Unusual Lifting

[MTG35]

I thought I might start a thread to discuss what type of unusual lifting you are doing and what you gained from it.

I wanted to get into this type of lifting when I started and tried but because of my obsessive personality I overdid a lot of stuff and then had to stop and regroup. I feel that now as a more experienced trainee I can attempt to start this up again. Plus seeing the Luke and Dan videos stoked the fire.

This morning I dusted off my sandbag. Mine is an old army duffel that I loaded 3 sand tubes into. Each tube is 60 pounds. They are the type you can buy at Home Depot to put in your trunk or truck bed during the winter. I don't know if I should reconfigure the shape of the sand to make it more difficult or if is hard enough as is. To me it feels hard enough, but I'm open to suggestions and ideas. I know some guys put the sand into a bunch of smaller bags. Not sure if it is solely ease of adding and removing weight or to make the odd shape harder to lift.

So I took out one bag to make the weight 120 and I hugged it and lifted. I then set it on my lap like you see guys do with stones. Once there I stood and shouldered the bag. It was pretty tough for me but felt pretty good to accomplish it first effort. Man I could really feel all the weaknesses in my core. I am going to stick with this as one of my major exercises as it sure hits everything in you and reveals a lot about your core strength.

My medium term goal is to shoulder the bag when it weights 200.

[Dan C]

With your strength I think shouldering the 200 will come a lot sooner, you could probably do it now. Pressing a 200lb bag overhead is an awesome long term goal though.

I think you're right about the smaller bags being for convenience but I like the feel of loose sand inside the bag. How loose it is will weigh in a lot on how difficult the bag is to lift. User preference maybe?

[luke.w]

Sandbags are good stuff, I used this method as a main staple in training for months, your forced into a rounded back position when lifting these off the ground, however I feel it more natural way of lifting the way the object is, it's like caveman days it was just meant to be, I didn't feel this with a barbell when I was inexperianced with deadlifts, I felt it not as natural, so I used the odd lifting to strengthen me for barbell deadlifts.

some odd lifts can be done with a barbell also, the ones I did were:
one-arm deadlifts/presses from all angles
steinborn lift
bottoms-up lifts
Steve Justas' "shovel lift"
thickbar

funny thing is these lifts were COMMON in the old-days, and if you look back the records were pretty big, I don't see this big advancemnet in human strength from the 1800's and know, I only see drugs/gear.

[MTG35]

Yeah it is funny calling this "unusual" when really this it the foundation to all we do today.

I do cycle one-arm deads with dumbells in my regular gym workouts.

On a similar though I was noticing once that we have all these "isolation" movements and if you look at some of them they are really parts of the olympic lifts. Take the clean. The bottom is similar to a deadlift (not that the deadlift is an isolation movement) then you have a combination of shoulder shrug and high pull. I can only imagine that some coach spilt up the movement so his athletes could improve the specific part were they were weak and someone saw it and thought that was all you needed to do not knowing it was meant to help them improve on a harder better overall lift movement. Now we have people who regularly do shugs and highpulls yet have no idea what a clean is!

[Jaster]

Here ya go!!
We got one of these in the station house and it's a Be-Witch!

http://www.keiser.com/products/other/forcemachine.html

[IronMan]

The Forgotten Lifts

[tim_mcf]

I have a 100 lb sandbag that I have actually been avoiding because it's hard on me - Last time I used it I did cleans and it kicked my ass. I'd better get on it again, anything you fear that much has to be good for you.

I've been cleaning up around my folks' house - my dad was in construction (backhoe operator) and was a huge packrat, so there's all kinds of crap lying around. Most of it is just trash, but some is HEAVY trash...I found an 8 foot length of drill pipe, I figured I could shoulder it and "run" up and down hills...there's a great big long chunk of rebar which I figured I could cut into 3 foot lengths and bend it...lots of big rocks lying around...I made a sled out of an old tire, and I throw big rounds of firewood on top of it to make it heavier...there's a big backhoe tire that I use for flipping, jumping on, whale on it with a sledgehammer, use it for GHD-style situps...

[MTG35]

Tim, that sounds like cools stuff. What a great find. Thats one thing I need to be more on the look out for. Theres all sorts of stuff all around us that makes for great creative exercises.