Three Mistakes That Might have Helped my Strongman Career
Oftentimes when we think of mistakes we see them as failures. Funny enough, what we deem as failures can have some of the best lessons baked in. In this article, I am going to go over three seemingly mislabeled mistakes that I made over my 15+ years in the sport of strongman that just might have actually paid off in the long run.
Competing Too Often
If you understand anything about training, you probably know that training creates fatigue. When we build up enough fatigue we actually perform worse than when we deload or rest and then compete. This is the idea of supercompensation, which is the goal of peaking into competition. The goal of expressing your maximum, and hopefully improved, strength levels. So why is competing “too often” a negative?
First, we have to define what “compete” and “too often” might be. To compete is to be competitive which some might view as bringing their absolute best performance. This is not something we can do every week for weeks on end because then we could never train and accumulate fatigue needed to improve. To compete at your very best might only happen as often as one time a year in the greater training plan for some advanced lifters and maybe a handful for less advanced, maybe three to four. Therefore, we could define “too often” as aiming to compete at our best more than say four times a year.
However, some people “compete” or enter contests more than four times a year, so is that “too often”? This is where it becomes very much a “it depends on the athlete”. Some athletes may not see it as a negative to not be at their best every competition and enter contests for the social or experience benefit. To do this effectively, they manage expectations and set realistic goals. So for some, competing six to eight times a year might be completely okay if they realize that not every show they are going to be able to express their absolute best.
Lastly, we have to look at the external factors and limitations of competing more often. Unless the contest is free and local, chances are it is going to have financial expenses. For some, the social or experience benefits might outweigh the cost there. However, when an athlete comes to me asking if they should compete, I remind them of this because strongman can be expensive and if you want to do well at higher level shows it might be a bigger benefit investing those resources in better equipment, coaching, nutrition, supplements, or any of the many things that could benefit you when you do peak for a contest that you want to express your absolute best.
Okay, but you said this might have helped you, “competing too often”. Yes. Between 2011 and 2012 I competed ten times over twenty months, which at the time was a lot as there were a fraction of contests at the time compared to today. This meant that I pretty much was always training for the next contests’ events, which as you may know in strongman change often, and therefore never really had solid off-season training to work on gym lifts or more standardized lifts or weaknesses. So why did it pay off? By competing so often, I put myself in “contest mode” more often and was exposed to more events and event variations. I had to learn to adapt on the fly and what mistakes I made were more costly and thus more likely to be remembered. A lot of athletes struggle to compete because they are nervous or do not respond well to pressure. It is much easier for them to express strength in their gym than at a contest. By avoiding or limiting competing they only widen the gap and begin to fear the “contest mode” mindset they need to get into. By avoiding this mode, they also avoid being exposed to novel events, some that they may not have access to in training. So when the same event pops up in a show they want to do they are less likely to enter as they have no way to train it and they have never done it in competition to have any idea of the feel to best pick training simulations. As I mentioned above, many enter competitions for social and experience reasons. But one of those experiences should be exposure to certain events they are unlikely to ever be able to train (i.e Conan’s wheel, hercules hold, odd objects). This is why many of the athletes I work with will enter shows that are local to not only participate with friends but also to use as a training day to get experience on the events and test “contest mode” to some degree in order to make adjustments for the future.
So while my younger self may have cost himself some progress in gym lifts, and arguably, building a better strength foundation, I was able to catalog more total events in contests like pressure to better hone my competitive abilities and learn to adapt to more events which paid off very well in the future in bigger shows. This was especially true when events were changed last minute or I was unable to train events.
Competing will always build confidence in competing, no matter how peaked you are. The goal is to create a balance of gaining experience and “testing” your ability in a contest with the act of building strength in the training stages. For most, I would recommend you pick two, maybe three bigger shows that are the primary targets and then sprinkle in two to three more local or lesser competitive shows, that you could use as partial deloads or just a training day. These lesser shows can help to hone your skills or reap the benefit of having fun with friends. At the end of the day, no person or coach can decide what is best for you. Define your goals and manage your expectations and you will come out the winner.
Rotating Events Year Round
My early days of training strongman were largely based on watching World’s Strongest Man and reading online articles. In the days before event access during the week, there were event training weekends. Guys (and gals) would train at a normal gym or in their garage during the week then get together on the weekend and either pick a few events to run, do a mock contest, or just try to beat each other at stuff. It was fun but by today’s standards some might see it as reckless and lacking a plan.
