Due to a few coincidents, like me being too weak for powerlifting and people at my gym having a large collection of Atlas stones, I somehow slid into strongman and did a totally beginner meet in May 2025. To commemorate this and have a few takeaways, I immediately started writing a blog post about it, and well, life got busy and now it is almost a year later, perfectly timed to remind me of the things I almost had forgotten.

Strongman is an actual sport

Contrasting with powerlifting, where you only need to be very strong in a very specific position, strongman requires multiple athletic characteristics. Endurance, speed, athleticism, mobility, spatial thinking, power and, of course, strength mean that there is a wider competitive pool than in powerlifting, where there is a strong selection for short limbed stocky short people.

Obviously, most athletes are very strong, duh. Genetic gift or pharmaceutical enhancements allow many of them to perform a few very heavy sets on the implements and still grow and get stronger from it, something genetically misplaced individuals like me can only dream of.

As a consequence, many people train like that and thus lack the work capacity of people who actually need to double down on volume to just keep the amount of muscle they have. Which means, until the training meta catches up, you need a lot less talent to compete, if you put in the work.

Basic barbell training goes a long way

There are a few goated strongman movements which are just not easy to replicate with barbells and dumbbells:

• Sandbags/Stones
• Log Press
• Farmer walks

A few circus tricks like the findle fingers aside, most other movements are just variations of the general patterns and you only need to get familiar with the implement, but not actually train the implement.

You get a better continental clean by training a proper power clean and just getting a bit of practice with the continental, than by actually strength training with the axle for the continental clean.

Most overhead events are just awkward Push Presses, and a good mix of Log Press and Push Press does check most of the boxes. Push press itself does carry over pretty well, but the hard lay back in a log press has more to it than just awkwardness.

The same goes for sandbag or stones, it's just not possible to replicate with standard gym equipment. If you have to choose one or the other, sandbags are the superior and more versatile training implement, one of the main reasons being that you can just drop them about anywhere without risking damage to anywhere or the sandbag itself. Their squishiness adds to the muscular development, whereas stones really do not lend themselves to more grindy efforts, like just taking them out for a walk. Stones definitely need some practice so you learn how to grip them, but once you have that down, there is not really much reason to train with them.

Something should be said about unilateral presses, as there is definitely a unique technical aspect to it, but so far I think unilateral barbell work like snatches or presses does seem to do the trick somewhat. Also unilateral barbell presses look a lot more cooler than circus dumbbells, which well, just look like a circus trick.

Farmer walks are also cool, but not world changing cool. Still, they carry over well to real life. They are basically useless for other sports and taking so many steps with heavy weights does require an exaggerated amount of recovery from your hip, knees and ankles.

Strongman movements don't do shit

Most other strongman movements basically are just very heavy partials. Some overload can be useful when it is placed strategically, but after all, overload does not drive progress, it only helps you to exploit progress you've already made.

Frontsquats, to me, are deadlifts, not squats

This is one of my favorite revelations from this period, because I never got front squats to work. But they carry over so well to most strongman disciplines, so I replaced my main squat work with frontsquats: Picking up a sandbag or stone is essentially a frontsquat. Cleans profit massively from a strong frontsquat, as demonstrated by olympic lifters everywhere. Carrying things in front of you profit from a frontsquat.

At some point it just clicks: Frontsquats carry over to picking up things, and deadlifts are just distilled picking up shit. Indeed, as the center of mass tends to hang over the midfoot, the bar is a bit in front of it (as opposed to the deadlift, where it can move further back), making it extraordinarily hard to hold the position.

In a sense it's a "bar very forward out and no hinge"-deadlift. And it is just as taxing as a deadlift, which is why I never got it to work. But slotting it in along deadlifts instead of squats should solve this issue.

At least for me. This definitely does seem to be universally true, as for one of my training partners, frontsquats definitely are squats and they can just program them as a light squat variant.

I guess the tl;dr is that frontsquats are awesome, they possibly just don't slot like a regular squat. This might actually change once I get better at them, but who knows.

Grip and forearms are delicate

Handling heavy sandbags twice a week, topped of with far too heavy Kroc Rows, for someone with a shitty grip resulted in my first actual severe overuse injury. Just rolling around a 150kg or 190kg boulder on the ground already does something to the connective tissue and muscles in your forearms, which you are usually not exposed to. It is a weird and unique experience. I have not yet found a solution, but for now I strap up for RDLs and rows and high rep deadlifts to give my forearms a break from "moderate" and accidental workload and do more bimodal training with heavy farmers and light weight wrist curls.

