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Just installed a 120 pound 6 foot Thai bag from CENTURY. This bag is hard as a rock( its filled with sand and cloth), is there anything I can do to soften it up besides repeated beatings to the bag. Low kicks are really painful at 50% power, and I do not want to break my shins training on the bag.
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I've been training kickboxing for only eight month or something, and I have kicked A LOT during that time. Now I can kick the heavy bag full force without feeling a thing. So I wouldn't mind having a harder bag now to further toughen my shins.
So maybe you can start kicking light, and let you shins build up? At one point you will be happy it's not softer. I think the bags at my gym are filled with cloth only.
But maybe you can wrap something around the bag if you want to softer right now.. like som foam material, I dunno. -
There are lots of opinions about how hard your bag should be. Naturally, I have one, but I also have a story. I was lucky enough to buy my banana bag when Master Chai was visiting. He opened it up, pulled out what seemed to be a huge armload of rags, hung it, and kicked it into submission. His reasoning: because a softer bag doesn't hurt your shin, you will kick it more often. He told me, when we had bags made for the Pacific Northwest Muay Thai Camp, to fill the bottom 18" with sand, and the rest with straw. You want your bag soft enough so your leg does not bounce off when you kick it, because kicks don't bounce off of human targets and you need to pull your leg back afterwards. We had no access to straw at that time, so we filled the camp bags with sawdust. It feels hard at first but by the last day of the camp they soften up pretty well. I filled a big bag years ago with 6" of newspaper, 40 pounds of sand, then foam and rags to the top. It is still going, and I notice Mr Inosanto consistently chooses it as his bag at the camp. My opinion: I think bags come stuffed too full and hard. A friend of mine who goes to Master Chai's house to kick the banana bag there takes it down and rolls/pounds it soft after every workout. Just my two cents worth. It's your leg, after all
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