Time. We always seem to have so little of it and yet are so bad at managing it. How many workouts were cut short on time? How often does our workout seem to take longer than we anticipated? How often have we stressed about being on the clock in a contest?
One instant remedy is to make the clock your friend and incorporate it more frequently into your training. Below are some easy suggestions for you to use the clock and increase your training intensity:
1. Time rest periods
Every time I begin taking short rest periods in training I realize that my conditioning was not as good as I thought it was. I am informed of this because I end up on the floor gasping for air.
Try keeping rest between heavier sets to a minimum of three minutes and cut it to 60 seconds for most everything else and note how your strength and conditioning both improve.
2. Time events
In strongman, you generally have a minute to do as much as possible or you must complete a task faster than your competitors. Therefore, timing events in training is critical to your progress and should be mandatory for every event you do from yoke and farmers to tire flips and stones.
3. Time your entire session
I followed a Franco Columbo bodybuilding routine years ago and he said it had to be performed in one hour and fifteen minutes. This was a lot of work and the guys at school would ask me why I was lifting such light weights. Well, there were so many exercises I couldn't finish it all any other way but to reduce the weights and cut rest periods short. This was effective for getting lean, but the point is if you cut yourself off you will work harder to get everything done that you need to.
4. Perform X amount of work with a time goal.
I used to love this for dips and chin-ups. I would set a timer for 10 minutes and try to do as many of one or both as I could. Each week I would try to get more reps in during that time and when I failed to do so I would change the time determination, either going up as high as 15 minutes or as low as 5 minutes.
There you go. Grab a stopwatch next time you're training and note your progress with every passing second.
In Part 1 of this series I wrote about how I got interested in grip training and performing various feats of strength. In case you missed it, my enthusiasm got the best of me and then overtraining led to various aches and pains that interfered with my progress in strongman.
In Part 2, I will discuss how to plan this kind of training into your program. I will also touch on the three basic forms of grip strength and how they can assist you in the sport of strongman.
If you are a competitive strongman and you are getting into grip training I think you need to start slow. You must first prepare by working your entire arm directly. That means training the biceps, triceps, and forearms pretty much like a bodybuilder in order to strengthen the muscles and tendons, which are strained intensely by strongman events and grip work.
While many are on the fence about direct arm work for strongman, concerned about overtraining the already smaller arm muscles and thus leading to injury, I think they do need to be trained. Of course, if you go crazy you can cut into your recovery and risk hurting yourself, but leaving those muscles proportionately underdeveloped can lead to injury too.
When I train arms, it's usually after I press and I pick one or two exercises for biceps, triceps, and forearms/grip and perform 3-5 sets of 10-20 reps. If I'm looking to start intense grip training again, my routine will look something like this:
Dumbbell curls
Overhead triceps extension
Reverse curls
Wrist curls
The first two are obvious but wrist curls and reverse curls work the flexors and extensors of the forearms as well as the brachioradialis. These will get trashed in grip training so it's best to prepare.
After a few weeks, I will cut a set or two from all three curl variations and begin adding the fun stuff.
The fun stuff, grip training, ultimately falls into three categories: pinch, crush, and support.
Pinch grip training really comes down to the thumbs. It is likely the biggest bang for your buck if you're looking into building stronger hands in general. It is most often trained by pinching together steel plates with the smooth sides out. Your fingers will be on one side and thumbs on the other. It can be done with stacks of 10s, 25s, 45s, and even York blobs (broken dumbbell heads).To add more weight to the plates, run a pipe or small bar through the plates and collar lock both ends.
Adam Glass demonstrating his awesome pinch grip strength with over 260lbs!
Card tearing, which I wrote a bit about in the first article, requires tremendous pinching strength. You must pinch the deck hard enough so the cards don't fan apart. If you add tearing as one of your grip movements, be sure to have trained your reverse curls and hammer curls well to prepare your upper arm for this feat of strength.
Crushing grip strength is basically trained with grippers. From the cheap Everlast wooden handles to the Captains of Crush, grippers are the movement most associated with grip training. If you want solid crushing grip you have to train grippers because other forms of grip strength don't necessarily carryover.
While crushing strength is trained by the action of closing the hand, support grip is trained by holding a weight in your already closed hand. There is open and closed hand support grip training depending on if you are using a a thick bar or a standard bar. This is trained and tested by all varieties of deadlifts, Farmers walks and holds, Thomas inch or Monster dumbbell training, chin-ups and pull-ups, etc.
Of the three, support grip is the most commonly tested in strongman competition. We have to deadlift Olympic bars and thick bars, clean and press thick bars and dumbbells, and farmers walks are a staple event.
