T Nation

Farmer's walk

#1

I've been doing this upper body workout twice a week:

Rows 5X5

Dips 5X5

A handful of sets of hand / wrist / grip / forearm exercises: mostly finger pushups against a wall, finger extensor pushups assisted with legs, wrist curls, reverse wrist curls.

As a finisher, I do a farmer's walk.

Goals are strength and mass, and to bring up my hand/wrist strength and endurance, which is a weak spot. I've basically been doing whatever extra hand/wrist work I feel like at the end of the workout, without a set-in-stone plan, but I have been pleased with the results thus far.

My question: How long/far/heavy should I be going? Last time, I took the dumbbells out of the free weight room, for a loop around a 200 meter track, and then back into the room, which took 3 minutes. Is this good, or should I be using a weight I can only carry for 1 minute, or 40-80 seconds, or 75 meters, or some other magic figure?

#2

What's the goal here? Just to develop grip strength?

For our grip strenth, we work on deadlift holds; three 30-second sets after a deadlift session or leg session. Next time, we're increasing the weight and holding for decreased amounts of time each set.

Think of it this way: Farmer walk events in a typical strongman contest don't last longer than 1-minute. It's a combination of grip and foot speed. We're trying to go at a pretty good clip while carrying that weight.

In a strongman training session, we perform our Farmer walks for a distance of 140-feet (one turn, 70-feet each way).

#3

Heh. Excuse my ignorange: just read your goals. :wink:

BTW: we train in Farmer walks like we would in any other exercise: we work in "sets" - and work up to a MAX weight.