You will improve while training within your limits.

In the “Train like An Old-time Strongman” program, the majority of your training will be in the 70-85% range. If you constantly test the limit, you will find it. If you constantly work within your limits and focus on making your practice better and better, then your limits will move without having to push them. This can be a difficult thing to stick with. We hit a new all-time personal record, then we immediately want to see if we can do just a little more.

Focus on doing better, not doing more.

I recommend focusing on doing just a little better instead of a little more. Remember: your goal is to get stronger, not make yourself tired or sore. With this in mind I have put together this four-week program for you. It keeps with the idea of practice and making incremental progress. Treat it like a performance. Give this program a try and let me know how it goes.

Week Four, Day One

5 Rounds:

Pull up: with added weight for 2-3 reps

Getup: one rep per side

Zercher squat: 80% of your 1 rep maximum for 3 reps

One-arm kettlebell press: 80% of your 1 rep maximum for 3 reps

Two-hand kettlebell swing: 10 reps with a heavy kettlebell to a comfortable stop, focus on being explosive

Week Four, Day Two

Video – movements in workout days one and three

Video – movements in workout day two

The post Strength & Conditioning: Dave Whitley, Week 4 appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

In my last article, we talked about the mindset and training principles that guided the old-time performing strongmen and how to apply them to a modern strength-seeker’s goals. As the saying goes, “Success leaves clues.” So, let’s look at the old-timers and see if we can get them to come up with a clue or two for us.

Old-time strongman Hermann Goerner.

1. Approach Training as a Practice

We covered this in part one, but it bears repeating here because it is that important. If you want to get better at something, then you must practice consistently and intelligently. There is no substitute for it and you ain’t gonna be able to rush it, shortcut it, or fake your way through it.

2. Keep Loads in the 60-85% Range Most of the Time

At first this seems counterintuitive. In order to get stronger, we have to lift very heavy stuff all the time, right? Actually, that is backwards. To lift heavy stuff, we have to get strong first.

For most people, going above this 60-85% of a 1-rep-maximum range too often or for too long can wind up being too taxing on the nervous system. In my own experience and with my clients, I have seen that the majority of the gains happen in this 60-85% range. Strength comes without having to kick your own ass and destroy yourself in the gym every single session. Sticking in this range allows you to recover quickly and be ready to go again the next day.

Beyond that, there’s a word I use for folks who insist on going all out, all the time: broken. You have a choice to keep making progress for the long haul and be healthy while you do it or push too hard, too much and bust something. It’s up to you.

Old-time strongman Maxick.

3. Use Full-Body Movements the Majority of the Time

Full-body movements are paramount to building full-body strength. Bending a horseshoe like an old-time strongman requires using all your bodily force and energy. If you want to be strong like an old-time strongman, but do not want to bend steel, then take the core principle – full-body power – and apply it to your chosen lift.

Deadlifts, squats, cleans and presses, get ups, snatches – these are the kind of movements that build coordination and seamless power in the whole body. Show me someone with a big deadlift who is not strong all the way around. Can’t do it, can you?

That is one of those success clues we talked about. Step away from the lat pulldown machine and load up that bar. Get your deadlift up around double bodyweight and notice how your lats and arms grow along with the weight on the bar.

4. Develop Your Grip Strength

The old-time strongmen knew that if you couldn’t hold on to something that you would have a really hard time lifting it. In our previous training examples, we included deadlifts, kettlebell swings, and snatches. All of these have a solid grip element to them without having to do any specialized grip work.

We also included a special kind of curl called a plate curl (explained in the video above) to work on our finger and wrist strength. The kind of strength we need for ripping decks of cards and phonebooks into pieces.

5. Strengthen Your Midsection

Long before “core” was a catchphrase in the fitness world, old-time strongmen knew the value – make that the the necessity – of having a strong midsection. The abs, the obliques, and the lower back are literally at the center of our strength. Maximize them and you get stronger overall.

In the workouts that I outlined for in part one, you will find a couple of exercises that have a surprisingly strong effect on your midsection: the Zercher squat and the get up. Doing these kinds of movements gives you the strength through the middle that allows for a great transfer of power and protects the lower back.

6. Make It Look Easy

Understand the relationship between tension and relaxation. Tension is strength, but it is also fatigue. Relaxation is endurance, but cannot exert maximal power. Striking the balance is the key.

