Man what an awesome time last week, DIESELS.

As you know, on Thursday, I help the Basics of Grip and Strongmanism seminar.

Here’s a pic, with Dr. Jim Wagner on the left, me, and Chris Fritz on the right.

I got this message posted on my wall on Facebook, after the event:

“I got to spend the day at a seminar with the grip legend himself,
Jedd Johnson. I learned more in 5 hours than I did in the last
five years. It was an awesome day and Jedd is one of the nicest
guys you could meet! I’ll be seeing you again Brother, hopefully
at the next contest!”
Chris Fritz

Here’s how the day’s content rolled out:

9:00AM Start, meet and greet

Warm-up
General to specific
– General Full Body: Mobility / Activation / Light Stretching
– Move to Weights
– Move to Specific
Magic Formula for Success

Grippers
Technique
– Placement
– Gripper Angle
– Wrist Angle
– Tension
– Set to Close
– Skin Stretch
– Hit
– Thumb Strike
– Roll the Dice
High Impact Drills
Other Considerations

Pinching
Technique
Chalking Considerations
Plate Pinching
Block Weights
Odd Objects
Euro Pinch
High Impact Drills

Thick Bar and other Open Hand Training
What is Open Hand Training? Is Thick Bar “Support Grip”
Support Specificity
Technique
High Impact Drills

Intro to Feats
Tension
Beginner Conditioning

Card Tearing

Steel Bending

Programming
Individual Based
Setting up YOUR Program
Formulating Workouts – Think Energy Economy
Specificity of Grip Training

Injury Prevention & Recovery Methods

2:00 / 2:30PM Close

Man, I’ll tell you what, I absolutely love talking GRIP with people.

As an added bonus, before we called it a day, Dr. Jim Wagner got out his Hawk Grips, a special set of soft tissue massaging devices, and worked on us a little bit.

We got EVERYTHING on film, and I’ve already begun editing the footage, and will be making it available on DVD.

If you want to be the first to add this information to your library, add your information to the box below:

It will be ready as absolutely fast as I can get through all 5 hours!

In the meantime, Make it a Great Week.

All the best in your training.

Jedd

P.S. Sign up for notification as soon as this seminar becomes available.

On August 24, 2014, I did a Strongman Show as part of the Mason’s Hope SuperHero 5K, a fundraiser for Mason Barto, a little boy with CDG (Congenital Disorders of Glycosylation).

Here is a short news video that talks about Mason’s story.

It was my pleasure to be a part of such an awesome cause. I was hoping to have Mason stand on my chest while I performed the Bend of Nails, but in the days leading up to the event Mason was visiting more specialists and ended up having to stay there longer than planned.

I look forward to meeting you, buddy!

On top of the great cause, I was particularly excited about being able to put on this show, because my parents, my grandmother, my wife and my daughter were all there. You see, I rarely do a local show – most of my stuff takes place in other states, so none of them have ever watched me perform live.

Below is the show I put together.

Watch each feat separately:

Frying Pan
Horseshoe
Cards
Phone Book
Kid Lift
Anvil and Blob
Bed of Nails
Wrench Bend
Hammer Bend
Hot Water Bottle

If you’ve ever wanted to do feats of strength like bending a wrench, a horseshoe, a hammer, or rolling a frying pan, this DVD can show you how to do it.

Braced Bending DVD

Make it a Great Day!

Jedd

P.S. During the show, I pulled off a feat I have never been able to complete, if memory serves. I lifted a 55-lb anvil by the tail and then picked up a 50-lb Blob and curled it. It was quite a rush to do it during the show, although most of the audience probably had no idea how hard it was, ha ha ha.

If you are working on Lifting the Blob, here is the best resource for you:

When Will You Die: Host, Jake Porway and Jedd after doing some Frying Pan work

Set your DVR’s and VCR’s to record Nat Geo at 10 PM tomorrow night – Monday April 22.

That’s right, I am asking you to tear yourself away from the final hour of Monday Night Raw tomorrow night.

Maybe you’re wondering why…

Many of you remember from last September the Top Secret Grip Trip that I took to California.

This show is what that trip (and my second trip in December) were both for.

The Show is called “The Numbers Game” and the episode is called “When Will You Die.”

I have not seen the show, so I am not sure how it was edited all together. All I know is that I took two separate trips out there last Fall and Winter and bent about two dozen horseshoes, frying pans, nails and other pieces of steel.

Plus I ripped a whole pile of phone books and decks of cards, so they have plenty of footage to go through – HA HA!

It was a great time, I had a lot of fun, and I hope it carries over well to the show.

Also, feel free to post something on Facebook or another social network. Sometimes, with a “crazy” sport like Grip or doing Feats of Strength, it is good to get it in front of your friends’ and family’s eyes when it is on mainstream media like this, to show them that you are not the only “crazy” one out there.

