This set felt like a max effort at the time. Doesn't look too bad on video. Something happened at the beginning of the second or third rep that had my lower back feeling funky but I can't see anything obvious on video. I've also been having trouble with bracing, I think I should move my belt up my belly a little more. This might be the first time ive ever filmed myself squat.
Any thoughts?
Hey gang,
I recently finished every session of Brian's 60 sandbag e-book and figured I'd share my thoughts.
What it is- there are no surprises after reading the title except maybe that there are 62 sessions. They are mostly meant to be 10 minute finishers to be added to whatever strength program you are on, or you can do a few sessions to fill out a stand alone workout. Brian prescribes three different sandbag weights, light (below bodyweight), medium (about bodyweight), and heavy (heavier than bodyweight). I applaud anyone that can stick to these weight prescriptions and make it through.
Who I am- Just some guy with a sedentary job that has enjoyed heavy compound lifts for about 18 years. I don't compete in anything. I'm 5'8" and about 240lbs depending on the time of year. I'm not very lean, I look like a guy that's about to bomb out of every event at a local strongman competition. My recent lifting history has been following different 531 templates with a decent adherence to regular conditioning. For lifts, I can pretty much hit 200/300/440/500 for P/B/S/DL year round and my conditioning varies from a decent amount of (slow) running mid spring-mid fall (~25-40 miles per week), to kettlebell and calisthenics circuits when the weather is poor, with the odd rowing, bicycling, and non-exercise activity like hiking, swimming, and pick up sports thrown on as they arise. I bought a few sandbags before I purchased the e-book and did probably less than 10 sandbag workouts, typically 20 min AMRAP of some exercise/weight, before beginning this journey.
Execution- as luck would have it, I owned a light, medium, and heavy sandbag (100, 150, and 200lbs). These were far from the prescribed weights but certainly heavy enough for me. My plan of attack was to just tack one of these sessions on the end of each of my 531 lifting days in place of whatever I would normally do for conditioning. I started off trying to just do them in numerical order but that wasn't always the best choice in the context of my recent and upcoming programming. In an attempt to avoid too much cherry-picking, I did try to pick a session from the next upcoming 5 or so sessions. I aimed for 3-5 sessions a week but there were a couple weeks I was not as productive due to sickness, work, having a newborn, and other life things. I began in late December and just finished up in early May. For carries, I had 25ft I could walk in my basement and would just go back and forth until I hit my distance. Stopping, then reversing direction repeatedly, does suck.
Results-
Aesthetics: I don't take before and after pics. I still look like a fridge. I've dropped just a few pounds but I've sent some random pics in the family group chat and I've been getting compliments that it looks like I'm losing weight, so maybe there's been some recomp going on. I may have added some girth to my forearms and upper back.
Performance: I've gotten a lot more proficient at handling the bags and I have to think my conditioning has improved. Prior to starting, I got 4 bag over bar with the 200 in one minute, now I can get 8. A 50 ft carry with the 200 would almost kill me before, now 200 ft is just a set in a workout. I acquired a 250lb bag during this stretch and I initially could not even get it to my lap, now i can shoulder it any time I try.
Thoughts on the experience:
-Really fun. It was a nice challenge trying to just do what was on the page instead of coming up with my own conditioning, which usually ends up playing into my strengths. Sandbags do fill in the gaps that traditional barbell work may miss. Found a love for the bearhug carry and pairing it with bearhug squats is diabolical.
-Impact on recovery. These workouts are short, and depending on how well conditioned you are, you might not be actually getting a ton of work done in 10 minutes even if those 10 minutes feel horrible. So no one session kills you, but doing 5 in a week will have you feeling it if you're lifting on top of it. My lift performance was impacted. Even if I wasn't sore, all the squatting and hinging was felt on my squats and deadlifts. I highly doubt I'm actually any worse at those lifts, but you carry a lot of fatigue. As I got more proficient and my capacity increased, I began getting more work in, and the sessions did start having a higher recovery demand so I adjusted my lifting routine to be pretty bare-bones and let the sandbag work fill in the gaps.
-Expectations. I had to look at these workouts as a suggested framework, not as prescriptions. For one, all my bags were way lighter than prescribed, and every workout wiped me out. Two, the rest intervals suggested were way to short for me, even using a bag less than half my bodyweight. Three, I just don't know who could complete some of these workouts in the time allotted. Most egregious is probably session #46 where the expectation is to complete 30 reps an minute with a lighter than body weight bag or 15 reps a minute with a heavier than bodyweight bag. I don't know if I could have got 300 reps in 10 minutes using a zip lock bag full of sand. A lot of the workouts are EMOM style and it's something I could not achieve at my current fitness. I would usually institute a 10-15 minute cap and try to get through as much as I could and call it a day. There are also workouts where you alternate exercises for AMRAP in a given time interval, and repeat for ten minutes. if I tried to push the AMRAP I would blow up in about 2 minutes and then miss several intervals to catch my breath. I learned to just pick a set number of reps to achieve in that interval and try to maintain those reps, then really push it the final 2 minutes if I had any gas left. I usually overestimated how many reps I could sustain and still ended up getting 0 reps for a few intervals. Also, when considering how impossible some of these workouts felt, I was several months in before I realized "150ft carry" and "1 50ft carry" were two different things even though they look very similar in the document. "1 50ft carry" is used interchangeably with "50 ft carry" even though there are no instances of "1 100ft carry" or "1 150ft carry". Fun times and you probably won't be worse off if you tripled a carry distance but you will be wondering how the he'll you are supposed to go 150ft and do squats, and bag over the shoulder, in one minute while taking the remainder of the minute to rest before starting at the top of the next minute.
Challenge Sessions- The last 3 sessions in the book are challenges that should be expected to take more than 10 minutes. I would add session #46 to the list of challenges. Two of them are carry focused and just killers. One is the deck of cards using a light sandbag. I swapped Nala Rolls for sandbag press and the workout took about 1:10 and was maybe the toughest workout I've done in a long time. It amounts to almost 400 reps across 4 exercises (I added two different challenge exercises for the jokers) and using a 100lb bag I was able to keep moving reasonably well while suffering for the entirety. There was a point I kept getting slammed back to back with face cards for bag over shoulder and squats which was killer. Each of these sessions were brutal.
Final Thoughts- Great product, well worth the $25. Gave me some more creativity in my sessions and my sandbag specific conditioning has greatly improved. It's very lower body intensive so beware when just plugging into a routine. I've been inspired to add in more strongman specific work and sandbags will play a big part. My next sandbag goal is to clean and press the 200lb bag 200 times and to rip the 250lb bag over shoulder 250 times in the upcoming months before moving up in weight. Pretty arbitrary goals but it seems challenging yet doable, and I don't think I could be worse off for the effort.