Fall, get up, finish, learn something and don't forget to have some fun: Recapping my First Strongman Competition

If I had to join a gym, I was at least going to join one that kind of matched my sprained personality along with my disgust of cardio equipment even if an exercise bike was what I was joining the gym for in the first place.  As part of my ACL physical therapy, I needed to ride an exercise bike, forwards and backwards, for 15-30 minutes a day.  While that's about as fun to me as drinking gasoline, it's PT.  I didn't have to like it.  I just had to do it.

The Dungeon Gym had three cardio machines and the rest is weights and strength training equipment.  That equipment line-up runs parallel to my training belief system.  You go there to lift.  Most of the crew there were getting into strongman training and that training, as I sadly peddled my knee back into use, rubbed off on me.  As I progressed in PT, the notion of joining my new crew of friends in strongman became a thought and goal that propelled me along with my training. 

After a year, I finally got the opportunity to achieve that goal.   Last Saturday, I did my first strongman competition in Tampa, Florida, taking 6th in the Novice Division. 

 

Over the past year, I've acquired a reputation for my unfiltered jokes and my wildly unconventional approach to strength training.  My cohorts in chalk and sweat shouldn't have been surprised that I'd rolled up in Clearwater sporting these sunglasses. That guy in the middle is my dear friend Richard. He's as conventional in the gym as I am crazy.  I was so overjoyed to be here with him.  I was overjoyed just to be here.  It's been a long, long struggle to get to a point where I felt like I could take my body to such a proving grounds.  While I wanted to do well, I was also here to have some fun.  In my typical, inappropriate fashion, that's what I was setting out to do.

 

Who need steroids when you eat these kind of sandwiches?

Training for this show had it's ups and downs.  One of the major downsides, naturally, was my lower body training.  My knee PT was generally successful save for one issue:  My left knee doesn't hyperextend like it supposed to.  So, my lifting with my lower body was slighty uneven, my right legs moving faster and working more than the left.  This eventually led to a carousel of lumbar disc irritation and issues an IT band tightness.  Plus, any movement that forced a lot of hamstring activation would leave my bad knee sore for the next day or so.  Long story made short:  my heavy squat work was minimal for much of the summer and I zeroed out on the Hummer Tire squat.




My friend, who was also competing, said it best:  shake it off, it didn't happen.  Move on!

 



 

Which I ended up doing with some success in the next event:  a car deadlift hold for time, head-to-head with another competitor.  That competitor turned out to be a guy named Bryan.  I ended up beating him by a grand total of .06 seconds.  The humor wasn't lost on either of us as we did the dude embrace after finishing.  While most of my leg training was suboptimal for months at a time, the one thing that worked really well was barbell hack squatting.  This movement that I regularly did was a pretty close approximation to a car deadlift.  In reality, a car deadlift is more of a squat anyway. 



I sprinted over to my lane.  Bryan looked at me like I was nuts. 

I wasn't too far behind him...

That .06 second difference basically turned Bryan and I into short term rivals.  We went head-to-head on the medley run (225 lbs farmers handles, 180 lbs yoke, 250 lbs power stair, 125 lbs dumbbell press, chain press).  Had I not been so amped up on nerve juice and anticipation for my favorite event to train, I might have taken note that one of the farmers handle kept rolling away from me.  At least I would have realized that the pavement on that side that I was about to step into had a slight depression right off the starting pads.  As soon as I took a step into it, I fell with the handles.  Other than a scrapped elbow and jamming the tip of my thumb, I got back to my feet and managed to catch up with Bryan a little bit. 

 That's when inexperience and nerve juice got the better of me. I exploded off the ground with the yoke, locking it out and steadying it with surprising ease.  Unfortunately, I missed the down command and kept moving.  I had to go back and do it. 

...Now I am



 

 

 



Nobody knew what to make of this.  Apparently, someone wanted to have me disqualified

I missed one.  Just not this one.  The crowd went nuts!

