DOES SPEED BAG BUILD MUSCLE?
Does the speed bag build muscle? Does hitting a bag as fast as you can until your arms and shoulders burn like the fires of Eden build muscle? Um, yes. Unless you already look like Arnold Schwarzenegger in 1975, this type of workout will definitely help you increase the muscle mass in your arms and shoulders, and even help exercise your core.
The truth is, speed bag training can help you reach many fitness goals. Not least of which is building muscle, assuming you’re not already super jacked. Your triceps, deltoids and biceps will get a thorough workout. Burning fat and building speed, rhythm and coordination while doing light cardio are some others. Hitting a speed bag is in many ways largely anaerobic and is very challenging. So when your training is designed to grow progressively harder, you will get stronger and build muscle.
Really? Anaerobic?
An aerobic exercise would be one that primarily taxes the heart and lungs, and can be performed for a longer duration. An anaerobic exercise is one in which the muscles use the short term fuel stored in the muscle itself, and can therefore only be performed for a minute or two.
In order to make speed bag training aerobic in nature, you would have to hit the bag slower and softer, and it wouldn’t be much of workout.
You must experience the pump to believe it!
When you hit the bag with some force and speed, your muscles will ache and burn well before you get out of breath. You will also get a tremendous pump in your arms and shoulders. Just like lifting weights for high reps with low weight. If you get an incredible pump, you’re probably going to grow.
So is hitting the speed bag as hard as lifting weights?
Maybe light weights for very high reps, yes.
I would speculate that an exercise with a comparable amount of difficulty would be knee push-ups. Easier than regular push-ups, and you can do them comfortably for a continuous minute or two. Then they will start to get very difficult.
A minute or so into a speed bag session, depending on your level of conditioning, your muscles will burn, especially your shoulders, and you will want to lower your hands. It get harder and harder until the end of the set.
‘But there’s no resistance!’
The bag provides only a little resistance because it is simply filled with air. YOU provide the resistance. You create resistance by hitting the bag and giving it momentum, which your following punches will strike against. You hit the bag after a bounce as it swings toward you, fast. This hit reverses the direction of the bag.
Harder! Faster!
The harder and faster you hit the bag, the more resistance you create. There will be limits at the upper end, of course, I mean you’re not a rotary engine. There comes a point when you can’t go any faster.
Keeping Your Guard Up.
Just holding your hands in a boxing stance is tiring enough after a couple of minutes. Hitting two-handed requires you keep your guard up in order to be close enough to hit the bag accurately. This doesn’t sound hard until you try it for 3+ mins straight! Let me tell you YOUR SHOULDERS WILL BURN! Professional boxers, who are highly conditioned athletes, have to hold their guard up for 3 min rounds in a fight, and even they sometimes let it drop due to exhaustion after a few rounds.
‘I can only hit it for a couple of minutes.’
Hitting the speed bag is not easy. It requires both strength and endurance. Although it can be considered more like cardio training, hitting a speed bag is intense enough to have a very substantial anaerobic component.
This means that your muscle will fatigue before you get too out of breath or otherwise tired to keep going.
There Are Many Ways To Increase INTENSITY!
In the context of weight training, there are several variables that you can adjust to increase the difficulty and effectiveness of an exercise. The most important are:
- Volume
- Speed
- Intensity (Weight)
When it comes to intensity, or resistance, you can’t simply add weight. You must use other ways to increase the difficulty of your speed bag training.
Isolation
Training one arm at a time will definitely make it far more challenging. Try doing a complete set of either 2 mins or 200+ punches with just your right arm, then just your left. This will mean half the rest and twice the effort for that arm, when compared to alternating for each punch.
This approach will also help expose and eliminate imbalances between your arms. Almost everyone has a dominant side when it comes to punching. This is especially true with the very precise strikes necessary for hitting a speed bag continuously.
Striking With More Force
Hitting the bag fast does not require you to hit it hard. A lot of people use this as a crutch so that they can hit it for longer. This is fine if you just enjoy speed bag training, or simply want to home your technique. But if you want to reap maximum benefits, you should hit the bag with some force. This will result in increased speed and resistance, bit will top out depending on the size of your bag.
Weighted Gloves
If you really want to kick the intensity up a notch you can train on the speed bag wearing boxing gloves. Depending on your size, they will weigh up to 16 oz (1 lb) for most adult males.
These will make it more strenuous for your muscles, and decrease the aerodynamics of your fist, thereby increasing the difficulty of the exercise. You will also need to hit the bag with a different technique when you have boxing gloves on, which works the muscles differently.
If you like to do things the hard way, or don’t like wearing boxing gloves, you can try adding 1 or 2 lbs in wrist weights to increase the difficulty of speed bag training. Make sure they are strapped tight or they will interfere with your technique. Also, you don’t want one popping off and into your face.
Smaller Bag
Once you have truly mastered the entry level, larger bag, you can graduate to a smaller sized bag to increase the speed and difficulty of your training. A smaller bag requires laser focus and precision, and will tax your muscles even harder than before.
Do not rush to move to a smaller bag, I prefer the weightier, larger bags. I’ve used them for years and I still get a great workout. Still, it’s an option if you find you are getting really good at speed bag work and want to increase the difficulty.
