Sat, 13 Feb 16

Today was the coldest training day of the winter so far and hopefully the last cold one as well.  I started my strongman career training outside year round with only occasional exceptions for major rain or snow storms (and even then we still went outside much of the time).  But I sadly no longer train regularly with my first crew and everyone since has always been bitchy, whiny babies to a greater or lesser extent (except for the tiny dancer himself, Nick O'Brien) when it comes to cold weather training.  Yes, there are great places where you can train indoors like Brute Strength Gym, the Edge 2.0, Colosseum Gym, and many others with the number growing all the time, however, most people who train do not live in a place where they are readily able to go to these places so you either tell mother nature to pack sand or hide inside and count your change.  If you have never had to shovel out a path in the snow to do yoke or farmer's and you don't live in Florida, California, or Texas, you are not a real strongman or strongwoman.  So obviously I feel quite strongly that training outside in winter helps ingrain qualities necessary for success in the sport of strongman and after today I hope that most of my training partners now are starting to realize this as well.  With the exception of Gregg who was doing a very light training day and had to leave early because of prior plans, everyone else hit at least one PR and showed huge improvement on everything we did across the board - despite single digit wind chills.

Axle C&J (clean once)

complex x 70

complex x 120

3x160

3x210

3x230

3x250

3x270 - It took me a while to get warm and get my groove, but each set was easier and better than the previous one and I was pretty happy about these considering I did them in my wrestling shoes instead of my weightlifting shoes.

Marc hit 2 all time PRs on axle today with 5x160 and 1x170 at a body weight of 165.  Bill worked up to 255 on the log after having been hindered by technique issues with the press for the last several weeks.  Ryan also worked up to 255 and after a miss the first time, we figured out where he was losing power from his legs and he hit it easily on the next set.

Yoke

100' x 250

100' x 450

100' x 540 - I forgot to time the 450 run for comparison as to how I was performing today so I started timing on this set and it was immensely better than last time I did long distance yoke.

100' x 650 - This was the weight I was scheduled to do a month ago that resulted in me being infuriatingly slow for no apparent reason on 2 consecutive runs.  I destroyed it today.

100' x 700 - I'll have to look back and check, but this might have been an all time PR for speed on this weight at this distance.

Marc PRed again on this event, taking 450 for 100' with no drops (a weight he had previously only done for 50').  Bill worked up to the contest weight for his first comp and wrecked it and then continued to go up and finished with a 50' run at 700 for a PR.

Stone Shouldering

3x4x200 - I was a little lacking in the hip explosion on these, but I think it was due to the multiple layers of clothing causing me to have a somewhat looser overall grip on the stone.  Despite this they were all easy.  Both Bill and Ryan showed improvement here and I made Marc do a set of 10 reps with the sandbag to introduce him to the joys of shouldering.  Overall an awesome training day with everyone looking good getting closer to their various upcoming competitions.