Shit You've Probably Never Tried- The Trap Bar Carry

In the past, I've looked at the trap bar mostly as an annoyance in the gym.  Kids who use them are typically weak as shit, leave the bar wherever the fuck they want and rarely unload the two to four massive plates they load on it.  Additionally, the vast majority of trap bars can't hold enough weight to make their use worthwhile, so they've simply been a speedbump to my workouts because they're in the fucking way.  I have, however, fallen in love with precisely one exercise that can be done with a trap bar in a variety of ways, and it rules harder than than Vlad the Impaler in his forest of impaled bums- the Trap Bar Carry.

Jesus tittyfucking Christ.

Unlike the methodology espoused by Stuart McRobert, which encourages people to deadlift on the trap bar because they're great for people too weak to actually lift weights (like the super tactical toughguy pictured above), my thought process on the trap bar goes like this- if you're strong, you're likely too strong for most trap bars.  In spite of this fact, there's got to be some way to make the giant hunk of metal darkening the corner of your gym and providing spiders with an ideal breeding ground useful.  So, when bored and sick of doing the same basic shit day in and day out 8 to 12 times a week for the last few months, I loaded that fucker up and started walking around with it, and I discovered something- it was a hell of a lot of fun.

We're not talking orgy with midgets, porn stars, midget porn stars, and a circus freaks fun, but it was a damn sight more fun than doing whatever the hell it is most people do in the gym.

If only.

Apparently, I'm not the only one who's come to the conclusion that this is the only truly useful purpose for Stuart McRobert's masterbatory fantasy about a 400 lb deadlift.  Author Craig Weller recommends these as well, though I think he'd take issue with my form- he recommends doing these considerably lighter than I do (doesn't everyone?), and with extremely strict form.  It's just about the most primitive movement one could imagine, however, so primitive form works for me.  Bob Peoples in all of his round-backed glory would agree with me, I believe, so fuck Craig Weller.  Actually, Weller's article is pretty good- I stumbled across it while looking for Dan John's article on the same topic, and he's the only other person who seems to have written about the trap bar walk.  Unlike Weller, I actually loaded the thing with weights, but he's got some great ideas for other loaded carries if you're inclined to use small weights and wear Vibrams, such as:

This saddens me.

The Underwater Rock Carry- "Take your rock, carry it as far as you can into the water from the beach, and then sprint with it under water while your partner swims on the surface. Once you’re out of oxygen, come up to the surface and switch out with your partner. Alternate in this fashion until you reach a set distance, like a depth of water you no longer feel like diving to, and then return."

How else would you carry a yak carcass up a mountain?

Sherpa Skull Carry-"While backpacking in Nepal, I spent quite a bit of time with the Himalayan Sherpas, and they have an interesting means of carrying double (and sometimes more) their bodyweight up the mountain. Their packs are so heavy that they couldn’t use standard shoulder straps because the weight would pull them over backward. Instead, they run a strap from the bottom of their pack up that loops around the head, and allows them to carry the brunt of the weight using the skull and neck. This helps them to keep the weight centered well enough forward to balance and maintain a steady pace up the mountain."

Brutal as those suggestions are, they're about as practical as wearing a cotton candy condom at an all-anal gangbang in Swaziland.  Instead, I suggest doing one of the following, which are my favorite ways to do trap bar carries:

Beast Mode- Load the bar with an appreciable percentage of your one rep max on the deadlift.  I ended up working up to 600 and doing a number of these.  I'd venture to guess my 1rm on the trap bar deadlift is at or around 650-660, so 600 was about 90% of my 1RM.  Walk as far as you can with it, which is probably not going to be all that far.  Rest and repeat until you feel like you might shit out your guts- this was about 90 minutes for me, including all of my lighter, longer distance reps.

Rocky Mode- If you read my Rocky vs. Clubber Lang blog, you'll know I rarely train with a partner.  This exercise, however, is an exception.  Doing this exercise with a lighter weight than you would for beast mode and a partner lets you do a bit of metabolic conditioning, as you can do carries for distance and rest only the amount of time it takes for your partner to go the distance, as it were.  If you happen to have a partner not quite on the same superhuman level as yourself, it's no skin off your upper lip- just adapt and overcome.  The guy with whom I've done these in my gym can get across the gym, Beast mode style, with 315.  As such, I carry the bar in a 3:1 to 4:1 ratio in terms of gym lengths to his- I'll go down and back twice to his single trip.  This gives him an opportunity to recover and me the opportunity to get in a decent amount of time under tension.

