Farmer Walks
 

Just wondering how many of yall have tried these?

I did them for the 2nd time today and they are quickly becoming one of my favorite exercises.

I love farmer's walk. Back at my parent's house I used to have a huge setup of strongman style events. Log press, tire flip, sled drag, farmer's walk, even the fingal finger. It's way more exciting than the gym :D

Edit: With all this talk of strongman and Darkhorse pimping GPP, I may just have to ressurect some of my old events :D

Kane: you're very very lucky :)

HULK: Farmer's walks are a great exercise.

My new thing is to do offsets which is a heavily recommended idea in Combat Core (great book).

Basically you can be creative and do all sorts of things with farmers walks which can adresss core stabibility and certainly help from a GPP standpoint.

Describe offsets.

I do Farmers every week. great exercise... probably not nearly as taxing to the core as yoke walks. Yoke walks should be easily replicated if you have a home gym. Some chain, a normal olympic bar... if you want to be very high tech you can buy loading pins, but it wouldn't be necessary to the setup at the most basic levels. The benefits of using the more ghetto setup is that the chains will allow the weight to move in all directions, forcing you to stabilize every which a way as you walk. A more traditional yoke setup that strongmen use has the entire frame as one piece... it is a little more forgiving.

The other very interesting tool that I have become a fan of is the "pillar of pain" or a pvc pipe filled 1/2-3/4 with water. The pipe needs to be a full length... I think that is 9-10ft. Depending on the size of the pipe you may end up with anywhere from 40-90lbs of water weight. The deviousness is that the water weight will quickly shift from one side to the other, putting nearly all 40-90lbs loaded to the right or left depending on how you walk and compensate. Try overhead walks or even simple overhead presses for extra fun.

ive done them a few times and they made my forearms sore for 4-5 days. writing in class hurt like hell.

Pillar of pain...the name peaked my interest but the video makes me want to go and buy some pvc right now. :D

There is a video with a beefed up pillar of pain out there. It looks so brutal I'm surprised that something like that hasn't popped up in worlds strongest man.

Crossfit has some pillar of pain videos... if crossfit does it, you know it is good stuff!

Crossfit gives some very good info, but I wouldn't go that far :)

Offsets are basically doing farmers walks with uneven loads with odd implements or at different levels. Like a sandbag in on hand and a kettleball in another. Really anything you can imagine. An example would be a heavy dumbell carried in regular farmer's walk fashion in one hand and a sandbag carried on the opposite shoulder. Or perhaps a dumbell in clean position. The weights don't need to match of course. In place of a sandbag and army backpack with heavy stuff in in will work.

I'm not talking about following crossfit exactly. But they don't waste time with stuff that doesn't work. Forget the programming of it and just focus on the lifts that they teach. Nobody gets out of there without squatting, cleaning, doing pullups, working with kettle bells... etc. I like to think of it as "strongman for people who want to be thin." :D

Who uses the offsets? I can kinda see it at lighter weights, maybe. I mean, every keg carry/sandbag carry etc is an unbalanced load. One arm feels more weight than the other and so on. I'm also all for unilateral exercises like DB clean and press or bent press etc. I guess that this type of work just puts a little more thought into the type of unbalance you overcome.