Points are weird and favour the fast

While powerlifters long had Wilks score and now have the sidegrade DOTS (thanks to the widely available data you can have students come up with a fairer score than DOTS in less than an hour), in strongman each discipline gives you points and then overall points determine the winner. The formulae seem arbitrary and I don't even know them, and currently, you can dominate all strength disciplines and then still lose first place to someone running a few seconds faster in a single discipline. At first I thought maybe I am just picking examples, but overall this seems to be a trend in the WSM orientied federations like the GFSA. After all, WSM definitely has this bias as Alexander Bromley pointed out in this youtube video.

Is it as bad as streetlifting, which has a whole lift dedicated to an amount of kilos that's 10-20% of another lift in the meet? Probably not.

This ironically leads to the situation where I, relatively speaking, am better suited for strongman than powerlifting, because I am just too fucking weak for powerlifting. Not to say that I could be competetive in strongman, that's just not in the cards. I still suck, but at least not at the bottom of the field but in the middle of the field, losing to people weaker and faster than me. Which is still weeeeird for a sport that has strong in the name, but that's at least something I can work on.

In particular, there are some basic strategies one can employ: If the carry weights are light, practice actual running with them; I think it makes sense to start with very submaximal weights, because running itself is already quite taxing and you do not want to get an overuse injury because you started sprinting with imore than a typical sprinter's bodyweight in each hand. On axle presses for reps, if possible, use full or power cleans instead of contintental cleans, because the latter just take a lot of time. Finally, in events like loading medleys, speed is a consequence of good technique. No minor correction of your stance before lifting the implmenet takes as long as taking a second attempt.

Implements make percentage based training difficult

It's well established that strength is best trained at average intensities of around 68%-ish of true 1RM across the months, and while with barbells this can easily be titrated, with strongman the jumps in implements require you to have training vary more intersession than intrasesssion, offsetting heavier days with days a lot lighter. Which probably explains why westside style conjugate training is still somewhat popular there.

The old approach of simply staying at a weight until it becomes obnoxiously boring also seems to help a lot. It also gives your body enough time to accomodate, and while strength-wise there could be faster progressions, longevity-wise this helps avoid a lot of the injuries we usually see in amateur strongman popping up.

The GFSA just does not care about good meets

On a more sad sidenote, the GFSA is shamefully lazy when it comes to the events. Under the false pretense of spongebob cased "strongman is about adapting", events are setup with uneven plates on uneven ground and rubber mats that jump around inbetween reps and need to be kicked back under the bar by helpers during a lifter's attempt. Which sometimes does not even work and then you have people deadlifting a bar rolling around, on one side elevated on a gym mat and on the other side just hitting the concrete of the parking lot. That's just rude and not fair. Depending on the circumstances this could be forgivable, but when the meet is in front of a well equipped gym which would allow you to use the same plates on all bars and actually set up a good platform for the lifters, it is just annoying. You don't have to go full power- or weightlifting pedantry, and prescribing as to how each plate has to face, but, idk, maybe make it look at least a little bit like you care?

Speaking of fairness, judging is also questionable. While I do enjoy watching lifters dribbling an axle like it is a basketball during axle for reps, grant this privilege to all lifters and not randomly forbid some lifters to do touch and go. Or don't grant it to anyone, I don't care, just make it even.

Ideas for the next prep

To sum it up, if I were to compete again, I probably would not change much in my regular training. Indeed, I am not even sure if I would swap out bench for push pressing, as I did in the past, since the bench gives you quite some hugging power and you do not need that much shoulder strength, as you can always drive with your legs.

An event day essentially is a given, as my gym buddies would demand it, so this would happen every other week, give or take. If there would be a very odd lift, I would make sure to practice it with light weights on another day of the week. Carries are somewhat a mainstay in my program, so I can simply swap them out for whatever variation is coming up in the competition. As mentioned, I'd favor speed over weight in training, especially if I know the weights in advance. And loading events I'd just train the technique.

Finally, work capacitiy goes a long way in a meet day, so timing rests is a good way to improve it basically for free. Timed sets work well with submaximal weights and do not require very accurate weight prescriptions, so you can make them work well with the implements.