Want to learn how to train for strongman? What lessons can you learn from strongman training that will help with your training?
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Transcript
The following transcript is AI generated, so please excuse any mistakes or inconsistencies:
Gary
Hello and welcome to the Triage Method podcast with me, Gary McGowan, and as always, my co-host, Mr. Patrick Farrell. Paddy How are you this week?
Paddy
I’m positively splendid, Gary. As per usual.
Gary
Wonderful. I was looking through every time I look to the podcast transcripts these days to keep calling you Patty with a T. Any video, it’s always Patty. So I’m thinking I might just start calling you Patrick at the start of each video, so I don’t have to edit it. But anyway, today we’re talking about Strongman. Okay, we’re continuing the How to Train series. So far we’ve discussed how to train for health, how to train for building muscle and how to train for strength and power. I know what we’re going to talk about is something that’s very similar to the power of discussion, but with its own nuances, and that is strongman. And what you might call, I suppose, functional strength training, not not quite CrossFit, but some components of CrossFit because there is a crossover. You do get some strongman that drips into CrossFit across training and just kind of general more functional strength training. So if you if you train in one of the more, the more rugged gyms, let’s say, and we’ve got some Atlas, Stones and Axel and different things like that, you’re going to have access to some of these exercises and it’s probably worth knowing some of the training principles.
Paddy
Yeah. And like I always think of this in terms of there’s this continuum, like CrossFit is more, I’d say more on the cardiovascular continuum as strongman is more on the strength continuum, you know, in terms of where they fit. But there is actually quite a lot of overlap in terms of some of the training methodologies, some of the thinking behind this. However, the fact that there is less cardio will say in strong members that say that there’s none and that there is more cardiovascular conditioning in CrossFit. Yeah, the training obviously differs. There are obviously different exercises that you’re required to do or potentially are required to do. And and as a result, there’s more of a focus on certain skill specific stuff which we’ll talk about today in terms of strongman, because the actual training you do for a strongman isn’t a groundbreaking. It’s not just like, oh, this is a really hard thing to train for. Like obviously physically it’s hard to train for, but I mean, like hard to program, hard to think about what you should be doing. Like it’s it’s pretty well, it’s pretty clear in terms of what adaptations you’re looking for. However, there is a large scale component, and we talked about this yesterday, my essay last day with powerlifting in terms of the skill component of lifting in general right now, you can imagine if you have movements that aren’t as you know, like just up and down, like a bench press, like, you know, that’s obviously a skill for lift. You have to have a lot of skill to do that. Lift. But if you have a movement with a lot of moving parts, like even something like, you know, lifting the stones, right? There’s a lot of moving parts to that. There’s a specific skill of being able to do that. You could be strong enough. You could be, you know, have enough muscle, you could weigh enough, you could do everything right. Your cardiovascular system is dialed in. If you don’t have the technique, if you don’t have the skill of being able to do that properly, you’re never going to be able to exhibit the strength and other physical attributes that you have. Right. So that’s going to be a huge component of something like strongman training. However, we do also want to cover today the, you know, broader discussion of strongman training principles, because a lot of people will do some sort of like modified strongman type stuff in the gym, you know, whether it might be something as simple, I suppose, as like farmers walks and farmers carries or whatever, or it could be very specific to strongman in terms of maybe they’re doing something like a Viking Press or they’re doing something like log presses, like log overhead presses, like, you know, But again, it just depends on what exactly we’re talking about, which unfortunately with all these discussions of like how to train for, you know, these are general discussions. You know, if you came to me and you had like very specific, clearly delineated goals, much easier to program for, whereas what we’re trying to do here is give you these like broad, broad strokes.
