Ultimate Sandbag Exercises for Better HIIT Workouts

It is an analogy I love because I think it is really truthful. Ultimate Sandbag exercises are pieces to a puzzle. If you put the pieces of the puzzle together properly your puzzle is something beautiful and strong. However, if you try to force pieces that don’t belong with one another, you get frustrated and break your puzzle.

Okay, maybe not a perfect analogy, but I think you get the point. Even as powerful and awesome as DVRT Ultimate Sandbag exercises are, they got to be put together right and that comes down to good programming.

Over the past decade of doing DVRT, I think we have heard a lot of the questions from people that keep them from really using Ultimate Sandbag exercises as a strong program. Questions like…

-How much weight should I use?

-How many exercises should I perform?

-How many reps/sets do I do?

-How do I know when to up my weight?

That is why we are so fortunate to have great coaches like, Robert Dos Remedios (Coach Dos), someone we can work with in making DVRT even better.

Not only is Coach Dos someone that has coached athletes for the past 30 years, he has made some rather average athletes into pros and Olympians. So, to say he knows a thing or two on training is an understatement.

Recently, Coach Dos and I have been talking about how to put Ultimate Sandbag exercises into a better program and how to really maximize the benefits of the DVRT system.

This led him to also talking about how many people get high intensity training wrong! Most of you are probably familiar with high intensity training (HIT), but many may not know that it is REALLY suppose to be high intensity interval training (HIIT). Why is that important?

As Coach Dos talked about, the REST is very important for a few reasons. For one, you need to go as HARD as possible when you are doing high intensity. Not kinda hard, not sorta hard, hard enough where that rest is MUCH needed! If you do so, you actually need much more rest than most people ever use. That is where the “good stuff” happens like the hormonal changes that allow us to have spiked metabolism for up to 22 hours and lose more fat than muscle.

What Coach Dos laid out was a plan that would allow people to benefit form HIIT more and answer many of the questions of how to use Ultimate Sandbag exercises better!

How do we do it? In order to make things easier we want to use one of three series….

15:45

20:40

30:30

That refers to the work time first and rest time second. You might be thinking WHY you need so much rest, but if you perform these Ultimate Sandbag exercises correctly you will find yourself very happy for them!

More for the 15:45 and 20:40 series the goal isn’t to just do the work, but to try to achieve a specific repetition goal. That is eight repetitions in that time frame. Yea, that means you GOTTA move with some intensity. However, you should also be using a load that you could normally do about twelve repetitions with. Why? You would burn out too fast, in other words, you probably would NOT use the appropriate intensity.

How do you know if you are using the right weight or too little? If you perform your entire workout and get the eight repetitions all through out you need to go heavier, or if you find yourself performing MORE than eight repetitions you need to go heavier. Yet, if you are performing more sets of five or six you may be going too heavy.

Of course another question is how long do you go for? My recommendation is 3-5 rounds depending upon your fitness level. It should take you though between 15-25 minutes for a workout.

That helps you also start streamlining the exercises that fit best for this type of training. The discussion on the best Ultimate Sandbag exercises for such training will be our next post, however, we are going to leave you high and dry. Try this 20:40 series I did the other day. Find the right weight of Ultimate Sandbag for yourself and give us some feedback!

Love these training ideas? Don’t miss many great DVRT workout programs HERE