by Brendon Lowe
ITW Strength & Conditioning Columnist

Traditional weight training has become the staple of many successful wrestlers’ training habits for many years. Hours upon hours of time has been spent in the weight room pressing, pushing and tugging at hundreds of pounds of metal plates attached to an Olympic bar.

Everyone knows how to bench-press and how to squat. But how beneficial are these lifts for true athletic progress? If a wrestler is on his back and pressing a weight straight up, then he is pinning himself. How often do you have your opponent strewn across your shoulders behind your head as you stand from a squat position?

These exercises often greatly benefit a wrestler, but too many weight routines focus too much on these two lifts. A wrestler should not concentrate on how much he can bench press. Olympic Gold Medalist Brandon Slay has said many times that the most frequent question he gets asked by kids at speaking engagements and training camps is “how much can you bench?”

A better idea with superior results is an alternative means of training. When comparing strength, the standard question asked is (once again, of course) … “How much can you bench?” But, in reality, who really cares?

This comparison is a crude assessment of the relationship of total athletic strength. Sometimes the best strength workouts don’t even take place in a weight room. These workouts incorporate nontraditional actions using nontraditional equipment. “Strongman” training is the term used for these techniques of training.

This may conjure up images of the ESPN classic television show where legendary greats such as Bill Kazmaier and Magnus Ver Magnusson lift 300 pound spheres and place them on pedestals to see who can do it the fastest. Strongman training takes a bit of imagination and a ton of guts to utilize. This is why it is so well fit for training wrestlers.

Incorporating strongman training into your routine is a lot easier than you might think. Instead of the ergonomically designed weight equipment found in the room, strongman equipment is often awkward and cumbersome. This forces wrestlers to adapt, and use muscles that may not be used to the work, but may be used on the mat.

Grip is often stressed through strongman training as well as the core strength. These are two crucial components to a wrestler’s power and strength. An example of equipment that I use with my men of the mat includes tractor tires, logs – even cars.

Tractor tires are great tools for strongman training. They are easy to obtain and provide a great total-body exercise. It may not sound like much at all, but flipping a giant tire end over end is harder than it sounds.

These tires can weigh as much as 500-700 pounds. When flipping a quarter-ton tire becomes easy, I guarantee that lifting a one hundred and some-odd pound wrestler becomes even easier.
When finding a tire, you want to find one that still has some tread on it. This gives you choices for grip position. Changing the grip can make the initial lift easier or harder, depending on where you grip the tire. The most difficult grip would be getting all the way under the tire and lifting from the bottom curve.

There is no absolute perfect technique to flipping tires, but to protect your back from injury you must use proper squatting form. Keep your back flat and lift with the legs and hips rather than your back.

A car can also be an excellent piece of training equipment and can be used in many different ways. First a caution: Anyone using a car or truck for training must use the vehicle with the utmost of safety at all times.

Always have another person present to steer and apply the brakes, and never perform an exercise while the vehicle is running. Always use an abandoned parking lot away from other vehicles and people for this type of training. A simple exercise that I enjoy is merely pushing the truck up a slight incline.

A beginner will want to push on a flat surface, but as that gets easier, look for a part of the parking lot with a gradual, and I mean gradual, incline. I like to push a truck, because you can also add resistance by placing heavy objects in the truck bed. Again, keep your back flat and your hips low and you will become more efficient and stronger.

If you have seen the movie “Vision Quest,” (trivia note: Vision Quest was the first-ever movie performance by Madonna), I’m sure that you remember the scene where the hulking grappling antagonist known simply as “Shute” is seen lunge walking up stadium bleachers with a massive log across his shoulders and a menacing grin on his face.

That would be an example of an advanced exercise using a log. A fellow personal trainer and buddy of mine, Dave Lehman, has put together logs for me that weigh on a range of 20-110 pounds. They are old telephone poles that have been cut to fit right over your shoulders and have been constructed to include handles and padding for your neck. I have used these for training more than any other piece of strongman training because of their versatility.

An exercise that I have borrowed from Dave is performed on a running track. Wrestlers partner up. One partner stands on either end of the football field. The first wrestler, with the log on his back, performs walking lunges for the entire 100 yards of the football field. Once he reaches his partner, he drops the log and sprints the remaining 300 meters back around to the starting point. Then his partner does the same thing. Talk about pushing yourself to the max.

Strongman training takes a lot of imagination to execute. But the potential results can take you from a pretender to a contender. If you need any more ideas for exercise, please contact me through the insidetexaswrestling.com forum under the “Body of a Champion” thread. When determining your strongman routine, search for exercises that mimic the actions that you perform on the wrestling mat, but always remember; keep it simple!
Don’t try to overdo sport-specific motions. After all, you should be getting enough of those through daily drilling on the mats.

Comments? Questions? Ideas for future “Body of a Champion” columns?

Thanks for reading. Brendan Lowe