Thanks everyone, for all the support, and all the best in your training.

Jedd

Over a year ago, my buddy Josh McIntyre and I were emailing and he suggested a name for a series to be featured here on the site called Tales from the Grip. It was to be stories of training written by all of you and posted here on the site.

The title is of course a play on words of Tales from the Crypt, which if you have never seen, was a horror story series shown on HBO, I believe, about 20 years ago and probably longer. I am probably showing my age by referencing it…LOL.

Tales from the Grip – Fayette Fair, Dunbar PA – July 2012

Today, I am going to start the series off by telling you of my experiences doing my first ever professional Strongman Performances, at the Fayette Fairgrounds, which started last night (July 26th) and will continue on until Tuesday July 31. If you are in the area of Dunbar, PA, you should come check it out.

How it Came to Be

I received an email from John Beatty well over a year ago asking if I’d ever be interested in doing Strongman Performances with him or for him. John was the owner of Fat Bastard Barbell Company for several years before recently selling it to his friend Jerry when he got to busy to keep it going. If that doesn’t ring a bell, then you may remember seeing him on TV back in 2010 on America’s Got Talent when he gave the big “In Your Face” to Piers Morgan.

Here’s the video:

John is an accomplished Strength Athlete himself. He was a professional strongman competitor from 2000 to 2010, and has also competed in many powerlifting and Grip Sport competitions, while also bending some awesome high-level steel.

After the initial emails, I didn’t hear much from John for quite some time, so I didn’t think much of it, but then, late last year, I got a call from John and he told me that he could use me for some shows coming up in the summer. I thought it sounded like an awesome and fun opportunity and I immediately told him I would love to try it.

In the months to come, I picked John’s brain about how to even set up a Strongman show. Considering my bending experience was limited to contests where you generally wrap and try to bend as big of steel as possible in 5 minutes time, the idea of putting together an entire 30-minute program seemed very daunting.

I have watched performing strongmen like John Brookfield, Dennis Rogers, Pat Povilaitis, Dave Whitley and Mike Bruce a handful of times over the years, but they mainly had performed single feats as part of other strength endeavors. John Brookfield did some of his bending feats during a larger expo in conjunction with other acts. Dennis, Pat, Mike, and David had all done their feats at Mighty Mitts between events. All of them were awesome performances, but they were shorter in duration.

However, with John’s guidance and coaching, I began to see some light at the end of the tunnel. He and I talked several times over the last 6 months and he would always share some knowledge about how to set up shows, some of the staple feats he did, and how to tie feats together to make the show run well. I soon began developing confidence in myself to be able to put a variety of feats together that would be entertaining for the crowd to watch.

Building the Equipment

About 6 months ago, John sent me the plans for some of the equipment that he uses in his shows. One was a deadlift platform that kids can sit on and then you lift them up. Another was a finger lift platform where someone lays on a board and you lift them with one finger. And the last one was a Bed of Nails.

In hindsight, the right thing to do would have been to get right on it and buy the lumber and build all of the equipment so that I could train on it and get to know it.

Unfortunately, what I did was I put it off and never built anything until last weekend. I am no carpenter. In fact, I make a poor carpenter’s assistant, so I enlisted my Dad to help me put this stuff together. I figured it would take us maybe 4 hours on a Sunday morning to build it all.

No.

It took use two hole days of serious work to build just the kiddie deadlift platform and the bed of nails. It took me 4 hours just to pound all of the nails through the plywood for the bed of nails, so that was quite a wake-up call in itself. Nevertheless, with the help of my good old Dad, the two pieces got built and I even through some deck stain on the deadlift platform. John was impressed with the craftsmanship and said that mine looks better than his! I told him I wanted to make sure everything looked good since my show was going to be a reflection on him.

The Drive Down

Finally, the day to come to the fair arrived. I figured, again, that the drive would be about 4 hours. I dropped the baby off at the babysitter and turned on the GPS in order to get an estimate of how long it would take to get down here. I nearly laid an egg when it said 5.5 hours. I still had to go get the trailer and load everything on it in addition to packing everything up in the car…amazing.

Once loaded, I got out on the road. I have never pulled a trailer behind a vehicle on a 4-lane highway. Quite interesting! I was swerving a bit at first, but eventually got used to it. PennDot has construction projects going on, on just about every highway I drove on yesterday, including a section on Route 22 where the road is one lane and the barricades seem just about wide enough to afford like a foot of space on each side of the trailer. Lots of fun driving, I can assure you. Sweat was pouring down my brow into my eyes as I drove. Awesome.

The First Shows

It felt good to drive the Jeep onto the Fairgrounds and find my location for the shows. I was placed under a pavilion, which was a good thing because it was pouring buckets last night.

