Bad Ass Muscle Building Exercises #2 - Walking with Weight

Many exercises that are performed in the gymnasium are not what you would call functional by any means.

But to build some serious functional muscle you need to be hitting your body with big compound movements, one such type of exercise is 'Walking with Weight', a favourite of Strongman past and you should make it a favourite of your own to get building some badass muscle.

Walking with weight, can be anything from farmers walk, atlas stone carry, overhead barbell walking, deadlift and carry to squat walking.

Brooks Kubik mentions walking with weight in his awesome Dinosaur Training Book and states that it was a favourite of Milon of Crotona and a staple of Oldtime Strongmen.

My own personal favourites are walking with weight overhead and deadlift walking. A simple way to implement deadlift walking is to deadlift the barbell and if you have space to take several steps backwards and then several steps forward but ideally would be done where you have plenty of space to take a barbell for a walk.

Steve Justa bases most of his unconventional training routines around walking with weight. You can fin lost of information in Steve Justa's very unusual training book Rock Iron Steel

Be warned, that walking with weight should be taken seriously as you'll more than likely be hitting ligaments and parts of you're body you would normally be so ease this type of training carefully into your routine. Build up te weight and distance gradually and enjoy the benefits of walking with weight which will be improved grip strength (farmers walk), stronger legs, bigger fitness capacity and badass shoulders,legs and traps!

Bad Ass Muscle Building Exercises #1 - Clean and Press

OK I haven't posted in a while and got round to thinking that I needed to run a series on the Best Exercises for building muscle, even in my own training it's sometimes easy to forget what works and did work for you in the past.

Many of the best exercises do come from the past (some more than a century ago), so you can guess right now there'll be no single legged deadlifting with a neoprene coated pink dumbbell or any bosu squats whilst sipping on a carrot juice!

Only big functional badd ass compound exercises!

So first up is the Clean and Press

The clean and press can be done using a barbell, a dumbbell or dumbbells or even a kettlebell. The main thing is that it is done with a heavy weight and aggression. The classic way is using 2 dumbbells and a great measure of manliness, it was stated by Sig Klein that a 75lb dumbbell in each hand clean and pressed 10 times would seperate the men from the boys.

So there's a great goal straight away, 10 clean and presses with 75lb dummbells.

Ultimately the clean and press is so fucking great because you have all the trimmings of olympic lifting mixed in with a pushing movement which can be made into an endurance strength movement or a big baddass 1 Rep max lift. Either way the clean and press is going to destroy you in the gym if you put in extreme maximum effort.

If you're clean really sucks you could try a continental clean to get the wight up to your chest before the press.

Some variations of the clean and press would be as follows:
Power Clean and Press
Hang Power Clean and Press
Reverse Grip Clean and Press (Like a power curl)
Single Dumbbell clean and press
Kettlebell Clean and press (1 or 2 kettlebells)
Continental clean and press

and of course any of the above using a push press or a jerk

Hits the legs, back, trunk, shoulders and almost everything else.