For me, the best example of my event training early on had some outlines but was random at times. If I was not training for a contest and its events, which I often was, I would usually do a compound gym movement, a moving event, a conditioning event, and nearly always a stone load event (at the time the only sandbag I owned was a leaking military duffle bag). The stone load aspect is what I will cover most here.
Without fail I would load stones every Saturday. At one time, I was even doing stone picks or laps during the week after lower body. I had learned from training videos and contests that most strongman contests came down to stones and that it was a very valuable event to be good at, so I needed to train for it. However, how I trained it always changed.
I would do standard lap to loading, one motions, reps, roll ups, three stone medleys, three stone medleys with a carry to platform, max height loading, shouldering, carrying a stone around my house, with tacky, without tacky, with tacky only on my hands, tacky put on once but never reapplied as sets went on. I literally trained stones forwards, backwards, and sideways. I am not sure if I had a plan per se, I just wanted to be ready for stones.
Looking back, I probably could have structured my loading training, and my general lower body training as I talked about in the previous section, much better. But it got me better, why? Again, confidence.
I was very comfortable with loading and developed my own style of loading. I was able to exploit my strengths and gain better understanding of my abilities on all the variations to know when to lap a stone, when to one motion, how best to transition, what tacky to use, and literally everything I would think of, including learning that chalk could neutralize tacky if it got too oily thanks to the late Scott Helms (rest in peace). From this, again, catalog of experience, stone loading became almost automatic in nature and now I do not even have to train stone loading until the final weeks of prep. Because I know the event so well I have found the lifts that best correlate to increases in my stone loading and I have a form I literally can not forget.
This idea, though, applies to most of the other events as well. I rotated farmer’s walk and yoke walks the same way year round with variations that were similar. One notable point being going WAY over the standard 50ft runs and doing 150ft or more straight runs for endurance and core strength.
Maybe I would have made more long term progress just bringing up my squat and deadlift in the gym with less events and more recoverability. However, even to this day yoke walks, loading, tire flip, and odd object movements are good events for me largely because I rotated them in early on and found my form on them.
Copying What Other People Did
One of the deadly “sins” that most coaches put out there is not to program or coach hop, going from one program or coach to another over and over without any long term consistency to any one system. But here I am going to say that maybe, just maybe, there was some good in that.
As a teenager getting into strongman I did develop various training principles which I did stick to, however, I was also not afraid to experiment with movements or ideas I learned from others. I tried my best to give each idea at least enough exposure to see benefits but, to be honest, I probably sought out novelty too often. But somehow, it still paid off.
When I was starting off I was hungry! I read, watched, and consumed the sport of strongman in any way possible. So naturally, I would try lifts, variations, progressions and so many random things to see if it had merit. And while many I dropped too soon to see benefit, the novel exposures likely did help to stack more movement patterns and understanding of various lifts. When you experiment with lifts and programming, even for a short period of time, you still learn a lot. You learn the value of starting off week one being manageable so you can progress without stagnation by the end of the program. You learn the practicality of implementing some methods based on your experience, equipment access, and personality type. You learn to view training through various lenses and systems and quickly throw out what might not be applicable. This last one is extremely important in strongman as strongman itself was never really thought of as a sport and thus all the training methods were bastardized powerlifting or weightlifting programs and ideologies.
So am I telling you to change things up more often? Not necessarily. What I am saying is to keep consuming the sport and watching for clues from any and everywhere. As I got more advanced, so did my seeking out more information. And guess what, there is more. When you seek out something new too often you start to feel like an imposter, especially as a coach, because you feel you do not know enough. The flip side, if you only do things one way forever you fail to adapt and learn from others.
If you are young in the sport, try movements and methods and get a taste. What did you enjoy? What system motivated you the most? Use that as feedback to create your unique plan. See a lifter you like to watch, are they built like you? If they are not then take it with a grain of salt. You want to find lifters and athletes like you in characteristics such as body type, strengths, and personality and see how they train. If you ever feel overwhelmed with what program or system to use do not be upset, everyone feels that. Find something that is working and stick to it and casually view more information, not to change your plan but to be aware. And if you ever feel so lost you struggle to get motivated to train, do not be afraid to reach out to a quality coach.
