One of the things we love doing at Diesel Crew is feats of strength, especially feats of grip strength. Tearing phone books, bending steel and ripping decks of cards is our Friday night.

Today, I would like to highlight one of the beast feat of strength performers that are out there today,  Adam Glass.

A great steel bender and kettlebell practitioner, he has helped me out in many ways with my strength training.  But also, Adam is an experienced veteran who has fought to protect our country – and for that I am most thankful to him.

So here is my salute to him.

Tell us about how you got into serious strength training?

Serious strength training started after reading Dinosaur training in high school. I knew I was missing something with my program at the time. Dinosaur training really elevated my concept of what is strength, what is fitness, and how does one get it. From there the turning point was reading and applying Pavel’s “Naked Warrior” and “Power to the People” which are easily two of the best strength books written in the last 20 years. In 2005, I found myself on the Diesel Crew website and I can say without hesitation- You and Smitty have a tremendous impact on my training. In 2009, you see a lot of people training in a similar way, and many of them are modeled very close to the Diesel Method. For many years you guys were the only ones telling people to hit more patterns, train with more implements and work the grip.

Many of the DieselCrew.com readers train for Grip strength. Do you have any Grip goals? Ever consider entering a contest?

For me, grip training is a core competency of my training routine. I have a wide range of goals within the realm of grip I am working towards such as pinching 45’s with either hand, two hands pinching 250lbs, finger lifting 500lbs with my middle finger and finger lifting 300lbs with my pinkie. I am close to each of these goals and it is only a matter of time.

What is the feat you are most proud of?

As a performing strongman, I do a variety of strongman feats of strength ranging from tearing cards and thick phone books, bending horseshoes, nails, long and short bars, breaking wrenches and pieces of chain, driving nails through boards, finger lifting, bent pressing, some Kettlebell feats and some impact/pain tolerance feats.

Things I am particularly happy with- I have been told by many people I am one of the best card tearers in the world as I am able to tear and quarter tough quality decks in literally 3-5 seconds, I am very strong in all styles of steel bending (3/8X7” CRS Double overhand, 5/16X6.5” Hex bar Double under, 5/16X6.25” reverse, grade 5 heslep style, Grade 8 Slim style, 60Ds barehanded) and I am happy with my progress this year with my pinch.

You train with a lot of Kettlebells. How often do you incorporate kettlebell training with your athletes?

Everyone I train, from youths, to people who seek fat loss, people who want to increase muscle mass, to elderly people who want to increase mobility uses kettlebells in their program. I believe the kettlebell is a superior tool for fitness and there are benefits for all who apply. The drills I include for every person is the goblet squat, Turkish get ups and swing. These drills can be scaled to every person’s fitness and mobility levels to produce a positive training effect.

What is missing in peoples training these days? What do you believe is the missing component in modern programming?

My primary observation is people want to move to advanced drills and techniques before ever establishing a solid baseline of strength, mobility, and stability in their primary movements. If its powerlifting, we see people doing a full blown WSB split before they ever reach a X2 BW squat and DL, before they even break a 1.5BW BP. In Kettlebells we see people who want to juggle and pull off the crazy lifts like double snatches and long cycle clean and jerk before they ever grasp the swing. I meet people who want to get in to grip and they are doing 10 different patterns before they ever get a single grip function strong.

If we look at the difference between a good athlete and a great one, we always see the great athlete has strong foundations with the basics of the sport, and they seek to improve their fundamental drills and weakness. If everyone trained this way we would see higher performance across the board.

What is your best overhead press?

My best barbell press has been 275@215lbs BW, best jerk was 300@200, best single arm press is 132lbs@210lbs, bottoms up pressing the 48kg (106lbs) kettlebell @ 212lbs BW. I press most often with kettlebells as barbell presses tend to aggravate a vertebra injury I suffered in 2002.

What other types of fitness training, besides weights, do you do? Running, jump rope, speed bag, etc.

Other methods of fitness training I enjoy are tire flipping, sledge hammer drills (beating the crap out of a tire is just plain fun) club swinging, body weight drills such as burpees and sprawl drills, and shot-put juggling.

Do you supplement with protein? When do you take your shakes?

I work on a carb rotation of 2/1 meaning I have two days with no carbs and on the third day I introduce carbs. I usually have a protein shake as soon as I wake up, one in the mid-day and one before bed. I use a single scope of protein which is usually 24g of protein. I am not a fan of overloading protein or very high protein as I have not seen a single advantage of such diet habits.

Tell us about your website

I started my blog, AdamTGlass.Blogspot.com to document my training. I wanted something I could use to look back and reflect upon to spot trends and record Highs and Lows. As time went on, I used it to push articles, training ideas I had, and show results of different experiments. My number of page views has gone up every single month for 2 years now and I see a wide range of visitors from all backgrounds. Many people contact me on a monthly basis and tell me they find the work inspiring, so I continue to post different things to show people that you can push yourself harder, and go farther. I maintain a list of other sites I endorse as well as some key products I want people to know about such as the Diesel Crew Nail Bending Ebook, the Card Tearing Ebook, Escalating Density training, and Combat Core. These represent in my opinion some of the best training resources on the web and I want people to know I think they are great for their progress.

Any products? Tell us about them.

This Fall I will launch a new site which is collaboration between a team of very strong coaches, who will be named upon release. We will cover a lot of material which is not available anywhere else. Readers will recognize the team immediately and you can count on it that we will push the very best information on the internet for strength, mobility, programming and injury prevention/pain reduction. The site will be a pay to enter subscription and we will make the price affordable for all trainees.

For readers located in the Northern United States there will be several all day workshops this Fall and Winter with Brad Nelson and Myself, a return to our Grip N’ Rip Workshop which yielded tremendous gains to all who attended in January 2009. For anyone in North Dakota, my gym Unbreakable Fitness features daily Ass kicking and monthly workshops.

So there you have it, my friends.  Adam Glass is a very smart and strong strength specialist and i am proud to call him a good friend!

If you have a question for Adam, leave a comment below!

Thanks,

-Jedd-

P.S.  Perform Kettlebell feats of strength like Adam does – check out our Advanced Kettlebell Training Techniques eBooks.  Click here ===>  Kettlebell Feats and Advanced Training Techniques

Articles You Might Also Like:

• Diesel Interview with Dan Cenidoza of Be-More Training
• Intro to Nail Bending
• Grip Training Using Kettlebells
• Home Made Strength II – Grip Strength Edition
• Quick Kettlebell / Bodyweight Workout – Part II

Tags: feats of strength, grip strength, grip training, grip workouts, hammer levering, hand strength, old time strongman, strongman, wrist strength

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 1st, 2009 at 12:59 am and is filed under feats of strength bending, how to improve grip strength, how to tear cards, old strongman feats of strength. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.