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The Conjugate Method for Strongman 4: The Next Evolution
- JHEPCxTJH
- 17 hours ago
- 66 min read
Updated: 36 minutes ago
The Conjugate Method for Strongman: The Next Evolution (Precision, Peaking, and Real-World Application)
Over the last fifteen years, I’ve used Conjugate principles to build strongman athletes in the real world. In the places where kit availability is inconsistent, training weeks get interrupted, implements vary show to show, and “perfect conditions” are something you occasionally stumble into rather than something you can plan around.
That’s why this series exists.
The first three articles were the foundation. They laid out the core structure, the weekly rhythm, and the logic behind using Max Effort and Dynamic Effort work to build strength that actually carries over to events. They established the base framework for how I integrate strongman demands without turning training into a constant cycle of chasing fatigue and hoping it counts as progress.
This fourth instalment is the updated system as it stands now. It’s still Conjugate for strongman, but it reflects everything that’s been refined since those original posts went live. The principles have stayed consistent, yet the execution has become more precise. The waves are clearer, the decisions are easier to repeat, and the path from “training hard” to “being ready” has become far more deliberate.
If I could go back and rewrite the earlier parts with the tools I use today, this is the missing layer I’d add. Not because the original framework was incomplete, but because the system has expanded. The longer you run it, the more you learn what needs to be made explicit so that athletes can apply it with confidence rather than guessing.
That’s what this article is here to capture: what Conjugate for strongman looks like now, how to run it properly, and how to make it fit your training reality without losing the structure that makes it work.
Part 4 is the version of this system I actually coach with now. The weekly skeleton is the same, because that structure is what keeps strongman training sustainable and repeatable across an entire year. What’s changed is the precision inside it. The rules are clearer, the wave logic is easier to run without guessing, and the event work is built around outcomes rather than effort for its own sake. If you want Conjugate for strongman as a framework you can live inside, not just a template you try for a few weeks, this is the missing layer that makes it work.
You can read the original series here:
I also need to mention that the original Conjugate for Strongman ebook has now been discontinued. It did its job, it helped a lot of people, and it played a huge role in shaping what came next. Since then, the full system has been rebuilt and expanded into a much deeper ecosystem of resources, including complete frameworks for weekly structure, event integration, rotation logic, and peaking strategies that let you aim at a specific outcome instead of hoping one appears.
What Conjugate for Strongman Actually Means
Conjugate for Strongman, as I run it, is a year-round system for building strength that survives contact with the sport. It’s built around the reality that strongman never gives you the same conditions twice: the implements change, the pick heights change, the pace changes, the terrain changes, the events change, and your schedule changes with it.
So instead of trying to force strongman into a tidy powerlifting template, the method gives you a weekly structure that can absorb that chaos without losing momentum. The goal is simple: build a high ceiling of strength, build the ability to express it fast and repeatedly, build the muscle and joint resilience to keep training, and keep event performance moving forward at the same time. Max Effort work drives the ceiling. Dynamic Effort work keeps you explosive, crisp, and able to produce output when you’re not fresh. Accessory work fills the structural gaps that strongman exposes the moment you touch awkward objects. Event work is trained on purpose, with clear exposure, progression, and intent, rather than being thrown in at random or treated as a weekly body test. That’s the difference.
Westside’s template is the starting point, not the finished product.. It ain’t “a powerlifting programme plus events” as an afterthought. It also is not a series of heavy sessions with bands slapped on the bar to make it look like a system. It’s a framework that trains multiple qualities concurrently, rotates demands to keep adaptation moving, and lets you progress week to week and block to block while staying healthy enough to actually make it to the platform. When it works, it doesn’t just make you stronger in the gym. It makes you hard to break, hard to gas, and hard to beat.
The Non-Negotiable Weekly Skeleton
Once you understand what Conjugate for Strongman actually is, the next thing you need is the weekly skeleton. Not an example week. Not a nice-looking spreadsheet. The actual structure that everything hangs off, because this is the part that makes the system repeatable and it’s the part that keeps you progressing when strongman starts doing what strongman always does: changing the rules on you mid-season.
This is the backbone I come back to over and over, across off-season, pre-season, and competition prep. The emphasis inside each day can shift massively depending on what you’re building, what you’re recovering from, what kit you’ve got access to, and what events are coming up, but the skeleton stays the same because it covers the whole sport. It covers your ceiling strength. It covers your speed and repeatability. It covers your ability to handle awkward objects. It covers your conditioning and durability. It stops you from training like you’re constantly auditioning for a highlight reel, and it stops your week turning into a messy pile of “hard stuff” that you can’t recover from.
Here’s the default split:
Max Effort Lower
Max Effort Upper
Dynamic Effort Lower + Moving Events
Dynamic Effort Upper + Loading Events / Event Practice + GPP
That is the spine of Conjugate Strongman as I run it. Everything else is just the details that sit on top.
