A lot of people cannot always get the right equipment for every event so I thought there should be a thread where we can exchange ideas/cheats that could come in useful.
Eg.
No concrete slab to train with?
Use your training partner and kettlebells.
I’m hoping this thread catches on. Someone out there has to have some ideas.
I can almost guarantee that Misha can afford a husaffel stone and is just having fun with his training. He does that quite frequently.
As for actual ideas, a while back there was a poor mans equipment thread that had some great ideas in it if you wanted to look that up.
You can get heavy tires for free you just got to go pick them up.
Wheel Barrows are in a sense a nice farmers walk substitute. Just load them up with plates and start walking. Be careful not to let it tip though.
Heavy Duty Duffle Bags full of smaller sand bags so you can adjust the weight are easy and sand is some what cheap from local hardware store.
If you cant buy a Walking Yoke you can make a Chain Yoke. This is essentially a a barbell with with chains or rope hanging off attached at the ends with weight plates attached at the end of the chain. You can’t go as heavy but it involves your core strongly and gives you a fill for walking with weights on you back.
You can find stones all over the place some round good for loading almost as a type of substitute for atlas stones and some that are more like busted up concrete that can be used for a type of picking up and walking event.
I heard somewhere that you can go to city maintenance and take old telephone poles (bam instant logs) off their hands pretty easily because they’re hard to dispose of- anyone else heard of that before?
Yeah thaty is true you can use them for flipping to a extent but if your good with a chain saw you can actually make logs out of them I have never done it before but I have seen them before. They dont last forever but, you can get a few months training out of one with some care and uptake.
Also kegs you can them fairly cheap and sometimes even free if they have been dented or anything and you can fill them with anything from water, to sand to concrete.
Sandbags are great. You can buy a good “shell” at an old army surplus store. Anything from a smaller backpack to a larger duffle bag can work. Trashbags make good liners (bag the sand, wrap it in duct tape and put it in your shell). Sandbags can be great for simulating stone loading, at least the gross muscle movements of it, or cleaning and pressing. You can carry them for distance as well.
I also have a pair of old WWII surplus gas cans with handles on them. Filled with sand they weigh out at 80lbs, with water you could probably bump those up over 100. Not contest weight, but I can tell you that carrying those around for 5+ minutes will still improve farmers walk performance.
Sandbags are great, you can do so much with them.
Go find some big fucking rocks and haul them off to you gym/home.
Truck tire/heavy equipment dealers will give away old used heavy tires. We just 5 of them ranging from 300lbs to 1300lbs for free. They even loaded them for us.
Use two dumbells for farmers walks. If you can use more than your heaviest dumbell use two barbells.
Work the hell out of your clean and press, regular barbell.
Deadlifts, barbell.
That’s all I can think of for the moment, I know there’s more.
Monopoly
Oh, and if you have an old barbell that unbolts on the end, you can make an axle by unbolting one end and sliding PVC piping down over the bar. I made one that is probably 2 1/4" and total cost was less than $12.
farmers walk…use barbells, alot harder
safe walk/superyoke…loaded barbell with chains
atlas/hussafel stone…go to a construction site and try to snag some concrete blocks
tire…go to a rubber recycling plant or a junkyard and find a tire
apollons wheel/any axle work…get a steel pipe the dimensions of a bar and cut it to 7 feet, then about a foot in from each side and afix something to act as a collar
atlas stone…find cut trees with various trunk diameters, and cut to right sizes, then cut bark off and lightly sand the outside
Barbells are miserable for trying to simulate farmers walks. Just like DB’s, the weight is going to have a tendency to spin out of your hand, but at least with DB’s the length and balance of the bars won’t be prohibitive. A pair of EZ curl bars would be much better, but still not great. I think that by the time you get barbells light enough to manage them you would be just as well off to fill a couple buckets with some gravel and walk with them.
Incidentally, refurbished barrels/drums are pretty cheap. Not as cheap as a keg, but I bought (and shipped) a 35 gallon steel drum for $40-ish, and filled it with wood pellets ($5/40lb bag and has a higher volume than sand) so that it weighs in around 290lbs. The hand hold on this is very limited and is great for walks and loads.
[quote]bdennis wrote:
I’m hoping this thread catches on. Someone out there has to have some ideas.[/quote]
Where are you in Ohio? I live near Columbus and I can tell you that there are at least 5 training groups around the state, probably more. You should be able to easily get your hands on the real deal if that is what you want.
I live in Cincinnati. I know there are a ton of places like this in Columbus but I’m a cheap bastard. I dont plan on ever competing either. I just enjoy this kind of work. It keeps training interesting.
[quote]bdennis wrote:
I live in Cincinnati. I know there are a ton of places like this in Columbus but I’m a cheap bastard. I dont plan on ever competing either. I just enjoy this kind of work. It keeps training interesting.[/quote]
Xenia… I’ll be more than happy to give you the name of the guy who runs the training group there. Even if you don’t plan on competing, the training is hard to beat. I would say that a full half of the guys I train with have no intention to ever compete. Your call, but a 45 minute drive to get in some good training on real equipment… priceless. I’ve driven almost 2 hours to get in a strongman workout with actual implements.
Of course I also own everything that people are trying to simulate, so…
If someone sits inside of a tire, even a small tire, and you tie a rope around the tire you can do sled drags. I slipped two 4’’ pieces of PVC through the string for handles because the nylon rope cut my hands.
Car pushing, it’s pretty damn near free even though I don’t own a car. I push random cars that are idle in the street.
Car Pulling, tie some nylon rope around it and slip two 4’’ pieces of PVC through it
I’ve made 3 axles out of 7’ length of steel pipe. The first two where hollow and bent after not very long. I bought a solid piece of steel last time for about 70 bucks. It weighs about 80lbs empty. Still under 100 bucks.
I’m going to steal some cinderblocks and random shit from construction sites.
Musclema1n1- Lol your just trying to get arrested aren’t you. I mean your pushing and pulling other peoples cars that are just sitting on the road and now you want to steal supplies from construction sites lol.
[quote]Andrew.Cook wrote:
bdennis wrote:
I live in Cincinnati. I know there are a ton of places like this in Columbus but I’m a cheap bastard. I dont plan on ever competing either. I just enjoy this kind of work. It keeps training interesting.
Xenia… I’ll be more than happy to give you the name of the guy who runs the training group there. Even if you don’t plan on competing, the training is hard to beat. I would say that a full half of the guys I train with have no intention to ever compete. Your call, but a 45 minute drive to get in some good training on real equipment… priceless. I’ve driven almost 2 hours to get in a strongman workout with actual implements.
Of course I also own everything that people are trying to simulate, so… [/quote]
PM the name or email address of the guy in Xenia. It might be worth taking a trip up there. Thanks.