In part one of this piece I discussed what I believed were some great lessons strongmen trainees can take on board from powerlifting. There are equally some great lessons from strongman training that powerlifters can employ to boost their strength training results.
1- Be Fit Not Fat
I think the statement speaks for itself. In recent times I feel this has improved significantly and a huge part of it is the popularity of raw lifting and many athletes transitioning from the likes of crossfit and bodybuilding into the realm of powerlifting. Across the board now the physiques of men and women and strength sports closer resemble those associated with bodybuilding. Muscle moves weight not fat. Don’t use bullshit excuses like more than 5 reps is cardio or the only cardio I do is walking from the gym to the buffet.
Add some cardiovascularly challenges exercise into your programming. 45min of light cardio once a week or focussing on higher rep ranges out of competition won’t cause you to lose all your gains. Infact it will actually aid in your recovery and if done right can help improve your work capacity. Ie your ability to do more lifting of the weights!
2- Farmers Walks
This ties in very well with point 1. I am not a huge fan of doing some of the more taxing strongman movements unless they are in an upcoming comp while others on the other hand we do year round. One such movement is the farmer’s walk. The farmer’s walk is probably one of the best developers of the upper back, traps and grip strength you can do, all of which will translate great into your lifting endeavours. The upper back, arm and leg strength carries over great to squats and deadlifts as does the grip. Your lungs, legs and body fat levels will also benefit greatly from incorporating these into your program.
Performing 3-5 sets of 30m-50m once or twice a week or doing a couple of max distance (read 60m-100m!) will have some big benefits and ZERO detriment to your powerlifting training. Try to keep them in the program when you are more than 4-6 weeks out from competition when specialisation is less important in the training and comp prep. No comp coming up? Good keep them in there!
3- It Will Never Be Perfect
This principle applies to both competition AND training. There is no such thing as a perfect prep as you can ALWAYS look back to find something you could have done better. Almost every single strongman competition I have taken part in or have run myself has had something go wrong. It could be as simple as someone forgetting a scoresheet or incorrect timing of an event and it could also be catastrophic equipment failure resulting in an event being changed all together. The chances of this happening in a powerlifting meet are significantly reduced especially in modern times with the fantastic equipment we have access to at all levels of lifting now.
One of the issues with this arises when the lifters expectation levels reach a point whereby the smallest change can throw you off your game. The differences in rack height between different brand racks, the difference in bar thickness from what you train with versus the comp bars and so on. How you respond to these can be the difference between having an absolute dogshit meet vs having a PR 9/9 lift competition. Shit happens. Learn to deal with it. Don’t let the small things get to you and get on with the job.
Worry about the things you do have control over and don’t sweat the things you can’t change. They are frustrating but the key to success here is not letting them get to you in the moment. Having the right support network helps with this tremendously and it’s one of the reasons why we have the success rate we do for our lifters at Iron Revolution.
Signing Off