Max Effort Lower
Max Effort Lower is where you build the raw output that strongman relies on even when people pretend it doesn’t. Strongman is full of skill, yes, but skill has a ceiling. When the weight is heavy enough, every event becomes a strength event, and this is the day that raises that ceiling.
This session exists for one job: push your lower body strength forward in a way that carries over to pulling, squatting, picking, bracing, and driving under load. It’s where you develop force production that you can’t fake with adrenaline. The variations change based on what you need and what you’re trying to protect, but the intent is consistent. You’re taking one main movement pattern and training it hard enough to create a real neurological and structural stimulus, then you’re reinforcing the weak links that would otherwise cap your progress or get you hurt.
Max Effort Lower also protects you from one of the most common strongman traps: thinking that events alone will build all your strength. Events are specific, and specificity is powerful, but it’s also narrow. If you only build strength through the events, you end up with a ceiling that’s determined by how well your joints tolerate the implements, how frequently you can take heavy exposures without breaking down, and how lucky you get with fatigue and inflammation. Max Effort Lower gives you a controlled way to drive strength upward without needing to throw yourself into a max stone load every weekend to feel like you’re training properly.
This is also where your posterior chain gets treated like a requirement rather than a slogan. Strongman punishes weak hamstrings, weak hips, a soft midline, and a brace that can’t survive repeated efforts. The Max Effort Lower day is where those things get built with intent, because they’re not optional qualities in this sport.
Max Effort Upper
Max Effort Upper is where you build pressing strength and upper body robustness in a way that feeds the sport rather than draining it. Strongman pressing isn’t just about having a big bench or a big overhead number on a good day. It’s about being able to express force through awkward implements, in compromised positions, under fatigue, without your shoulders slowly falling apart over the course of the year.
This day is where you train your highest-output upper body pattern for that phase. Sometimes that’s a straight bar bench variation to build absolute strength and triceps dominance. Sometimes it’s a log or axle exposure to keep specificity in the system. Sometimes it’s an incline, a floor press, a close grip, a Swiss bar, a pin press, or something that solves a technical bottleneck while still letting you strain hard.
The purpose stays the same: raise your ceiling, sharpen your top-end strength, and build the structures that keep you pressing year-round. Done properly, Max Effort Upper stops strongman athletes from becoming the classic story of “great overhead for a few months, then shoulders cooked, then no pressing at all.” You’re not just trying to hit a number. You’re building a system that lets you keep showing up, keep progressing, and keep pressing heavy implements without your elbows and shoulders becoming the limiting factor long before your actual strength does.
This session also protects your event days. When upper body max effort work has a home, and it’s intelligently rotated, you no longer need to do what most strongman athletes accidentally do, which is turn event training into a second max effort day every week. Your top-end pressing output is handled here. That means your event exposures can be more technical, more repeatable, and more productive.
In my own programming, this is also where heavy overhead event exposure usually lives, especially when the competition demand is a proper “from the floor” press. Log FTOH and axle FTOH are a perfect fit for Max Effort Upper because they let you strain hard in a way that is specific to strongman without turning the entire week into an event-only gamble. You get the full technical sequence, the clean, the rack position, the dip and drive, the finish, all under meaningful load, and you can progress it like an actual main lift rather than treating it like a once-a-week test of survival. When those implements matter, I want them in the slot where heavy intent belongs, with the session built around them properly, and with the accessories chosen to support the exact positions that determine whether the rep is smooth or whether you get stapled at eye level and end up fighting it into lockout.
Max Effort Lower can also take an event exposure at the end when it makes sense and when it doesn’t sabotage the session. This is where you earn the right to be practical. If the main lift and supplemental work have already done their job, and you’ve still got something left to give, you can finish with a small dose of event-specific work that reinforces what you’re building rather than competing with it. Sandbag tossing is a great example because it gives you speed, extension, timing, and aggression without needing you to take a maximal beating. It’s a fast, explosive finish that teaches you to express lower body power violently and repeatedly, and it fits nicely as a short, controlled add-on without dragging the whole day into a two-hour circus. The rule is simple: the event goes in after the work that matters, it stays within a pre-set dose, and it leaves you better for next week rather than wrecked for the next session.
Dynamic Effort Lower + Moving Events
Dynamic Effort Lower is where strongman athletes start feeling like athletes again. It’s the session that builds speed, rate of force development, rhythm under the bar, and the ability to hit clean reps without needing half an hour of psyching up. It also builds something that doesn’t get respected enough in strongman until it’s missing: repeatability. The ability to produce force repeatedly, not once.
