Strongman and squats

When I got into strongman I loved squatting. I had done some powerlifting competitions and it was my best lift. It was always my best lift as long as I could remember. When I first started training at the age of 14 I always put more into that lift and took pride in the fact that most guys were not willing to match my efforts there.

Fast forward about 20 years to my first strongman contest and three months of event days and I had developed a deep anxiety for my old friend. My back hurt all the time. I was deadlifting, squatting, cleaning, pressing, loading stones, carrying kegs and sandbags, moving yokes and farmers and lifting whatever else I could. Obviously, I was overtraining. But this led me to really delve into programming for a sport that requires strength across multiple movements.

Besides planning my event training more efficiently, I had to plan my squat training more efficiently. As a low bar, wide stance, squatter that used a lot of back strength to move the weight, I needed to change my pattern and squat variations. Here are the changes I made.

1. Front squats

Front squats became my primary focus. I didn't do them at first because I hated the. I hated them because I wasn't good at them. I couldn't hold the bar with an Olympic grip and the bodybuilder's cross arm style usually ended up with me dumping the bar. I learned a good trick from some fellow trainers (Kyle Hunt and Jonathan Lespinas) to solve my problem: load up a bar or a yoke, assume the Olympic grip and have a buddy pull your elbows up into a good rack position. You will have to do this more than once.

The benefit to doing front squats is obviously you will be using more leg power (quads) and not as much back (so you can get more from deads and events). Therefore you can expect better recovery following your squat sessions. Furthermore, most of our events are front loaded so they have a more direct carryover to your event training. Front squats will build your upper back by forcing you to maintain thoracic extension throughout the lift. This will carryover directly to front loaded events such as sandbag and husafel carries or keg and stone loading.

2. Back squats: from low to high

Again, this will save your back and open up those hips. If you are like me then you will need oly shoes or a board underneath your heels to perform these. 

Instead of pushing your butt back and descending slowly, you let the knees translate forward a bit and drop a bit more quickly. You will end up with a greater range of motion and better quad development.

3. Hack squats

I swear these are awesome for strongman. I like to do these with both heavy weights and high reps. All the grind is in my quads and the unbearable pain is similar to the kind I feel in a car deadlift.

4. The bodybuilder: high reps and pumps

Since we are now using squats to help us improve our sport training we need to think about the how we organize our sets and reps. 

When a contest is near I like higher reps. 8 will be the lowest I go and I love sets of 20. At a certain point, it's all heart and conditioning and that will help big time on competition day.

5. Programming squats with all those events 

You can be creative here, but these plans have helped me in the past:

A. Squat and deadlift on the same day. I prefer to deadlift heavy first then squat for reps.

B.  Train legs early in the week and then deadlift with events later in the week.  When the leg strength needs to come up, you must prioritize.

C. Squat before events. You can never be sure how fatigued you will be when you do farmers, yoke, Conan's wheel, or medleys in a competition. By leading your event day with squats you will acclimate yourself to the severity (hopefully) of competition day.

If you have any comments or questions, please feel free to respond. Thanks.