Gary
Absolutely. And I think like as a trainer in particular, if you’re a trainer listening to this, what you really need is a solid knowledge of foundational principles and then the ability to apply that to different clients so that if you have your first client who has strongman training goals, let’s say that you can actually start somewhere. You know, you could still get mentoring for someone who has more experience, but you still have somewhere to start because you’ve got knowledge of the foundational principles. That’s probably one of the things that trainers struggle with most, is taking on clients who have goals that they don’t have much experience with. If solid grasp of the foundations is actually really easy to coach, a broad range of clients and you’ll still get better with time coaching specific goals, obviously, but it gives you a basis on which you can supplement your initial foundations. So that’s really important. Now obviously it’s in the name Strongman. There’s a big role here for strength, There’s a big role here for having more muscle, a big role here for resistance training generally, and you will have to do quite a bit of strength specific work if you want to do well in Strongman and this type of training. But there are some events sometimes, and this varies by local, regional, national competition, etc., where you will have to do higher reps. You know, there’s even times when they’ll do like let’s say a car deadlift and it’s as many reps in a minute, for example, and you might be doing 15 to 20 reps potentially. You need to train for that. But one of the things that’s going to confer decent ability overall is having a high level of maximal strength. So we do need to be getting exposure to that 1 to 5 REP range, relatively close to failure, probably 2 to 3 reps reserved most of the time. And we do need to be getting exposed to that fairly regularly. And it’s going to be very similar in that sense to what we said as it relates to powerlifting, where if you’re training in this lower rep zone, you’re going to be training closer to maximal strength and thus you’re going to get more specific adaptations to maximal strength. However, when it comes to strongman, it’s a bit different in that when we come close to competition, we’re not necessarily trying to do loads and loads of singles and that’s it or loads and loads of triples because we’re trying to be specific to one rep max because as I said, that might be what you’re training for. So you might actually have to do even right up to competition sets of five sets of ten, maybe even more, because we’re trying to express strength across a broader range of intensity zones. And that goes right back to what we said at the start of the Last Strength podcast, where we said that strength is task specific force production. It’s not just maximal strength. It doesn’t have to be defined solely in terms of one rep max and a test of strength in terms of how many times you lift something a minute and you might get 15-20 reps. That’s still strength. It’s just over a different intensity zone. So as you begin to think about strength and strongman, there is a strong rule here for that. Lower those lower reps on similar to powerlifting. But we have to broaden our definition of strength to encompass some of the higher rep activities and those we start to enter into strength and then strength, endurance and somewhere along that spectrum. So I think that’s one of the key differences here.
Paddy
And it’s really important to understand because like a lot of strong men get into strong men because they’d like this kind of like strength stuff. They like being able to like just be strong, you know? So they obviously naturally gravitate towards, oh, well, I’m going to express my strength. I want to do like a triple, I want to do a double, I want to do a single. You know, if they want to really push that on a maximal strength and it definitely has carryover, but you have to actually train the carryover as well. You know, like you can’t just get stronger in the one, two, three rep max range, you know, and hope that it fully carries over because if that was the case, then power lifters would, you know, absolutely crush a strong man. And that’s not generally always the case. You know, like obviously again, there’s carryover, but if you’ve never done a 20 reps, you know you’re going to be dead after like five reps. You know, if you’re doing a heavy like deadlift or something and you’ve never done a 20 rex, ask for more or try to do that for whatever 60 seconds or whatever it is, you know, you are going to be in bits, you’re going to be halfway through your smoked can’t go on, right? So you have to train those specific attributes. But the, the difficulty in thinking about this more broadly is that, you know, if you wanted if someone said like, oh, like I know how what’s the best way to add 100 kilos, 50 times, you know, like you want to do a 50 or at maximum you’re 50 rep max to be 100 kilo bench. Right. Which is obviously, you know, great. This is something that might apply to something like the NFL combine or something where you’re like, here’s your 100 kilo entrance rep. Right? And what’s the best way to get better at that? Well, it’s probably to get your bench press, Max, to 200 kilos because you’re hearing 50% like this feels like a fucking lightweight. Like take whatever your one rep Max is on whatever lift that you currently do and then do 50% to this, you know, like it’s going to feel very light and you’re going to be able to do more reps. So it makes sense that getting stronger makes like just gave me stronger in an absolute sense. Makes your rep endurance go up because at any given weight, because they’re just simply a lower percentage of your overall strength ability. Right. However, you still need to train that specifically. You still need to go, okay, well, there’s a technique to this. There’s a skill to being able to do whatever, a minute of bench pressing, you know, And there’s a skill of like the breathing, the pacing, the, like understanding of your body positioning across the whole minute. Like, you could be really great, staying tight, bracing, doing all that kind of stuff for a one rack max. But as soon as it gets into multiple reps, you’re all over the place and you see this all the time with something like, you know, squatting or deadlifting because you have to stay braced while being able to breathe, you know, which is a little bit different than doing like a single double or triple or whatever, right? Whereas if you’re doing a minute of deadlifts and you just hold your breath the whole time, like you do that valsalva manoeuvre you’re going to pass if you’re going to be absolutely gassed, if you don’t pass it and it’s just going to be a non enjoyable experience, right? So you have to learn that skill of, okay, well, how do I breathe? How do like, when do I take the breath 2-3 reps and then take a breath? Do I do two? Do I breathe in between every single rep? Like how do I stay braced like this? A very specific skill to it. Right? And that’s just from the like lifting exercises. If you’re doing something that’s very sport specific, like a game, you know, Atlas Stones or whatever it is, you know, whatever the specific event is like, you have to learn the skill of that. You have to know when to breathe. You know, if you’re not carrying whatever the fuck they call those big fucking shields like things, you know, if you’re carrying one of those and you’re just like, okay, well, I don’t know how far I should be stepping, how like I can step further out if I’m, you know, fresh. But if I’m fatigued, like, maybe I want to take smaller steps, you know, same way as you know, and, you know, as farmers carries, Farmers walks And where do you want to take small steps? Do you want to take bigger steps? Do you like to explode at the gate and then get into a good rhythm? Like there’s all these very skill, specific things, which yes, it is like, yes, if you’re stronger, they’re just going to become easier because it’s a lower percentage. But that doesn’t negate the fact that you still have to practice at that percentage. And this is something that a lot of people really make a mistake with, especially when it comes to like strongmen or something. Because again, like people going into it, you just want you want to be going heavy, you want to be going hard, but you have to remember that you still need to train in those kind of lighter intensities, those lower intensities to actually develop that skill. Like if you’re going to be doing like again, Atlas Stones, whatever it is, you don’t always need to go to your max at Atlas Stone. You can still work on the scale of it, you can still work on your technique. You can still work on your breathing, you can still work on, you know, the muscular physiological adaptations by using a lighter weight. You know, it’s just maybe not a stone.
