Is It OK for a Kid to Use a Punching Bag Everyday?

Punching bags are a fantastic workout for your body and mind at whatever age; they can be used to get into shape, relieve stress, and of course, to improve your boxing skills. But is it possible to overdo it on the punching bag? Can kids use punching bags every day? Are there any downsides to using a punching bag? Let’s take a look.

Why You Should Get Your Kid a Punching Bag

Punching bags have numerous benefits for people of all ages, including:

• Improving physical health
• Relieving stress and frustration
• Improving boxing technique

They provide a fantastic cardiovascular workout, increasing your heart rate and causing you to breathe heavily and pumping more oxygen around your body. So with almost a quarter of children in the UK overweight or obese, getting into boxing and spending time training with a punching bag is a great workout to help keep your child physically active and using up energy.

It’s important to set a healthy attitude towards exercise when a child is young, so they understand the importance of maintaining an active lifestyle as they grow older, for the sake of their physical and mental well-being, as well as seeing how enjoyable exercise can be.

But as well as being physically beneficial, hitting a punching bag is great for mental health too. When you spend time striking a heavy punching bag, you relieve a lot of stress and frustration through the action of hitting, as well as exercising which releases dopamine in the brain, elevating your mood. Children experience stress as much as adults, with their school lives, social lives and home lives, so punching bags can be a wonderful way of releasing negative emotions.

While kids should use punching bags specifically designed for them as they are smaller and lighter, children of any age can benefit from using punching bags. Smaller children can get easily frustrated as they can’t yet express themselves as they would like which can cause them to punch, or even bite and kick. As this behaviour should be avoided, you can help them release negative emotions by giving them a small, kid’s punching bag to get out negative energy and frustration in a healthy way, so they can be calmer in other situations.

How Long Should You Use a Punching Bag For?

Some exercise is always better than no exercise, so if you’ve got a punching bag and are wondering if 10 minutes a day hitting the heavy bag is ok, that’s absolutely fine. If you’re trying to lose weight or get in shape, however, you should be aware that you need to balance exercise with a healthy diet, so you should make sure you’re burning more calories than you’re taking in from food to reach calorie deficit and lose weight.

The NHS recommends at least 75 minutes of intense exercise a week, so if using a punching bag is your main source of cardio, you should aim for 15 minutes on the heavy bag a day, 5 days a week.  You can hit the heavy bag every day, but make sure your workout is less intense so your body has time to recover and rebuild muscle fibres.

Is It OK for a Kid to Use a Punching Bag Every Day?

Depending on the intensity of your workout, it can be fine to exercise every day. However, if you have an intense workout, your body needs 1 or 2 days a week to rest and recover so you don’t injure yourself.

Children who are avid boxers undergoing an intense workout on the punching bags should also have 1 or 2 days a week to rest in between training sessions, but if your child is doing a moderate, 10 to 15-minute workout every day on a punching bag, that’s perfectly ok.

The important thing to remember for kids as much as adults, is that you should always wear boxing gloves when you train. Boxing gloves are designed specifically for punching, with the thumb tucked in, padding covering the knuckles and a thick strap around the wrist to protect the wearer’s hand, wrist and arm when striking boxing equipment or real opponents. So when striking a punching bag, you and your kids should always wear boxing gloves.

Muay Thai gloves are similar but don’t offer sufficient protection to the hand as their design is for different fighting moves, so make sure your kid has the right boxing gloves when training with a punching bag for them to train safely.

Are There Any Downsides to Using a Punching Bag?

When you train with a punching bag such as a free-standing bag or heavy bag, you’re repeatedly striking the bag with a lot of power, so it’s normal to wonder if there can be any long-term damage caused from this action such as arthritis. But if you have hand wraps and the right boxing gloves on, the equipment protects your hands and does not cause any harm, so getting arthritis from boxing is nothing to worry about.

In fact, participating in sports is much more likely to benefit your joints, muscles and overall physical health than leading a sedentary lifestyle, so you can hit your punching bag comfortably knowing you’re improving your health.

Others wonder if participating in an aggressive sport may make them or their child more aggressive overall, and, while the evidence is scarce, the opposite seems to be true. There’s no evidence suggesting boxing at all increases anger or aggression levels, and there’s some evidence that angry and aggressive people relieve their emotions effectively when striking a punching bag, calming them down and improving their mood. Just another reason why we believe boxing is one of the best sports!

How to Use a Punching Bag Effectively

There are several different types of punching bags, each designed to work on a different aspect of your boxing technique, including

• Footwork
• Correct punching technique
• Practice combinations
• Utilise power
• Speed
• Shot accuracy

If you regularly go to a boxing gym, you can utilise each type of bag for your training to improve your overall boxing performance. However, if you want to train at home, a heavy bag or a free-standing bag is a great choice so you can work predominantly on your cardio, power and punching combinations.

To best improve your fitness, you can integrate 45 seconds of strength training exercises such as squats, crunches and press-ups between 5 to 10-minute rounds on the punching bag to help build muscle as well as practice cardio.

Free-standing bags are also one of the best options for beginners to use as they can be useful for practising many aspects of boxing as well as getting into shape. They also don’t need permanent installation so can be brought out as needed. However, if you can hang a heavy bag at home, you can learn to utilise your punching power as well as begin to improve your shot accuracy as a heavy bag more resembles the human form, so you can roughly see where to land your punches.

Heavy bags can seem daunting to beginners as we’re used to seeing the likes of Anthony Joshua and Mike Tyson going hard on heavy bags, but they’re equally as important to the training of beginners and lighter-weight boxers. Fortunately, the price of a decent punching bag doesn’t differ so much, so you can choose either bag depending on your space at home.

What Are Grappling Dummies For?

Grappling dummies are often in the same area of a sports shop as punching bags, or you may have seen them in the gym, but they’re not as useful for boxing as they are for Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and MMA. Grappling dummies are filled with cloth rags like punching bags and are shaped like mannequins, so fighters who use grappling manoeuvres and wrestling in their sport can practise certain moves.

Buy the Best Punching Bags – Maxx Pro Boxing

At Maxx Pro Boxing, we manufacture and distribute high-quality affordable boxing equipment across the UK so everyone, young and old, can get involved in this fantastic sport. Browse our range of punching bags and get yours today!