At Spartan we are lucky to work with many top level and aspiring Strongwomen from around the world, not just the UK. These include the current World Strongest Woman and Arnold Amateur HW Champion Donna Moore.

Below are three tips I believe all up and coming strongwoman will benefit from.

IMPROVE UPPER BODY STRENGTH

Some women are genetic freaks and are extraordinarily gifted with their upper body strength. That or they’ve been exposed to laborious hobbies/sports throughout their childhood such as horse riding or gymnastics. Sadly, for the rest of us, we as women are simply not designed to display much in that department.

Women tend to compound this issue by not targeting their upper body muscles enough. For a lot of women, the thought of becoming ‘bulky’ crosses their mind and they simply choose not to train upper body as much as they may do their legs and ass in case one day they wake up in a dude’s body.

Well, what can I say to that except, GET OVER IT!

Strongwoman requires you to train for strength, strength training requires you to build muscle and personally I see that as a pretty fucking awesome side effect, looking like a superhero.

As with my clients at Spartan Performance and online I recommend you:

• Include 1 upper body strength session per week
• Include 1 upper body hypertrophy session per week
• Practice 1 pressing event per week.

GROW A PAIR!

I’ll apologise in advance to those this may offend and to those this absolutely doesn’t apply to.

There’s something that the general female population lack and the women at the top possess and that is the ability to work fucking hard in the gym. If you watch these ladies train they’re grunting, pulling angry faces, working their asses off pushing themselves to the limit EVERY damn session.

You will never develop sufficient adaptations if you don’t push through that uncomfortable barrier. I can promise you something, beyond that barrier, IF you dare to break through it, is glorious gains. THAT is the difference between Shero and zero.

GET A GRIP

Strongman/women is a sport that tests every aspect of strength and one of the most important of those is grip strength.

For the female athlete, there is a slight problem, we aren’t exactly renowned for our enormous hands, are we?

Sure, there are exceptions, myself included, but if you typically have tiny kitten hands then you’re going to have a bad time. But don’t panic! Grip is actually something that you can get away with training nearly every day one way or another, and you absolutely should. See below for the methods I have found effective over the years:

• Stop relying on those straps for deadlifts. Train your double overhand just as seriously as you would your mix grip.
• Add variation by training with an axle/fat gripz on assistance exercises.
• Add timed hangs to the end of all heavy sessions not only for extra grip work but all-important post training spinal decompression too.

Jenny Todd

A coach at Spartan Performance, Jenny is also the current and 4x England’s Strongest Woman and 2017 Arnold’s Amateur Strongwoman Middleweight Champion.  To learn more from Jenny and our methods for training Strongwomen at Spartan, join Jenny for her upcoming Strength Workshop  on November 12^th .

(Jenny Todd (MW Champion) & Donna Moore (HW Champion) at the 2017 Arnold Classic)

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I was first exposed to these through one of my biggest influences – Louie Simmons. There were no UK suppliers back in 2002 so I had a fabricator make me a sled. This was 5 years before Spartan started to become a reality. Xmas Day 2003 I was pulling it uphill on grass ankle deep in snow (Shout out to my training partner Colin who was mad enough to join me). Since then I have used them on all surfaces in all conditions.

Much to my client’s delight we have switched a local field to indoor turf and upgraded our equipment from homemade to the very best in Watson Gym Equipment and A-Unit.

More importantly I have learnt from past mistakes that saw me use these invaluable tools to simply bury people. Those of you that have used these know how easily it is to induce what my mentor Joe Defranco called ‘prowler flu‘.  Whilst that may serve a purpose on the odd occasion, there are far more effective ways to incorporate these into your own training as well as that of your clients. Check out my article at IronLife magazine where I discuss in detail.

The post PROWLER & SLED TRAINING – THE SPARTAN WAY appeared first on Spartan Performance.