Gary
Yeah, absolutely. And and that kind of brings us to a broader point. Again, that applies to strong men where so we we’ve said you need to train in a broad range of intensities but you also need to train quite a broad exercise selection. And this is a challenging thing, but it’s also a good thing. It’s challenging because like if you’re, let’s say a year out from your next drama and competition, you might know exactly what events are going to be at that competition. So you might know in advance. So you need to train to train a broad range of qualities. And you know, the event you do after might be different again. So this is especially true if you’re applying trying to apply this to CrossFit because very often it’s totally unpredictable in advance. And so if you’re in that type of situation, what you want is a broad range of strength qualities where you’re strong in lots of different muscles, lots different movements, lots of different range, and most range of the motion, which as I said, is very challenging. But the good thing about that is that it means there’s actually quite a bit of crossover when you’re comprehensive. So for example, if you have a block where you had you have in Train Atlas Stones for a while, but you could be doing loads of squatting, evening loads of rolls, loads of deadlifts, you’ll still have a lot of your strength, you know, similar. You might not be doing much long presses, but you’ve done lots of dumbbell presses, kettlebell classes, military presses. You still have a lot of that strength that carries over quite easily. It just requires a couple of specific changes. And this is why you obviously see if a power lifter, you know, changes over to strongman, that has some difficulty with some events, but they have a lot of advantages because of their previous training. So if you’re comprehensive in your training and you’re prepared for most events, they’re not going to be your general base for the long term. So everyone’s going to have some sort of squat squat, some sort of deadlift or hip hinge. You need to be strong on an overhead press. The bench press is probably less emphasized in Strongman, but it’s still important to have that strength, even like something as simple as if you’ve got a super strong chest, it’s going to give you a greater crushing strength to keep a hold of the Atlas stone, you know, all these little things that begin to add up and you basically want lots of muscle all over your body, lots of strength, all of your butt, all over your body and experience then in training and different ranges of motion. And going back to the Atlas Stone example again, if you’ve only ever trained deadlifts and you’ve trained them with conventional plates, conventional technique, you’ve tried to keep your back super straight all the time. Now you try to do an atlas stone, you have to squat down lower to get a proper grip that you have to bend your back, you have to round your back that’s more efficient. And if you haven’t been exposed to that before, it’s going to feel really strange. It’s going to be it’s going to feel like maybe it’s going to injure me. And if you had never done it and you tried to lift a super heavyweight, maybe you would injury because it’s a totally novel exposure. However, if you’re training this more consistently, you develop your strength in those moving patterns, in those ranges of motion, in those giant positions. And it’s just like anything else, you can build up tolerance to that. So initially you might find that if you’re trans transferring over from a deadlift where you’re being super straight with your back to something like an Atlas Stone where you’re initially starting more flex and then you extend at the top, you might find that your lower back is actually much slower than normal after training because this is a novel stimulus. But again, over time you adapt to that. That’s one of the beautiful things that strongmen would expose you to, is this broad range of movements, broad range of strength qualities, and it’ll teach you that your body has the potential to adapt to far more than just these few conventional lifts,
Paddy
But it brings up the point of you need to be strong all over. You need to just have muscle all over. It’s very like a shotgun, like you could anything can be thrown your way, right? So you just need to be very generalizable, be strong. Right. And a lot of people will train just in the gym. They’ll just generally get themselves stronger. But going back to our previous discussion as well, in terms of the skills specific stuff, like there comes a point where you still need to train the actual events. I know back in the day, like, you know, strongmen would have trained like basically just gym work and, you know, it’d be relatively specific gym work, but it wouldn’t necessarily involve the events. Right. And that could be because people still do it to this day, and that could be because of like logistics. You know, your gym might not have all the strong language or whatever. Right. And whereas there might be a gym an hour down the road, 2 hours in road, whatever, that you could go to maybe once per week and practice the events. Right? So there is a kind of continue here with, you know, never practicing the events, practicing the events like once per week and then really fully integrating the events into your training every day. Right. And there’s no actual, like perfect answer. I would say probably if you never practice the events, like that’s probably a lesson optimal way to go about things. But that’s not to say that you need to go completely the other way and practice the events every single day because the events themselves, especially if you are actually, you know, trying to be somewhat competitive when it you’re trying to use heavier weights, you’re trying to do whatever, like they beat you up quite a bit, you know, And it’s not necessarily even just in terms of like muscular stuff. It’s, you know, ligaments, tendons, whatever else, you know, and also just your body in general. Like if you’re carrying something like your forearms are going to get bruised up, you know, like there’s all these little things that you don’t necessarily think of, but they are part of the adaptation process, right? So there is this kind of continuum in terms of you need to practice the events, but that doesn’t mean it has to be every single session. But I will come back to that, the discussion overall, because right now, if we’re saying we need to be strong, what are we thinking? Like, how do we set up our training? Gary? Are we doing like three rep Max is every day we go into the gym like, what’s the story? Yeah.
