember what you learned in the previous lessons and check for the gaps in the strategies you were told to incorporate into the shadowbox.

Another important thing when practicing shadow boxes is that you can build up the situations yourself and solve them.

Imagination is a form of pre-battle training, in which the brain poses situations and processes them, thereby evaluating the results of possible responses and selecting movements. This is most beneficial for the practitioner and also is the key point of Shadowboxing: all assumptions are made freely, and the fighter will have time to choose the best solution.

The results will not be shown immediately; they will show their ability to cope and control the game over time.

It sounds ambiguous because what the practitioner assumes probably will not happen exactly as in the match. But it is not necessary to expect things to turn out 100% the way you imagine it: just recognizing the similarities between the shadowbox and reality at some point is more than enough to come up with a suitable countermeasure. At this point, the habit of using techniques in the shadow box will come into play, instead of taking a beat to think about how to react.

Shadowboxing is also a basic exercise to help you build reflexes during combat. 

Most practitioners often handle single situations well when practicing. But mastering a single hit won’t have any effect. The next thing you need to do is to combine these attacks to form a new strategy. This requires an ability to analyze and feel the techniques learned through shadowbox practice.

Heavy Bag Work

The arm muscles, the shoulder muscles and the lower body muscles are the parts that benefit most from heavy bag boxing.

On average, in a 3-round match, there are a few hundred punches from strong to light being released, the shoulders will “carry” all the hand movements. Simply said, if you want to lift and move your hands, then the right shoulder must pull them first.

Therefore, exercises with sandbags will help the arm muscles handle the movements quickly and neatly to attack opponents. A good pair of fast, fast and accurate hands is the most valuable asset of a fighter.

Back and abdominal muscles are also two important groups of organs and are significantly improved during the practice of punching with sandbags. These two parts have a very important function that a few people know about, which helps control the punch. More specifically, the ability to recoil, allowing you to bring your hands back to the initial defence position faster, or to perform two consecutive strikes on the same hand.

To be more specific, when exercising with a heavy bag, every time you punch the bag, there is a jet back effect back to your body. This jet goes in exactly the same way that the force of your hand emits has gone, but it will not return to the leg muscles, abdominal muscles, but mainly stop in the back or back, affecting the ability recoil of the punch.

If you have a good back-shoulder muscle, this problem can be handled more easily as these two muscle groups will withstand the reaction and combine it with the recoil movement you intended.

Heavy bag work is also a very effective medicine to improve your mood. It is a well-regarded sport that can help lifters effectively reduce stress. Because according to common psychology, when under stress, pressure often tends to want to smash something. So when “unleashed” the beasts inside, it will help people relieve pressure very well.

Shadow Boxing vs Heavy Bag – Which One is Better 

In spite of not pursuing professional boxing, you can try to practice with a boxing sandbag to add flexibility to the body. For those who are professional, they often spend about hours per day to practice with sandbags. Not only sandbag punching is ideal for a particular group of boxing but you also are a normal person and are looking for some exercise to improve your health, go to a boxing sandbag.

However, to master the techniques when entering the game, the practitioner needs to seriously implement the shadowbox, absolutely not burning the stage in the basic steps. You should do the shadowbox faster, apply more pressure, hit as if you were in real battle. All withdrawal techniques, balance control, movement have to be refined. Shadow is both suitable for novices and professional athletes who have been playing for many years.

Shadowbox cannot replace the role of bag work. The combination of both exercises under the coach’s guidance is still essential to perfecting the technique, balance, force of attack, and the practitioner’s ability to follow the opponent.

>Read more: Shadow boxing with weights.

Conclusion

There you go, all the things you need to know about Shadow Boxing vs heavy bag work. These two exercises bring amazing benefits to your body, helping you perform more standard boxing techniques. Choosing 1 in 2 or combining the two into your exercise program will bring great results.

Thank you for reading.

Categories Training Guide

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