For the first day of the Fair, with such bad weather, the fair was nearly empty, but we got the two shows in that were scheduled. The small crowds were great to break the ice and get things rolling.

In the first show, John handled the PA system and narrated. He and I traded back and forth doing feats.

For the second show, I manned the PA and narrated and did 6 feats while John did 4. Everything went well, including my flaming hammer torch feat. Other feats that we did included the kiddie deadlift, phone book tearing, horseshoe bending, mace swinging, kettlebell juggling, and more. A rather diverse range of feats.

More to Come

As the rest of the shows progress, I will keep you posted. But I must say, I am pumped to be doing them.

I never thought I would ever get up on a stage and perform for a crowd. I always saw myself as more of the coach person who would help others enjoy the feats of strength by safely learning to do them themselves, but after just one day, I am excited to be given the opportunity to share what I know in this new way.

I really want to say thank you to John Beatty, “The Strongman,” for giving me this opportunity. Find out more about John here: John Beatty The Strongman.

Oh, and by the way, my favorite feat so far has been bending stuff while laying on the bed of nails. Surprisingly the pain from 600 nails digging into your butt and back fizzles away when the adrenaline rushes through the body.

If you are in the area, be sure to stop by. If not, keep coming by the site as I will be adding to this post as the shows go on.

All the best in your training,

Jedd

I was thinking about my training back in June and I realized that I have been bending nails for nearly 10 years. However, in all that time, I had never successfully done any nail breaking.

Nail breaking involves bending a nail back and forth over and over until it breaks. This is much harder than simply bending the nail into a U-shape, mainly because it takes so much longer to do it, requiring much more grip strength endurance and mental toughness and determination than simply bending it over. I’d tried several times in the past to break 60D nails, but after flipping it around and having it slip in my grip, I’d generally get frustrated and say, “Screw it,” and move on to the next thing.

This time, I really wanted to give it a solid effort and see if I could do it.

When I decided to take on the challenge of nail breaking, I immediately set my sites on the 60D nail, also often referred to as a spike.

If you are not entirely familiar with nails, I will explain. The term, 60D, means 60-penny, coming from England in the 15th Century.

From Wikipedia.org: “Penny sizes originally referred to the price for a hundred nails in England in the 15th century: the larger the nail, the higher the cost per hundred. The system remained in use in England into the 20th century, but is obsolete there today. The d is an abbreviation for denarius, a Roman coin similar to a penny; this was the abbreviation for a penny in the UK before decimalisation.”

Benchmark Nail

The 60D Nail is also kind of a benchmark nail of Strongmanism, the practice of being a performing Strongman. So if you successfully bend a 60D nail, you can consider it a comparable feat to what most performing Strongmen of the past and present have done as well.

My first attempt at breaking a nail was long and tedious. It took me upwards of 20 minutes because my bracing technique was very poor and my wraps kept slipping over and over. To top it all off, my conditioning was lacking and between running out of breathe, my hands were also cramping up on me big time.

I continued to do my nail breaking training one or two days a week. I didn’t want to go overboard with it and end up with some kind of forearm or elbow pain, so I spaced my nail breaking days out pretty far.

Each time I bent I was able to whittle away more time, with my ultimate goal to finish the nail break in less than three minutes. On the second session, I was able to cut my time by more than half, going from nearly 20 to less than 10 minutes. I actually did two nails that session.

Finally, earlier this week, I was able to reach my goal of under 3 minutes.

In fact, it was around 30 seconds.

But there was something about that break that just didn’t seem right. I talk about it the following video.

60D Nail Break Under 60 Seconds

I could tell right away on the initial kink double overhand that this nail, although it looked similar was no doubt a much weaker nail. In addition, the subsequent efforts to open the nail back up felt like I was twisting jello.

Below is the second 60D I broke in the workout. This one is one of two types of 60D’s that I was given in the past:

• Zavaco 60D – That may be miss-spelled, so I apologize if it is. Strongman Chris Rider, who penned this awesome article on Chain Breaking last year, gave me a stack of these in 2009. I had never heard of the Zavaco brand of nails/spikes before but he said they were much more difficult than regular 60D’s, and he is right.
• Canadian 60D – The other possibility is that these are some of the Canadian 60D that I got from Canadian Grip Competitor, Jonathan McMillan. He gave them to me in 2008. It is entirely possible that Zavaco nails are a Canadian brand, or that McMillan go this hands on some Zavaco’s up there and then brought them across the border, or just simply that 60D nails produced in Canada are the “real deal.”

Here is the second, more difficult 60D nail broken in under 3 minutes.

