Strongman

Mark Brown

October 11, 2021

Strongman is my favorite strength sport. The mix of both straight ahead powerlifting and seemingly absurd lifting or power movements makes it something I can latch onto. There’s not a lot that can say that for me much anymore. It’s also impacted which athletes I follow more closely, how they train, what they train with, and how I can train better. Strongman has been around for over 40 years but has gotten more mainstream over the last 12-15 years as modern technology has evolved to make everybody more connected. My relationship with it is very new but I feel connected with it the way I was 20 years ago to the mainstream American sports.

To start, it’s best if I help illuminate the strength sport scene to those who might not be familiar with it. Each strength sport values various elements of strength over another as a main source of differentiation. A mainstream audience is familiar with Bodybuilding because it was Arnold Schwarzenegger’s path to stardom in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It’s probably the most mainstream strength sport because it values the body over the lifts themselves. Powerlifting, as a sport, is less known publicly but everybody knows the lifts. It requires a level of discipline that most people who train can’t or don’t want to have. An even smaller niche within the sport is Equipped Powerlifting, which uses suits and shirts to push the limits of what can be done. Weightlifting has been around for much longer than either of those two sports but gets nowhere near the publicity because it’s one of “those” Olympic sports that gets coverage for a week every 4 years then disappears. It has no media partner to keep it in mainstream. The name even causes some confusion because the lifts, the clean and jerk and the snatch, goes by another because of its attachment to the games: Olympic lifting. Its inclusion in the Olympics going forward is even in doubt due to corruption within the sports main governing body, the International Weightlifting Federation. CrossFit is the youngest of the strength sports, but has gained a lot of steam over the last decade because it’s appeal to a time crunched public. Combining Weightlifting and conditioning is a way to get a serious workout in over a short amount of time. Strongman, like CrossFit, uses both lifting and conditioning as the core of their sport. The difference is the weights lifted and a serious emphasis on finding out the maximum of what can be lifted. The thing that really differentiates Strongman from Equipped Powerlifting, which it definitely shares qualities with, is that anything heavy could be part of a competition. It’s that last sentence that really speaks to me.

I was a major consumer of a couple different shows on the History Channel from about 2017-2020 and I saw promos for a show called “The Strongest Man in History” starring Brian Shaw, Eddie Hall, Robert Oberst, and Nick Best in 2019. It was about 4 professional Strongman competitors seeing if they could repeat strength feats of legend and lore. When the ludicrous is combined with people who can make it happen, I’m in. I watched it without knowing really who the guys were or what Strongman was. In Winter of 2019-20, I fell into a rabbit hole on Youtube and before long I had watched all World Strongest Man competitions from about 2001 through 2015 or so. This was my introduction to the sport. I saw overhead presses with logs, deadlifts using cars as weights, garbage trucks and planes being pulled by a rope, 400 pound round balls of concrete called Atlas Stones placed on pedestals and other ridiculous things happen. I could keep this list going on for a very long time. I saw all these things being done by guys who were mountains of muscle. I’m having difficulty telling if it’s the lifts or the lifters that really drives it for me. I can’t mentally separate the two from each other. Whatever the case is, it works for me.

The individual feats of strength put me in a sense of awe. It’s not always the big record setting lifts that do that to me, either. I haven’t experienced that watching baseball, football or basketball in a long time. Heavy deadlifts and log presses are especially impressive to me because I understand a little bit how hard they are to do. Eddie Hall’s 500 Kg deadlift at the World Deadlifting Championships in 2016 is mind boggling to me. It’s genuinely inspiring. Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson’s 501 kg deadlift in 2020 was also inspiring but it didn’t feel the same because of how I feel about Björnsson, aka Thor. The way the deadlift record went up over this past decade was crazy. What stood out watching those WSM contests, especially after 2009, was the way Zydrunas Savickas owned the log press and it was so effortless it seemed at times for lifts above 200 kg. Bobbi Thompson strict pressing a 370 pound log at the 2021 Shaw Classic made me laugh because of how absurd the concept was in my head. The WSM contests between 2009 and 2014 are especially fun to watch because both Savickas and Brian Shaw going back and forth at every event both of those years.

