When most people hear “strongman training” they picture televised competitions — enormous humans pulling semi-trucks with their teeth, flipping tires the size of a small planet, heaving kegs over walls.

That is not what we are talking about here.

What we are talking about is the foundational principle underneath those events: picking up heavy, awkward things and moving them under control, for time and distance, under fatigue. Stripped of the spectacle, that is one of the most transferable training methods available to military and tactical athletes — because it describes a significant portion of what the job actually requires.

Every day you lift, carry, grip, pull, drag, and push things. A training method built around exactly those movement patterns is not a novelty. It is specificity.

Why Strongman Training Works

Getting strong in a usable way — not just strong on a barbell in ideal conditions, but strong in the ways that matter when the conditions are not ideal — requires training that develops functional, integrated force production. Strongman-style movements do this better than almost anything else in the gym.

The science backs this up in a specific and surprising way.

In a study by McGill, McDermott, and Fenwick (2009), researchers analyzed hip forces during the yoke walk event. One participant demonstrated 271 Nm of maximal hip abduction strength in an isolated test — and then produced 457 Nm of peak hip abduction strength during the yoke carry. That is 1.6 times more force than his tested maximum, achieved through the coordinated stiffening of the torso that the carry demanded.

The mechanism: bracing the midline and buttressing the spine against shear forces allows the hips to produce force that they cannot generate in isolation. The whole system working together is stronger than the sum of its parts. This is what “functional strength” actually means — not light dumbbells and balance boards, but full-body integrated force production under real load.

This transfers directly to ruck carries, casualty drags, equipment handling, and any other task that requires moving a significant load through space. Training these patterns makes those tasks safer and more efficient. The ruck training mechanics post covers the midline stability piece in detail — the same principle at work.

Is Strongman Training Safe?

The reasonable concern: some of these movements look dangerous. Extreme spinal flexion on an atlas stone lift, for example, is the opposite of what you are told to do in a conventional gym.

The McGill et al. study addressed this directly. Despite the extreme flexion required to wrap the body around an atlas stone correctly, compressive forces on the spine were significantly lower than researchers expected — because the athletes used the stone’s center of mass correctly, keeping it as close to their own low back as possible and bracing in that position throughout the movement.

The critical caveat: this was studied on high-level, actively competing strongman athletes who had mastered the technique. The safety of these movements is inseparable from the skill of executing them correctly. This is not beginner territory for the atlas stone and yoke work specifically.

The less technical movements — farmer carries, sandbag carries, sled pushes — are accessible to almost anyone with a basic strength foundation and carry very low injury risk when loaded appropriately.

The prerequisite: before adding strongman-style work, you need solid numbers across the major barbell lifts. Squat, deadlift, front squat, power clean. If you cannot deadlift a symmetrical bar safely and well, you have no business picking up a heavy odd object. Build the foundation first, then add this as supplemental work.

The Mental Edge

There is another benefit worth naming that rarely appears in the research.

Long, grinding loaded carry workouts — the kind where the movement is not technically hard but the cumulative demand over time and rounds is severe — build a specific kind of mental toughness. The kind that makes everything else feel easier by comparison.

A 10-round workout of box step-ups, bear crawls, and walking lunges while wearing a ruck is not glamorous. It is not technically complex. It is just hard in a sustained, uncomfortable way. And that sustained discomfort — managed, completed, repeated — is exactly the stimulus that builds the mental capacity to perform under the sustained discomfort of the job.

This is the same principle covered in the mental toughness exercises post — deliberate exposure to physical difficulty in a controlled training environment as preparation for the uncontrolled difficulty of real situations.

How to Add Strongman Work to Your Training

Think of this as supplemental to a solid strength and conditioning foundation — not a replacement for it. Add these movements at the end of training sessions, or as standalone short sessions when your schedule allows.

The movements that provide the most bang for the buck, in rough order of accessibility:

• Farmer carries — two heavy dumbbells or kettlebells, walk as far as possible
• Uneven farmer carries — one heavy, one lighter; forces core stabilization in a different plane
• Suitcase carries — single arm; directly trains the lateral core
• Sandbag cleans and carries — odd object, develops grip and full-body power
• Sandbag get-ups — ground to shoulder, develops the kind of total-body strength that transfers to casualty handling
• Sled push/pull — low technical demand, high conditioning stimulus
• Yoke carries — high demand on midline stability; requires coaching and a solid strength base first

Here are three workouts to get started:

Workout 1 — Grip and Go (10 minutes): Farmer carry with 2 x 53lb kettlebells. Continuous movement for 10 minutes — cover as much distance as possible without putting them down.

Workout 2 — Carry and Condition (15 minutes AMRAP):

• 100ft farmer carry
• 6 burpees
• 100ft kettlebell front rack carry
• 6 burpees

Workout 3 — Sandbag Grind (5 rounds for time):

• 10 sandbag get-ups
• 10 sandbag power cleans
• 200m run with sandbag

None of these require a strongman gym or specialty equipment. A pair of kettlebells, a sandbag, and open space is enough to run all three. Add them to the end of your current sessions for three to four weeks and you will feel the difference in your grip, your posture under load, and your ability to sustain effort when things get uncomfortable.

Build It Into a Complete Program

Strongman-style work is most effective when it fits intelligently into a broader training structure — not bolted on randomly, but sequenced to complement your strength and conditioning sessions without adding excessive recovery demand.

The Strategic Foundations Training Team incorporates this kind of functional, loaded carry work as part of a complete daily training program. If you want it done for you — the programming, the sequencing, the progression — that is where to start. Fourteen days free.

And for a deeper look at how loaded carries connect to military-specific performance, the ruck training mechanics post and the Pareto Principle applied to training selection are the natural companion reads.