Gary
So no, we’re not going to be doing that. What we’re going to do, broadly speaking, is we’re going to have some exposure to that 1 to 5 REP Branch. Okay. So what I would do if I was training for Strongman is I would start my workout with 1 to 5 or a 1 to 5 reps that are multiple sets, I should say, in that 2 to 3 reps reserved range and I would have some sort of squat, some sort of hip hinge or some sort of overhead press. I’d probably keep those as my core movements stop more workouts out like that, and then as I move through the workout, I’ll move towards more of the higher reps. So for example, the next exercise you might do might be, let’s say we’re doing today, we’re doing a heavy squat creation. First exercise 3 to 5 reps, second exercise, then we might do maybe 8 to 12 reps of like log overhead pressing, for example. So that’s the this is where you’re getting volume exposure to that lift for higher X, you’re focused on hyper activity and you’re focused on that strength, endurance and still have another day than when you’re doing your pressing for you to focus more on the strength quality. So depending on the nature of the event is going to be a maximum lift. Is it going to be so maximum if reps for time, for example, we’re trying to fit it all in. Okay. And then as you move through the workout, what you’re going to do is you’re going to encompass maybe some of the more aerobic challenging events. So it’s kind of a mix of aerobic and strength, but maybe something like a farmer’s walk where you have to do 200 meters. You like put that towards the end of the workout as more of a and aerobic challenge. And then you might include things like specific strengthening specific rehab, a rehab work that you have to that you have to do. For example, it might be that you haven’t done your Atlas Stones in a while, so you want to build up some more lower back and core strength. So you might do core strengthening work. You might do Jefferson Curls to get used to the flex flex spinal position on the lower back and so on. So that’s kind of like the broad framework. I would use this. I’d start with the strength, I’d move towards hypertrophy and strength endurance work, and then I’d move towards the high end of strength, endurance, slash, slash aerobic work towards the end, along with the rehab and rehab.
And I think that’s like a good broad framework. And then that would change at multiple times throughout the year. So if you’re coming up towards an event, let’s say, and you now know the nature of the event, you can start to train in a more specific manner. So for example, if you have like two different movements you need to do in a row or something like that, which is sometimes featured, that might be something that you train more, or if you know the distances, you know, the rep ranges, you know the timings. Now you can start to get more and more specific. So as an example, let’s say we did the, the deadlift example. You’ve been told that you’re but at your competition you have to do an arm wrap in one minute as many reps as possible at a certain way in one minute of time. And you’ve previously only been doing 1 to 5 reps deadlifts. What you might do is you might start including maybe one set where you do a 32nd mirror in your workout, or you might try to do sets of 10 to 15, assuming that you’ll get at least a minute and so on. Okay, So you’re basically moving more and more towards event specific challenges. What appreciating that you don’t need to be doing that all the time. Your base is still like that broad framework of your strength, strength, endurance hypertrophy, aerobic rehab stuff, rehab. And then you move towards event specific over time. That’s not like a decent framework.
