Training - Changing from Bodybuilding to Strongman

There are many things you need to take into consideration when you switch your style of training. Follow these tips and they will help you avoid some common mistakes.

Don't overtrain

Don't try to add a couple of days of strongman training while keeping up your other gym workouts. You will burn out and get injured. You must reduce how much you do in the gym and you will need additional recovery time. Your exercise choices should be heavy power movements. These include squats, deadlifts, rows, cleans, military presses and shrugs. Forget all the cable and machine work. You won't need it.

Proper diet

The chicken-breast-and-rice-cake meals you ate as a bodybuilder won't cut it for maxi-mum power and recovery when you start doing strongman. You will need more protein and calories to help you recover from the increased stresses. Without proper food, I guarantee your training will ultimately fail.

Learn the technique

Strongman training is different from body-building, powerlifting or weightlifting. While there will be some carryover in ability, even great powerlifters who are super strong can have problems with basic events when they start training strongman. The sport is not pure brute strength, as you may think Learning how to do the events properly is the key to your success. You have to be a master technician if you want to succeed.

Ease into it

Don't think that in a few weeks you will be ready to do damage at the World s Strongest Man contest because you were a great bodybuilder. Take your time and things will come. Remember, you have to learn how to master a new technique, and your body must learn how to properly recover from your training sessions.

Compete

I doubt that you'll win your first show, but you will learn about the sport and how the events are done in a real setting. This will be of great value to you - not only in your future training, but also for future competitions. You will learn the ropes and receive guidance from veterans in the sport that you can forget during your training sessions.

So here you have it, just a few tips to help you get involved in strongman training. Start off easy, but work hard. You should increase your strength on the events in just a short time.