"you're a fast little shit!"  Bryan

Bryan later told me that he was stunned when he saw me just behind him on the dumbbell press.  He figured that my redo on the yoke press combined with the power stair would give him an advantage.  Unfortunately, that wasn't the case.  While we both missed our first attempts with the circus Dumbbell (Bryan has some elbow issues; my jammed thumb weakened my grip on the dumbbell), I pulled ahead, throwing the Crossfit-like chain press easily and again edging him out. 

The last event I figured to be my strongest event:  keg tossing over a 13' bar (Four Quarter-kegs.  20, 25, 30 and 35 lbs).  What I didn't figure was how good everyone else would be.  I threw just before Bryan, who I didn't realize was a Highland Games thrower.  He one-handed his way through those fuckers in just over 21 seconds. 

 I drilled the hell out of the throws.  I regularly did heavy T-handle swings, double Kettlebell swings, and throws with my Alpha Strong Sandbag (40 lbs).  I got off to a very hot start, throwing the first three kegs 3-4' over the bar in around 18 seconds.  However, inexperience got the better of me.  As I was throwing,  I stopped taking the two steps backwards to get into a good position to throw the keg.  By the time I got to the 35 lbs, I was throwing too far away and my last keg bounced off the pole, forcing me to redo the throw and coming away with a 26 second finish time.  



 

 

 

Initially, I heard that I had came in 4th place.  After a few days, when the scores were finally posted, I had to readjust to just missing the top three.  While I told myself that I just wanted to have some fun and simply being able to do this was reward unto itself, I'm still a competitive person.  I couldn't simply just go to participate.  There's a part of me that wanted to win, even if I was cognizant of the fact that it may be unlikely on my first competition since I was going in knowing that my squatting practice had been marginal and thoroughly sub-par (I also had tweaked my lower back the week of the competition.  I spent the entire week trying to get rid of the back pain, which I did succeed at). 

 

What was particularly galling about the tire squats was that I previously trained for these back in April for another show that I wasn't able to do in Florida, hitting 350 lbs for two, 385 lbs for one, and narrowly missing 405 lbs.  So, failing at 365 lbs proved that I lost leg strength in the course of six months.  Still, I've gotten in front of the IT band syndrome and hitting the hyperextensions served the dual purpose of helping get my left knee closer to natural hyperextension and strengthening my lower back muscles.  I trust that if I get my knee to do that, most of my back and IT problems will dissipate.

 

The rest of my errors I felt were a combination of inexperience and nerves.  I will never do a moving event without checking the surface I'm walking on first.  Ever.  That fall cost me both on the farmers handles and the circus dumbbell.  I also should have paid closer attention to my down calls.  Finally, I need to make sure that I take the needed two steps back on my keg tosses.  The winner of the novice division, Alex, also pointed out something I hadn't thought of:  after asking me if I knew I could clear the bar with my throws (which I knew I could) why watch and see if they were going to clear?  That could have shaved some time off too. 

 

Still, there were bright points to take note of:

• I correctly surmised that a barbell hack squat was likely to be very similar to a car deadlift.  As a result, the car went up pretty easily. 
• Getting the farmers handles were initially a problem for me in training since I did so little heavy deadlifting due to my back.  So, what I did do instead was practice lighter deficit deadlifts and deficit-deadlifts with chains.  As a result, I was able to get the handles off the ground and do it reasonably quick. 
• Despite some problems with the yoke in training, I mastered squatting underneath it and pressing as I drove upwards.  This made my two yoke presses fast.  I also correctly surmised that regular squat-pressing would aid in this.
• While my thumb screwed with my grip on the circus dumbbell press, I still nailed it.  I'd been practicing this for over a year and this one implement in the medley finished the medley for 4 of the 10 competitors. 
• Inexplicably, I didn't meet anyone who used swings to training for throwing kegs. Someone must have! Lots of the competitors needed start the keg at eye level in order to get the extra momentum to get the keg over the bar.  After months of swinging 100-150 lbs of weights, I started most of my throws at my knees.  Even that may have been unnecessary. 