60D Nail Break Under 3 Minutes

You can see right away that this nail is just plain stronger than the other one as I had more difficulty with the initial kink, as well as the opening and the re-kink on every single effort. Plus, the lighter 60D never got to the same temperature as the harder one. With the harder one, I could feel the heat going through my pant-leg when I was bracing it on my thigh to open it up.

Comparing the Two Nails

Obvious Differences:

• Coloring – The Zavacos are lighter and duller in color. The easier 60’s are much brighter, but that does not serve much meaning as to their difficulty in this case.
• Hatches – The Zavacos come with a much deeper series of hatch marks that are etched into the side of them near the head. My assumptions is that it helps keep the nail from working its way back out of wood, once pounded into the project.
• Size – Both nails are roughly the same length, but the Zavacos may be slightly thicker. I don’t own a micrometer, so I can’t get a perfect measurement, but by eyeball, they look a bit heftier.

In closing, I will say that the coolest thing about breaking nails is the way the steel heats up as you work it back and forth. Like I pointed out above, the heat was so intense it felt like it was going through my pants and burning my leg. I have also had my finger get off the wraps and get in contact with the nail and gotten a noticeable burning sensation.

Next, I plan on working on some longer nails/spikes but continue down the path of breaking, as I like the endurance factor that it trains as well as the mental toughness.

The Big Take-Away

The thing to learn from all of this is that nails will vary. Some are made to withstand more punishment than others.

How do you know if what you are bending is tough or not compared to other suppliers stock? You don’t. In fact, you will never know until you try other stock that is available. That is just part of the game that is Steel Bending. For more insight into the variation that can be seen between various nails, bolts, and bar stock, check out this post: Variation of Steel and Nail Strength.

More videos to come of Nail Breaking. Until then, all the best in your training.

Jedd

Usually, when you hear about a horseshoe tournament, you think of a bunch of old sun-burned dudes with beers in their hands wearing tank tops and wife beaters, throwing horseshoes into dirt or sand pits, trying to hit a stake for points.

Double Ringer – 6 Points – YEAH BUDDY!

There’s an old saying that mentions horseshoes that goes something like this: “Almost only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades.”

What that means is that when you have a goal, you need to accomplish that goal, and not just settle for “almost got it.” You see, in normal horseshoes, if you almost hit the stake, then you still get partial points for your throw. Throwing grenades is kind of the same thing. You don’t have to hit your target spot on every time because the shrapnel will do the damage for you.

Well, almost doesn’t count in horseshoes when you’re bending them!

Last week was the fourth week in the Diesel Classic Strongman Tournament, and the feat of strength contested was Horseshoe Bending!

The great thing about last week’s tournament was that both master horseshoe benders and beginner horseshoe benders competed.

In case you are wondering, there is a near endless variety of horseshoes out there to try and bend. In our DVD, Hammering Horseshoes, Mike and I cover about a dozen types of shoes that are readily available and easily obtainable.

Mike and I are also working to extend this list in order to give more options for beginners as well as more steps in between established shoes. Look for this listing to come out sometime soon.

Now, let’s get back to the tournament.

Here are the standings after last week’s tournament:

• 1st – Cameron Bailey – 4.5 Points
• 2nd – David Horne / Mike Rinderle / Darrin Shallman – 3 Points
• 3rd – Richard MacLean / Jason Steeves – 2 Points
• 4th – Daniel Reinard – 1.5 Points
• 5th – David Wigren – 1 Point

Here is how the tournament panned out this week. Remember, a win is worth 1 point. A tie is .5 points, and a loss is worth zero. A lot of how the tournament works out each week depends on the luck of the draw and how many people submit entries into the tournament.

So, after this weeks bracket, we now have a new leader and the running score is looking very different. Here are the standings:

• Darrin Shallman – 5 Points
• Cameron Bailey – 4.5 Points
• David Wigren – 4 Points
• David Horne / Mike Rinderle – 3 Points
• Richard MacLean / Jason Steeves – 2 Points
• Daniel Reinard – 1.5
• EJ Livesey – 1 Point
• Christopher Smith – .5 Points

So, now we head into the final week of the Classic Strongman Feats Tournament.

The rules for the final showdown of the tournament will be posted tomorrow.

Believe me, you do not want to miss the final turn of this spectacle. There will be MANY points up for grabs.

Now, let’s check out the awesome shoe bends from the entrants this week:

David Wigren – Kerckheart SSP 8X18 #000

Mike Rinderle – St Croix Forge Plain Regular #3

EJ Livesey – St Croix Forge Lite Rim #1

Darren Shallman – Diamond Classic #1

Daniel Reinard – St Croix Forge Polo #1

Andy Thomas – St. Croix Forge Ultra Lite #2

Christopher Smith – St. Croix Forge Ultra Lite #2

Great week guys. Look for the next challenge very soon.

Jedd