Work Unrelated Muscles
Sometimes I like to hold a weighted medicine ball or dumbbell between my knees while I hit the speed bag. Another way is to stand on one leg for a whole set, or stand on tiptoes. Hopping from one leg to the other will also stimulate more muscle fibers and burn more calories.
Superset With Pushups or Pullups
If you want to get a serious muscle building workout, try doing 10-20 pushups or pull-ups between sets. This will make it a great deal harder and will really stimulate your whole upper body.
Pushups are a great exercise that require no equipment and complement speed bag work perfectly.
Pull-ups are a tremendous upper body exercise that will strengthen your back and arms, particularly your biceps. There is a direct correlation between biceps strength and punching speed, so this can only help to take your speed bag work to the next level.
Your Individual Starting Point
If you can already run a marathon, walking on a treadmill 20 mins a day probably won’t take your performance to the next level. In the same way, your starting level of musculature is going to determine how much muscle mass you will be able to gain. However, even a well developed trainee will see some gains. If, muscularly, you are already well developed you will need to train with more volume than a complete beginner. Perhaps not at first, as learning any new movement has a learning curve. But once you get the hang of it, you will need to extend your workouts or use some of the other methods to increase the difficulty of your training if you want to see gains.
Volume
I have always chased the pump in all of my training. It is such a great feeling, and it makes me like mirrors more, Speed bag training will give you one of the best pumps you will ever get, especially in the triceps and deltoids. The longer you can hold this pump, the better you will grow. This is my favorite thing about speed bag training.
You will need to hit the bag regularly to see any gains. At first you will probably only need 1 or 2, 2 minute sets (much harder than it sounds). Initially a newbie will see gains from just this amount of training, 3 or 4 times a week. You will need to increase the volume of training, i.e. number and length of sets, regularly but incrementally.
For example:
- Week 1. 2 x 2 min sets x 3 sessions
- Week 2. 3 x 2 min sets x 3 sessions
- Week 3. 3 x 3 min sets x 3 sessions
- Week 4. 3 x 3 min sets x 4 sessions
- Week 5. 3 x 3 min sets x 5 sessions
- Week 6. 4 x 3 min sets x 5 sessions
- Week 7. 5 x 3 min sets x 5 sessions
- Week 52. Never sleep, only sip protein shakes and hit speed bag, 24/7. (Sometimes the X-Files is playing in the background).
But seriously, work your way up to 15-20 mins daily. This will be plenty to get you results if you are really going at it hard. That’s actually a pretty lengthy workout on a speed bag! Try it, you’ll see!
Which Muscles Will Grow?
Obviously, this is an upper body exercise, so the majority of the effects of speed bag training will apply to the arms, shoulders and, to a lesser degree, chest and core. The muscles that will reap the most growth stimulating effects are triceps, biceps, and shoulders.
Triceps
The triceps unarguably get the most from hitting the speed bag. In case you didn’t know, the triceps are a fast twitch dominant muscle group. The explosive nature of punching the speed bag works well for it, and you can produce a very large amount of power in a very quick burst.The pump you will experience on the back of your arms after a couple of 2 min sets will seriously have you hooked on speed bag work.
The speed bag seems to really work the hard to stimulate long head of the triceps, right near the elbow, toward the inside of the arm. This was always a lagging area for me personally, so the soreness in that lower extremity of my triceps was a welcome surprise when I started hitting the speed bag.
Biceps
Most of the resistance for the biceps is just controlling the power of the triceps, and bringing the fist back for the next punch, fast. The bag is simply filled with air, so when you punch “through” the bag, your biceps need to “catch” your punch and snap it back.
Deltoids, Traps
The momentum for a jab comes from your shoulders, more specifically the front deltoids. This is another fast twitch dominant muscle which can produce amazing power when you consider it’s size.
This muscle is front and center in every type of upper body pressing or pushing movement, and it’s importance for upper body strength cannot be overstated. It has been said “strong shoulders, strong man” and this is pretty much true (as long as you don’t have chicken legs)!
If you have skinny legs and are tired of it check this out…
When hitting a speed bag, not only are you throwing punch after punch but you are also holding your fists up in a guard position. This works your deltoids and trapezius, and never lets them rest between punches. This will really burn a few mins into a set. It will also lead to bigger stronger shoulders.
Forearms
Training with a speed bag is even a good forearm workout. As you clench a fist for each punch, the wrist flexors execute a forceful contraction. I believe this effect is maximized by clenching your fist anew on each punch, as opposed to keeping them clenched the whole time. This will lead to more power and speed to your strike, and also to a good forearm pump.
Core
When hitting the speed bag, you can away and step from one side to the other, adjust your footing and continuously hit from different angles.
If you are ‘ducking and diving, bobbing and weaving’ sufficiently, and rotating at the waist, you will stimulate the muscles in your core as well. Not as much as the arms and shoulders, but enough to feel it.
So, to summarize…
Yes you can definitely build some muscle in your arms and and shoulders. While no replacement for weight training (which you need to do if you want to gain muscle), if otherwise untrained you will definitely see some visible muscle growth within the first few weeks. But you need to hit it regularly, and increase your volume up to about 30 min/day max. After that the returns diminish and you are just doing cardio. Don’t let up, fight through the burn! If you stick with it, hitting a speed bag can totally change the way you look and feel, not least by helping you gain a few pounds of lean muscle.
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Can You Do Speed Bag For Cardio?
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