What’s going on guys? It’s Hai.
I recently added these REP Fitness sandbags to the home gym and in this blog, I want to talk about how I filled them.
Now, you may think that “Hey, they’re called sandbags so I can just fill them with sand” and you can definitely do that, but it’s not the best approach. The problem with sand is that it’s generally very dusty. So if you just fill your bags up purely with sand, when you’re working out, every time you move the bags you may get a face full of dust which is obviously not ideal and not very good for your health. Sand also tends to hold moisture and again, not ideal because you’ll likely be sweating all over these bags.
With these REP Fitness sandbags, you actually get an internal bladder that you use to hold whatever filler you want and that goes inside the more durable external bag that you pull around.
From my research, the best approach seems to be to fill the sandbags up with a mixture of pea gravel and rubber mulch. I personally picked both of these up from my local Lowe’s but these supplies can be found at various other home improvement or garden centers.
For the mixture itself, you’re shooting for a ratio of 2/3 pea gravel to 1/3 rubber mulch. You can take that as seriously as you want but I personally eyeballed the ratio. The pea gravel is where you’re going to get the main source of weight for the sandbags and the rubber mulch is really just a filler. It helps to take up space so that you get a fuller internal bladder. This helps to prevent the internal bladder from sloshing and bouncing around inside the outer bag.
When I purchased my pea gravel, it was actually pretty dirty so I dumped it in a 5-gallon bucket and just sloshed it around with some water, then laid it out to dry. This is completely optional.
After that, I put the gravel back into the 5-gallon bucket, a little at a time, while mixing in the rubber mulch. Again, you’re shooting for a ratio of 2/3 pea gravel and 1/3 rubber mulch. To make it easier for myself, I would periodically dump this mixture into the internal bladder.
I personally got a medium and large sandbag. The consensus online seems to be to run 40lbs in the medium sandbag and 80lbs in the large sandbag. These are just recommended numbers but I can say that these weights do work out pretty well.
Now, to figure out how much weight is in each bladder or how much weight each sandbag weighed, I just periodically put it on a scale and weighed it. Remember, both the bladder and outer bag add weight so depending on how exact you’re trying to be, just remember to compensate for those things.
And that’s about it. What I’ve shown you in this video is slightly more complicated than just filling these sandbags up with sand but I think it’ll be worth it in the long run. These are my first sets of sandbags and I’m still trying to work them into my workouts but so far so good. They seem to be very well constructed and should last a while.
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REP Fitness Sandbags https://amzn.to/3zjmIdo
Pea Gravel https://amzn.to/3TVcQAj
Rubber Mulch https://amzn.to/42W7skA
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