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All girls. But it is not for pussies. A couple of months ago my mum told me about Sjöbo’s Strongest Man, a strongman competition hosted in my town (of all the places!). I made it my mission to find out more about it and meet the guys behind it. I was lucky enough to meet one of them just a few days later, who told me a little bit about it all and invited me to come along when their summer training started. It started about a month ago, and it is so much fun! I still haven’t really found my role, it’s “Conquering the Weight Room” all over again, but they make me feel really welcome and my confidence is peaking! They have almost everything when it comes to equipment, and a great place to train outside.

It’s so amazing to get out of the weight room and train for real. This must be the height of functional training (and not “balancing-spinning-medicine-balls-on-index-fingers-and-nose-while-quarter-squatting-on-giant-ball”). It’s so easy to get obsessed by how many plates you are pulling or how much you are curling that you forget the point of strength itself. The only place where you will need to lift dumbbells is at the gym. They don’t exist in nature. And how often is something heavy you need to lift from the ground shaped like a barbell? And what you are lifting isn’t usually evenly balanced either, so no matter how strong you are in the gym, you may be fooling yourself.

Ain’t nuthin but a penis peanut

Because you are so huge and massive, making sure that your joints are keeping up with your huuoooouge muscles is really important. And while mobility is great, stability may even be more important when you are placing really heavy loads on your body. I would advise everyone to do their mobility drills, but also to combine that with compound exercises that stabilize your joints, rather than isolation exercises where you build muscles and kill joints. Think of a good quality squat for example; hips, knees and ankles need to be mobile enough to allow for a proper range of motion, but stabile enough to keep you from loosing control during the motion. Unstable ankles are great if you are looking for that extra touch of knee valgus, but it may also be your amazing ankle stability that make your squats awesome.

Deadlifts and squats are the base of pretty much all strongman exercises. If you are strong in these basic exercises then you are more likely to be able to use your strength to the fullest when you are starting out. If you have a weak posterior chain and an overworked anterior chain you will probably have to reprogram your body and start over from the beginning. You can’t curl up a tire and those stones ain’t gonna lift themselves…

If you are not as lucky as me to have strongman people working it at your gym, you can improvise and make your own equipment in the beginning. Tires are usually quite easy to get, considering that they often are a little bit of a hassle to get rid of, and they can’t really be put to much use if they are already worn out. This goes for kegs too. Instead of Atlas stones, you can find natural stones, or fill a bag with gravel to make it as heavy or light as you need it to be. If you want to go all out you can actually make them yourself with concrete. Use pallets for platforms. For yokes, Farmer’s and logs it helps if you know how to weld, but if you are creative enough and not trying to break a world record you can actually come up with really cheap, non-welded solutions.

Some links for the ambitious;

Strongman equipment on Youtube
Ten strongman websites and a few tips for making your own stuff
Strongman DIY
Stone Making

If you turn out to be too awesome for your own equipment you should definitely find other strongmen in your area and work out for real!

By: Isa Olsson

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