You don’t get any extra points for making faces or looking like you are about to die. Consider this the next time you watch an athletic event and think of what is more impressive – someone who looks like that are about to lose the whole thing or someone who is in complete control the whole time?

If you are staying in your 70% range most of the time and treating your session as a practice or performance, then it will be easy to make it look easy. See how it all works together?

Apply these ideas to your own training watch how strong you get and how much fun you have getting there. See you on the stronger side.

Click Here to Start Dave Whitley’s Free Strength Program

The post 6 Clues to Training Success From Old-time Strongmen appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

You will improve while training within your limits.

In the “Train like An Old-time Strongman” program, the majority of your training will be in the 70-85% range. If you constantly test the limit, you will find it. If you constantly work within your limits and focus on making your practice better and better, then your limits will move without having to push them. This can be a difficult thing to stick with. We hit a new all-time personal record, then we immediately want to see if we can do just a little more.

Focus on doing better, not doing more.

I recommend focusing on doing just a little better instead of a little more. Remember: your goal is to get stronger, not make yourself tired or sore. With this in mind I have put together this four-week program for you. It keeps with the idea of practice and making incremental progress. Treat it like a performance. Give this program a try and let me know how it goes.

Week Three, Day One

4 Rounds:

Pull up: with added weight for 2-3 reps

Getup: one rep per side

Zercher squat: 75% of your 1 rep maximum for 5 reps

One-arm kettlebell press: 75% of your 1 rep maximum for 5 reps

Two-hand kettlebell swing: 10 reps with a heavy kettlebell to a comfortable stop, focus on being explosive

Week Three, Day Two

Movement Video Part 1

Movement Video Part 2

The post Strength & Conditioning: Dave Whitley, Week 3 appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

You will improve while training within your limits.

In the “Train like An Old-time Strongman” program, the majority of your training will be in the 70-85% range. If you constantly test the limit, you will find it. If you constantly work within your limits and focus on making your practice better and better, then your limits will move without having to push them. This can be a difficult thing to stick with. We hit a new all-time personal record, then we immediately want to see if we can do just a little more.

Focus on doing better, not doing more.

I recommend focusing on doing just a little better instead of a little more. Remember: your goal is to get stronger, not make yourself tired or sore. With this in mind I have put together this four-week program for you. It keeps with the idea of practice and making incremental progress. Treat it like a performance. Give this program a try and let me know how it goes.

Week Two, Day One

4 Rounds:

Deadlift: 70% of your 1 rep maximum for 5 reps

Dips: bodyweight only for 3-5 reps

One-arm row: 5 reps per side

Kettlebell snatch: 5 reps per side with your 8 rep max

Plate curls: 3-5 reps per side

Week Two, Day Two

Movement Video Part 1

Movement Video Part 2

The post Strength & Conditioning: Dave Whitley, Week 2 appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

Did you ever take a moment to consider the feats performed decades ago by the old-time strongmen? Arthur Saxon would put 300lbs over his head with one hand as a part of his show, nightly, sometimes for multiple shows in a single day. If you were like Saxon and your job was lifting heavy things night after night as a performer, how would you approach it?

Strongman Arthur Saxon

Old-Time Methods for Old-Time Strength

Would you apply modern, high intensity training “wisdom”? Would you push yourself to fatigue and near exhaustion? Maybe let your technique get a little sloppy? Oh, and make sure you were very tired, laying on the floor sucking wind like a fat kid chasing an ice-cream truck when you finished, and so sore you walk funny for the next few days?

If you took this approach, then you would also most likely wind up some combination of weak, injured, and unemployed. Sure, you could keep at it for a little while, but the “no pain, no gain” mentality would eventually catch up with you.

I much prefer the concept of “no pain, know gain.”

The No Pain, Know Gain Approach

What if, instead of all that silliness, you approached training like it was your job? What if you got paid to not only make the lifts, but to look good and be entertaining while you are doing it?

• Would you train to failure? (Hint: I doubt it)
• How often would you attempt to set a new record one-rep maximum (1RM) in any lift? (Hint: very, very rarely)
• How ambitious would that record be, in relation to your old 1RM? (Hint: very conservative)

Keep it in perspective that missed training (performing) time from an injury would be time that you couldn’t do your job and that there are always wolves at the door in the form of up-and-coming, would-be strongmen who want to challenge you for the position of being the star of the show. If you don’t lift – for whatever reason – then you are unemployed.

