Shovelglove - The Sledgehammer Workout

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Reinhard Engels has developed a great functional strength training system that uses a sledgehammer called “Shovelglove”.   I'm actually very keen to try this form training and incorporate this program into my strength training.

Heres the story of the “Shovelglove” http://www.shovelglove.com/

The Story of Shovelglove

Take a sledgehammer and wrap an old sweater around it. This is your “shovelglove.” Every week day morning, set a timer for 14 minutes. Use the shovelglove to perform shoveling, butter churning, and wood chopping motions until the timer goes off. Stop. Rest on weekends and holidays.

Do them at the pace and in the order that feels right to you. Pay careful attention to your form, so as not to strain yourself. Imagine that you really are performing the activities being simulated. The critical thing is to do it every weekday, no more, no less; for 14 minutes, no more, no less; in a careful, non spastic manner.

I don't know how to explain shovelglove without going into the story of it's genesis, so here goes. Pretty pictures and a spell-checker will eventually grace this site, but don't hold your breath.

It was a rainy Sunday. I hadn't gone to the gym in over three months, and I was feeling painfully out of shape and antsy to do some kind of exercise. But I didn't want to go out in the rain, and the prospect of subjecting myself to the boring torture of the gym seemed even drearier. I wanted an exercise I could do right there, in my bedroom, without any fancy equipment.

But I didn't want to do sit-ups or pushups. I didn't want to grovel on my stomach on the floor, like some degraded beast. “There must be some kind of movement I can do standing up, with the dignity of a human being,” I thought, “some kind of movement that is natural and interesting, that my body would like to do.”

I started making all kinds of spastic movements, hoping to come across something that resonated. I remembered reading something in some French novel about coal shovelers having the best abdominal muscles of anyone the author had ever seen. I started making shoveling motions.

Now there are a few problems with shoveling, from an exercise perspective. For one, if I actually went outside and started shoveling, I'd get all wet (remember, it's raining). The neighbors would think I was crazy, and if I did it at the wrong time I'd actually annoy them. I'd also have to have something to shovel, a waste of space, at least (our backyard is more of back alley). So outdoors is out. But I couldn't really shovel indoors, either. Even if I just did a pantomime with a shovel, I'd need some kind of weight to move, and I'd need some way of keeping it from scratching the floors or killing the cats.

That's when it occurred to me: what I needed was a shovel with a weight attached to it, and a fuzzy glove to keep it from scratching the floors or killing the cats. At first I thought I'd call it “fuzzy shovel,” but “shovelglove” seemed catchier.

Now I had to make the darn thing. I went to the local hardware store, and after some experimenting, I wound up with something that worked: a sledgehammer with an old sweater wrapped around it. It had the right shape, just enough weight, and the requisite softness. And it was pleasingly simple.

Useful Movements

Other movements besides shoveling occurred to me. My chief criterion was they had to have a natural analog, some useful movement that human beings had historically performed during the course of their ordinary daily activities. My hypothesis was that these movements would be inherently interesting to perform, develop muscles that might actually come in handy (God forbid you should actually have to shovel something), and relatively safe. These are the movements we were made for, after all, the movements that enabled us to survive. They might not target specific muscles quite as efficiently as the contrived motions of the gym, but that seemed to me a vastly less important consideration; what you won't do – because it is painfully boring – won't help you.

The second criterion was that the movements had to be performed standing up. The first criterion pretty much makes this a given, historically people haven't done a whole lot of work lying down, but I feel that erect posture is important enough to deserve its own particular emphasis. Before we were Homo sapiens, we were Homo habilis, the tool user, and before we were Homo habilus, we were Homo erectus, men who stood up. A great deal of pompous smarmy nonsense has been written about what makes us human, but these two attributes go even deeper, they make us pre-human. They distinguished us from our bestial brethren before we had sufficient brains to make more impressive but less accurate distinctions. And I firmly believe that you will feel better about whatever it is you are doing (with a couple of obvious exceptions) if you do it standing up.

The third criterion was that the movements had to be convenient to perform in a modern living room. Plowing fields passes the above criteria with flying colors, but I haven't (yet) figured out a way to plow a field short of actually plowing a field.

Schedulistically Significant Time

So I had the tools, and I had the movements, the “what” and the “how.” All I needed was a “when.”

The “when” is perhaps the most satisfying component of this system: 14 minutes every weekday. Rest on weekends and holidays.

You guessed it, 14 is a significant number. Why? Because it's one minute less than the smallest unit of schedulistically significant time. No calendar has a finer granularity than 15 minutes. No one ever has a meeting that starts at 5 or 10 or 14 minutes before or after the hour. You have no excuse not to do this. Time-wise, it doesn't even register.

Yet it is just long enough to give some aerobic benefit. Yes, half an hour would be better. An hour would be even better. But guess what? You won't do it. You might do it for 3 weeks, or maybe even 3 months, but you'll start to resent it and you'll quit. Do it for 14 minutes and you'll do it for a lifetime.

Respect the timer. When it goes off, you stop. It doesn't matter if you have a few reps left in your set. The sets and reps are just guidelines, the timer is the only hard parameter. Don't feel like you are doing something good, something extra, by continuing. You're just establishing a dangerous precedent which will make you that much less likely to start shovelgloving again the next time. By dragging the routine into schedulistic significance, you are just setting yourself up with a good excuse to skip it.

You are doing this for the long run. The goal is to form a lifelong habit, not to burn a few extra calories today. 14 minutes is habit friendly, and excuse proof. And 14 minutes will burn enough calories, build enough muscle, for long term health.

Don't look at the timer, that will drive you crazy. Just wait for the beep to go off. Extending the labor metaphor, think of it as the overseer's whistle.

Not exercising on weekends and holidays has several benefits. Your body needs rest. You get to enjoy your time off. And you're much less likely to take trips that interfere with your exercise schedule. It'll still happen, but (unless you travel a lot for business) less frequently. And who is really going to exercise on Christmas or Thanksgivings (or your religio-cultural equivalents)? You might as well make it official and spare yourself needless guilt.