Paddy
Yeah, I definitely agree with that. And again, it depends on your specific needs. Like if you find like your endurance is just stuck in next level, like never have a problem with that. The ability to train it less like obviously you can train the self that you’re good at and try to get even better. But you know, the the magnitude of improvement is probably lower. Whereas if you’re like, right, my strength, my actual like, you know, maximal strength isn’t where I want it to be, then you probably need to dedicate more time to that, right? So you do need to be somewhat specific in terms of what’s going on with your body. But again, a general shock on approach here. You know, you could do something like, okay, well, I’m going to go in and I know a lot of strong men do like something like a kind of like a slender five, three, one kind of approach where it’s like the throughout treatment, whatever. But they’ll often do it with like more specific exercises. So maybe rather than a like a back squat, they might do something like a front squash, which just has a lot more carry over to something like again, like Atlas Stones or, you know, just, you know, movements that strong that are more likely to be doing right and they might use them to make a high handle track bar deadlift for the ideal variation rather than a deadlift from the floor. Or you know, if they have like Wagon wheel fucking deadlift blades or whatever. Right. They, they might make it a slight bit more specific. They might use something like a, an incline bench press rather than a bench press for their. Yeah. On their upper body pressing days or their upper body days I should say. And they might then obviously use something like an overhead press but they might just use a log press like a lot of gyms these days, have some sort of log press, you know, type implement. And it might not be very specific to strongman, but you know, if they need to be overhead strong, it can help. Right. And so that’s I know a lot of people do like that kind of approach. They’ll do that kind of luxury one, but then they’ll do like a kind of back offset so that we’ve talked about before. That kind of like tops that back off approach. A lot of men, again, they kind of like that approach just to build this kind of generalizable strength. So they’ll do their like five, three, one SAS, you know, they’ll do whatever a five rep max that is. It’s not actually a max. I shouldn’t say I’ll do a set of five that is like 2 to 3 reps in reserve and next week we’ll do a set of three for next week, video set of one, all with like 2 to 3 reps in reserve, but then they’re back after that, they’ll just pick a percentage that makes sense for what they want to do.
It’s like 20% or 20% if they want to do like a something that lasts like 60 seconds or maybe they want to get like 20 reps or whatever it is, I’ll be like, Right, I’m just going to use like 60% of whatever I did for that. Main Yeah, all out set, that heavier set. Okay, I’m going to use 60% of that and I’m just going to do like an MRA, you know, I’m going to see how many reps I get that can be quite effective. Generally, again, we need to just delineate are we training or are we testing so that that doesn’t need to be all a failure and you’re still getting good adaptation is again, if it is one like let’s just say it’s like, you know, competition down from, you know, if you’re like I have to do you know, an I’m 60 seconds deadlift from the floor or you know, car deadlift or whatever fuck it is, you’re just, you know, the event and it’s something similar to that right. Like that doesn’t mean that every single training session that you do has to be your absolute best max attempt at that. But you’re trying to BS every single week on trying to get an extra. I’m going to try to do it faster or whatever. Like you can do this so maximally and just really build up that kind of pacing, the understanding of like, okay, well actually for this many sets, I know that, you know, my grip is going to be something that is fatiguing or whatever it is. Like you can still develop a better understanding of that movement. You can still develop a lot of adaptations without having to train to the absolute max. That’s not to say that you never train to the max, but we do have to be aware of recovery. You know, you can’t just train incredibly hard, incredibly heavy to failure every single day, especially if you’re doing certain movements that’s, you know, strongmen are being exposed to you which put them in like stretch positions or, you know, rounded over spinal positions or wherever. Like you just need to be a bit more aware of your overall recovery because the body just gets beat up. Right. And so I just wanted to say that.
Gary
Absolutely. And I think like something that does become important here on top of the overall programing framework is when you do what you do. Okay. So I’ve talked a little bit about, you know, the specialization as you come up towards the competition already. Okay. So that’s that’s kind of cover. But the thing that does become quite important, especially in Strongman where like just absolute strength lifting as much as possible and being able to do it multiple times becomes important. Gaining muscle over time and gaining weight is something that you probably want to do. If you want to obviously do as well as you can. And strongman just look at the world’s strongest man competitions. You know, they’re it’s not the shredded esthetic physique you’re looking at. You need to gain more nutrients and it would fair and so most people are going to need to gain quite a bit of weight if they want to, like do their absolute best. So the question is when you do that, when do you try to bulk up, when you try to focus on muscle mass and hypertrophy?
