If you’ve been following the Stoltman brothers after seeing Tom’s inspiring World’s Strongest Man win this year, you’ll know they’ve been in an off-season recently. Lower calories, more reps at lower weights (although still pretty damn heavy) and focusing on healing any little injuries they’ve developed.
But the world’s strongest brothers began their strongman events training again last week, and they started by focusing on the axle press movement. Here’s how they got on and exactly how the guys are approaching training this time around as Tom is going for “back-to-back champion”.
Stretch & Warm-up
They kicked off with a stretch and a few light exercises with a resistance band to get things moving — much needed for Luke who has suffered shoulder pain for a while.
“Nothing too heavy but it’s a start. We’re starting at 110 kilo axle clean and press and we’re going to increase that every week as we go along. Just trying to cover all bases with the press and with World’s in May/June time, we’ve got quite a long time to prep for it. Cover everything, do everything and be everything.”Once their joints were loosened up and ready to go, the lads started with some warmup sets of the clean and press. And their warmup weights are 70kg and 100kg. Whew. We’re getting sweaty just watching.
Next it was onto working sets of 110kg. Three sets, five reps each, and they smashed it. At least it seemed like it when Tom finished a set describing it as “spicy. Hot sauce.”
Pinch Grip & Hold
Next up was a pinch grip and hold. Which if you’re not familiar, is pretty much what it sounds like — pinch the plates with your thumb and forefinger and hold them in the farmers walk position for as long as you can. For the Stoltman’s it’s 25kg in each hand.
“That’s a really good one for your forearms, gets them pumped like nothing else. Or maybe it’s just the tattoos I don’t know.”
Conditioning
After feeling the burn in their forearms, it was time for conditioning.
“We’re gonna do some conditioning so sandbag pickups and then we’re gonna do some sets with the slam balls as well to mimic the atlas stones. We can’t do the atlas stones at the moment because of the inkwork we got done by our good friend Gordon.”Conditioning for the Strongmen started with chucking a sandbag over a barbell set at just above waist height which proved incredibly challenging.
Then finally, it was time to train for the Atlas Stone event. As Luke explained, the guys can’t do the real Atlas Stones at the moment thanks to their new tattoos. Instead, they decided to do one armed pick-ups with 30kg slam-balls.
“We’re gonna try and pick up the slam balls with one arm, and put them over our shoulder and slam them down. We’ve got a 30kg one first, see if we can do it, and this will be a little challenge for you guys too.”And it definitely was challenging. But the guys smashed it as usual, even if it did come with some difficulty at first... If you managed to have a go at this one, we’re more than impressed.
Take home message
“It’s always good to have a bit of fun in training, so yeah, nice and fun, now we get to chill out for the rest of the night, chill out for the weekend, and Monday is when it all starts properly, prep for 2022.”Kicking off with a bit more of a fun session is a great way to start the guys’ prep for World’s Strongest Man next year. But the serious stuff starts from Monday. And we can’t wait to see what the world’s strongest brothers do in 2022.
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