How to hang a Heavy Bag

The heavy bag is one of the best training aid a fighter can use. Given that it is filled with both sand and liquid, and weighing in at anywhere between 25-75 kg, it is the perfect training equipment to mimic the human body. You quickly realize practicing on a heavy bag that punching it would give you the best similitude of hitting an actual fighter.  The heavy bag is great not for its resemblance to the human body but also the fact that it is a great tool to develop both your punching technique as well as punching power.

 Finally a heavy bag offers a very cardio intensive workout – imagine having to tense up your body, standing in the proper punching stance and punching away at a heavy bag with all your full intensity for the equivalent of a full boxing round. It is hard work where beginners usually can’t go past the 1 minute mark. The only thing you have to get right about a heavy bag is how to hang it up properly.

The first thing to do in hanging a heavy bag is decide on where you want to hang it. The most optimal way of hanging a heavy bag is on a ceiling mount in the centre a room in which you will use for the heavy bag. Apart from the fact that the bag probably won’t break anything around it if it is in the centre of a room and that it ricochet of a wall to come back at you and thus avoiding the chance of injury, the best reason to do so is from the perspective of a fighter.  It will allow you the freedom to move around the bag attacking it via a 360 degree angle to mimic an environment of a right and a fight. 

There are drawbacks of using ceiling mounts for a heavy bag if they are being used in a residential setting. Most houses don’t have the necessary structural support to withstand the jarring vibrations caused by punching a heavy bag and results in slow deterioration of the support beams you use to hang a heavy bag. 

The wall mount is a possible alternative but it too has specific caveats in utilizing it. A heavy bag cannot be mounted on a wall made from plywood or drywall. The best material would be cement as such material has the strongest resistance to any jarring caused by repetitive punching. 

In a wall mount, instead of the heavy bag hanging from a ceiling, it hangs off a long arm that is an extended off of a bracket on the wall and allows easy swivel of the long arm so that it may not intrude in normal day to day domestic activity when it is not being used in a workout.