And the best time to do that is obviously further from competition, where you spend more time doing more overall volume, you’re going to do more kind of, I suppose, conventional bodybuilding work where you’re able to focus on building muscle without all the fatigue that comes from it. So for example, if you were saying, right, I want to layer on as much muscle as possible, it wouldn’t be very efficient to just do like five sets of 12 and Atlas Stone lifts is probably not the best way of going about things. You want to think about What are the bodybuilders doing? What the bodybuilders look for is maximum muscle stimulus with the least fatigue coming from that. Okay, So they don’t want joint stretch, they want to accumulate volumes. They build muscle without the joint stress. So this is a good time to actually take lessons from bodybuilders. It’s still a supplement to your overall strength and training. Like you still want that to be a cornerstone of what you’re doing. But I would prioritize more conventional hypertrophy work as part of a block like that. And obviously then that’s coupled with caloric surplus and and along with that, then you want to think about when you are trying to focus on hypertrophy, what do I actually want to hypertrophy? So it might be if you look at the overall analysis of Stroma like you’re going to need very strong legs going to need a very strong back and you’re going to need pretty strong shoulders and you want to look at what’s my weak point currently. You know, what if someone just not performing well because if you’re able to specialize in building more muscle in those areas specifically and then transferring that over to strongman and strength specific training, that’s going to lead to a much better outcome than just having a shotgun approach of following Mike around and bodybuilding program. You don’t need to be spending like loads of time doing different angles of like bicep curls and tricep. pressdowns probably not very high yield, so focus on the things that are going to be of most benefit to you, especially when your hypertrophy work is somewhat limited because you have to keep in the skill of the strongman work. At the same time.
Paddy
Yeah, I don’t really have anything else to add to that, just that strong and generally do need to be bigger boys that you know and obviously a lot of that is we’re looking at enhanced strongman. Yes but it is what it is you know generally speaking, even in the small kind of ranks, bigger is better than. And we did touch on metrics. I don’t think we need to go over it again. But doing event work like you just need to factor it into your training. It’s skill specific stuff. You know, you need to get better at the skill of the specific events. And unfortunate thing is sometimes you’re not going to know what the events are. You know, if you have a local competition, you probably know more. So what the events are going to be. They’ll announce it ahead of time, whatever. But even in that case, it might only be a handful of weeks before the event you might not have thought about, Oh, what am I going to compete? Whatever. You might not be able to train across the year in an event specific way, You know, like you would like in an ideal world, in like a sporting context being like, okay, well, I know I’m going to be trained for this event in whatever August, and I’m able to train there for the entire year up to then with the specific events in mind, that would be fantastic.
You’re not generally afforded that. And so you just have to train in a more generalizable way, you know? Okay, well, what events have come up previously in those kind of competitions or in that area or whatever? So you’re like, okay, well, I know they have access to these lists, so it probably makes sense to do something similar to that because different federations, different like at events will have like prepared kind of lifts where they’ll be like, Right, well, we often like a, you know, a deadlift variation for max reps, you know, across a minute or whatever it is, you know, and some other ones will just have different. So, you know, you can build of a better picture, but you’re still at a disadvantage very often over a longer period of time of knowing what specific events you’re going to be training for. So you just have to get good at all of them, which is unfortunate because that’s very hard to do in a very specific manner. Like how much time do you a lot to every single one of these. What’s the likelihood of each of these coming up? Right. And so it’s just it’s just hard. And again, it’s also hard logistically because your gym may not have access to these various things. You might not have access to like Atlas Stones or whatever it is. Yes. You might have to do just okay, well, I have to do an event day one day per week. I’m travel 2 hours to get to that place. You know, it just is what it is.
Gary
Absolutely. So you can also do it what what some people do where they just total makeshift stuff, you know, and they’re in their house, in their backyard. You know, you come up with some sort of stuff and that is an option. But yeah, that brings us to another area that I already mentioned previously. But it does it does bear repeating. And that’s the area of rehab and rehab. So deal with these things early. That’s the best thing I can say. And don’t keep hammering the same lists if they’re causing you issues, especially in a sport like Strongman, where you have the option to focus on one of the things. Okay, if you’re far from competition and you know that in your last competition season, your shoulders kept giving you trouble, your back was fine, your legs were fine, or vice versa, you can focus more on, you know, building up volume, building up maximal strength on those exercises where you’re not really prohibited much at the moment, but then on the exercises where you’re constantly getting pain, constantly getting niggles, pull back the volume a little bit, pull back the intensity, work a little bit. Might need to do some specific shoulder strengthening. Maybe you do some rotator cuff work, you might add in more lateral raises, more specific shoulder strengthening before you move back to the heavier weights. That’s something that you do have the luxury of doing, especially in an off season period, and especially when you have so much variety in your training that you can focus on other things. So as I said, deal with them early is the best way of doing that because especially as you come towards competition, it’s going to be very difficult to avoid loading those areas. You know, if it’s your lower back, most lifts are going to involve your lower back. Like it’s gonna be very difficult to avoid that. Whereas if you do it really far from competition, you can focus more on your pressing, you can focus more on chest vertebral variations, you can focus more on the enrollment conditioning side of things so that you have a fantastic engine when you do come back to your maximum lifting. So the last you can still workout and dealing with them early is just the best thing you can do.
