This past weekend I stepped out of my comfort zone and entered a Deadlifts and Donuts competition at a local strongman gym and won my event.
I’d been looking into Strongman training as this event showed up in my Instagram feed. This is typical of something you’ll see in Strongman, some sort of deadlift for reps event is quite common.
A big part of Strongman is awkwardly shaped (to hold/lift) objects, and the difficulty to prepare exactly for an event. Also I wouldn’t know exactly how to train for something like this (whether to use the competition weight and build reps and peak or use a percentage and work volume). So with that in mind I decided to not train specifically for this event. Leading up to it I carried on with my normal peaking program and rested the last 3 days leading up to the event to have a small taper.
There were two events;
- max deadlifts with 2x bodyweight
- 10 rep max with the heaviest weight.
The rules were; no straps, no hitching, no bounce reps, and no resting. It had to be max reps in one go.
You could do just one event or both. I entered the max reps with 2x bodyweight. I weighed in at 75kg / 166lb and managed 18 reps with 150kg / 331lb.
I am chuffed. I wasn’t expecting to get so many reps. At the end I felt quite faint. I only noticed after that it was a minute long.
In training the most reps that I did was 4 sets of 7 and 5 sets of 5. But I wanted that challenge that comes with Strongman of rarely being perfectly prepared and to find out what I could do with little direct training for the event.
I’ve been doing the 16 week peaking program CBB-16-2 (you can read my review of it here).
I wouldn’t normally do something like this until the end of the program but made an exception.
People were supportive of each other’s attempts.
It was really inspirational seeing how explosively the other guys were moving 200kg.
It was a fun day and an awesome experience. Unlike the long powerlifting meets It was all done before mid-day. A great way to start off the Saturday with gold sparkly donuts and deadlift for max reps.