Lou Sandoval is trying to break a world record, but it’s not just a personal quest. He’s also doing it for us.
Sidhu Kshetri from India holds the Guinness world record for consecutive hours of hitting the heavy punching bag at 55 and 15 minutes. Now, there’s someone out to break that record – 60-year-old Lou Sandoval.
There’s more to this story, though. He began this quest to combat depression in his own life and to inspire others to punch back at depression. Sandoval has already gone 24 hours straight, punching the bag. He is gearing up for 33 consecutive hours beginning on April 15.
Sandoval, raised in the Catholic faith, is doing this in part for Lent in preparation for the celebration of Jesus’ resurrection on Easter Sunday. He notes that the path to healing from depression begins with human connection. With the help of Craig Syracusa, his journey started when the Diocese of Brooklyn commissioned Sandoval, an artist in many media, to create a sculpture. Syracusa, a writer and director, is making a documentary about Sandoval’s punching bag quest.
Sidhu Kshetri “kissing the bag” (photo, UPI)
Sandoval points out that if you watch the video of Kshetri’s 55-hour marathon, he is barely tapping the bag, “kissing it,” as Sandoval describes it. In contrast, Sandoval is hitting the bag with force. For this reason, Syracusa is asking Guinness to create a new category for punching the bag with force so that Sandoval’s 33 hours will establish a new standard.
Born and raised in Gallup, New Mexico, Sandoval’s family attended the Catholic church. “We were just going through the motions as a Catholic family,” Sandoval recalls. “But when I was ten, the charismatic Catholic movement hit. My parents became very active in it. When I was 12, I got baptized into the Holy Spirit.” Sandoval says the Holy Spirit has led him on his punching bag quest.
Sandoval moved to Los Angeles to pursue an acting career as a young man. He gained membership in the Actor’s Studio there, which gave him access to the New York studio branch. Once in New York, he turned to sculpting and other art projects, eventually leading to the sculpture for the Brooklyn Diocese and his friendship with Syracuse. When commissioned for a sculpture, he usually travels back to Gallup, where his dad had set up a workshop, which Sandoval describes as a “sacred place.”
Photo courtesy of Lou Sandoval
His punching bag mission developed from a personal, ‘Job-like’ crisis. “This was nowhere on the horizon six months ago,” he says. “But a little over a year ago, I was experiencing severe depression. I was living in the Palm Springs area because my fiancée was there helping her mother. Within a month, my truck died, three commissions dried up within ten days, and I was forced to be separated from my fiancée and go back to my hometown with nothing but a broken heart.
“I had been fasting and praying through my running, and I had to give myself a goal physically that would take me out of the anger of the depression. I said I’d try for ten percent body fat. The plan was to build a good foundation through resistance training for the first six to eight weeks. Then, I would go into boxing training for cardio. When it came time for the boxing training, I fell into the early morning roadwork, the speed bag, and jumping rope. But I discovered an unusual capacity to hit the bag longer than ever.
“Someone at the gym asked me if I knew if there was a world record for hitting the heavy bag. And I didn’t know, I mean, never even considered it. A couple of days later, I was hitting the bag, and I was in my third hour, and I heard a voice that said, ‘Why don’t you see if you can go four hours? Maybe you can go six.’”
Sandoval says that the inner voice was the prompting of the Holy Spirit. Sandoval became familiar with the Guinness rules for the record: The participant goes for an hour and then has the option of resting for five minutes or foregoing that rest, banking it and continuing, and, for example, having 15 minutes of rest in three hours. When he reached 12 hours straight, he felt a breakthrough. Suddenly, the record seemed achievable.
Sandoval says the physical key is the brain’s anterior cingulated cortex (ACC) development, which involves higher-level functions such as attention allocation, reward anticipation, decision-making, impulse control, and emotion. “Neurologists have discovered it as the seat of the will,” Sandoval explains. “How it grows is us choosing to do something we don’t want to do physically. That can be as simple as making amends or doing some notes on the piano. It’s also by not doing something that you’re pulled to do, which is about addiction. It’s spiritual combat. This discovery of hitting a bag or even thinking about doing it for more than two hours, I could never do more than 45 minutes before. But it’s because of my spiritual connections. But on a medical level, the hour-to-hour connection trying to develop that cortex.”
His motivation, rather than personal achievement, is to highlight the issues of depression and addiction. He notes that men are mainly told, “’ You just take it on the chin; you’ve got to be macho. Vulnerability is a weakness.’ That is essentially pride. And pride will get you killed.”
Craig Syracusa: It [Lou’s quest] inspires you to speak openly about your struggle with depression. And that is what Lou is doing. It’s not about the bag or the fists, or the time. It’s something about the man himself.
Syracusa’s documentary of Sandoval’s experience will also feature interviews with experts, doctors, and mental health professionals, as well as others who have suffered from depression and have fought back.
The event will be live-streamed on Tuesday, April 15, beginning at 9 AM, on Syracusa’s “Walk in Faith” YouTube channel.
