You probably already know that serious strongmen need all of the following to be successful:
Brute force
Ultimate Lower Body Strength
Super strength and resistance
You may also know that strongman workouts should be:
fast and efficient
goal-oriented
A way to gain an edge over your competition
And this is why I recommend that every strongman who wants to be the best add the following workout to their training.
My name is Tim Kauppinen and I have been training strength and conditioning for the last 15 years. One of the skills I have developed is being able to observe the needs of competing athletes and design training to meet those needs.
When I look at Strongman competitions, I see the need for a unique combination of strength, speed, power, endurance, and (perhaps most importantly) mental toughness.
Your training should reflect these needs. You should not be told to waste your time on things that don’t work. They shouldn’t tell you about the latest shiny chrome machine, or doing long, boring (and useless) cardio exercises, or anything else coming out of those mirror-carpeted social clubs that dare call themselves gyms.
No, what you need is something “old school.” An exercise that is simple but effective. One that can address all of the needs listed above and take you to the next level in your training.
For all this, I strongly suggest you add trail running to your training. This is why:
First, hill sprints are a great way to build power. They are a perfect mix of strength and sprint training. And as you know, training strength and speed together is the best way to develop the power needed for competition.
Running sprints on hills can train your muscles to fire fast and hard, to increase both speed and contraction force. This training will help you develop the power necessary for many of the traditional strongman events. Your performance in Carrying, Atlas Stones, Truck Pulling, Rock Lifting, Log Throwing and Weight Throwing can take off like a rocket with the speed/force of hill sprints.
Second, hill sprints build strength in the muscle groups essential for strongman training. Most importantly, the hips, glutes, quadriceps and calves. Muscles needed for pushing, pulling, and lifting involved in events such as log or rock press, rock lifting, car rocking, and tire flipping.
Even though you already train these muscles for these events, hill sprints add different stresses and demands on those muscles. Hills are a great way to “confuse” your muscles and force them to adapt. These sprints will ask your muscles to not only be strong, but to be strong and explosive at the same time. A great way to break a plateau in your workouts.
The third reason to sprint downhill is that it’s a great way to build the energy and stamina needed for long training sessions and (even more demanding) competitions.
It’s a training method that pushes the capacity of your heart and lungs to new limits, increasing their volume and allowing you to move more oxygen in and out of your body (and pump more blood to your muscles when they need it most). Training your heart and lungs in this way can also help you recover faster between attempts or events.
And all without doing what you might consider “cardio.” It used to be thought that you could only improve your endurance by training like a marathon runner with long, slow distances. Who wants to look like a marathon runner? All the training does is shrink your muscles and make you look like a skeleton. The good news is that science is now showing that higher intensity training, like sprinting down hills, can give you even better results than plodding around doing “road work.”
Think how much better your farmer’s walk, drive-thru, crucifix, or Hercules grip can be when you can stay stronger…for longer.
These are just 3 of the benefits you can get from sprinting down hills. In Part II, we’ll look at how uphill sprints can help you fit all your training into your busy schedule, give you an edge over your competitors, and build your mental toughness to the point where any goal is possible. Until then.