Getting ready to continental clean an axle.
The others, pinch and crush, are not so much tested. But, if you wanted to have more well rounded hand strength and get the biggest carryover into your training I would train pinch. The additional thumb strength can assist in picking up odd objects and thick bars. If you're like me and you need better support grip, you should start with improving your farmers both for maximum weight and distance.
Some people add levering as a fourth category but for the sake of brevity and simplicity, we can talk about wrist development instead. In my opinion, levering is a good way to start to build the wrists and provide the foundation for getting into steel bending. As steel bending puts tremendous strain on the wrists, the strength gained from levering will provide an easy, less painful transition.
Here is some classic levering above.
Here is another way to train levering, deadlifting it from the floor.
If you want to put it all together, here is just one example of how to incorporate extra grip training into your strongman routine.
Day 1 Press
Axle clean and press 3x5, then for the last set clean and press each rep 60s
Floor press 4x8
Pull-ups 4x10 (this is a good exercise to add fat gripz on)
Face pulls with band 3x20
Dumbbell curls 3x15
Triceps extension 3x15
Reverse curls 2x15
Wrist curls 2x15
Day 2
Deadlifts 5x3
Front squat 4x8
GHR 3x12
Seated calf raise 3x15
Day 3
Yoke. 2-3 runs timed
Farmers. 2-3 runs timed. Alternate between heavy weights and light weights for distance
Stones. Alternate stone over bar and stone series.
Two hand plate pinch. Alternate weekly between dynamic and static pinches.
The above routine is actually quite grip intensive. Overall arm strength is built on Monday along with additional support grip training via pull-ups which can be done with an open or closed support grip. Support grip is tested again on Wednesday with deadlifts and really taxed Friday with farmers runs. Additional grip strength is built through pinch grip training after events on Friday.
For those looking to get into feats of strength, you could replace the pinch lifts with levering on Friday. After you make some progress with your levering, you should have a better foundation to begin tearing cards or bending nails.
If you have more questions or want more information, check out Part 1 where I list some good resources you can find online to get started with your training. And, of course, I encourage you to reach out to me if you have more questions on how grip and feats of strength can be incorporated into your strongman training.
Whether you're a strongman, powerlifter, crossfitter, or gym bro, you probably want a bigger deadlift. If you're willing to put in the time and work, here are some things that I learned over the course of my training.
More volume.
Programs such as Cube Boss, Coan-Phillipi, Ort-Mag are not magic formulas. They simply prescribe more volume than you are used to. Cube Boss uses a variety of deadlifts and multiple sets giving you the bulk of your volume by actually deadlifting. Coan-Phillipi really just makes you do explosive sub max work and a variety of assistance work. Ort-Mag pushes you to do more reps. Think about why these programs work and what you need before you try them.
More reps.
I pulled heavy singles for a while and noticed I always used the same weight. That's because heavy singles didn't help. I started doing reps but they were touch and go and my max still stayed the same. So that didn't help either. Dead stop reps from the floor finally got my numbers moving again. I tend to work in the 3-6 range. This will do a lot for your starting strength than singles or touch and go reps.
More rows.
Your back just isn't big enough. Pull-ups are great but you need rows. Barbell rows and dumbbell rows are best. Use heavy weights here and do lots of reps.
Leg press.
Don't be afraid to use this machine to put size and strength on your legs.
Grip.
Farmers carries are best because they train support grip. This is the kind of grip you need for deadlifting. Crushing grip and pinch grip don't really help so much here so put the grippers and shit away unless you want to be good at grippers.
Hamstrings.
Put some more meat on your backside and use straight leg deadlifts, leg curls, and GHRs. Like the rows, train these heavy.
Angles.
This is related to deficits but experiment with different heights and variations. I found 4" block pulls helped me in the past. Unfortunately 18"/rack pulls only made me better at 18"/rack pulls, which is great for strongman when the event shows up. Sumo deadlifts can help too.
My favorite, however, is deficit deadlifts. The longer range of motion means more power off the floor and those extra 2" make the top end a real treat to lockout too. I find that being more powerful at the initiation of the lift does more for my lockout than any hip thrust does.
Strongman effect.
Strongman training can make your back big and strong in new ways. Lifts such as stones, farmers, and yoke tax the musculature in new ways, particularly because of the increased time under tension of these lifts. It's not uncommon for a new strongman trainee to see a huge improvement in their deadlift by virtue of training events hard.
That's the bulk of my general thoughts on improving your deadlift. If you read some of my other training articles you will see the same theme: more reps and more volume and building more muscle pays off. Good luck.