 



I suppose I can only be so hard on myself.  This picture is about 13 months old. 

 

So, after popping my strongman cherry after a year of conceiving of doing such a competition, I'm tentatively setting my sites on Florida's Strongest man in Davenport, FL.  Overall, this day will go down as one of the best in my life and I couldn't be happier to take part.  

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Bench Pressing again...

The comment about mastering the pushup will make you rival or surpass any body builder or power lifter is so stupid. If this were the case every body builder and power lifter would be doing pushups instead of lifting weights. Even Body builders and power lifters train quite differently from each other. One utilizing Rep range from 8 -15 the other rep range 1-6. This whole functional strength argument is stupid too, to say someone that lifts weights isn't functionally strong? How is a pushup any more functional? If your building a house, carrying a baby, or doing garden work dropping down and doing 20 isn't going to help any more than bench press. I'd wager that most people that workout do it to look better and feel better. If your goals are to just generally be in better shape sure go for the pushup. It's even challenging enough for most new people to build some decent size and strength, but if you want the earth to move when you walk, the ability to push trees over, and for people to make sculptures of your body you better stack on some weights. -Brent

That fateful post from nearly seven years ago now still draws views and comments to my blog...

http://thebodyweightfiles.blogspot.com/2008/02/pushup-vs-bench-press.html

 

 

Things have changed over those years.  While I do look back on some of my old posts and sometimes find my past self outright wrong on a few occasions, this post still stands up.  Much of what I think about the bench press vs. the push up hasn't really changed all of that much.  There might be a very good reason for that.  That reason is that, in a lot of ways, the bench press encapsulates much of what I don't like about the strength training subculture that I inhabit. 

 

First, the bench press needs very specific stuff to perform.  You have to have a bench, a barbell and plates, sometimes lots of them.  In other words, you have to have a gym set-up in order to do it.  So much of what I do is based on the premise that you don't need a gym to work out in the first place.  Benching anchors you to the gym if you insist on doing it.

 

There are lots of people insist on doing it.  As I've ventured into strongman training, I've noticed that lots of people migrate over to it from powerlifting.  Some strongmen, in turn, seem to take a shocking amount of programming tips from powerlifting.   What lots of people therefore don't get is that working the chest doesn't simply mean doing the bench press.  I've said it before:  the pectoral major muscles are extremely versatile.  Any movement that requires moving your arms in front of your body back towards your centerline is using them.  So, you don't need to be glued to one movement that, in turn, glues you to the gym.  Since I have an aversion to being intentionally stuck to a physical location to train, you can bet your ass I have a problem being married to one movement, especially one that I hate that's part of a competition of have no desire to participate.

 

Frankly, there is NO GOOD REASON to be so glued to the bench press.  It's an incomplete upper body-push movement anyway.  If done by itself, it doesn't develop the shoulder and chest muscles in a balanced manner.  Push-ups can and do, which is why I prefer them (weighted these days).  One thing that some strongmen do get right is they move the bench press to an accessory movement to the overhead press.  There are a mess of chest exercises out there any why the more incomplete ones got selected as the go-to for chest training just boggles my mind. 

 

To top it all off, as I said above,  I just don't really enjoy bench pressing.  I don't really have a rhyme or reason for that other than it just isn't a compelling lift for me.  So, since I don't enjoy then why should I do it?  After all, it's not a lift in any competition that I'll ever do.  I can do others to get  complete upper body development.  Plus, I don't need to be at a gym that, aside from the past two years, I have extremely limited access to.  At the end of the day, there are more practical lifts for me to consume my time with.  I'll just stick to those. 

 

 

 

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Check your special shoes at the door and get your head right

I should have been finishing up dead-last in the group, looking like a pasty weakling.   At 195 lbs, minimal direct strongman training experience, only two months of regular leg training, and a pair of totally gripless Chuck Taylor shoes I shouldn't have been doing much to write home about with a 12,000 lbs truck pull.  This was my second time ever attempting one...

