Speaker A
Today we’re going to take a look at some of the exercises submitted by you, the people who actually want to know, asking whether or not these movements are worth doing… or not.
Analysis of arm wrestling exercises evaluating effectiveness, progressibility, and relevance for training, featuring Commando Pull Up and Bench Press.
Ask about this video. Answers come from its transcript only — with the timestamp, so you can check them.
Generated from the transcript and can be wrong — check the timestamp.
Key Takeaways
- Commando Pull Up is a useful, progressible exercise that targets key arm wrestling muscles with some advantages over standard pull ups.
- Bench Press can enhance side pressure and hook strength but carries potential shoulder injury risks requiring careful technique.
- Supination training is beneficial for elbow health and hook mechanics but may be efficiently combined with bicep curls.
- Exercise selection should be based on specific arm wrestling needs, progression potential, and practical training feasibility.
- Viewer engagement and shared experiences are valuable for refining arm wrestling training methods.
What the video covers
- The video reviews arm wrestling exercises submitted by viewers, assessing their value based on training specificity, progressibility, and common usage.
- Phil Woody's Commando Pull Up is analyzed as a valuable exercise targeting lats, upper back, core, and elbow flexors with potential benefits over regular pull ups.
- Bench Press is discussed for its role in building brute force side pressure and hook strength, but with caution regarding shoulder strain risks.
- Supination training is examined, noting its role in elbow health and hook movement, with suggestions to combine it with bicep curls for efficiency.
- The video highlights the importance of critically evaluating exercises for arm wrestling rather than following trends or flashy content.
- Exercises are judged on whether they train relevant body parts/movements better than alternatives, their ability to be progressed, and their prevalence in training.
- The towel side pressure move is introduced as a specific hook strengthening exercise, though the complexity of defining side pressure is acknowledged.
- The presenter emphasizes individual variability in exercise choice and encourages feedback from viewers on their training experiences.
- The video is part one of a series, with additional exercises to be covered in subsequent videos.
- Overall, the content blends biomechanical insight with practical training advice tailored for arm wrestlers.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction and criteria for evaluating exercises
- 00:42Commando Pull Up by Phil Woody
- 02:35Biomechanics and benefits of Commando Pull Up
- 02:55Bench Press and its relevance to arm wrestling
- 03:43Risks and considerations of Bench Press
- 04:31Supination training and its role
- 05:30Practical supination exercises and elbow health
- 06:43Challenges in defining side pressure and towel side pressure move
- 07:59Summary and preview of next exercises
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
Speaker A
Does the exercise actually train the body part, or movement that you want to train - and if so, does it do it better than any other exercise?
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Two. Is it consistent and progressible? Three, Do you actually see people doing it in their own training?
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This is especially useful with Armwrestling, especially in the modern age of clickbait and flashy videos combined with the creative ideas of Armwrestlers who seem to be brimming with new and interesting methods constantly to essentially just rehash the same old movements.
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So, onto the exercises submitted. From Phil Woody, one of the OGs of the sport - The Commando Pull Up.
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This is a variation of a standard pull up that puts the body parallel to the bar with a neutral but closer than normal grip, with the hands staggered one ahead of the other.
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The main difference between these and regular pullups, is that there is slightly more work placed on the arms, especially the brachialis and brachioradialis, since the grip is neutral.
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The back and surrounding muscles are all still working as they would in a standard neutral grip chin up, but one side is going to be working slightly harder than the other depending on which side your head will move around the bar.
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And, given this slightly offset position - the core is having to work harder to stabilise the body - which probably reduces the ability to swing and cheat, making it more work for the muscles involved.
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And, with that offset loading, the exercise could potentially be seen as a progression towards a single arm chin up.
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So, to the criteria. Does the exercise actually train the body part, or movement that you want to train - and if so, does it do it better than any other exercise?
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If your goal is to strengthen or hypertrophy the lats, upper back, serratus, core and elbow flexors or strengthen the upper body in general - then yes, the Commando Pullup will do this just fine.
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Do other pull up variations do it better? Not especially, since they are all very similar variations of the same thing.
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You could even argue that given the higher load on the arms and the ability to load one side more in each rep, they may be more useful for Armwrestlers.
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Is it consistent and progressible? Yes, just as much as any other chin up or pullup is.
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You can easily add weight and reps to the movement to progress in it over time.