Train Like It’s Your Job

What if you decided to train as if your livelihood depended on it? Not as if your life depended on completing this maximal lift, but as if your life depended on the completion of this feat – and the next one, and the next one, and the twelve feats in the next show at 9:00pm, and the two shows tomorrow, and three on Saturday that you have to do.

The commonality of the training of the old-timers as well as the modern performing strongmen is constant practice and progressive overload. Not constant extreme effort, constant straining, constant “feeling the burn,” or constant pushing yourself to exhaustion. I am not just recounting history here.

Modern Grandmaster Strongman Dennis Rogers told me the exact same thing. If you don’t know who Dennis is, search YouTube and prepare to have your mind blown. In his mid-fifties, Dennis is about 5’9” and 170lbs – and bends wrenches, frying pans, screwdrivers, and all manner of other things. The Association of Oldetime Barbell and Strongmen proclaimed him “Pound for pound the world strongest man for the feats he performs.” He is my mentor in the art of the old-time strongman.

How Working Strongmen Approach Training

There have been times I have spoken with Dennis about a particularly tough feat he wanted to test out and heard him say words to the effect of, “I think I can do that, but I have nine shows in the next two weeks and I don’t want to risk hurting myself. After that I have a couple weeks off. I will try it then.” This is the essence of a professional attitude.

Dennis’ mentor, old-time strongman legend Slim the Hammer Man told me that if you attempt a maximal lift in front of a crowd for a show, then you are an amateur (unless of course it is for a documented record). His reasoning is simple. You can only run wide open all the time for so long, and then something will break. The thing that breaks almost certainly won’t be any kind of a lifting record. “People didn’t pay to see me try to make a lift. They paid to see me make a lift, and look good doing it,” he said.

See the theme here? The greatest strongmen in modern history, absolute legends of strength, all have a similar attitude and approach in training.

Dennis Rogers and Me

My Free Four-Week Program

If you want to test yourself and see what you can do in an all-out attempt, I am certainly not opposed to it. I am a fan of occasionally flipping the crazy switch and seeing exactly where I stand in a given lift or feat of strength – but it should be a very infrequent and planned thing.

The majority of your training will likely be in the 70-85% range. If you constantly test the limit, you will find it. If you constantly work within your limits and focus on making your practice better and better, then your limits will move without having to push them. This can be a difficult thing to stick with. We hit a new all-time personal record, then we immediately want to see if we can do just a little more.

I recommend focusing on doing just a little better instead of a little more. Remember: your goal is to get stronger, not make yourself tired or sore. With this in mind I have put together a four-week program for you. It keeps with the idea of practice and making incremental progress. Treat it like a performance. Give this program a try and let me know how it goes.

Click Here to Start Dave Whitley’s Free Strength Program

Photo 2 courtesy of DLAB Photography.

The post Train Like an Old-time Strongman: Free 4-Week Program appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

You will improve while training within your limits.

In the “Train like An Old-time Strongman” program, the majority of your training will be in the 70-85% range. If you constantly test the limit, you will find it. If you constantly work within your limits and focus on making your practice better and better, then your limits will move without having to push them. This can be a difficult thing to stick with. We hit a new all-time personal record, then we immediately want to see if we can do just a little more.

Focus on doing better, not doing more.

I recommend focusing on doing just a little better instead of a little more. Remember: your goal is to get stronger, not make yourself tired or sore. With this in mind I have put together this four-week program for you. It keeps with the idea of practice and making incremental progress. Treat it like a performance. Give this program a try and let me know how it goes.

Week One, Day One

3 Rounds:

Pull up: bodyweight only for 2-3 reps

Getup: one rep per side

Zercher squat: 70% of your 1 rep maximum for 5 reps

One-arm kettlebell press: 70% of your 1 rep maximum for 5 reps

Two-hand kettlebell swing: 10 reps with a heavy kettlebell to a comfortable stop, focus on being explosive

Week One, Day Two

Movement Video Part 1

Movement Video Part 2

The post Strength & Conditioning: Dave Whitley, Week 1 appeared first on Breaking Muscle.