I haven’t watched as much fitness content on Youtube in 2021 as I did in 2020. I find a lot of dumb content involving the subject and I don’t want it sitting in my head. What stuck is certain content creators. My prior viewer relationship with Brian Shaw helped me follow him. His level of commitment to training and the sport is very inspirational. I can easily leave aside the fact that I’m nowhere near as strong as him and see what he does and why. He started running a Strongman contest last year called the Shaw Classic, and I’m all the way in. Eddie Hall, 2017 WSM winner, has a Youtube channel that is entertaining because his personality is so large and goes all in. He is an extremely powerful lifter, especially at static power lifts. His recent bicep tear pushed his boxing match with Thor down the road a bit. Oberst’s channel is mostly about training but his personality is so big it shines through. I can see why the people who run the History Channel chose the guys they did for their show. Alan Thrall, a powerlifting and strongman gym owner in Sacramento, California, has a channel that is both highly entertaining and educational. I have learned a lot from it.

Where Strongman interacts with me personally is training. While the base of my programming is powerlifting, I have elements of hypertrophy and Strongman in it. Powerlifting doesn’t care much about overhead pressing, but it is a major part of Strongman competitions. Shoulders are a major part of the bench press because of the way the human body is arranged, so shoulders must be addressed in training. This is where Strongman comes in. The sport specializes in overhead press movements. A lot of those movements are done with neutral or almost neutral hand positioning as opposed to pronated or supinated grips on barbells. Once I got the American Cambered Bar, I felt the difference in how my shoulders felt when overhead pressing. Seated overhead press with that bar is part of my regular routine. Standing overhead press is a physical issue because the length of my forearms makes it difficult for me to get an easy front rack position with a straight barbell. That has an effect on a number of different lifts but this is the one does so the most. The logs Strongman uses in competitions allows for a very easy to maintain front rack position. That changes the nature of the clean to it as well. To me, its much safer than cleaning a barbell because the pressure is lifted from all of the joints on the arm. I got an 8 inch log from Rogue when I saw them back in inventory in fall of 2020 after deciding to start working on clean and press. It helped immediately. In addition to strengthening my shoulders, I showed more muscular development in the front and side deltoids.

Another Strongman event seen in competitions is the Viking Press. It’s typically it’s own machine where each hand presses a weight up overhead. Its purpose in competition is to determine whose shoulder strength is stronger. Almost all of the times I have seen it done is for reps, not max. That machine is neither cost effective not space efficient for a home gym owner. EliteFTS came up with a solution for us home gym enthusiasts. It is a piece with two handles that attaches to one end of the barbell while the other end of the barbell is in a Landmine, if one owns a Rogue power rack. It is a quintessential Strongman piece of equipment. The ethos of being able to lift any thing of any shape as part of training or competition is embodied in this piece because it requires a deadlift and a continental clean just to get it into position to press it overhead. It is also one of the most effective shoulder and upper back exercises I have found. It is my primary rear deltoid lift. The reason is that it feels like it both an overhead press and a lat pull. That makes it a very unique lift, and one I can overload unlike the log press.

Moving events in Strongman involve moving something heavy from place to another. By “something heavy” I mean it could be anything. Most of what I have seen is sandbags, kegs or anvils. That’s what makes the sport so accessible for people. Other moving events are more defined by their equipment, like the Yoke Walk and Tire Flip. I own a tractor tire and will flip it occasionally. I would love to get a yoke. I am very seriously thinking of getting a rubber Atlas Stone. These moving events is my kind of conditioning. I don’t like running or jogging. It just do anything for me mentally. Making it more physically demanding makes me perk up. I love pushing a weighted sled as part of leg training sessions. I don’t own one but I do it when I do go to the public gym. Farmers Walks are very easily done. They train grip strength and conditioning. All one needs is a set of dumbbells heavy enough to be a challenge to walk with. That’s not a hard thing to find in my friend’s garage.

I don’t see myself doing Strongman competitions anytime soon, but I do find a lot of value in the ideology and practicality of Strongman. It is a sport designed to get the most out of anything we have around, the heavier the better. At this point in my life, it is one of the sports I follow the most because I feel an involvement in it. It’s a niche sport at the moment but modern communication technology is helping spread the word of Strongman. I hope to see it gain steam and see more gyms based around it. I will be keeping an eye on it.