how hard to hit a heavy bag?

[Andre]

Wrist strenghtening exersizes.

[Shrivell]

Yup. Wrist strengthening excersizes for sure, and goig lighter at first on the bag, focusing on technique.
For strenthening I reccomend tight grip bench press (focuses on the triceps, but you have to balance the weight with your wrists so it will help. Also a lot of forearm excersizes. try picking up the biggest dumbells you can and just moving your wrists in as many directions as possible. Do some wrist curls with either dumbells, or a barbell, making sure to curl with your palms up, and then palms down to get both motons in. and maybe hold your arms like your doing hammer curls with dumbells and move the weight up and down. It really helps. When I started hitting the bag I used to mess my wrists up all the time. After about a month of doing those excesizes, I can go full out even without wraps and not have a problem.

[Andre]

Buckets of rice or large sand, move your wrists around through the rice grabbing handfulls and letting go as you plow through too.

[TotalFighter]

Buckets of rice or large sand, move your wrists around through the rice grabbing handfulls and letting go as you plow through too.

Gripping hands in a bucket of mung beens works for me.

[boyla]

Toughie, you dont hit your hardest on a bag often, pace yourself you want to go for a whole round or at least unless your doing lots of sets with short round and long rest

when you land a hook make sure your palm faces your face when it lands, also your wrists in boxing should point in not out. (try to touch your right elbow with your right hand)

Make a proper fist, thumb at the bottom

[Mr.B]

Lots of good tips so far. I think the wrist strengthening excercises will help. I've been doing some of them for a few days now and call me crazy but I can already feel a little difference. Maybe my muscles are just tensed up from the unusual excercise and the stiff muscle tissue is acting like an extra layer of support/reinforcement?

One exercise I kind of stumbled upon today that you may want to try.... I have a rope toy for my dogs... it's about 2 feet long and has a hard plastic handle on one end. When the dog pulls on it, your hand is in a similar position to holding a dumbell at your side. Anyway... playing tug-o-war, the dog is trying to wrip it out of my hand while I twist the handle back and forth like a dirt bike throttle. Kinda hard to explain, but for those of you that get bored with the same old routine, it might make things a little more interesting.

[El Kabong]

My advice is just be careful going to the "body" of the bag, there is usually more weight there so therefore it's the hardest part of the bag...but like Meunouk said hit it as hard as you like