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Do you actually see people doing it in their own training? Not as often as regular pull ups or chin ups, but that may be because Armwrestlers typically tend to do neutral grip chin ups that require two parallel handles, whereas a commando pull
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up requires a single bar with enough room at either side to clear the head, so the option may not be as available and the standard neutral grip chin up does just as well.
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So, to wrap up the Commando Pullup from Phil Woody - I’d say it is absolutely a valuable exercise for Armwrestlers, although not much more so than the pull up or chin up in general.
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Next, from Leaf - the Bench Press and Supination. The Bench Press is of course a classic exercise that everybody knows and almost everybody has probably done at some point in time.
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But is it especially beneficial for Armwrestling? Well I’d say it could be, especially for people needing more brute force side pressure and hook type strengths, since those rely heavily on strong internal rotation at the shoulder, which is reinforced by the chest, lats and internal shoulder muscles that the
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bench press strengthens very well. So, if your goal is a stronger chest, shoulders, triceps or internal rotation then yes, the bench press absolutely trains these.
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Are there other exercises that do the same thing? Yes, but the majority of them are variations of the bench press or through inversion the pushup, or with a vertical torso, dips.
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They all achieve similar goals very well, and whether or not those goals are useful to you as an Armwrestlers depends on your specific needs, but having a generally stronger upper body is certainly not a weakness.
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One possible downside is the amount of strain the bench press could place on the shoulder joint, given the need for relatively heavy loads to make the exercise effective and the potential for poor technique or general wear and tear type injuries, which of course would
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be an issue for pulling. So, while it may be a good exercise, it’s important as we said before to look critically at it and weigh up as many pros and cons as you can when deciding.
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Is it consistent and progressible? Yes, like most basic barbell exercises, you can add weight progressively and move through a clearly defined range of motion, assuming you don’t cheat yourself there.
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Do you actually see people doing it in their own training? We have seen many people doing the bench press in training, especially the heavier athletes and those who are able to recover from a lot more stimulus through exogenous supplementation.
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Is everybody doing it all the time? No, there are many top level athletes who do not do the exercise, so it’s really a personal choice and one you might need to experiment with to find out.
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And supination. I assume here you mean isolating supination as an exercise in the same way you can isolate pronation.
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First, we need to understand that supination is the responsibility of the bicep and the supinator muscle.
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Supination in this case is a dynamic movement rather than just the position of the arm.
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As you probably all know, it’s the opposite of pronation, moving the palm from facing down to facing up.
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So, you could isolate this movement just the same way that you isolate pronation, but reversed.
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However, since the majority of justifications I have heard for training supination seems to be in support of the hook movement, which is primarily wrist flexion, elbow flexion, internal rotation at the shoulder and ideally pronation, supination seems less of a priority
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to train. In the hook, the rotation of the forearm is often such that the bicep is more involved, and we do know that supination is partly a function of the bicep which we would want to strengthen anyway, but could we not save time, be more productive and potentially allow
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higher loading by simply strengthening supination alongside bicep driven elbow flexion - aka regular curls?
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Or, if we wanted more dynamic supination, we could do curls with active supination, maybe even with a belt or rope pulling from the bottom of the palms and forcing supination through the curl.
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Is it consistent and progressible? Yes, it could be if the exercise we use allows it, so there’s no real problem there.
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Again yes. I have seen a lot of people, especially hook dominant pullers training supination in some form or another, both statically through curls and dynamically with belts.
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You can also make a good case for it being important for elbow health, given the large amounts of pronation that the sport encourages.
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So, it could be useful, but again it’s very individual. If you’ve had any success training the movement, then let us know in the comments so we have more data points to work with.
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Backwards Fitness asks to take a look at Travis’ towel side pressure move. Here we start to get into the muddy waters where just movement and exercises for strength become a little messy.
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This exercise is clearly aimed to strengthen a tight hook, which depending on your definition could or could not be side pressure.
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Side pressure is quite a tricky movement to define, since it really covers any movement from the middle of the table over to your winning side, which could depend on all types of different things.
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But if we can narrow this movement down to being just a hook exercise, we have something more specific to analyse against.
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So, it is for all intents and purposes just the hook movement but done with a more foreign tool to resist the hook rather than just practising on the table.