"So why do them?", you might be asking yourself.  If "because they're awesome isn't compelling enough for you, perhaps this is: Weighted carries like the trap bar deadlift carry can have a profound carryover effect to your deadlift, due in large part to the fact that the deadlift is a show movement that doesn't rely on a stretch reflex (unlike the squat).  According to Mike Tuscherer, isometrics are excellent for this sort of an exercise, and given the fact that the carry portion of this movement is, for all intents and purposes, an isometric, it should help your deadlift considerably.(Tuscherer 34)  The fact that it combines a variety of movements just adds icing to this awesome cake.

Weighted carries also have the benefit of increasing the amount of muscular tension over your entire body, the quality of which "determines how big and strong you can become", according to Charles Poliquin.  (Poliquin 47)  Lifting weights at 90% or more of your 1RM results in the maximum hypertrophy in Type IIb muscle fibers, as does slowing down the tempo of your repetitions, both of which occurs when you're doing an exercise along the lines of a weighted carry with extremely heavy weights.  (Poliquin 48-50)  According to Dan John, loaded carries will allow you to "build more muscle faster, drop fat quicker, and kick any ass on any field of play" and recommends doing them three times per week.

Seems to be working for me- this was last Saturday at 196 lbs.

In short, trap bar carries are awesome, and you should start working them into your workouts, stat.

Sources:

Bondarchuk, Anatoliy.  Transfer of Training In Sports. Michigan:  Ultimate Athlete Concepts, 2007.

John, Dan.  The Secret of Loaded Carries.  http://www.t-nation.com/free_online_article/most_recent/the_secret_of_loaded_carries

Tuscherer, Mike.  The Reactive Training Manual.
Weller, Craig.  Weighted Carries for Size and Strength.  http://www.wannabebig.com/training/weighted-carries-for-size-and-strength/

Shit You've Probably Never Tried- The Overhead Walk

To begin, I hold no illusions that this is in any way a novel exercise.  I'm sure a quick google search will reveal that 198,734,867 other videos detailing the manner in which other people do this.  I don't care how or why they do it, however, and figure you guys might like another take on how this exercise could be done.[ed.- After initially writing that, I actually bothered to look, and the results were hilarious.]  Before I get into the hows, let's deal with the wherefores.

For those of you who are foreign, non-native English speakers, or possibly retarded, "wherefore" doesn't mean "where"- it means "why".  The misuse of this word annoys the tits right off me, so stop doing it.

So, the wherefore for the Overhead Walk- it will probably boil down to boredom and curiosity.  I started doing them initially because my old roommate and I started taking a bunch of plates and a barbell to the park on Saturdays, grilling a shitload of steak, drinking a tremendous amount of liquor, and lifting for a few hours.  We ended up getting bored with cleans and snatches and the like, so one of us decided to snatch 135 and walk with it as far as they could.  When they ditched it, the other one of use would yank it out of the ground (where it would be deeply embedded) and then walk as far as they could.  We'd do this for an extraordinary period of time, and left us sore as a motherfucker the next day.  Given a preference, that's how I'd still do it, outdoors, over uneven ground, drunk, and to death, but I lack access to both a masochistic training partner and barbells and plates I can take outdoors, I'm forced to do it inside by myself (as will happen occasionally to the best of us).  Which means I go as heavy as I possibly can, because fuck cardio anyway.

For those of you who want a little more reason for the things you do in the gym, you'd do well to remember that many bodybuilding pontificators and some sports scientists (among them Dr., Charles Staley), emphasize the time during which one's muscles are under tension as a critical part of program design.  Clearly, as I spend the vast majority of my considerable time in the gym lifting as violently and briefly as possible, this is not a key component of my training.  I do, however, believe that it is a fairly good indicator of training volume, and thus should probably not be completely ignored.  This type of exercise will drastically increase your time under tension, as it's a sort of combination static-hold, microrep partials, and endurance exercise all rolled into one gigantic bag of awesome.

As to the how, it's fairly simple- you clean and press or jerk, or snatch, a weight overhead and then walk with it until you don't feel like it any longer or cannot.  I enjoy using a variety of rep ranges, weights, and techniques for this type of exercise because mixing this sort of thing into a workout is all about spicing shit up a bit.  Like just about every other facet of training, this is hardly rocket science- just figure out what you like and do it.  A lot of it.

As to the when, Overhead Walks are a nice way to mix it up, give you something to do on a day you want to train but have no idea what you want to do, or are spending the day in the park grilling, drinking, and lifting.  I do them very infrequently (like, once a year), but I always enjoy them when I do them.  If I did them more often, I'm certain I'd have no problem going heavier with them, but I'm far too focused on other lifts right now to get sidetracked with this silliness.  For those of you who are already winding up a nice cry about how I walk around with more weight than you overhead press and you could never do this and blah di fucking blah blah- suck it the fuck up and press more.  When you're pressing, make sure you lock out each rep and hold it.  If you do that, walking around with heavy weights overhead's easy as fucking on a dead bear.

SHAKE THAT BEAR.