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Kettlebell Farmboy strength

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Marino

Marino

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I've been researching what this type of strength is and how I might get it - I'm an office worker living in a city.

From what I can tell, farmers pick things up off the ground, lift them overhead (slowly or explosively), carry them around, hit things explosively, bear hug things and pull things. The weights typically used do not seem to be particularly heavy - in the 20kg to 50kg region - but the moves are done dozens of times a day.

The method seems to be GTG. Seems to me that the six basic KB moves plus farmer walks have most of these moves covered and if done daily with KBs in the 20 to 48kg range one would develop a similar type of all-round non-specific strength.

Anyone agree with this assessment?
 
Having a bit of farm boy experience I'm not disagreeing with you Marino. I think the thing that separates that type of strength to say a powerlifter or even possibly a well built athlete or strongman is the endurance of doing it for 8-12 hr. This type of training would allow you to chop wood for much longer than you could without it. On the other hand a lumberjack could still most likely out chop you. But could the lumberjack do a turkish get up? It's all the same but different. : )

Edit: Work capacity, that was the term I was looking for.
 
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I have a friend who is a "home farmer" with her husband. They grow/raise/hun/ all their food for the year except spices, cacao, and coffee. She never does TGU's, may never have but she does jump off cliffs on skis at high speed every winter! And yes 8-12 hours/day at least and more during harvest, planting, and birthing animals times. Maybe 5'6" and she can huck hay bales for hours no problem...
 
Back as a travelling twenty something I picked bananas. Overhead carries for 12 hours a day with bunches ranging from 20 to 40 kgs or so. Distinctly remember very painful forearms from scratches and seeping banana juices with muscle soreness. After 4 months or so, it was pretty easy! Ate a lot of bananas, unsurprisingly, to see me through. Despite this, some 30 years later, I'm still crap at overhead pressing but still eat a lot of bananas
 
I was raised on a ranch, my first "paying" job was on a farm moving sprinkler pipes and picking rock. I've been a logger, green chain puller (stacked green sawn lumber), cleaned engine blocks and many other manual labor jobs. Work on the ranch consisted of bucking hay, digging fence post holes, splitting rails and posts, cutting and chopping firewood, repairing and building fence, milking cows (want a vise like grip?), hauling buckets of water and sacks of grain and the list goes on and on.

I have found it interesting and amusing that modern training sessions attempt to duplicate this kind of work and yet miss one very important component, doing it all day long. Light to light as we used to call it.

Two very interesting stories to tell you.

When my brothers and I were early 20's we made a deal with a hold homesteader named Bud. Bud had a grandson that was a city kid, weight lifter and football player. Bud wanted his grandson to work with us so he could pay him some wages, make the strapping young lad earn it. Typically Bud hired a bunch of wrestlers, football players and weight lifters from the city to put up his hay for him and it would take the crew 4 - 6 weeks to do it. Anyone that has put up hay in the summer knows that 60 ton isn't no joke, it's a lot of work in the hot summer sun. The grandson couldn't hang with us at all, he was done within an hour and we went easy on him too. After the anchor slowing us down removed himself from the field, we put up the entire 60 ton of hay in 2 days, one weekend.

Bud was so impressed he asked us if we did firewood to, which we did. 10 cord in half a day.

Just a few short years after that I had an acquaintance that needed help, it was coming onto winter and she didn't have her firewood put up yet. The guy that had agreed to do it had sloughed it off all summer. So I did it for her, 5 cord, cut, hauled, unloaded, split and stacked in one very long brutal day. (I did cheat a little, she had a hydraulic splitter)

Now some key things here to take home. First farmers, ranchers, loggers and such work all day, 8 hours is the minimum and can easily stretch into a 16 or even 20 hour day. Second they don't try to make their work as difficult as possible, they try to make it as easy as possible. Once you repeat something hundreds of times you get a groove for it, you learn how to hit the bale of hay with your knee to get it up on the stack or swing the splitting maul just so to get maximum power without tiring yourself out in five minutes. They don't "train" to work, they just simply work and it's hours of back breaking labor, most of them are arthritic when they get old. Bad shoulders, knees, backs and the list of ailments goes on and on.

If you want to get strong like a farmer here is the short list of what you can work on.

Make sandbags in various sizes, up to 100 or even 150 pounds. When do you need the 150 pounder? When the 100 pounder feels easy, you will know you are ready. Haul them around. Over your shoulder, bear hugging, just keep going until you get tired and you will, find a new way of carrying it that doesn't hurt so bad.

Get some farmers bars, kettlebells or make a contraption that you can load with rocks. Jon Paul had such a contraption, it flat works. Carry it, as far as you can go. Half body weight in each hand is a good first goal to shoot for. Next goal is body weight in each hand. I've done 130 lbs in each and you feel like you're flying when you drop them.

Get a old tire and a sledgehammer, start off with 8 pounds. Better yet volunteer to chop firewood for friends and neighbors. Just go until the stack is done, your fitness level will determine your pace. If you use the tire and hammer method, you'll know when to quit. Just keep pushing until you can go an hour and not feel like you got beat to death by a gang of teenagers.

Grip, grip is the defining characteristic of manual labor types. Do towel hangs for time, thinner towels with a hand on each end is easier. When you can hit a minute, use a thicker towel. After that, use a thin towel and go one hand at a time holding both ends in the same hand.

What happened to me? I moved to the city and got a desk job. Now I have to bust my a#@ to get it all back .......... fun.
 
@Darren Best... +1
My old man was one of the strongest guys I've ever known. And he had a grip like a vice. (Which he also attributed to milking cows as a kid) He lived to 95. He never 'worked out' a day in his life. But he grew up living a life much as you describe. He was probably a generation or two removed. He grew up on a farm during the depression, fought in WWII, and was a heavy duty mechanic until the day he retired. There's a lot to be said for a days hard work....

Thanks for you post. It brought back some memories...
 
Marino said:
I've been researching what this type of strength is and how I might get it - I'm an office worker living in a city.

From what I can tell, farmers pick things up off the ground, lift them overhead (slowly or explosively), carry them around, hit things explosively, bear hug things and pull things. The weights typically used do not seem to be particularly heavy - in the 20kg to 50kg region - but the moves are done dozens of times a day.

The method seems to be GTG. Seems to me that the six basic KB moves plus farmer walks have most of these moves covered and if done daily with KBs in the 20 to 48kg range one would develop a similar type of all-round non-specific strength.

Anyone agree with this assessment?
Click to expand...
Yes, as far as it goes, but GTG can be difficult to implement for office workers living in a city, which is why many people like programs like S & S. While I don't question the _desire_ to be "farm boy strong," I do question the _need_ for it for most people with non-physical jobs.

That said, it's been a fun thread to read and I thank everyone for their contributions thus far.

-S-
 
I spent a summer working in France on a vinyard as a student. Generally the work wasn't too tasking, but had you on you feet in work from 6am -12 (too hot to keep going after that). Twice a week we sprayed some vines. This involved putting a pack on and walking several miles up and down the vinyard spraying sulphur onto the vines - it gave me a chemical skin peel people would pay thousands for (and my acne cleared up in about 2 weeks - not a recommended treatment!). Every couple of weeks we had to pray a different pesticide which required donning a full body suit with gasmask, one of us would carry the 50kg pack with sprayer and the other would lead up and down the vines, we'd do 2 laps - running, and then swap who carried and who ran.

The two summers prior I had helped to build a house and a school. I basically didn't work out at university for the first few years, ate crap and drank far too much. These summers of hard physical labour stopped me becoming a blob and even gave me a 6-pack (much easier at 19-21 than now I know!).

All this and my job has turned into a desk jockey in the last month....not sure why I made that decision!
 
@offwidth is spot on. I was raised on a dairy farm, third generation of dairy farmers. The men before me were the strongest, hardest working men you will ever meet. Even after the invention of the automatic milkers they still had the vise grip because there was always plenty of manual milking to do. Sun up to well after sundown. But you should see them as they aged, broken down, in rough shape, stubborn as hell so the work still gets done. Not how you want to age.

I have to share one thing my father told me before he got out of dairy farming always makes me laugh and anybody that has worked with dairy cattle will understand, but he always said "The only thing God created that was dumber than a dairy cow is the dairy farmer." He loved those cows though, they were like pets to him.
 
OneBunke said:
"The only thing God created that was dumber than a dairy cow is the dairy farmer."
Click to expand...

Horses are smarter than cows, only slightly smarter though. I've seen them do some really dumb things. Pigs on the other hand are pretty damn smart, they are liter Houdini's when it comes to getting out of pens.

One thing I want to point out and some of you know this already. Farmers and ranchers are tough, strong and heave nearly endless endurance, most of them don't even look fit enough to get around the block, let alone do manual labor all day. I learned early that there is a vast difference between looking strong and being strong. Sometimes the two coincide in the same person, but not as often as one might think.
 
Im a generation removed from the farm. My dad grew up on the farm, but he gave me lessons in our family landscaping business.

One example is we used to do tree removal during the storm season. We'd drive in with a truck a 20ft trailer and gloves. He'd start cutting and I'd start loading.

I remember the first time thinking, ok just fill the truck and trailer and we'll be done. I filled the truck and trailer. Dad time to go. He looks at me like "are you dense don't you see all the tree left on the ground." He cut branched and built side on the truck and trailer 8 feet high!

Whoa. Ok fill that and we can go. I filled it. Dad, time to go! I get that look. "Your still not getting it." He climbed up on top and started cutting down into the limbs with the chains saw. Then he told me to climb up and jump on it. The load dropped more than 1/2 way down!

Fill it up. I filled it. I knew no one was getting out alive when he handed me the chain saw and I had to climb up. It went like that. Cut between your feet. Jump and stamp it down. Fill it up. Repeat. Still the lesson didn't really sink in until the end.

We had all the limbs. Everything I could get my hand around. We'd raked up all the refuse and throw it on top. The truck and trailer was dense. Jumping didn't push anything down. It was like a trampoline that did move much and cut you. We put the tarps on the load. Still we had a couple of thick trunks that dad had cut up, and I thought "I guess welcome back for these".

One was about 3 the other about 4 feet in diameter. They were cut about shoulder width. I've been watching the old worlds strongest man lately, so the best description I can give is they were like really wide, really short barrels. And he lifted them like that rolling them up the chest the sort of push press throwing them on top of the pile! That's when I think I fully got it. Jobs done when the jobs done. Tire, hungry, equipment problems, but this, but that doesn't enter into it.

I can't say I work like that very often any more, far from it! But I've got it in my back pocket when I need it.
 
Interesting the number of hits that come back if you do a search of "repetitive use injuries among agricultural workers".

I grew up on a retired farm and in close proximity to many, the type of fitness that develops tends to be from a wide variety of tasks and varying intensity. As mentioned by Travis Dirks, a great deal of it is mental.

I also have a lot of experience doing hard bluecollar labor, notably in printing. In the shop I started out at all the paper had to be "thrown" from pallets onto special feed skids, usually 2ftx3ft cut sheet done in grabs of 20 - 30 lbs. You could take smaller but would quickly fall behind. These lifts had to be taken with the thumb and base of index finger knuckle so you could "wind" them and get them to jog up perfectly from a few inches off the floor into stacks about 5 ft tall. Doing this for 8 hours out of ten you developed great grip strength and stamina...at first.

Individuals who couldn't get promoted within a couple of years would wear out or burn out and quit or be fired - turnover and on the job injury were high in all positions on the shop floor.

As with all hard labor, there is a point of wearing down instead of building up. To hit the sweet spot with a workout variety and intensity that isn't directly linked to your paycheck or livelihood would be a difficult trick to manage.
 
Years back,I worked on a loading dock for a department store in the summers during my college years.The job entailed unloading and loading a very large truck with various items 8-10 hours/day 5 days a week.A fair number of objects were metal sheds,cast iron stoves,lawnmowers,tables,and other odd objects weighing between 200-325 pounds.Customers could purchase items where we would drag/carry/end on end the objects onto/into their vehicles.
I weighed about a buck50 then and could eat like an ox.I did no other lifting.I remember going to a friends house and was able to perform a 2x bodyweight deadlift and an easy 10-12 pullups without any practice.The WTH effect was the most profound I've experienced.
I enjoyed reading the other members experiences--thanks for sharing.
 
Lots of interesting posts here, especially the grip strength achieved by milking cows. Even though as a desk worker I can't spend all day lifting heavy stuff (not sure I'd want to, but I'd like to know that I could if necessary) I believe it is possible to develop a decent level of all around strength using those six basic KB moves in some fashion (whether S&S, ROP, Strong or similar) plus farmers carries perhaps adding in GTG at the desk with grippers and power breathing.

Thanks for all of the anecdotes.
 
Marino said:
Lots of interesting posts here, especially the grip strength achieved by milking cows. Even though as a desk worker I can't spend all day lifting heavy stuff (not sure I'd want to, but I'd like to know that I could if necessary) I believe it is possible to develop a decent level of all around strength using those six basic KB moves in some fashion (whether S&S, ROP, Strong or similar) plus farmers carries perhaps adding in GTG at the desk with grippers and power breathing.

Thanks for all of the anecdotes.
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On a side note: are there any other city folks out there feeling an empathetic twinge for the cows whose nipples help build incredible grip strength?
 
No matter what farm activity I've ever done (picking rocks, throwing bales, fixing fence, cutting/chopping wood, mutton bustin', etc.), grip goes first followed by low back. I wouldn't worry about all of the big 6. Farmer Carry, Swings, and Clean & Press daily would do it for me - 10 minutes on the minute of each (add reps/distance each week.)
 
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