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To get the best out of your boxing and martial arts from home, you need the best punching bag stands, with the right specifications for you. Here they are…
Boxing and martial arts are amongst the best sports going for full fitness, power, and endurance. Aside from the obvious advantages of learning to fight more efficiently, working a punch bag regularly will:
- Help you develop and build muscle mass (hypertrophy)
- Give you a hell of a cardiovascular workout – you should peak well in the 85%+ heart rate range
- Help you to burn through a lot of calories – that 85%+ heart rate range will elicit an afterburn effect, so that your metabolism is raised more generally for a day or so after training
- Aid in full body coordination and proprioception
You also won’t spend long at it – good luck working a heavy bag for more than a few minutes at a time!
There are few athletic disciplines that give you so much.
However, you need to get the right goods. Working a lightweight punch bag on a rubbish stand won’t get you anywhere. You may as well shadow box – in fact, you might even be safer doing so. A poorly designed punchbag stand can also take up a lot of space, which is hardly ideal in a piece of home gym equipment.
You should be fussy when choosing which punchbag stand to go with.
I hold blackbelts in kickboxing and Shaolin Kung Fu, have competed, and have spent a large part of my career teaching martial arts. It’s how I met my wife. I even had the chance when I was younger to live and study Kung Fu with the head of my form in Yunnan province, China.
I’m pretty picky about punch bags and punchbag stands. I’ve nevertheless managed to find a list of punchbag stands that work incredibly well for their price bracket – neither cheap, flimsy rubbish of the kind a certain catalogue shop might deliver, nor pro bags that you will need a small loan to invest in.
They’re a good lot.
How To Choose The Best Boxing Bag Stand
You will need to think about the kind of bag you want, and what you will be using it for. There are:
- bags that are midweight, perfect for endurance training;
- bags that are heavy, perfect for power and strength, alongside decent knee, elbow and kicking practice;
- bags for speed and hand-eye coordination.
All of the items below will give you a mid- to heavy workout and have a speedball attached, giving maximum utility. This is how I would always go when buying a bag for myself.
Size is also important. Do you want a large or small footprint? Small bases obviously fit smaller spaces, but you may find yourself crammed in and unable to move around the bag, cutting out a lot of the benefit of training with a bag.
Large ones give you plenty of room to manoeuvre, and to practice longer range work like kicks and springing punches, but obviously take up a lot more room (which not every garage gym has to spare!).
Then there is height and build quality. I’m shorter of stature and tend to punch heavy. I also use a lot of knees and elbows in my own personal fighting style. I therefore take well to lower, heavier grade bags and stands.
If you’re taller and tend to punch lighter, the reverse will be true for you – high-strung bags that don’t offer as much resistance and aren’t built so hardily will be perfect.
Durability is also important. There’s no point buying a bag only to buy a new one next year. Everything in our list below should be able to last you a good five years or more with regular use, no matter how heavy you go.
Our Top Punching Bag Stands
As I said above, I get picky about bags. I’m not just shopping for myself here, though. If you’re built like me and hit like me, there will be something here for you. However, if you’re lighter, or taller, or newer to the sport, you will also find what you’re looking for below.
Most importantly, you will find a bag built to last, and built to really challenge you.
They would all work well in your home gym.
HOMCOM Freestanding Punchbag And Speedball Station
As I mentioned above, you will get the most utility out of a stand that will give you a couple of options. HOMCOM’s offering on this list is the first to do so, featuring a main, large punchbag alongside a smaller speedball.
You can therefore work hand-eye coordination, speed and temp (using the speedball) as either a warmup for your heavy work (on the punchbag), or as a good conditioning phase after your main work.
I personally like alternating days, working heavy one day, speed the next.
Either way, this utility is to be very much celebrated.
HOMCOM’s bag is also completely freestanding. You won’t need to bolt it in place if you don’t want to, though you can. There are handy, good-quality brackets you can use to bolt the whole frame to the ground.
I wouldn’t always recommend doing so, unless you really are confident that you won’t need to move it around (a tough call in a home gym). Realistically, I would use a few plates to weigh it down. Unless you’re going super heavy on a midweight bag, this should absorb most of the shock without the frame moving around too much.
This is backed up by some really decent padding on the main bag. It’s filled with EPE and cloth for safety during use.
I used thin grade MMA mitts and was completely fine afterwards – if you use 12oz. gloves you’ll barely feel a thing. It absorbs shock really well but also regains shape quickly, so that you can work it hard and fast without it losing shape.
The frame itself is also very stable. It’s made from solid steel with a 163cm x 115cm footprint, so there really isn’t too much that can rattle it.
It can take a maximum weight capacity of 100kg, too. I can’t imagine anyone needing a bag that’s any heavier than this. As mentioned, I’m a hard, low hitter, and I like to get my elbows and knees into the action a lot of the time. 100kg is more than enough for me.