While my technique was as ugly as I am stunningly handsome, on my second pull I tugged out the second best time of the day out of the group.  I ended up beating one of my best buddies at the gym by two seconds.  With his extra 30 lbs of extra weight, more strongman training experience, and a brand new set of rock climbing shoes to that savvy strongmen competitors utilize on truck pulling he should have left buried me. 

Questions about what shoes to use with what kind of lifting and training seem to come up as often as Kardashians show up in the public consciousness.  Like the Kardashians, as far as I'm concerned, they pop up far, FAR too often.  This has to be part of a larger marketing conspiracy that exploded way back in the 1980's when Nike teamed up with Michael Jordon and created the illusion that somehow shoes were the key to peak athletic performance.  Strength training chicanery simply must have followed suit. 

I mostly train with Chuck Taylors for two key reasons:  they're cheap and they're what I have.  With my limited funds and my near-constant traveling, I'm forced into strength training minimalism largely by necessity.  That has drawbacks that I largely don't mind.  Just like growing up poor teaches you more about living life than growing up privileged, training with nothing will teach force someone to make more out of less. 

As we were all playing around with pulling a truck, many of the guys in the group struggled with driving with their legs because they were up too far on their toes.  I explained to everyone that they need to think of their feet like their hands and get a good grip on the ground by making sure that with each step by planting as much of their foot on the ground (balls and toes of the foot) with each step.

Ever heard of chip-coated pavement?  It's pretty much gravel with not enough tar to call it real asphalt.  In other words, it's a little loose.  That's what I was pushing this truck on.  Either I get my footing right or put my teeth into the bumper when I slip!

 

I learned this from pushing work trucks in lousy driveways...wearing my Chucks.  Push heavy weights on such an unforgivingly-loose surface with a shoe that has does you no favors will force you to plant your feet one way:  the right way.  What would rock climbing shoes have done to fix that? 

I'm not completely slamming specialized shoes, or anything else for that matter in aiding weight training.  Where I in a competition and I had the means to buy a special pair of shoe for every event to maximize my chances of winning, I'd certainly do it!

Your work-out gear doesn't make you strong.  It didn't make Michael Jordon one of the most legendary athletes of all time and it won't make you fantastically strong.  Your head and your body are responsible for that.  If you don't have those two things in check then the only thing that your shoes buy you is credit card debt. 

SO TRAIN AND STOP WORRYING ABOUT SHIT THAT DOESN'T MATTER.

    

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Old Man Strength Training

OK....this also applies to "old women" but I thought the title was catchier that way.  Here is the deal; most trainers get this terribly wrong.  By wrong I mean that their focus is 180 degrees out, exactly opposite of what it should be.  And this concept also applies to middle age trainees (like me).  Trainers and the major certifying agencies often get the programming backwards.  Their focus is wrong, and as a result, they deliver much less than they should.  Let's explore the issue a bit more.

Coach Dan John likes to say that strength training is loaded movement.  There are basically 5 different fundamental human movements: push, pull, squat, hip hinge, and core/carry.  Of course there are other movements, but these are the fundamental ones that form the basis of most athletic movements.  They simply must be addressed in your training program or it is incomplete at best. Again, strength training is loaded movement.  Load and movement (along with volume) are the major variables that are manipulated in designing a strength training program.

Young people spend lots of time running, jumping, tumbling, climbing trees, jumping over fences, wrestling, playing sports ............ moving.  Active young people rarely have a movement deficit.  I think you will agree that in general, young people move better than older people.  They may not be strong, or even fit, but they can move.

As we get older, we don't do that stuff anymore.  If you are 40+, when was the last time you climbed a tree or hopped over a fence?  Your movement ability is not what it used to be.  This is partly why recreational sports are so dangerous for 30 somethings.  They are young enough to feel invincible, and to remember participating vigorously, but they have already lost some movement capability.

Which brings up a simple concept.  Programming for younger trainees should focus on loading, with simple, basic movements.  Of course, movement quality is always important!  However, it is OK to use some machines to increase loading.  However, for older adults, the focus should always be on movement.  Movement is more important than loading!