Paddy
Yeah. And I also just on top of that, which very much factors into that, is just learning this kind of like auto regulatory approach. I mean, an auto regulation component built into your training that’s, in my experience at least is key for preventing injuries. Now again, something like Strong man, especially if you’re doing event specific work like little injuries are going to happen. It’s the nature of any sport like we do jujitsu, you just get little niggles, you know, you can be, Oh, I’ll tap early and I’ll tap often or any of these different things that people try to do to avoid any like significant injuries. But they’re still going to happen. You’re still going to get loadings like, you know, it’s the same with strongman, right? So we can bring in an auto regulatory approach. What I mean by that is having an understanding of what’s required on that day, like what adaptations are you trying to elicit? You know, is it like, okay, well, the general framework is I want to be one over three reps from failure for this lift, right? And you go in your sleep deprived, your girlfriend broke up with you or whatever. There’s a lot of shit going on in your life. You don’t have to do the Latin, you know, a month ago you did whatever for 140 kilos, four or five reps and that was three reps for failure. Right? And this week you’re like, okay, well, I’m going to go in, I’m going to try to get 145, but you have all this extra life stress. You’ve all this lack of sleep, you’ve got all this fucking stress whatever, right? That’s probably not what you’re capable of on the day. Or if you are able to do it, it’s just going to take more out of you. Right? So, you know. Okay, well, that was three reps for failure. I want to be somewhere in our rank, three reps for failure. I’m just going to see what’s possible in, you know, what feels good for something like three reps from failure that might be 120 kilos today. You know, that’s fine. That’s perfectly okay. It’s just that’s what you’re capable of on the day. You might also notice that like, okay, well, actually I’m progressing a lot faster than this program says that I should be progressing.
And if the goal is to be roughly like one over three reps from failure, two reps are better, whatever it is. And you’re like, Well, it’s saying, oh, increase the weight like arbitrarily, like 2.5 kilos. And you’re like, I’m on, I’m at ten kilos stronger this week, you know, like if it’s their go for it, you know, obviously that has to still be with the overall trend of the program in mind because most people, when they’re like, Oh yeah, it’s definitely it’s definitely they’re the strength improvements are definitely there and they’re supposed to be getting like eight reps. They’ll be like, Oh, well, I only got six reps on this one and like, it’s fine. And then next week it’s like, Oh, I only got five reps on this one. It’s like you’re supposed to be doing an eight reps at an eight rep set with three reps at a time. You know, if you’re failing that five reps, you didn’t even get to eight reps, right? First of all, and you definitely are not keeping three reps at a time here, you know, So you do have to be aware that it is a natural human tendency to be like, Yeah, that’s progress progress. Progress. Even though you’ve actually started to deviate away from the exact training modality or the exact like loading parameters that we want and that happens very often. It’s just it just it’s part of the game.
Gary
Absolutely. And that brings us to the final component that’s important to think about for training, which is cardio and this is this has a bit more of a specific component than some of the other discussions we’ve had so far, because what you need is you need aerobic adaptations, but you also need to have smart aerobic power. And you can train this in multiple different ways. So any role with training is an interesting topic because if you’re doing like a set of 12 on deadlifts, let’s say, or even instead of a set of one that they’re an aerobics demanding activities, as you move towards the higher up set where you are, the higher reps, that’s where you start to feel that burn. That’s when you’re starting to enter the period of time where you’re having difficulty clearing acidosis, difficulty carrying fatigue. Your muscle function’s going to be starting to decline and we typically would call that lactic. Okay. It’s just for simplicity’s sake, we call that something like a lactic interval where you are getting a large accumulation of lactate. So the increase in acidosis within the muscle. So that’s something that does become important on those higher up sets, especially if you’re doing like something for time. But that doesn’t mean that you just have to focus on like just the lift itself. You could complement your strength performance by doing something like hard intervals, for example. So if you’re doing hard intervals on an assault bike, you’re getting more anaerobic adaptations along with your aerobic work that will then carry over to something like max squat in the minutes, you know, carries Max dead less than a minute, etc. where you have to take your strength moving towards the endurance end of the spectrum and bring in those honourable contributions. Okay, So, so having intervals in your training is important. Having a role with training as your absolute base is important. And what I would do is because strong man can be so tough on the body, I would just have like a high volume of like the kind of zone to low to moderate intensity cardio that’s in there on a consistent basis. So you’re constantly just ticking over with the aerobic engine and then you can make it more specific depending on the events that you’re working on. So if you need to be spending a lot of time on your feet doing a lot of carries, for example, you want that to be part of your training. That may be aerobic. It may be jumping into anaerobic energy systems. That’s not too important. Once you just have this general of I’m covering my cardio with large volumes of aerobic work, smaller volumes of anaerobic work. And then I translate that along with my strength, strength towards the events themselves
Paddy
