Intro
If you’re into sandbag training or strongman in general, odds are you’ve heard of Brian Alsruhe. I’ve gone down a rabbit hole of buying his ebooks lately, and since I didn’t see any reviews of this when I was considering buying it, I figured I would write one myself.
What this book is
There’s a 20ish page intro section all about why sandbag training is awesome and how to fit it into whatever you’ve got going on right now. If you enjoy Brian’s colloquial YouTube videos (compared to some other fitness figures who may as well be science teachers), this section will be an easy read.
And then, of course, there are 62 (yes he went above and beyond) scalable, standalone workouts where the only required equipment is a sandbag, each lasting anywhere from 6-60 minutes (but the vast majority of them fall around the 10-12 minute mark).
What this book isn’t
There is not a fully fleshed out program in the sense of “do this Monday, do this Wednesday, do this Friday, and so forth, for X amount of weeks”. This is pretty atypical for Brian as almost all of his other ebooks are based around that structure.
There are also no exercise descriptions for the majority of the movements (save for some he coined himself). If you don’t have at least some familiarity with the movements, you will need to look them up online.
What I liked
There is a ton of variety in here. Need to get better at carries? There’s a bunch of sessions focused on that. Ditto if you need to get better at loading. Want something more conditioning focused? Lots of sessions have burpees or sprints. Some are EMOM based, while others are focused on getting in as many rounds as possible.
What I didn’t care for
Not one session focused on putting the bag overhead! I understand that’s a bit more of a specialty movement, but given how wild some of the other sessions are in here, it still wouldn’t have felt out of place.
Would I recommend it?
Yes! If you have any interest in sandbag training, or maybe you are looking for ways to spice up your “hard conditioning” days, you are bound to find something of use in here.