Richard Giese Bends the Red Nail
I am proud to announce that one of my coaching clients, Richard Giese, has succeeded in bending the IronMind Red Nail with IronMind Wraps and no rubber bands only.
Rick first contacted me at the beginning of last year and wanted coaching on Grip and Bending. He said he felt he had a good understanding of Grip and Bending, but he wanted some guidance to break through some plateaus. He told me his goals, sent me his list of Grip equipment (dude ricks nice collection of toys), and we scheduled our first coaching call.
We got started with a complete Grip and Bending program last February, and his progress immediately started exploding.
In less than a month, he was bending steel equivalent in size to the red nail in leather wraps here and there. Once he started dominating them, we then began the transition away from leather and towards IronMind cordura wraps, which make the feat much harder.
This journey to slaying the Red Nail did not come easy. Along the way, Rick experienced a couple of injuries. One of them, he was ripping a giant phone book with insufficient warm-up and jacked something in his forearm.
A few months later, he messed up a shoulder doing double digit repetitions in the Muscle-up.
These turned out to be significant injuries that required professional assistance in order to overcome. Some people, when they get injured, throw in the towel and they give up on their goals and dreams, but not Rick.
Rick contacted a very good chiropractor in his area and got the treatments he needed to bring his body back to 100%.
When his body needed the recovery time to battle the injuries, he deloaded, not allowing himself to get distracted by the injury but rather to give his limbs the time they needed to come back.
Rick came back stronger than before after both injuries and now he is still doing elite-level bodyweight feats like double-digit Muscle-ups, Human Flags, Dragon Flags, and now Bending Red Nails in authentic fashion, all while in his early 40’s.
It’s been my pleasure working with Rick over the course of the last year and I can’t wait to see what else he accomplishes. We just sat down for a re-alignment of goals via Skype last week, and he tells me that now he has his eyes set on the Inch Dumbbell.
I take no credit at all for Rick’s accomplishment. He is the one that fought the battles. He is the one that got stopped along the way, threw half bent Red Nails through dry wall. And he is the one that took the energy and refocused it where it needed to go, while also accomplishing some other awesome bodyweight and grip strength feats along the way.
Please feel free to leave a comment below for Rick. It’s been awesome being his coach through this journey and becoming good friends with him along the lines as well.
All the best in your training,
Jedd
P.S. Want to bend the Red Nail one day? You can start out like Rick did with my renowned ebook on nail bending, so creatively named, The Nail Bending eBook. Click the image below.

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Tags: bending, IronMind Red Nail, Red Nail, rick giese
April 6th, 2012 at 4:42 pm
CONGRATS RICK!! The first Red under official conditions is so sweet! I know you are flying high! Enjoy it. Onward and upward! Congrats.
April 7th, 2012 at 8:55 am
Thanks for posting, Andy!!!
April 7th, 2012 at 1:39 pm
Nice job, Richard! I bet that felt AMAZING! Best wishes on all your future grip feats. I’m sure you’ll nail ’em!
April 9th, 2012 at 6:39 pm
Congrats Rick on the awesome feat of strength by taking down the Red Nail…Thats one of my goals im working on, so I can appropriate what it took to get that..Best of luck on your future goals……..