You can adjust the speedball height, too, giving you a range of options. In fact, you can choose between 5 different height levels, going from 167cm to 187cm.
I’m on the shorter side and found the second-lowest setting worked well, putting me in the ideal position and keeping me safe from strains. The whole thing stands at 224cm, which is pretty standard, and very good given the stability and versatility on offer.
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FIT4YOU Heavy Duty 2 Way Free Standing Boxing Stand
Again, we have a good two-way bag here, with both main punchbag and speedball attached.
I would recommend FIT4YOU’s version for those looking at a bit of a lighter workout, going more for endurance.
The frame itself is heavy duty enough, with 2.0mm thick steel frame and 2” extra thick speedball board. It can hold large bags – up to 5 feet – without any bend or wobble. It’s perfect for power work and powerful fighters looking to go for some endurance work, but can be a little flimsy for larger strikes.
It’s also very easy to put together and install. (Quick note: pretty much everything on this list needs putting together yourself, so have your toolkit to hand!)
The pro-style design makes the speedball perfect for longer, drawn-out sessions – as above, the whole thing is good for endurance. The design is lightweight and pretty elegant. The ball itself is quite smooth to use and gives very speedy rebounds, so you really can build up to a good pace.
The ball and bag are tough as anything, though. They are hand stitched to a high quality and the riveted attachments give great durability and a sense of stability. You feel like you can fully unleash yourself on FIT4YOU’s bags without worrying about anything going wrong.
It’s also a fair amount smaller than HOMCOM’s model, with a footprint at 109cm x 146cm, and a height of 202cm. You can dance around it easily enough, with plenty of room to work, but it will tuck away a lot more neatly than a lot of other frames.
It’s a bit on the pricey side for what you get, and power players may want to leave well alone, but lighter fighters wanting to work themselves into the ground will get a lot of utility from it.
Check Latest Price Of The FIT4YOU Stand
VEVOUR Punchbag Stand
VEVOUR have given us a sturdy, durable frame here that can take a lot. It features baked powder coat finished steel for extra toughness.
The frame is capable of taking bags of up to 60kg/132lbs. This is nothing like the same level as HOMCOM, and definitely not Senshi (see below), but it’s workable enough.
It’s all the more impressive when you realise that VEVOUR’s offering is capable (in theory at least) of being folded for easy move and storage. I found it wasn’t actually all that foldable, despite what they say, but it is still pretty unobtrusive and can be stored without too much hassle.
It’s also very easy to put together, which is a plus.
I would personally skip VEVOUR’s bag in most cases. It only has the bag attachment, with no speedball. This obviously denies it a fair amount of utility.
It also needs to be set up in a corner because of the way it has been designed (its base is triangular, for some reason…). This limits how much you can move around it, as well as obviously limiting you as to where you can place it in your home gym.
However, the bag itself is great – though you will need to buy it separately. The stitching is hardy and the weight, though not the highest, is decent.
The height can be adjusted from 182cm (6 foot) to 230cm (7.5 foot). This is where the magic happens, for me.
Bolted down, or weighed down with a couple of plates, and further strengthened by being in the corner, VEVOUR’s stand is perfect for larger athletes who might otherwise struggle to find a comfortable, workable bag going.
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Senshi Heavy Punch Bag And Speedball
Senshi’s punch bag stand is built using heavy-duty steel and designed with a pretty small footprint so as to fit perfectly in any home gym, garage or garden.
You really can get a decent workout in without it having to take up a whole room (though, of course, this may limit the space you have to move around the bag when using it).
I would recommend Senshi’s bag for close-range fighters, Muay Thai fighters, and boxers. Longer range fighters, who like to bring a lot of kicks in from a distance, may find themselves a little cramped in the kinds of spaces in which Senshi’s bag will flourish. Knees, elbows, and punches will all work very well.
The punchbag itself is weatherproof. I’m pretty sure many of the other items on this list would do well outdoors, but they haven’t been specifically designed and labelled as such. If you want a decent punchbag for your garden or yard, this could be the one for you.
Everything is adjustable for a range of heights, too. I struggled to find specs, but the heights for both the punch bag and the speedball were adjustable across quite a wide range – I found the perfect height for my own training, and am fully confident that larger fighters would do well with it.
Though it’s got quite a small base, Senshi’s frame is actually quite stable. It is made from heavy-duty steel for maximum weight capacity and durability, as above.
It features enough reinforcement to take impact from even the heaviest of hitters, and has weight pins in every corner so that you can really keep it down.
In fact, the frame can take bags up to 120kg, which is immense!
I was sceptical that such a small frame would work for me, but it did – I was humbled as I tried my hardest (and failed) to knock it over!
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James is a full time personal trainer and an award winning writer with over 10 years of experience behind him. So far, he has helped hundreds of people with their health and fitness through his career.
