Benefits of Heavy Club Training

Here is a short brief on the benefits of heavy club training, written by Dr. Uzair Ahmad, Doctorate of Physiotherapy. This is part of our comprehensive Heavy Club Guide.

You should always consider the uses and benefits of your training tools. Here are the benefits of using steel clubs in your training:

Mobility & Stability:

Mobility and stability are some of the hugest benefits steel clubs have to offer. The combination of pullover, rotational, and swinging drills and exercises, in different planes of motion (sagittal, frontal and transverse planes) helps you increase your range of motion and muscular stability.

By training through a large ranges of motion via rotational exercises, you are creating a tractional force in your joints rather than compressive force.

Compressive exercises, like squats, bench press, and deadlifts, compress your joints and shorten your connective tissue. Meanwhile, tractional exercises decompress your joints and length your connective tissue.

In fact, many things we do in our daily life compress our joints. So, implementing exercises that use tractional force will curb and oppose connective tissue and joint degeneration.

Shoulder Mobility, Strength and Endurance:

Shoulders are some the most complex joints in human body.

Most people only train their shoulders with push and lateral motions. Steel club training works the shoulders in a completely different manner.

Instead, the steel club trains the shoulders through rotational movements.

When performing rotational and swinging exercises, you are also engaging muscles that assist the shoulder. This includes your core muscles and rotator cuff. Which helps build your overall stability tremendously.

These steel club rotational exercises build onto movement patterns that will improve your ability to throw a punch, swing a tennis racket, or contort your body during a rock climb.

Steel club rotational exercises will enhance your endurance, durability and strength in all of your movements.

Which is why they are highly recommended training tools to develop joint stability and mobility.

Rehab/Prehab:

Steel Clubs ranging from 5lbs to 10lbs are particularly beneficial for rehabilitating joints, tendons, and small muscles. They are also great for active recovery to prepare for your next intense workout.

Developing balance control over the weight helps stabilize and strengthen the structures that need rehabilitation.

Grip Development:

Steel clubs are popular among wrestlers for developing a strong grip.

Steel club training helps enhance grip strength and physical dexterity, similar to that of a kettlebell. But more effectively by differentiating the weight distribution across the fingers.

By design, the weight of a steel club is unevenly distributed, which displaces the weight away from your grip. This causes your grip to be challenged in ways that most fitness tools can’t replicate. Ultimately, your grip strength will vastly increase.

At various parts of a movement, the stress an exercise places on the hand forces adaptation over time. Resulting in the user becoming more efficient and preventing fatigue.

Steel clubs have proven to be extremely beneficial for improving grip strength for those who are recovering from injuries and have a weak grip.

Of course, it’s not only beneficial for those who are rehabbing their grip strength. Increased dexterity and grip strength can help maximize efficiency, strength and endurance in all kinds of racquet and bat-related sports like tennis, lacrosse, baseball, cricket, etc.

Deceleration Training

During your steel club training, by learning how to slow the momentum of a swing you develop decelerative strength. Decelerative strength is useful for minimizing risks of injury because in many sports and training, injuries are the result of lacking control.

This kind of physical control is not only important in sports activities, but also in daily functional living.

In fact, many injuries are not even result of contact. Instead they are caused by an inability to decelerate or change directions quickly.

KINAESTHETIC TRAINING (BALANCE AND COORDINATION)

Kinesthetic training means training for body awareness, i.e. balance and coordination.

Due to the offset weight of a steel club, steel club exercises are very similar to unilateral training. Unilateral training (like split squats, lunges, one arm presses) is necessary for increasing balance, coordination and core stability.

By performing a single arm exercise with a steel club, you are combining unilateral training and offset training for improving balance, coordination and core stability.

The steel club will help in improving sports performance as most sports require exceptional balance and coordination. This is why you see a lot of unilateral training in athletic programs, and that is a major cause of the athletic community is taking to the steel club like no other.

CORE STABILITY

This benefit of steel club training essentially goes hand in hand with kinesthetic training. By training for balance and coordination, you are increasing core stability. Core stability is best trained through anti-rotational exercises. Powerful core stability will allow you to take force from one side while maintaining balance. Football, basketball and soccer players greatly understand the importance of this.

Decompress Your Joints and Tissues

Most weight-training exercises tighten your body up. Let’s think of what happens to your spine when you do a back squat: the bar rests on your back, shoving your vertebrae closer together. And when you push heavy weights, your shoulders and elbows get squeezed.

Continually compressing your joints, and shortening the muscles that act on them, can lead to pain and loss of flexibility. But using steel clubs can help alleviate both.

You can strengthen a joint with traction just like you can with compression. Pulling the joints apart makes the muscles and connective tissues work to hold the joint together, and it’s a nice counterbalance to compressive forces you get in your other training.

Particularities and Benefits of Training with a Heavy Club

The weight of the hammer is shifted to one extreme, which makes the body have to strain to overcome the produced lever force. Due to the leverage effect, it is unnecessary to use excessively high weights to challenge the body, which can reduce possible soft tissue damage and compression damage to the joints.

Additionally, swinging the heavy club around the body through all motion stages rather than simply lifting it causes traction on the fascia and joints due to centrifugal force. This centrifugal force stimulates the myofascial matrix to generate stronger fiber layers while being oiled with synovial fluid due to movement, which also benefits the joints. This increases the potential for building elastic energy in tendons and even increases bone density, which helps prevent injury.

Another advantage over using symmetrical weights is that the same clubbell weight can be used for different levels of force without having to make constant changes in weight. To make it easier to handle a heavy club, you can grab it from a position further from its end, while if you want to complicate things, you can grab it more towards the end or move it faster. Swinging a club twice as fast takes four times as much work.

Get the Heavy Club Training Approved Steel Club here.

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