100%. And I think this is one of the things that you also have to be specific to your needs. Like you might just have phenomenal gas. Like, you know, it’s just, you know, all day this is no problem. I used to be, I don’t know, like a football player, you know, it’s like I just my fitness is just next level already. Now, you can probably dedicate less time to that, maybe need to dedicate more time to strength or something. Right. So keep that in mind. But also very often people find it difficult to be specific in terms of what adaptations they actually need to work on. Because let’s say, for example, you find that your your body just kind of like, you know, just kind of fatigues across a day, like you’re doing a competition day, right? And you’re like, oh, well, I just feel like I couldn’t get into that extra gear. So you might think of that as going like, okay, well, I really need to work on my anaerobic fitness, you know, And that might be the case. But very often the case is actually that your aerobic capacity is quite low and you’re not actually able to recover fast enough in between events, you know, and that’s the aerobic system that you need to work on because the aerobic system is what’s restocking effectively the anaerobic system. Right. So you have to be specific, but it can be quite hard to identify what you actually need to work on. So again, shotgun approach here, you need to work on every now and they’ll generally mean, you know, you’re going to need to do a baseline level of aerobic conditioning. You know, I often tell like I say, it’s strong on people and like just do something like very low intensity aerobics of do it on like a cross trainer. Very poor impact on the body. You’re getting some upper body contribution as well. You’re getting like total body blood flow. Obviously, you’re getting total body oil forward, everything. But you know what I mean? Like you’re getting more blood flow to the upper body as well. And so that can be really good. It’s not fatiguing. Yes, it takes time, but it can be really helpful in terms of improving your overall endurance, improving your overall cardiovascular capacity. You know, and then depending on how much event specific work you are doing and how hard your resistance training is, especially if it gets into like higher rep ranges where you are getting significant like acidosis. You know, if you’re really feeling that kind of lactase in the system or, you know, hydrogen ions in the system and you can then maybe layer on some anaerobic specific conditioning, you know, but it’s one of those things where you have to weigh up how much event specific work am I doing, how much like really hard, like, let’s say moderate to higher reps at some I doing. And then you need to decide how much anaerobic like a specific conditioning you bring in because the the kind of thinking with a lot of people is oh well the anaerobic stuff, that’s what my events are. The event lasts 20 seconds or 60 seconds even or whatever, so why would I ever do like 45 minutes of aerobic cardio when I could just do, you know, a 20 minute session and get like ten sprints in in that time? You know, And yeah, that’s somewhat correct. And you will definitely see fitness improvements from that, but you’re also going to see your body get beaten the fuck up as a result, right? So if you had unlimited recovery and then yeah, maybe we could bring in some more anaerobic work. We not get all the aerobic adaptations that we want, but you know, you’re still going to see improvements. And this is often why people actually, you know, turn to steroids because they just want to have unbelievable recovery. It’s not actually for the strength improvements, but actually for the increases in muscle mass. It’s generally, especially in an athlete or a sporting context like it’s generally. So they can just train more, you know, it’s just generally so they can be recovered that they train three times a day. And it’s just it’s fine, no factor. Their body is just able for us, you know, and and that’s something that, you know, very often people don’t factor in. They look at some athletes and they’re they’re not the terror the stereotypical like roid it up like Jack that in their mind person or like well how is he on steroids like Lance Armstrong, for example. You know, And it’s like, yeah, he just he he was using them for recovery, you know, like he was using them so he could train multiple miles, play hours per week, you know?
Gary
Yeah, absolutely. So I think that Paddy’s message was basically start talking steroids and everything like I don’t we do not condone the use of anabolic steroids, blah, blah blah. Usual disclaimer anyways, that concludes this podcast. So now you are your strongest self. You’re ready for your first round man competition. So some of you may actually like just be listening to this and you still might take away useful principles, even if you’re not interested in strong man. Like I use some of these principles myself, you’ll see in the next episode we talk about combat sports that there’s actually such crossover here in terms of the generalizability of these principles, and that’s hopefully something you’re getting from the series generally is that if you’re a trainer, you just need to have a grasp on the basic concepts, basic principles of strength, conditioning, and you’ll be able to coach a wide range of people. So with that said, if you’d like help with your own goals. We do have coaching spaces available a treat, so our expert coaching team can help you with your goals, whether they be related to strength hypertrophy, just improving your physical exam, body fat, overcoming an injury and so on. We coach a broad range of clients and if you’d like help with your goals, you can pop your information into the link below and we’ll be back to ASAP. We do also have a nutrition coaching certification which is closing this one. So yeah, let me close because this is next week. So sorry guys. If you were waiting to get on the nutrition cert that’s closed until at the end of the year, so sorry if you missed out, but we do have lots of other free info that we’re putting out.
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