Sandbag Fitness for Better Functional Fitness

People are often shocked when they hear my response about “how is Ultimate Sandbag fitness different than other programs?” They might be expecting me to talk about instability training, or grip strength, or real world training. Those are all good ones, but I keep going back to one key concept that makes DVRT Ultimate Sandbag fitness so different!

WE MOVE!!

What do I mean?

I read an article the other day from a well known strength coach. He was discussing different planes of motion and all the technical information he shared was correct. However, this was little actual practical information shared.

What does that matter? More and more people are starting to understand that we don’t move in life or sport JUST up and down. In REAL life we move and resist forces acting upon in several directions at a time.

This is a hard concept for people to really grasp because for SO LONG in the gym we have been told to focus on muscles. Train this muscle, that muscle, etc. However, the reality is that goes COMPLETELY against how our body actually works!

Our body is designed to create movement, very complex movements! That is why in our DVRT Ultimate Sandbag fitness programs we focus upon building progression from foundational to complex.

So, why don’t people naturally just “get” the real concepts of functional training? Partly because it is hard to “feel” these different chains and things like “lateral strength”. Often times when even I do these drills I can’t pinpoint a specific muscle, but my Ultimate Sandbag fitness programs give me so much more feedback.

Like what?

For one, I know how many repetitions to perform or weight to use by the quality of movement I’m able to maintain. What a novel idea right? When my movement starts to be compromised I move on. If my lunge, squat, press, row, is not meeting the standards of the movement it is time to do something else.

The Ultimate Sandbag fitness drills themselves give me a ton of feedback as well. Something that DVRT Master, Troy Anderson, came up with is the idea of “movement accuracy”. If you are finding yourself getting “banged up” or unable to control the Ultimate Sandbag it is feedback that there is some issue with your movement. This is one of many reasons we put such emphasis on Ultimate Sandbag fitness drills like Clean and Press, MAX Lunge, Lateral Drags to name just a few!

When your ability to keep the chains of the body connected and strong go, you quickly get feedback that the quality of your training has deteriorated. That means time to move on to something else!

The real beauty becomes progressing to more and more real life type of activities. Ones that make you lift and move in a DIFFERENT direction! You know, like what ACTUALLY happens in life and sport?

How do you do it though? We can take an Ultimate Sandbag fitness drill like Cleans and totally fop them on their head by adding more patterns of movement. Check out how Strength Coach, Joel Gunterman, does JUST that! By using our DVRT Matrix concepts he creates not just force application and power, but resistance to force!

The NUMBER one reason people get hurt is their inability to resist, not produce force. Learning how to lift is important, but only if you only progress to learning how to do so in an environment where you can resist force as well. Remember, no one ever hurt their low backs because of the load of a pencil, but because their movement quality just wasn’t there!

Don’t let the gym be the place where you train hard but doesn’t improve your quality of life. The gym and your workouts should be devoted to making you move, feel, and perform your best. Oh by the way, you will end up looking pretty darn good too!

Want to learn more about how DVRT is changing fitness? Check out our DVRT workout programs HERE