Trying New Things: Strongman!

I made the promise to myself that I would start training in Strongman after the American Open. It's been a little over a month of Sundays, about six or seven of them now, and I feel like I'm well on my way to getting the competition bug for this new endeavor of mine.

Why must I always fall for the obscure sports?

So it might be a while before I actually get to compete, or I may take my chances at traveling to one. Regardless, I'm having a blast. Some of the things I'm learning to do:

Tire Flipping

The only tire they have is a 750 lbs one. I've flipped a tire before, but I was never instructed how. Being given the small cues, like how to decide where to put your feet and how to drive your shoulders into the tire make the 750 lbs tire more manageable than the 600 lbs one I first touched.

What's nice is that every person has a spotter on each side, just in case the person flipping gets stuck, slips, or loses grip, the tire won't come crashing down on the working athlete.

Front Carries/ Connan's Wheel

These are terrible. The front carry training device we use is a yoke with the normal bar switched out for a thick pipe. You have to carry it in your arms in front of your chest and you aren't allowed to front rack it. This one gives me trouble because I've always been trained to take in a large breath and hold it during a lift, and that would be a recipe for disaster here. So you have to take shallow, quick breaths during the carry as to not pass out.


Farmer's Walks

CrossFit programming isn't a stranger to these, but we certainly don't touch the weights I'm expected to carry now. Each handle is ~25 lbs and we warm up with 45 lbs plates on each for a total of 115 lbs per hand. As the warm up. It only goes up from there.

This is certainly one of those moves where you just want to go to your happy place as you walk along, because your hands are not going to be happy if you grab them right. I find myself pushing my skin back into place after I run the course with these.


Log and Axel Clean and Press

Both of these moves are definitely more brute force than even your typical Olympic clean and jerk, as they both have an intermediate position between the floor and your shoulders.

With the axel, the continental clean, you bring it up to your belly to switch grips before flipping it to the rack. For the log, you dead lift it to your thighs, adjust the grip and basically roll the thing up the body. For both, all that talk about "prioritize the spine" and "neutral spine" gets thrown out the window.

Hand Over Hand

Just like it sounds, you drag a sled (maybe a vehicle) towards you by an attached rope. My tiny, lady hands had a hard time holding the rope, and would instead clamp the rope with my upper arm against my ribs and pull back with my whole body. There was something around 300 lbs of sled and plate weight I was trying to drag.

And in summary, this is what every new endeavor does to me in some way, shape or form: