Inch Dumbbell Overhead (Photo by Joe Mugovero)

One of my main body strength goals for 2012 was improving my Overhead Pressing ability, so I really began to look at all the contributing factors to a big press. Things like a strong core, lockout strength and speed off the shoulders were some of the things I looked at most heavily, because when I was doing strongman training, those were the things I focused on most often for building the press.

However, one of the things I did not take a real close look at, at first, was my flexibility and mobility in my shoulders and torso. To my surprise, working stretching into the routine has proven to be the absolute biggest factor in my increase in pressing strength recently.

It’s kind of ironic that including the simple practice of stretching would have such a big effect. I remember watching Lee Haney videos on ESPN when I was a teenager, so it’s not like this is the first time I ever heard of the concept.

My absolute neglect for stretching and any kind of range of motion or mobility maintenance came when I started studying NSCA materials. The literature stated that if you performed exercises with a full range of motion, then there would be no worry for loss of it.

More recently, several proponents of Biofeedback/Gym Movement have even spoken of their lack of use of stretching and mobility work in their routines.

Well, here is the problem with all those organizations and belief systems, from Lee Haney, to the NSCA, to GM: they are only referring to lifting and NOT what is going on the other 22 hours in the day.

For me, and maybe some of you reading this, the most important factor for my flexibility and range of motion status (aside from sheer genetics), I feel, is my positioning during those 22 hours.

The amount of time I am in a seated position, whether it is working, driving, or just lounging around is staggering. Sometimes, it seems as though if I am not walking to or from my car, or if I am not training, then I am sitting on my ass, and getting more and more locked up.

In relationship to my pressing numbers, I posted a few weeks back how I was able to make incredible jumps in pressing strength with some stretching and soft tissue work prior to and during my pressing workout. That post is here: What’s Working Now – Improving Overhead Press.

Now, although the improvements I saw in that workout were impressive as far as the actual weight jumps from one workout to the next, the numbers were still not where I would want them because in the past I have been capable of much more.

So, I began going back through some old video clips of myself pressing, and one thing I noticed was that several years ago I looked much more fluid. These days in my videos, I walk like Frankenstein, as if my spine is fused and when I press, I have almost zero lean in the thoracic region of my back at all. In the past, my thoracic mobility was far greater and a real strength of mine, so I knew I had to do something to get back there. Once I began incorporating drills right into my workout, I began instantly seeing some good results, thus the post I mentioned above.

And once I started seeing progress, I began trying out even more movements to see what would work the best. I’ve come up with three movements that I have gotten continued good results from and I want to share them with you so you can try them.

Pipe Roll Thoracic Arch

Squat Cage Doorway Stretch

Squat Cage Shoulder Point

These three movements have proven to have the biggest benefit for me in my training, of the dozens I have tried. If you think you are lacking in the mobility department for your thoracic spine, or if you think your shoulders are inhibited in some other way, then you should give these a try.

If these drills don’t seem to do anything for you, then I encourage you to do some experimenting. We are all different and have different limitations, so in turn we will all need to do different things in order to address those limitations.

Results From 8 Weeks of Concentrated Mid Workout Stretching

Barbell Military Press – Recent PR

In recent memory, in the Barbell Press out of a cage, my best has been 215. I have gotten that number so many times I have lost count. That really irritates me, because it is about 40 lbs under my best strict press on a barbell.

Without stretching or soft tissue work, I was topping out at 215 whether I did overhead press first or if I did Bench Press first. And that little factoid irritates me because you would think that after benching the triceps would be too tired to match my best PR, but it has seemed to have no effect whatsoever.

So, here is a recent video of some new high water marks for the Barbell Press out of the cage.

Barbell Military Press – Old Working Set

I am not sure if you can tell in the video clips, but I am able to get a bit more extension in my thoracic spine in the new PR video (I could certainly feel the difference that day). In the working sets video from a few months back, I don’t get anything at all. The benefit to getting this fluidity in the thoracic portion of the spine is that each repetition feels better, and feel less like I have two baseball bats running from my shoulders to my glutes, restricting me. Being able to bend ever so slightly back near the shoulder area lets me press much easier.

