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 Kaupinen and I have been training strength and conditioning during 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 of the “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 that you add mountain races 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 necessary power for many of Strongman’s traditional 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, Sprints in Colinas develop strength in the essential muscle groups for Strongman’s training. The most important, hips, buttocks, 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.
Although you already train these muscles for these events, the sprints in hills add different tensions and demands to those muscles. The hills are an excellent way to “confuse” your muscles and force them to adapt. These sprints will ask your muscles, not only that they are strong, but are strong and explosives at the same time. An excellent way to break a plateau in your training.
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 everything without doing what you could consider as “cardio.” It used to think that you could only improve your resistance training as a marathon corridor with long and slow distances. Who wants to resemble a marathon? Everything that 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 only 3 of the benefits you can get when making sprints in 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.
