Reigning World’s Strongest Man Martins Licis has been documenting his training ahead of his next big contest, the Arnold Strongman Classic. Licis officially qualified for the event with a win at the 2020 Arnold Strongman USA event in January, and since then, we’ve seen him haul a bunch of bros and bro out with his competition, Hafthor Björnsson.
Now that the week of the competition is here, Licis is fine-tuning his final few concerns before the event. (The Arnold Sports Festival was recently cancelled for fans and vendors due to the spread of coronavirus, but the most competitive events, the World Bodybuilding Championship and the Strongman Classic, will still take place without an audience. Licis and other strongmen will still compete.)
To wrap up his video training series, Licis is letting his viewers in on the methods he uses to prep for one of the toughest, most specialized events in Strongman repertoire: the Conan’s Wheel, a.k.a. the Wheel of Pain. The huge, wooden apparatus made by Rogue specially for the event isn’t exactly something you find in your local gym (or that a training facility even has space for), so Licis’ team has to get creative to provide the necessary resistance the big man can push against.
The key is a tool called the Exergenie.
“The Exergenie is something that I think was used by NASA years ago for basically getting resistance weight in space in zero gravity. It went from there to being used by fire departments for letting people down from burning buildings and things like that,” explains one of his trainers, Mike. Put most simply, the system uses a nylon rope looped around a metal shaft, and the line twists over itself to create resistance.
The team also uses the tool to train for the truck pull.
“We use it for truck pull, which is 10 times harder than a normal truck pull. Basically the start of a truck pull is exactly like this, but now you’re going 50 to 60 feet with it. It’s one of the greatest pieces of equipment we have here,” Mike continues.
Licis gets to training, and shows off his customized Conan’s Wheel attachment from Exergenie. He pulls the rig all the way across the gym, and talks about how much he loves it after he’s done.
“It’s really hard. The stability of your shoulders is really hard. sensation if I go too low, I have to focus on the shoulder stabilizers so my arms don’t rip off backwards, but I love it,” Licis say. “That’s why I think i had such good stamina last year doing this with my arms, everyone else’s shoulders were getting pumped, but this where the bar is not secured makes me really have to keep my arms active. Phew,” he says.
He does another pull, then follows it up with a double, no rest.
Licis takes his time to stretch, then finishes off his training light: big-time sandbag tosses and ‘easy, light’ deadlifts. When you’re the World’s Strongest Man, 715 pounds is no big deal.
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