Take note, I am not talking about bending the lumbar spine like a 1950′s Olympic Press, as shown above. That is something that you should try to avoid. I played Russian Roulette with that too often back in the day and have no desire to go back to it. What I am looking to improve is my thoracic spine, the mid to upper torso (shown below)

Dumbbell Military Press PR

My numbers in this had been so bad, that I was pretty much stuck at 50′s. Then with time working on my ROM and soft tissue, I was gradually able to work up to 70′s and now 85′s is becoming my new standard. Below, I hit a set of 6 with 85′s, a set which felt so easy up until the last set, it is hard to put it into words.

In the video above, I think it is a bit easier to see the extension I am getting in the thoracic spine. This video was shot two pressing workouts after the Barbell Press workout where I pressed 235.

To sum things up, although my upper back/torso issues are not so bad that I walk around with like Quasimodo or have scapular winging, I still have issues with tightness in the shoulders and lack of thoracic mobility. Like an addict with a gambling problem, it took my a long time to admit to having these issues, but now that I have owned up to them and begun addressing them, as well as seeing the results, I feel I will be able to continue to improve.

Look for more updates coming down the pike on this. Until then all the best in your training.

Jedd

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Richard Sorin, Pinching Two York 45′s

Plate Pinching is one of the main forms of testing Pinch Grip Strength. Plate Pinching involves placing two or more plates together so that the outside plates are facing smooth-sides-out, and then lifting them in a Pinch Grip.

I’ve always wanted to be able to Pinch Two 45-lb York Plates. I’ve pinched several sets of 45-lb plates over the years, but pinching two old-school York 45′s is a feat altogether different.

I only know of two Grip Monsters who have ever pinched two old-style York 45-lb plates with one. One is Richard Sorin, shown to the right. I can only imagine how many times he had to pull the feat off so the camera man could get the shot right.

Richard Sorin is probably the only man with a great enough love for strength exploration and pushing ones own limits to even try this feat. If you’ll remember, he is also the originator of the feat of strength and definitive test of open hand strength, pinch grip lifting the Blob, which is a half of a 100-lb Old School York Dumbbell. I have tons of information on that feat of strength here on the site as well if you are a newcomer: What is the Blob?

Aside from Richard, I only know of Chad Woodall as someone who has accomplished this feat.

Slide this video to the 3:00 minute mark and watch Chad stomp a mud hole in two York 45′s:

I watched him do that again at the Sorinex Summer Strong 2011, and almost got it with a pair in each hand on one attempt. He would have been the first person any of us know of to have accomplished that feat, and he was seriously close that day:

So the way I figure it, it is time for someone else to accomplish this feat, so I have put aside all of my other personal grip feat goals and am going to be focusing on this one.

To me, this is a good goal to focus on for many reasons:

1. It is a Pinching Goal, so it will support my other goals within Grip Sport, including the Euro Two Hands Pinch, Grip Medley Demands, etc

2. It is a lofty goal, meaning I feel I am nowhere close to it right now, so it will force me to think, work, and try new things, i.e. Further Challenge My Paradigms.

3. It is Wide Pinch and Open Hand Dependent, which means it involves the same qualities as Block Weight Training, and the same benefits for general hand strength as well.

The long and the short of it is that this feat is world class and I want to do it. Grip Feats are cool, especially when almost no one else in the world can do them.

So, in order to keep myself going on this, I wanted to involve someone else. Daniel Reinard, one of the most impressive newcomers to Grip Sport in the last 5 years in my estimation, is a superstar when it comes to accomplishing feats. For his bodyweight, he just may have the best all-around Pinching ability in the world, so I did what anyone else would have done in my position.

I called him out…politely of course, after all I am a Pennsylvania Gentleman.

Aside from knowing that I want to Pinch Two 45′s so bad I can taste the rust on the old ass plates, I also know that Daniel has his eyes set on pinching two 45′s as well, so I reached out to him to see if he would be interested in an on-line challenge. His goal would be to Pinch Two Regular 45′s – mine would be to Pinch Two Old School York 45′s.

Daniel has accepted, so I went ahead and made this video to show where I am at with this challenge.

As you can see, these Two OSY (Old School York) 45′s barely even stir when I hit them, so this is sure to be an interesting ride. These are so hard to lift because they are very wide and their edges are rounded so any tilting, which would generally make pinching two 45′s easier, makes OSY 45′s slide apart.

Incidentally, in the video above, I have a small section of pipe running through the plates, to keep them from sliding around. I will focus on lifting them like this first, and then graduate to a completely loose pinch of them.

Wish me luck and make sure to subscribe to my channel to see how the training goes.

