Had a great workout last night - nothing major as far as new accomplishments were concerned, but I did a lot of blockweight work, a lot of wrist work (wrist curls, hammer curls and I did manage three strict reps on each hand with a twenty-five pound plate in the plate curl) some light finger lift work and a good set of twenty rep squats.

I plan on training the finger lift regularly until I can pull in the neighborhood of 250lbs - below is a video of my first hard workout on the finger lift apparatus that I threw together after I had seen professional strongman Adam Glass (link to the right) perform the lift in a video on his site. The contraption probably needs to be honed a bit to be perfect, but it will certainly work for my training purposes at the moment...

Hand Grippers

This is a big part of the talks over a the Gripboard (link to the right) and a great test of grip strength - it also happens to be something that I'm very interested in performing well in but unfortunately the gains with hand grippers haven't come as quickly for me as they have in other areas.

Here's a video of me closing an HG300 hand gripper that has been chokered down to parallel - heavy grips aren't the top of the food chain among the world of hand grippers, but this represents my best close to date...

Intro to Bending

Bending nails, bolts and other forms of steel in both the braced (with help from another part of your body, like the leg to lean on) and unbraced (making no contact with the steel with anything other than your hands) has been a strongman feat that has been impressing onlookers for hundreds of years. My personal journey into bending just began recently, but within the short period I feel that I'm showing good progression.

Here is a video of me bending two 1/4 X 6 grade 2 bolts at the same time...



Grade 2 are the weakest of the graded bolts, but bending two together coumpounds the strength required to perform it, turning it into a reasonably difficult feat - I'm currently awaiting arrival of some bending stock from Fat Bastard Barbell Co (link to the right) consisting of some much more difficult bolts (grade 5) as well as a few horseshoes to work on.

First Major Feat of Strength

I'm currently working on more "feats of strength" that I can probably count, and I have been for a while - I'm close to my short term goals on many of them but all that's been happening with grippers, blockweights/blobs, one hand pinching and two hand pinching have been close calls - until last week. On February 16th I hit what's considered a decent accomplishment among the strength world - a tear of a full deck of cards with Jokers included...