#Boxing: How to Buy a Heavy Bag

This is the story of the punching bag you see on the left. It is made of leather and is soft-filled, about two inches worth.  It has chains at the top rather than textile straps.  All these attributes are necessary for a successful boxing workout.

Before buying it from Amazon, I drove far and wide to find a bag of similar quality and size. And came up with zilch.  I've had considerable experience in boxing gyms although I was never a professional boxer.  I went into Dick's Sporting Goods, Sears, and K-Marts and even a Play It Again Sports shop.  Play it Again had a real heavy bag at least, though it wasn't exactly what I wanted. It was sort of a brick, but not as bad of a brick as the red, vinyl, skinny, short concrete cylinder that the local Y shamelessly installed and called a Heavy Bag.

A really professional heavy bag should be heavy, 100 to 150 lbs at least.  The one pictured above is about 75 lbs, soft-filled about two inches on the outer circumference and solid on the inside. It is well-packed and well-balanced. It has a chain and swivel at the top rather than textile loops and cheap wrapping where you can see the stitches.  There are bags heavier than 150 lbs too but they're for the really big guys,  people like Deontay Wilder or Tyson Fury.

The bag pictured above is the right one to buy if you're like me--familiar with the sport, but of declining prospects due to old age and because you were never good enough to function in boxing at the highest levels anyway not even on your best day.  My hands are kind of shot so I need the extra padding, in addition to Mexican wraps, and IMF packed leather gloves.  It's not the cheapest bag by any means but neither is it the most expensive. I've looked at heavy bags that cost in the $700 dollar range. Yes, you heard that right.

You can go to Walmart or K-Mart or Dicks' and any one of the number of mass market retail stores that have no clue about the products they're selling. The main criteria for them is cheap.   Your body is not cheap.  Your hands and teeth and nerves are not cheap.  You can buy one of the chintzy bags for cheap and hit it with pitty-pat punches and pretend you're having a real boxing workout but you're not.  The heavy bag serves a lot of purposes but one chief purpose is to engage in and improve your hard punching.

Okay, so the bottom line is here:  $149.99 at Amazon.  You get free shipping but the tax in New York State is eight percent.  It comes to about $161 and some change.  It comes with the chain and swivel.  Made of nice black leather.  You can really lay into it.  You can give it angles and pivot.

Here's the link to the bag on Amazon in case you're interested. Oh, and I've got no dog in the hunt, no investment in Ringside, or any other compulsion to sell you this bag. If I were profit minded, I wouldn't be donating it and hanging it at my local YMCA here in upstate New York.