All the best in your training,

Jedd

IronMind Axle Axle Deadlift

The IronMind Axle is the thick bar implement sold by IronMind Enterprises. It is just under 2-inches in diameter. The Deadlift on the IronMind Axle was an event in contests quite frequently up until 2011.

Past Training History with the Axle

My memory is a bit foggy as to the Exact years but I am going to try to pin them down. I believe it was 2008 when I set my all-time high-water mark in the Axle Deadlift with (I think) 396-lbs. So close to 400-lbs, yet so far away, and I just kept drifting further from that point. In 2009, I lifted 394 at the beginning of the year and then at the end of the year could only manage the high 380′s.

I was slowly but surely getting worse and worse at this lift for no good reason whatsoever.

As I mentioned, the lift took a back-seat to other events through much of 2010 and 2011, at least in the contests I attended.

Then, out of nowhere, something crazy happened. I lifted 408-lbs on the IronMind Axle, and uploaded the video last week.

IronMind Axle 408-lbs

As you can see, the weight shot up off the ground and got past my knees and once I felt that, I knew it was all over. Knee height is usually like my point-of-no-return, in that if I can get it to my knees, I can usually finish the repetition.

A lot of people over the years have watched me struggle with thick bar lifting in contests, despite my large hands, so when they saw me accomplish this mark, many asked me what I changed in order to be able to accomplish this.

Progress on the Axle

Here are some of the things I have been doing to which I credit my Axle Deadlift progress.

Thick Bar Training Frequency

With my selection for the Mighty Mitts competition at the Arnold Classic this year, I knew I would have to face the incredible Sorinex Monster Bar, which is a 500-lb Axle with globe-like heads. Due to my lower back injuries, I have not done a great deal of deadlifts from the floor in the last 6 months, so i knew I had to start doing some more.

I chose to work with the sumo deadlift style because I find although I can lift less weight this way, it seems to be better for my back. I also chose it for its shorter lift stroke and its emphasis on the hips, which I am weak on.

I am also continuing my steadfast work on the Inch Dumbbell. My progress in that has been continuous, although never fast enough for my liking. Regardless, my confidence is growing as I continue to work hard on it.

The Big Change

Many of you are aware that I hold a record in the Two Hands Pinch in Grip Sport. You also know that I chased that damn record for nearly 5 years before finally attaining it. In order to get it, I had to change my way of thinking and the way I trained for it…

Looking back on my historical thick bar training, especially my Axle training, there was a common recurring thread: load on the weight, do a single, load on more weight, do a single, add more weight and fail and keep on trying for a single, all the while failing in the upper weights.

Probably no less than 50 times over the last 5 years I have followed that same pattern where all I did was add a few pounds to the Axle per attempt, do a single and then add some more and try another single. While on one hand, you could probably count the number of times in the lat 5 years that I worked lower intensities for more reps and different tempos.

Insanity, as they say, is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. So why should I continue doing the same stuff I had always done and all of a sudden expect my numbers to go up? I decided I would no longer work any singles. All my work sets would be done with the objective of hitting triples and my PR’s would be based around them, ONLY.

I started this new approach to the Axle on 12/31/11 and by the first week in February, I had already broken the 400-lb barrier.

This of course, is not all I have been doing.

Specialized Thick Bar Auxiliary Work

I knew that if I wanted to see progress in my Thick Bar Training, that I needed to mold it to look more like what I was doing for Two Hands Pinch. With that, I chose some auxiliary thick bar work that would mimic the auxiliary work that I have done routinely for the last couple of years in my Two Hands Pinch training.

Now, as much as I would love to put this all down here on this site, I am not going to. In order to see what all I have been doing, to get this recent explosion in thick bar strength, you need to join me at my Grip Training Instructional site, TheGripAuthority.com.

The entry that I am working on there at the TGA site involves exactly what I have been doing. I filmed an entire workout – plus I show you exactly how to set up everything. Here is what is included:

• Axle Work Sets: You will see every work set that I do, as I nearly set yet another PR! Plus I explain exactly why I choose the loading that I do, technique, and tracking too.
• Auxiliary Lift 1: In this portion, I show a slight modification I use on the axle, modifying the lift slightly to make it more difficult
• Auxiliary Lift 2: This is a pre-exhaustion technique I have been using to strengthen the thumb in order to reinforce the open hand position of the axle deadlift.
• Auxiliary Lift 3: I show an awesome piece of home made grip equipment that goes further in strengthening the hand specifically for thick bar lifts such as the axle and the Inch Dumbbell.

