Strongman competition is a rapidly growing sport in the strength
world. As someone who has a lot of love for strongman, I thought I’d
try to offer a little guide for anyone interested in having a go at
this most entertaining of strength sports. Here are my humble
thoughts on how best to prepare for your first strongman contest.
Build
your foundation.
The first thing you
need to do is to actually be strong – it is in the name after all.
You do not have the luxury of being able to pick your weights in a
strongman contest. The weights used in each event are decided by the
organizers. So, if the contest you’ve entered calls for you to
press a 175lbs log for reps, but you can’t get a set of 5 with
135lbs yet, you’re going to look very silly in front of all the
other competitors.
This means that, at a
minimum, you should have run through your Novice Linear Progression.
If you have not, stop here. The rest of this article is a discussion
of modifications you can make to intermediate programming to prepare
for an event. Intermediate programming is something you earn, not
something you skip to because you want to be the next Brian Shaw. I
cannot stress this enough. The best way to prepare for any
strongman contest is to first spend several months getting as
generally strong as you can, and the best way to do that is with the
NLP. Go away and do your fives.
Now, I can already hear your objections “But Jack, neither the
squat, the bench press, or the chin up are contested lifts in
strongman. Why should I bother training those?” If this is a
serious question, then you, dear reader, have not been paying
attention. You are confusing training and practice. Go back and read
The Two Factor Model for Sports Performance in the articles on this website. In short, training makes you
generally strong, practice makes you more skillful. If you need more
evidence, look at any high-level strongman competitor around the
world today. Every single one of them has an enormous squat, a
ridiculous bench press, and can perform reps of chin ups with their
300+lb bodyweight. If these exercises are good enough for Eddie and
Thor, they’re good enough for you.
While I’m on the
subject, don’t skip your power cleans either. Strongman is more
than just a test of static strength. There are lots of events that
require explosive power, so get in the habit of training heavy power
cleans.
Commit to running the
NLP in full for the next several months and you’ll have built a
solid foundation to begin your strongman career.
Training
and Practice
All right, now we’ve
gotten that out of the way let’s look at the actual meat and
potatoes of this thing. Every strongman contest is different, but
most have the same core elements: pressing, deadlifting, carrying,
and loading. All these elements can be performed with a wide variety
of implements and for several different goals in mind (max weight,
max reps, distance, time). This massive variation from contest to
contest makes it difficult to offer generalized advice for
preparation, but there are a few outlines I can offer.
For the sake of this
discussion, I am assuming the lifter is training three days a week,
but all these ideas can be easily modified for a four-day split. I’m
also going to suggest a hypothetical list of events:
1. Log clean and press
– max weight
2. Axle Bar deadlift –
max reps in a minute
3. Farmer carry – max
distance
4. Yoke run – fastest
time 15m
5. Stone over bar –
max reps in a minute
The first approach is
very simple. You take your heavy day and turn it into an “events
day.” With this approach you’ll train normally on days one and
two, focusing on squats, presses, and light pulls, and do all your
events practice on day three. So, your week might look something like
this:
Day 1: Squats, Presses,
Power Cleans
Day 2: Chins,
Bench/Dips, Conditioning
Day 3: Max Log, Axle
Deadlift for reps, Farmers Walk for distance, Yoke for speed, Stones
for reps
The events day is
straightforward – do the events in the order they’ll be in the
competition. It’s usually best to build up to competition weights
over the course of several weeks as you practice the skills required
to handle unfamiliar implements.
This is the simplest
approach to fitting in events practice and for many people the most
convenient.
Strongman is growing in
popularity, but it’s still rare to find gyms that are well equipped
with strongman kit. For many lifters this will mean they’ll have to
travel to a new gym (potentially quite far out of their way) to
practice on the equipment. By concentrating all the events work in a
single day they only have to make that journey once a week. This
approach also has the added benefit of conditioning the lifter to
exactly what the comp day will be like by having them do all five
events in a single day.
There are drawbacks to
this approach, however. First, a full event day can be a very long,
and a very tiring training session indeed. Some people might not have
the time and energy to commit to a full events day every week. The
second, is that the lifter will only really be performing a warm-up
and then one max effort working set on each event. This means that
they’re not getting that much practice with each lift. The lifter
could do multiple sets across with each movement, or with only some
of them, but you run the risk of drawing out an already long and
difficult session to an unmanageable extent.
The second option is to
spread the practice across the week. So now your week might look
something like this:
Day 1: Squats, Presses,
Stone loading
Day 2: Chins,
Bench/Dips, Yoke
Day 3: Log, Axle
Deadlift, Farmers
There are different
ways you could approach the events work with this method. For some
events (axle deadlift) you could easily just do the comp day event
and call it there. For some of the more difficult movements that
require more practice (log and stones) you can do a sets across
approach to get more practice in. The obvious drawback here is that
the athlete will need access to equipment for every session. You also
may end up sacrificing some of the foundational strength training
work to make room for events. If you’re lucky enough to train at a
place where this is possible, then this might be a better option for
you.
The final option is
perhaps my favorite. It’s inspired by Olympic weightlifting
programs I’ve seen, where you perform specific technique work on
the clean and jerk and the snatch at the start of the week and then
go for lots of heavy singles at the end of the week (big Friday).
With this option we pick out specific things to practice each day
during the week and then go full-send on events day at the end. It
might look something like this:
Day 1: Log practice –
10-15 singles, Squats, Chins
Day 2: Power Clean,
Bench/Dips, Stone practice – 8×2
Day 3: Max Log, Axle
Deadlift for reps, Farmers for distance, Yoke for speed, Stones for
reps
This option is the best
of both worlds in my opinion. It allows for additional practice of
weaker movement patterns while maintaining your high intensity event
practice and as much foundational strength work as possible.
Admittedly it shares the equipment drawback with option two, but if
you actually want to be good at strongman you should find a
well-equipped gym.
Practice
Makes Perfect
I’ve been to a lot of
strongman competitions. I’ve watched them, I’ve competed in them,
I’ve coached athletes to compete in them, and I’ve run them
myself in my old gym. So believe me when I tell you that the athletes
who do the best are not necessarily the strongest ones in the field.
I’ve seen bigger, stronger athletes beaten by lifters with better
technique, faster movement, and more stamina.
Strongman isn’t just
about who the strongest athlete is, it’s about who the best
strongman is. The more event-specific practice you can get under
your belt before competition day, the better you will perform.
There is one giant
great big but to accompany that statement, however. No amount
of practice with a 135lb atlas stone is going to help you if you’re
not strong enough to pick up the 250lb stone on comp day. Get
strong first, then get good at strongman.
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