Swinging Clubs

You have my profound apologies if your search engine led you here while you were seeking like-minded people with broad views on marriage or were trying to track down a decent jazz band.  This is a piece on swinging club-‘bells,’ kind of like dumbbells, weighted implements used in strength training.  A ‘club,’ as it’s known to enthusiasts, is shaped halfway between a bowling pin and an aluminum baseball bat.  They come in numerous sizes and weights, and their combination of load and length makes for a very effective brand of shoulder, arm, and torso training.

I’m picking back up again with my blog, so this is Topic One in addressing some of the discoveries I’ve blundered upon over the past year and a half, which include (but are not limited to):

- the need for dynamic movement in training for older lifters

- injury

- red-light therapy

- varying the ranges of motion in exercises

Even before I got hurt, I had been feeling my age, if not a slow boiling insanity over the Sisyphean nature of heavy benches, squats, deadlifts, and presses.  My numbers were regressing while my muscles calcified into an armored shell.

This should be more fun - and not always a slow grind, I started thinking.  If the point of all this lifting is awesomeness, as in strength and speed for hockey, I was achieving exactly the opposite.  What I needed was some combination of strength training and dynamic movement.  Comprehensive awesomeness would have to include agility.    

I hadn’t figured this out in so many words until I hurt my shoulder this past summer.  I thrashed possibly a biceps tendon or the subscapularis, a rotator cuff muscle lying between the shoulder blade and the ribs of the back.  Perhaps I thrashed them both, as they tie in at the same place at the top of the arm bone.      

For a long time I haven’t been able to bench press, so I’ve been doing narrow grip or dumbbell work, and it’s hurt to hold a squat bar on my back.  That brings your hands behind the line of your shoulders, and on my right, the intersection at Chest and Shoulder simply hasn’t wanted to stretch back that far.  I tried to loop a strap over the bar for kind of a conventional grip; I tried safety bar squats, but I’ve settled for belt squats - which, on the topic of dynamic movement, have made for a big improvement.    

This would seem to be a blessing in disguise, but one on a life changing, dramatic friggin’ scale: the disguise has been prolonged misery to the point that I genuinely feared I would need surgery.

The blessing is the discovery of club swinging, and it’s completely fit the bill: fixing the shoulder and providing that dynamic blend of strength, speed, agility, and coordination training that will foster the awesomeness I was after.

Google the topic of clubs fixing shoulders, and you’ll find all kinds of old guys like me swearing by it.  The entries will fall into two major categories, however, light and heavy clubs.  ‘Indian Clubs’ is a term that generally refers to smaller clubs on the level of two or three pounds apiece.  These lend themselves to a fancy brand of twirling that neither summons nor creates any real amount of force.  Other than in the case of a very serious injury, I cannot see them being of much use to a strong man.

Having tried the light ones, I’ve ended up with two heavy clubs, a 20-pounder and a 35.  A club’s wicked genius is in its length, which creates the very powerful imbalance and resulting leverage that plates, kettlebells, or dumbbells are designed to minimize.  One of the important skills in club handling is being able to hold it upright from the end of the handle.  It if tilts over at all, it’s going to feel like much more weight as it gets away from you.  On the very first day I had my 20, I pulled it out of the shipment box to give it a try and cracked myself in the skull almost immediately.

The 35-pounder feels like way more than twice the 20 - which doesn’t make sense - but not only is it thicker, it’s three inches longer, and that leverage makes all the difference.

Heave the club up to waist level, holding it upright with one hand or two, your forearm(s) parallel to the ground, and you have all kinds of motions and directions in which to send it around your body or overhead.  The weight is amplified by the leverage, so a swing will take on more force and speed as the club tips and the lever lengthens.  You have to contain and reverse these swings, and then redirect them, from high to low or low to high, as you execute one skill or another.

At this point in my life, two hands on the 35-pounder makes for quite the wrestling match.  Sometimes as it swings free and fast, it stretches every muscle in my upper body out and away from me like a golf stroke gone out of control or a tow rope yanking me out of my waterskis.   Arresting the club’s movement, which is catching it with a little downward dip as it comes back to vertical, back at that waist level starting position, would seem mainly to be a locking of the biceps - which it is, but you also grasp how your shoulders, pec muscles, your traps, and upper back all combine to form a harness of sorts.  That’s something you don’t feel in the singular and linear movements of barbell training.

Two hands on a club means you’re holding it like a baseball bat.  Starting and stopping as well as all the places your elbows go are gloriously asymmetrical and athletic.  It calls for strength applied in unconventional positions.  The trick, of course, is then to repeat all these skills with your grip reversed, to train both sides of the body and brain in equal measure.  It might remind you of a good hard round of chopping wood, except this is harder and heavier.

[FOR THE RECORD:  The best resource on the internet on club swinging is the YouTube channel run by Mark Wildman.  His videos are all safe and sensible tutorials on how to progress in skill and strength, and this would be a lost art without his making the fundamentals available to everyone.  Other videos do exist, but they mainly serve to add skills to the core list Wildman has created.]

So, is this strength?

Yes, though not in the way we’re used to thinking of it.  Strength is the ability to apply force against external resistance, and usually we measure this in the context of a muscle or set of muscles contracting through a full range of motion in a conventional, linear barbell lift.

The strength in circular motion is spottier by comparison and more impulse based.

Consider some examples: In splitting wood with an axe, that’s your strength imparted to the axe and creating the penetration and cut in the wood.  In swinging a sledgehammer, bringing it down is one thing, but so is picking it back up and initiating the next swing.

I recently watched plumbers install a new boiler in my basement.  Imagine wielding a giant pipe wrench in tight quarters.  Lifting and holding the wrench and turning a pipe fitting with it put them in countless awkward and asymmetrical positions, each one of which called for force - and strength.

I can attest to two specific upshots to this new brand of training:

1.  I can hardly put on any of my jackets, having developed enormous lats, maybe - or probably enormous serratus muscles beneath them.

Speaking of axes and sledgehammers, a common maneuver in club swinging is bringing the club downward from overhead and behind you.  This motion, up - around my head - and back down, has broadened my back considerably.

2.  In hockey, I can now rip a hard, flat, and fast wrist shot at crossbar level from the blue line.  Part of this is rotational power, while part is from a new understanding of levers and fulcrums.

Everything is closer to your body than you might realize.  Splitting wood, don’t let the axe out and away from you.  Keep the heels of your hands close to your gut.  You’ll have way more power.

In hockey, it’s not the lower hand pushing out that rips the puck.  It’s the upper hand coming in.

When I’m slinging the 35 with one hand, I’ll decapitate a goalie.