This has all worked very well for me, and I can’t wait to get it out there for my TGA subscribers to see how it works for them as well.

I’d love to work with you too. I’ve worked with lots of people over the years and I strive to help them all with their particular goals. Join TGA today for just $7 and you can see for yourself.

See you at TGA.

Jedd

This is a video I shot as part of an article for my buddy, Murph, recently on what to do with lighter grippers you might have laying around, especially if you have family members like I do, that don’t quite understand what it is you do in your Grip Training.

Check it out.

Taking requests for upcoming videos – anybody got anything they want to see?

Thanks,

Jedd

I would be doing you all a disservice by not posting this video.

Prepare to be blown away by the most amazing Euro Pinch Set-up ever designed, owned by the Texas White Boy Rapper, Paul “Up All Night” Knight and Certified Red Nail Bender and Horseshoe Bending Pioneer, Eric “The Pointed Goatee” Milfeld.

Now, if you are clueless as to what the heck is going on with this video, let me point a few things out.

In Grip, everything is weighed to precise measurements in order to calculate exactly how much is being weighed. So, we don’t just count 4-25′s as 100-lbs. In reality, each plate is most likely off by a few ounces, so we either take our plates to a post office or we calibrate a scale we own against another calibrated scale and we identify the exact weight of each plate.

For instance, if you saw all of my plates that are used in competitions here, you will see that each one of them has a number on it and it has the weight in pounds and ounces. So, a certain 25-lb plate might be marked with the number 17 and have 24 – 14.4 on it. That means that this specific plate was identified as being weight number 17 and it weighs 24-lbs, 14.4-oz. I then log that into an Excel spreadsheet and am able to calculate exactly how much weight is being lifted on each attempt.

What Eric Milfeld and Paul Knight have done is they have modified the internal rubber inserts so that the base apparatus weighs exactly 38 kilos, so they are starting with a nice round number each time. If you are doing everything on paper, which some do, this can make it a lot easier to count everything up. Normally adding things up on paper is a giant pain in the ass, but Eric and Paul have also gone to the expense of purchasing calibrated lifting plates, so they are dealing with a series of nice round numbers, instead of having to add up 2 to 4 decimal places on a sheet of paper – AWESOME!

Why a fiberglass cross-bar you might ask? In the past everything from rulers to elastic cord to steel bars have been used for the corss-bar or stick. Each material has it’s own benefits and risks. For instance, we used a long metal ruler one year for our stick. Everything was awesome until John Mannino missed an attempt and got fired up about it and pushed down on the metal ruler and bent it.

In 2008, I traveled 8 hours to compete in a Grip Contest and had the World Record weighton the apparatus. Thee “stick” cross-bar being used was made of either steel or possible lead or some other extremely heavy material. Also, Dave “The Genius” Memont failed to secure the front loading collar like a man. He must have hands like a bitch, because he did not compete in the contest. You are only a cool promoter if you promote and lift in the contest. The result of the loose front collar and the ultra-heavy cross-bar was that the weights ended up falling off on my World Record attempt and my lift was disqualified.

By using the fiberlass cross-bar, Mannino can press down on it as hard as he wants to and it appears it will retain its natural shape. Also, it looks to be so light that it will not interfere in the pull-to-height or angle of the loading pipe.

Many other things are intriguing about the Texas Fella’s Euro Set-up. They are using a solid steel loading bar. It will be interesting to see how numbers are affected by using an implement with such a heavy loading bar. Will it make tilting easier or more difficult? Will the length play a factor? Will plates loaded on the bar take up so much acreage that only a nub of it will be jutting out from the plates? It will be interesting to see, as well, how the size of the plates being used affect tilt as well.

In the end, without a doubt this is definitely the most Pimped out Euro-Pinch in existence. Paul and Eric truly love the sport to invest that much money into it. Eleiko calibrated plates are not cheap, no matter where you buy them, and the rest of the set-up right down to the collars and the bull-nose shaping of the stainless steel loading bar were all appreciable expenses tambien.

My hat is off to these two for being a good example of taking pride in the sport of Grip, as well as showmanship and playing to the power of social media by cutting up a classic like this for all to see and share.

I do think Paul’s little raps could have been better if done with a fat lip of Copenhagen, and with Eric Milfeld scratching a record or doing beat-box off to the side, perhaps next to the fern int he garage.

All the best in your training and Happy New Year to you!

Jedd