Building Strong Tendons

Unlike muscle building, if you want to increase the strength in your tendons you need specific type training. Wrist curls and things of that sort will not cut it unless you have a thick bar but not too many commercial gyms have them so what do you do? Well for a weightlifter you might want to consider Training With Partials. The reason why I say this is because with partial lifts you’re hitting the body from a certain angle and the tendons actually go into play more then muscles do plus with partials you can lift heavier and heavier weight then you can with full range.

Now we all heard that building a great body means you need to build/tone muscles but nobody really talks about the tendons and if they did, most of the time the exercises to build them aren’t really good for you (trust me I’ve been there). One thing I learned from York Barbell Hall Of Famer Slim The Hammerman Farman in his DVD was that exercising the tendons are a key to developing great strength. Muscle building is great in many ways but building muscles may not be quite enough. Slim’s mentor The Mighty Atom was an avid explorer in building tendon strength and for good reason. He was and still is the World’s Strongest Little Man.

If you want to build great tendon strength, there are many ways to do them and a favorite of mine is through isometrics. Even though I love doing that I still need specific type work on them and I want to feed the energy in my hands in order to accomplish my training. When you can do that and build a solid foundation your tendons will be supple, strong and healthy all at the same time. However you do not want to do exercises that can damage your hands. There are exercises out there that do more harm then good in your hands because of the way angles are made and how many repetitions and all that crap. You want to have vital strength and vibrant health in your tendons because the more you develop it the healthier your hands will be and it can even save your life.

One such guy I know has been building his tendons since he was a little boy and now is one of the best pianists the world has ever seen. His name is Garin Bader and seeing him up-close I can tell you first hand he is one of the strongest dudes I’ve ever met. At his size of 6’ over 200 lbs. he can do 2 finger superman push-ups and that’s just an appetizer of what he can do. Because of that he has developed a system that not only works but has kept him from getting injured because some of the stunts he does are extremely dangerous and he has no safety net if he fell doing certain things. That’s where Finger Gymnastics come into play. It’s a simple system that can help you turn your tendons from jello to solid steel with a touch of flexibility. We all have suffered carpal tunnel in our lives at sometime.

Its no fun wearing those casts on your wrists and not being able to move your hands without them hurting. I’ve been there a time or 2 and I’m younger then most people who have/had it. With this system you don’t have to go through complicated exercises or do this or that to get results, the results come from working what you can and making a little fun out of it. You learn to use energy and relaxed strength to build a solid program of building the strongest tendons possible. I may look big at 242 lbs. but I don’t rely on my muscle building training to get where I want to be, I rely on my tendons and when I have built them up to a degree, my muscles will come in automagically (sorry had to go biz Markey on ya). The same can happen for you and it costs far less then a doctor’s visit. Have Garin share his story and how you can develop strong and supple wrists and lower to the degree where if you’re a martial artist, your grip will go through the roof, if you’re a musician your playing will become much greater and if you’re a strongman (like yours truly) you will be doing things far better then you ever thought before. Get yourself some powerful tendons my friend.

Strongmen Vs. Bodybuilders

One of the deceiving myths about Bodybuilding today is that they are functionally strong. Back in the day when you had guys like John Grimek, Bill Pearl, Reg Park and Steve Stanko these guys weren’t just awesome in the physique department they were also incredibly strong in quite a few areas such as heavy weight lifting, can do strength stunts and were some of the greatest hybrids of the strongman bodybuilder. Unlike today where you have guys who isolate every single muscle in the body and spend a long period of time in the gym and very few make it to the top and even fewer are in good health.

The mental aspects of these different athletes are just that they are very different but yet they have a common goal and that is to be the best at what they do. For strongmen, they’re goal is to lift the heaviest weight possible, show different bends, tearing thick phonebooks, rip license plates, hell some even lever heavy sledgehammers but yet the mental training to get to those stunts relies on what they need to break through past the governor that resides within us to stop if there is going to pain. Bodybuilders’ mental game is picturing the perfect physique, hitting those last few torturing reps and blasting their bodies to the point where their veins look to pop out.

