Ultimate Sandbag Workouts for Functional Muscle

Ian Vaughn, DVRT Master (Creator of DVRT Strength & Muscle)

With the popularity of functional training growing, simple movements like bicep curls get outlawed by “functional fitness gurus” as not a optimal way to train and if you do you’ll get abolished by the community a redundant meathead.

The real problem really more lies in performing an entire workout of “arms”. Even if you just want to look better, focusing on just a single muscle group is not the most efficient use of your time and can lead to pattern overload injuries.

However, if we look at some of the common bodybuilding exercises in different terms we may gain a different perspective how they can fit into functional based DVRT Ultimate Sandbag workouts.

Bicep curls can be great from injury prevention perspective because people can tear their biceps with exercises like heavy loaded deadlift or farmer’s walks for example. While this movement may seem incredibly simple, it’s surprising how many start compensating with a hunched back and curling with little range of motion in the elbow leading to zero strength gains.

If we focus beyond the bicep it’s self in the curl you’ll notice the upper back needs to keep the shoulders down and back because the weight is sitting in front the body; so to resist the forward lean the core needs to brace while the legs need to lock in place with squeezed glutes.

DVRT Ultimate Sandbag workouts take this to another level because the distance from your grip to the weight is longer than most fitness tools. That means that you overload the body the more as you curl the weight up. With many other forms of biceps curls the tension comes off of the biceps as you get higher in the curl.

If we put biceps into terms of DVRT Ultimate Sandbag workouts we can see that they can be a great functional training exercise. Seeking tension in the right places to gain more stability and strength. So we don’t need to be standing on a stability ball to make it functional – remember is the philosophy, not the tool that’s makes this a functional exercise.

Functional movements simply applies to our everyday movements and why DVRT Ultimate Sandbag workouts has such practicality. Having grip strength is very important because not everything we lift is completely static. This goes from a mother picking up a kicking screaming child to a police officer taking a criminal down -locking them in cuffs. We also know there is a positive correlation between grip and shoulder stability! This where Ultimate Sandbag Training Gripped Curls can bring a new dimension to grip and load. No being vertical, the pulls against you and the leverage in the Ultimate Sandbag makes it seem heavier than expected.

Lastly if you’re a reader of my Ultimate Sandbag Training blogs, it probably comes to no surprise I always find a way to add in front squats. This raises even more awareness to keep your grip zipped into your lats (keeping the shoulders down & back) as you squat with down with a straight back maintaining the end rage of the curl. Pretty fun DVRT Ultimate Sandbag workouts a try once you own the foundations.

So remember its not about abandoning classic movements like the bicep curl with more highly complicated movements and deeming them pointless to one’s program. Instead view how the body moves as one piece and the how the tool can make it simple and effective. So to gain real world strength, there’s no need high reps and sets depleting ourselves to the point of failure – we need the right concepts and great tools like the Ultimate Sandbag workouts to bring a higher level if awareness to our training.

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