With summer in full swing, I haven’t been blogging much but my training hasn’t missed a step even if I have. This week, our favorite smack-talking Freak Factory strongmen, Scott and Pete invited us to one of their Saturday sessions over at Scott Brengel’s Costa Mesa home gym. Now it may have been a simple matter of those two just being sick and tired of slapping each other down and needing some “fresh meat” by bringing in newbies like me, Mike Covert and their friend “Rhino” along with another strongman, Sean. Maybe Scott decided to have an “Open House”. Either way, it was great to get the invite and we had a great time training with the freaks.

Initially, we lifted the two strongman logs and did 8 sets of 3, up to 161 lbs.

That proved to be merely a warm-up to the medley, which consisted of a 410 lb Farmers Walk for about 100′ uphill.

Next, came the tire flip. This tire weighed between 800-900 lbs and only the freaks could lift it unassisted. The Barbarians, newbies that we are, required assistance.

We flipped it three times before moving on to the third and final leg of the medley, the tire sled drag. According to Mike, we were pulling 250#. That didn’t appear to be too bad until you factor in the friction of dragging the tire. That, for me was harder than I expected.

Apparently, it took me longer to write about this than actually do it as my time was 2:07. (That’s minutes, not hours)!

The newbies thought we were done, but that was not to be the case. I had tried the appropriately named “Conan Walk” which is derived from “Conan’s Wheel” from the classic Arnold movie, “Conan, the Barbarian”. Well, I just had to try this, right?

Mike tried his hand at running a sand-weighted beer keg across the alley and hoisted on to the platform. I missed at the platform. I also took several attempts at lifting an Atlas stone and on the third attempt, got it resting on my lap. I neglected to finish with a techique thing that would have me move my arms over the top of the stone and lift it like a crane to get it to the platform. Instead, it dropped to the ground. Next time.

Of course, by this time, we had our fill of strongman lifting for one day, but everyone had a great time and I think the Barbarians, Mike and I impressed the pros with our effort.

Take a look at some more of our strongman pictures and a couple of strongman videos of Scott Brengel doing the Farmer’s Walk and Tire Flip.

We were all back at Met-Rx doing our usual stuff by Monday, no worse for the wear.

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