One of the most memorable scenes in the 1976 Oscar winning movie for Best Picture, "Rocky," involves Sylvester Stallone pummeling slabs of beef hung in the meat locker where his future brother-in-law Paulie worked. Rocky knew what everyone in the fight game knows, in order to hit hard, you must train to hit hard, and the best tool for this training is the heavy bag.

Regardless of your fighting style or art, regardless of your goals for training, sport, fitness, or self-defense, training on the heavy bag will take your fighting and martial art skills to a new level while increasing your power and fitness levels. To get the maximum benefit from heavy bag training, Wim Demeere with Loren W. Christensen has written "The Fighter's Guide to Hard-Core Heavy Bag Training." This book is an excellent reference on how to maximize heavy bag training for increased power, speed, endurance, and explosiveness. Additionally, the drills here will enable you to perfect your form and work on timing. For one of the simplest training tools, the heavy bag produces some of the greatest gains for time spent with it training.

For the person new to training with the heavy bag, this book is a must. The guidance here will save you time, money, and wasted practice doing things wrong. It will also help you prevent injuring yourself or training partners. For the advanced martial artist, I bet you will still learn a thing or two. I've been using heavy bags for over 25 years and I still picked up a few great tips and drills to incorporate into my workouts.

The book contains 12 chapters, which I will briefly describe here. Chapter one covers kinetic energy and five types of impact. This is a good introductory chapter discussing a bit about speed and the ways to impact the heavy bag and how the five types of impact affect your opponent. Chapter 2 teaches the reader how to choose and take care of a heavy bag. From there, chapter 3 illustrates how to attach or hang your bag. The book covers various ways to hang your bag depending on your location. The 4th chapter titled Nuts and Bolts focuses on things like gloves, how to get started, and advanced hitting. It is a short chapter with some practical advice. Chapter 5 covers some basic and advanced training concepts for the heavy bag. Read this chapter twice and be sure to incorporate the concepts into your training routine. Chapters 6 and 7 contain a variety of drills to perform on a heavy bag. Using these as a guide, you should then be able to expand on what Demeere illustrates through photos to vary your heavy bag workouts endlessly. Even if all you do is the workouts shown here in this book you will have many hours of varied routines. Chapter 8 focuses on partner holding. Various drills are shown that work better when you have someone holding your bag. I like that Demeere and Christensen show how to hold the bag and help your training partner. Reading this chapter will keep a few people from holding the bag wrong and getting hit or kicked. (I've seen it happen in the gym) In chapter 9, various ways to use the heavy bag for ground training are shown. I've never really used a heavy bag on the ground much, but I plan to try out a few of the drills shown here. Chapter 10 shows some drills you can do with your training partner holding the heavy bag while it is not attached or hanging from someplace. Again, there is some interesting way of using the bag shown to vary your workouts and increase your range of training. Chapter 11 is a very short chapter on using various things to make your training with the heavy bag more precise. The final chapter, 12, contains ten common errors and how you can prevent them while training.

Overall, I found this to be a very valuable book for anyone who incorporates heavy bag training into his or her workouts.  Published by Paladin Press, a leader in instructional books and DVDs.