For the most part lets face it unless you’re superhuman there isn’t a way to put on 30-40 pounds of muscle in a month without the need of some “help.” Bodybuilders today do use steroids like a lot of other athletes but for entirely different reason. I’m not saying all of them do but there are a high number of them. Unlike sports athletes, bodybuilders relied on getting bigger and more muscular other then performing on stage better. Strongmen in certain areas of strength do use steroids and again not saying all but some do. Back in the day before the 50’s and 60’s most bodybuilders relied on strength and power and a few ended up developing great musculature. Take for example John Grimek the muscle god from New Jersey who won every single bodybuilding competition he entered in but yet to him it wasn’t as important as being strong. He was one of the very few bodybuilders at the time who competed in Olympic Weightlifting and was apart of one of the greatest clubs in weightlifting and that was the York Barbell Company. Now lets take a guy like Ronnie Colman who won Mr. Olympia titles as many as Arnold Schwarzenegger and Lee Haney. He is without question one of the greats but for him it came with a price. His body was so overdeveloped you can clearly see as bright as day he can’t move his upper boy very well and his legs look like they’re set up to be injured.

This brings to my point about injuries. Injuries happen often in both areas of the strongman and the bodybuilder but who gets the most injuries? For obvious reasons, bodybuilders today rely on building as much muscle as possible but they’re neglecting the tendons which help hold the muscles together and if you build too much muscle tissue the tendons can rupture and tear. Strongmen do get injured as well but probably not as much as bodybuilders but it does happen. Unlike bodybuilders, some strongmen rely on tendon training to do some of the craziest stunts there are. Any other reason to debate these athletes is that no matter what people say about them, these guys go all out for the thing they drive on to become the best.

Bending Steel: A Documentary

Films come and go, some take your breath away, some make you cry, even some make you think. A documentary however is different. It shows real life as we know it or may not know it. Look at Pumping Iron. Yes it was considered a documentary but under certain scopes it really was a docudrama. Really a great film in of itself and showed the power and strain and drama of bodybuilding. Now how many documentaries are there for strongmen? Not too many but one film seems to want to take that obstacle and take it to another level.

This film is about the journey of one such strongman. Small in body structure but big in will power and the will to succeed. His name is Chris Shoeck and he's learning the craft of the old-time strongmen from the vaudeville era of the early 20th century at the historic American boardwalk Coney Island, NY. Along this journey you will see what this man at 5'7 155 pounds does when he bends incredibly tough steel bars and such other great feats of strength, you will find very rare Photos of one of Coney Island's Strongest men Joseph Greenstein AKA The Mighty Atom who wasn't that much smaller or bigger then Shoeck is today. You will also see very rare footage of the strongman's protege' Slim The Hammerman Farman who was recently inducted into the York Barbell Hall Of Fame.

While you will see a heartfelt and surprising journey unfold it wouldn't be possible without the help of Chris' mentor. Professional Performing Strongman Chris Rider is also in the film as well. He's a protege' of World's Strongest Man Dennis Rogers. Rider has become famous in his own right being one of the top guys in his field at a relatively short span of only a few years. He's one of the fastest rising strongmen in the world and for good reason. The man is a monster at 6'4 290 pounds of pure solid rock. He's known to bend tough horseshoes, rip decks of cards in halves, rip license plates in quarters and bend wrenches unbraced (not using the lower body as leverage).

As you will see in the film which is set to be out as of summer 2012, Rider helps Shoeck learn the ropes of the audience, bend certain things within periods of time and also see Rider at his best as he bend and tears whats infront of him. This film is one that needs exposure because the Old-time Strongman are starting to fade if it hasn't already and this film is helping bring back what was the glory days of the Strongmen of that era. With Shoeck on his way to performing, does he have a bit of the Atom in him? Will he perform unlike other times he has before? We shall see and if you take a look at the trailer http://www.bendingsteelmovie.com/ you will get a peice of the journey but will you find the destination once you see it?

I'm proud to get to help get this film going. While the crew is finishing up, me and Chris Rider will be helping spread the word of this film and I hope YOU will as well. Nothing in the Iron Game is more sacred then being apart of some of the strongest people on the planet and nothing is more sacred in this business then to help restore what is now a memory in the eyes of those came before us. Join me and Chris to bring this film to life nationwide and around the world.