The summer in the UK is great for training outside. The winter is less so. During the summer, I spent lots of time doing various projects outdoors. I don’t have a lot of garden but what little I do have I put to good use!
What I did last summer
Here are a few articles I wrote about what I did last summer…
- How to build a cheap sandbag
- How to make cheap farmers’ bars
- Introducing farmers’ bars
- More interesting ways to do cardio
What I want to do this winter
I want to keep using my strongman tools. I really like the farmers’ bars and the sandbag for building overall strength. I like the way they teach my body to work as a whole unit and to exert maximum force by producing whole body tension.
I want to use the space I have outside. I don’t have the world’s biggest garage so I can’t really do farmers’ walks or sandbag carries for any appreciable distance. By the time I get started, I have to stop again.
I like being able to trudge up and down the patio with my homemade farmers’ bars swinging out each time I turn a corner. I like pretending to be Mariusz Pudzianowski loading Atlas stones onto a platform when I’m moving my sandbag from one end of the garden to the other. I know, I’m sad that way…
But the weather is not delightful
But it can be really grim outside at this time of year in the UK. Cold, dark, wet and windy.
(This picture comes from John Hee, with his kind permission).
The other day I caught myself trying to argue that I could drop the sandbag carries. I rationalised that it was OK to do deadlifts or squats and then a few extra sets of one-arm rows, reasoning that the combination of the two exercises would be the same as sandbag carries. No way.
Reasons I find training outside daunting
To help get over the problem, I jotted down the reasons I found training outside daunting during the winter. I reasoned that if I could write them down and then think of ways to get around the problem, I could find ways to train outdoors again.
- It’s raining
- It’s dark
- It’s cold
It’s quite a short list, really. But when I thought about it, I reasoned that I can probably get round all of these quite easily. For example, I could:
- Wear a waterproof coat
- Fit an outside light (or just open the downstairs curtains)
- Wear another jumper and a hat
So it’s not really the elements that are defeating me.
When we moved house I shifted gravel
When we moved in to our house 3 years ago, the back garden didn’t exist. It was just gravel. I took 3 days to wheel a couple of hundred barrow loads of gravel round to the front of the house, where I dumped them in a skip.
When I moved the gravel, it was a May bank holiday weekend and it rained for 3 days solid. I used to set my watch for 45 minute intervals. I’d do 20 minutes of shifting wet gravel followed by 15 minutes of sitting in the kitchen squelching my toes in my socks and drinking hot tea. I did that 7 or 8 times a day.
Then I got up and did it again the following day.
Why?
Because I had a goal of getting all of the gravel shifted in 3 days. I had motivation.
Getting motivated
The real problem is that my sandbag carries are at the end of my workout. They’re a distant priority to pushing up my main lifts (deadlift, lumberjack squat, bench, dip, pull ups and chins).
I’m seeing them as assistance exercises and I need to commit to them more. I need to commit to putting the weight up every week: true linear progression with no cop outs.
My new sandbag programme
To make things interesting, I’m going to put two sandbag exercises at the end of each of my lower body workouts (because I have two sandbags and because I like the idea of a push and a pull).
Sandbag carries
I treat this as if it were an Atlas stone lift (not that I’ve ever lifted an Atlas stone before, I’m just imagining). There is quite a lot of upper back involvement to pull the weight towards you as you stand up.
This is me at the start of the lift. Once I’ve stood up, I then turn around and walk about 15ft and put it down again. I’m aiming to do this about 5 times each workout.
Sandbag loading
I first saw sandbag loading at Gym Junkies and it captured my imagination. The pressing element should be fairly obvious from the picture. Bascially, I start with the sandbag on the ground, clean it to my chest (sort of continental style) and then press it (carefully) onto the roof of the shed.
I’ll do a more detailed post on these two exercises later. I’ve also got some more thoughts on keeping myself motivated to do them.
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[...] week, I wrote about the difficulty of training outside in winter and how the weather and the long nights make finding the motivation challenging. I’ve decided to [...]