Landmine Training - A real weapon in your exercise arsenal

It’s been given many names in the weights room, mainly because most people have no idea what it is. Landmine training is where you take an Olympic bar and stick one end of it in a corner of a room so that you can use the bar as a big lever. Weight up the end you hold and you will have one of the best training tools in the world for developing whole body explosive power.

Landmine training is an incredible way of developing your fitness. It’s fun and can be done with light or heavy loads. If you use light weights you can improve your endurance, speed, tone and burn loads of fat. If you use heavy weights you can increase your maximum strength, power and muscle mass.

The best selling point of landmine training is that every exercise is a whole body exercise, so you develop power through your legs, transfer it through your core and in to your arms – Toe to finger power! This is why you will see such insane increases in your strength. I saw my single arm lunge press go from 30kg to 75kg in 6 weeks! If you’re throwing a punch, lifting someone up or wrestling them on the ground you will be able to produce a lot more force if you use your body as a unit, rather than isolating specific muscles.

This sounds obvious but if we know that we need to create force using our whole body why do some athletes still train in isolation or with really stable, simple movements? Bicep curls, Bench pressing and sit ups will all have minimal impact on your performance because they are movements we never re-create in fights or any other sport for that matter. The closer you get to real movements that you use in your sport the better the transfer you will see from the results you get in the gym to your performance in the ring.

The other reason landmine training is so effective is the fact your core has to work so hard to keep the bar travelling along the right path. A lot of the exercises make it feel like the bar wants to fall away from you. Take the single arm fly. You would normally associate that exercise with a chest isolation exercise used by body builders. Do it on a landmine and you will feel your abdominals working like never before, as well as your chest and shoulder complex.

To see some of my favourite landmine exercises check out the Wild Training landmine tutorial on YouTube – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iv5N9GZ0y4Q. Subscribe to the Wild Training channel on YouTube for regular training advice and exercise demo’s. If you want more advice get in contact with us at http://www.wildtraining.co.uk.

Start off with light weights to get the technique right. Something like a 60 second set to fatigue with a 30-60 second rest. Aim for 2-3 sets of each exercise. If you want to increase your maximum strength and power then do a 30 second set to failure with a 2-3 minute rest in between sets. Aim to complete 3-6 sets of each exercise.

Again start at the lower end of these numbers and build up.