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With the position that the towel is wrapped around, specifically around the wrist from above and below, passing under the hand - meaning wrist flexion and pronation is not really being challenged much at all, so this movement is only really targeting elbow flexion and
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internal rotation. As we mentioned before, there are exercises that do a better job of isolating and strengthening those functions - bicep curls and the bench press, or variations of these.
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If the case is that you need to learn how to perform the hook movement, you would probably be much better off practising it on the table with an opponent to learn as close to the ideal scenario as possible.
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Is it consistent and progressible? No, it really isn’t. At what point does the exercise begin or end?
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How do you add more or less resistance in any measurable way? Someone could pull heavier or lighter, but exactly how heavy are they pulling?
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Are they able to add only 5kg more resistance? If you really wanted to do the same exercise but with more consistent resistance, then you could replace the person either with a resistance band or a cable system connected to the towel - and you could just remove the towel entirely and switch to a handle to actually
Speaker A
involve wrist flexion and possibly even pronation. This particular version, no I have not seen elsewhere than here.
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But, it is quite similar to the way Voevoda used to train in some videos - and I have seen a lot of people pulling against bands and cables in a similar way, but usually with handles.
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So, Travis’ specific version doesn’t work that well as a long term exercise, but with some modification still holds some value.
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Mr. Peanut brought up an interesting exercise, and I quote: “This exercise is to improve your hit from the start.
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Tony Villa repurposed an old lawn mower engine to use the pull/start mechanism as a training device.
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After removing the engine from the lawn mower deck, he then rotated the engine 90 degrees & mounted it into the wall, with the starting handle slightly above the hand height when your elbow is on the table.
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Disable the spark and all done. Just push the table up to the wall when you want to use it.
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From a Ready/Go position you are pulling like you are trying to start the engine.
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As you hit the engine compressions ‘Hit’s’ back, the compression provides a building resistance. Very ingenious, easily made, cheap, you just need to find an old mower.” So, I’m guessing that this setup gives a progressively increasing resistance as the
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string stretches out against the internal coil and possibly hits a hard stop at a certain point.
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In which case this is another exercise that needs to be looked at differently than exercises done purely for strength or hypertrophy, since those are almost purely mechanical tension based whereas this is more movement speed and coordination based.
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This exercise then is not actually training a specific body part but is training a movement.
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So, it’s more like a drill you would see footballers do to work on specific skills rather than strength.
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And as a drill this seems a good one to work on an explosive start, but it could be reproduced more simply by just using resistance bands which when set up correctly will give little resistance at the start, allowing you to start very explosively and then build tension as
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you move further, forcing you to keep pulling with more force rather than letting the initial momentum carry you through the movement.
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But, is it consistent and progressible? This is where differences in types of movement begin to be exposed.
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If this were the same movement but done using a cable, then yes weight could just be increased over time, but at some point the weight would increase to a level that speed and movement slow down and change.
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Whereas the intention of this is purely to move quickly and correctly with weight being a very secondary concern.
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So, as a strength movement, this doesn’t really work, but as a practice drill, it could work very well, and if you did want to increase the resistance you could do it more easily using resistance bands, although this is deviating from the lawnmower example.
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And, if the lawnmower had a hard stop element which you would hit at a certain point, the movement would be similar to one we have seen Voevoda use briefly, which enters into the realm of isometric plyometrics which are an overlooked part of training that I aim to
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cover at some point. Hopefully. But essentially this would be a movement that allows a fast start and then hits the tendons with a hard crash into an isometric hold, which theoretically trains an ability to overcome resistance past the start, although the actuality of that is debatable.
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Obviously you, Mr Peanut have seen Tony Villa do it, and I’ve seen lots of very high level athletes do the same thing with resistance bands and it’s something I implement when getting closer to competition.
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So, despite the slight inconvenience of disassembling and mounting a lawn mower on the wall, the movement itself seems theoretically good, as long as you aren’t expecting strength or size to be gained from it.
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And I’m going to have to wrap that one up for today. I have more exercises suggested, which you can see here on the screen and I’ll go over those in the next video.
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But if anybody has any more weird or novel exercises that they’ve seen or heard about, write them in the comments so I can check them out and give my opinion on their validity.
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That’s it for today and I’ll see you next time.
Topics:arm wrestlingcommando pull upbench presssupination traininghook strengthside pressurearmwrestling exercisestraining progressionelbow healthstrength training
