Training equipment you won’t use: Boxing Bag

I always wanted to have a gym at home.

Full of weights and kit.

With a boxing bag front and centre.

I’d work that bag regularly; jabbing, bobbing and weaving, and generally looking hard as fuck.

Letting off steam. Showing how manly I am.

When you’re living in flats on average money then installing a boxing bag is never very likely.

Landlords rarely write ‘please drill boxing equipment into my ceiling’ into contracts.

I’d sometimes consider buying one of those cheap ones, from Argos or somewhere, that you fill with water or sand but they always seemed shit.

So onwards I’d go instead, with this vague fantasy of living somewhere with its own gym and boxing bag. Packed into the back part of my brain alongside the idea I’d quite fancy a home sauna or a table tennis table or a dog (that doesn’t shed hair, shit or bark).

A Greek affair

Every now and again I’d get a glimpse of what this future might look like if I ever visited a gym with one in it.

Like the time I visited a Greek resort a few years ago.

(Moody look, sweat sheen, tensing stomach and plaster on foot from flip-flop chafing optional)

This was a particularly good day to explore my fantasy, as there was nobody in the resort gym.

Allowing ample opportunity to take photos and indulge myself — without fear of judgment, especially from someone who might actually know how to use the boxing bag properly.

I’d just been doing a decent weights session when the last other person left the gym.

So I quickly called my girlfriend (now exasperated wife) away from her real true love — her sunbed — and demanded she took loads of photos.

So there she stood, body language drenched in apathy, as I furiously twatted the bag (with limited technique) in very short bursts.

Hoping the photos would look ace. Maybe make me look like a white Roy Jones Jr or Nigel Benn.

(To be fair — my arms look really big here. Bit of a trick of the light and blur. Still, they look like anvils! Amazing.)

No gloves. Wonderful ‘square’ stance favoured by all the greats. Erratic blurred technique. Biting the tongue in classic De Niro-esque ultra violence.

Yep, good photo that. Well done Claire.

However, like all the best holiday romances.

It meant nothing to me when I got back home.

It was over.

And I went back to a non-boxing bag life.

Until that is — a few years ago…

For eventually, we bought a house. Out of London. A suburban family man to be.

With it came a decent garage. For a home gym/storage dump.

With walls that I (or the Lithuanian gent who put in the kitchen) could drill stuff into without censor.

So I bought a boxing bag.

And I (the Lithuanian fella) put it up.

Every night I’d come home from work and I’d spar and jab and smash that punchbag in a total cardio massacre.

Chiselling my frame and dropping body fat whilst improving my self-defence and offensive capabilities.

Or at least I said I would.

Promised myself I would.

But I didn’t.

And I don’t.

Now look at it:

Disrespected.

Stranded behind the soon to be used pram and car seats.

Alongside it sits a more obvious fitness equipment trope — an unused static bike used as a clothes horse.

A partially obscured whiteboard, that I was going to rewrite every workout, hides sheepishly against the wall with the same unchanged words I put on there months before:

Morning, KRS-Brom (a nickname given to myself inspired by KRS-1):

Bench.

Deads.

Squats.

That was all I wrote. To be fair that’s a pretty solid workout plan even without much detail.

I feel bad. For now, it’s basically a ghost.

I did use it a few times.

I’d get home after work, tired, but drag myself into the garage to strap on my gloves and unleash poorly timed flurries as hard as I could.

Then I’d hurt my shoulder. Or my hand. Or wrist.

Which would mean taking an enforced break for recovery.

In which I would rapidly lose interest in using it ever again.

I don’t have the technique. And I can’t be arsed to learn. I wanted to be naturally good at it.

I bought the bag. The gloves. The wraps.

Then wanted to just be instantly good.

Just like when I bought a guitar. And loads of books and tuners.

Then just expected to be good at it.

I don’t want to LEARN boxing. Or the guitar.

I just want to be good at it without the boring learning bit.

Visitors aren’t any better.

When people come round the house to visit they will often want a go on it.

They sometimes even put inhibition aside and don the gloves to live out a mini raging bull fantasy.

Here’s my mum imagining caving someone’s face in (with another impeccable stance).

But they soon get bored.

It’s hard. It knackers you out. You run out of steam and ideas quickly.

You give up.

It’s just easier.

So what’s the moral of the story?

Dunno.

Is there only one lesson?

Some things you want. Promise you’ll use. Then get and don’t. It’s life.

Maybe the lesson is to not waste your money on equipment you’ll have to learn to use if you’ve got a history of being a lazy bastard.

But on the flipside of that, there’s another angle.

I have a theory that if you spend money on something then you’re more likely to use it.

You’re forced into it by guilt.

The money and fear of annoying yourself (or others close to you moaning you’ve wasted money) causes you to use it. To avoid the ego sting.

This should work on me. I’m tight. I hate wasting money.

However, if the bags of unused training equipment and gadgets in my house are anything to go by, then clearly that theory doesn’t seem to bother me!

But I have ANOTHER theory that spending money on equipment you never use DOES WORK.

Just in a less obvious way.

You see I think the money is just collateral damage.

The very act of buying equipment for training (which I’ve consistently never used) — be it boxing bag, swiss ball, grip strengthener, skipping rope, weight vest or altitude mask — at least keeps me THINKINGabout training.

I might not end up using that equipment how I hoped, but I am still mentally hovering around the ideas.

That equipment guilt gets me into the gym. It doesn’t matter if I don’t use it. I’m in the gym, so I train.

With the standard equipment, I already had and use regularly.

So my net effect is still to ‘keep training’ when I might have given up.

Keep pushing myself. Maybe not with the boxing bag. But in general.

Maybe the act of buying and not using something is still useful.

It’s counter-intuitive.

And maybe it doesn’t completely assuage the bad feeling you feel after you’ve spunked hundreds of quid on a running machine (I haven’t. Yet.).

But when living a life of health and improvement you have to take a few risks. Spend some money. Show interest. Try things. Even knowing they probably won’t stick.

In your health and fitness journey, you can’t expect everything to work at first. Maybe ever. But it doesn’t mean it’s wasted time, energy or cash.

Yes, you might seem to buy a lot of stuff you never use (or not often) but I still believe the very act of ‘wanting’ or ‘meaning to’ is an important part of growing.

Oh yeah, training ideas.

I’ve just realised I’ve stuck this in the training section of the site so if you do have a boxing bag, here are a few ideas from a non-professional to get you using it:

• Counting games: Throw stiff jabs in a sequence, 1, 2, 3, 4 in a row until 10 then swap arms. Repeat until bored.
• Combine with hooks, combinations etc and mix up the numbers.
• Throw as many punches as you can in 10 seconds, rest 20 seconds. Repeat.
• Pretend the bag is someone from work or someone who did some minor infraction on your commute. Shout highly-specific things out loud as you go crazy: “stop breathing so loud in meetings!”, “your elbow is on my side of the seat divide!”, “you’re not the boss of me”, “move your bag you shitface” etc
• Unleash wild haymakers and body shots until tired/hurt.
• Hug it. Then crack it a few times in clinch.

That’ll do you. You’re likely to do all of the above at least once before losing interest — so enjoy yourself while you’re doing it. And don’t feel guilty.

Or even better — feel the pain of wasting money — and use it as a trigger to reinforce your resolve, strap on your gloves, get in the gym and get your Muhammad Ali on.

Spend like an idiot, sting like a bee!