Consider the exercise below.  This is a seated overhead press.  This is the kind of exercise that is often used with older adults. It is used because it is "safer" than the free weight version.

Here is the problem, all of the "movement" work is done by the machine.  It is completely stabilized, with the movement path fixed.  This removes all of the stability work, which is the most critical part for older adults!  The legs are completely relaxed, the core does not really need to be engaged.  Really, only the few muscles that are necessary to move the device along the fixed path are engaged.  However, because the movement path is fixed, with little chance of deviation or error, it is safer to load heavy.  That is why it is often used with older adults.  Again, this is backwards.  It is sacrificing movement for loading.  

Take a look at the exercise below.  This is a very "movement" focused exercise.  It is a movement based version of the exercise above.  Every muscle in the body is engaged from the muscles in your fingers to your toes.  The core is locked down, the neck and traps are stabilizing the upper spine and shoulder blades.  The lumbar stabilizers, glutes and hip flexors are stabilizing the trunk and hips.  The legs are working to provide a strong base.  

But, many trainers will object,"That exercise is not safe for older adults!"  Wrong.  It is not safe if the loading is too heavy.  They may have to start unloaded!  That is OK.  Strength training is loaded movement.  We don't sacrifice movement for loading, especially in older adults.  Instead of prescribing exercises that help to restore functional movement, they often prescribe exercises like in the top picture (seated machine press).  They emphasize loading over movement by having the older client do 5-6 exercise machines.  

Instead, how about having an older client practice getting up off the floor instead (i.e., Turkish get ups, even without a load)?  Maybe lift something off the floor and even press it overhead.  It does not have to be heavy, yet.  Instead of a machine bench press, how about a push up?  Even if it is a knee pushup the core will still be engaged.  What about a bodyweight squat instead of a machine leg press? Even if it is not a full squat initially, or they have to deload a bit by holding on to something (i.e. TRX), it is a more of a functional movement than the leg press and is plenty safe if loading is appropriate.  

There are lots of simple programs that fit this template:

Dan John's Lifetime Warrior Workout

How about a version of the "Program Minimum"

Monday - Swings
Tuesday - Getups
Wednesday - Pushups
Thursday - Swings
Friday - Getups
Saturday or Sunday - Pushups

Or maybe something like:

Monday/Thursday: Pushups, body rows
Tuesday/Friday: Goblet squats, Bulgarian goat belly swings

Or perhaps for a middle aged client:

Warm up: Turkish Getups, then: Pull-ups, dips, goblet squats, kettlebell swings

For an older adult, a program of nothing but Turkish Getups (starting unloaded and progressing to loaded as able) could be a life changer.  In fact, for a middle aged adult, try working up to a 1/2 bodyweight Turkish Getup!  If that is all you did, and you reached that goal, you would be a strong and capable human being!

Some parting thoughts.  Doing some work on the ground is good.  Any exercise that requires you to get off of the floor is going to be of benefit.  Carry some stuff for distance.  Training to pick things up off the floor is important. You are going to have to do that every day in real life anyway.  Press things overhead.  Most exercises should be done while supporting your own weight, and not sitting or lying down.  Keep it simple! Focus on improving movement quality first, and loading second.  Never sacrifice movement quality for loading.

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NAVY WRESTLING TRAINING

Go Navy beat Army!  Motivating clip from Navy Wrestling.

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Ruck Training Program

I have updated the ruck training program.  After experimenting with some simple strength programs, we have settled on an approach that works well with ruck training.  I have updated the ruck training program to include that strength program.  You can find the ruck training program on my blog by clicking on the hyperlinks on the right side of the page.

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Updated SEAL Screener - BUD/S Training Program

This is the 4th edition of the program.  Although it was edited very recently, I updated it again based on our recent experience with the Tactical Athlete Program assessment.  The most recent version of this program can be found on my blog by clicking the hyperlink on the right side of the page.

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