Starting Strongman

This article was first published on StartingStrength.com

Strongman is a rapidly growing sport in the strength world and 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 yourself 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 organisers. 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 short, training makes you generally strong, practice makes you more skilful. 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+lbs frames. 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

Alright, 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 generalised 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 as being:

1.      Log clean and press – max weight

2.      Axel 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, focussing on squats, presses, and light pulls, and do all your events practice on day three. So, your week might look something like this:

1

Squats

Presses

Power cleans

2

Chins

Bench/Dips

Conditioning

3

Max Log

Axle Deadlift for reps

Farmers for distance

Yoke for speed

Stones for reps

The events day is straightforward. Do the events in the order they’ll be in the comp. It’s usually best to build up to comp 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 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 is will only really be performing a warmup 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 degree.

The second option is to spread the practice across the week. So now your week might look something like this:

1

Squats

Presses

Stone loading

2

Chins

Bench/Dips

Yoke

3

Log

Axel Deadlift

Farmers

There are different ways you could approach the events work with this method. For some events (axel 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 favourite. It’s inspired by Olympic weightlifting programmes 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:

1

Log practice – 10-15 singles

Squats

Chins

2

Power Clean

Bench/Dips

Stone practice – 8x2

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 to train at.

Practice makes perfect

I’ve been to a lot of strongman competitions. I’ve spectated at 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 comp day, the better you will perform.

There is one giant great big BUT to accompany that statement, however. No amount of practice with a 135lbs atlas stone is going to help you if you’re not strong enough to pick up the 250lbs stone on comp day. Get strong first, then get good at strongman.