This matters because strongman isn’t one maximal rep followed by a sit down. Even when an event is “for max,” you rarely get to approach it like a powerlifting single with full rest and perfect setup. When an event is for reps, or for distance, or in a medley, your ability to keep producing output while fatigue accumulates is often what separates “strong” from “competitive.”
This is also why this day pairs so well with moving events. Moving events are one of the biggest fatigue sinks in the sport. Yoke, farmers, frame, sleds, drags, heavy carries, anything where the goal is to move fast under load, these demand force and conditioning at the same time. If you treat them like a max test every session, you will get strong and tired in equal measure, right up until your recovery stops keeping up and the wheels come off. Pairing them with Dynamic Effort Lower solves that problem because the emphasis is already on speed, intent, crispness, and controlled exposure.
In other words, Dynamic Effort Lower protects you from destroying your week with moving events.
It also creates a clean division of labour across the training week. Your heavy lower-body strain lives on Max Effort Lower. Your speed and explosive intent lives here. Your moving events get trained alongside the day that supports them best. That keeps your loading exposures and your pressing exposures from turning into a mess of overlapping fatigue that you can’t manage.
On a practical level, this is the day that keeps your hips and knees feeling alive. It keeps your start positions sharp. It keeps your ability to accelerate under load from disappearing. It makes you more efficient at producing force quickly, which is the difference between a yoke run that feels like controlled violence and one that turns into a slow-motion grind that drains you for the rest of the week.
Dynamic Effort Upper + Loading Events / Event Practice + GPP
Dynamic Effort Upper is where strongman pressing stops being a purely “grind and hope” experience. It’s where bar speed, timing, technical sharpness, and repeatable pressing output are trained with a purpose. For strongman athletes, this is about building a press that doesn’t rely on a perfect day to work. It’s about keeping the nervous system fast enough that implements don’t feel glued to you the moment you’re slightly fatigued. It’s about giving your shoulders and elbows a dose of quality work that reinforces mechanics without beating them up.
And this is why it pairs so naturally with loading events and event practice.
Loading events, stones, sandbags, kegs, natural objects, series work, platforms, these are physically expensive. They’re awkward. They’re high output. They’re position-dependent. They require bracing, extension, and strength endurance at the same time. They also smash people when they’re trained carelessly. The fatigue they generate isn’t just muscular, it’s connective tissue, it’s systemic, it’s the kind of fatigue that makes your next lower session feel like your spine is made of damp cardboard if you mismanage it.
When you run loading alongside Dynamic Effort Upper, you get two benefits straight away.
First, you’re placing loading on a day that is already designed around controlled output and repeatability, rather than stacking it on top of Max Effort Lower and hoping you survive it. Second, you’re keeping the weekly stress distribution sane. Heavy lower strain sits on one day. Moving event fatigue sits beside speed lower. Loading fatigue sits beside speed upper. The whole week breathes better.
Then you finish this day with GPP. GPP as the thing that keeps you training year-round. Strongman is a sport where the training itself is the conditioning, but the athletes who last and keep progressing are the ones who have the engine to recover from their own training. GPP is what expands that engine. It’s the difference between being strong in isolated sessions and being strong as a lifestyle.
This is the day where you build the work capacity to handle a full training cycle. It’s where you keep the trunk strong under fatigue. It’s where you keep the upper back from becoming decorative. It’s where you build the kind of durability that lets you peak without feeling like you’re falling apart by week six.
Why the skeleton matters more than the details
Strongman athletes love details. They love implements, variation, cool bars, weird medleys, PR attempts, new toys. That’s part of what makes the sport fun. It’s also exactly why people end up with training weeks that feel exciting but don’t build anything stable. The skeleton fixes that. It makes the week intelligible. It makes it predictable enough to recover from. It makes progress measurable again.
When you keep this structure intact, you can change the inside of the sessions without losing the method. You can rotate variations without losing the plot. You can shift emphasis toward pressing, toward deadlift, toward moving events, toward loading, toward overhead, without rewriting your entire identity every four weeks. That’s the whole point. The system isn’t rigid, it’s reliable. It gives you enough structure to keep progressing, and enough flexibility to deal with strongman’s chaos without making chaos your training philosophy.
That’s what this split protects. It protects your progress. It protects your joints. It protects your ability to train consistently. It protects the year.
And if you can protect the year, you can build a strongman athlete properly.
Once the week is fixed, the next lever is how you run the speed and skill exposures inside it. This is where the system stops being a schedule and starts being a process, because Dynamic Effort work isn’t just there to fill a slot. It’s the place you build bar speed, rhythm, and repeatable execution without stacking more joint cost on top of your heaviest work. If Max Effort days raise the ceiling, these sessions are where you make that strength usable in strongman conditions, and where you keep it alive across an entire season.
Dynamic Effort: The Updated Wave Logic
Dynamic Effort work is the part of Conjugate that strongman athletes either ignore completely or misunderstand so badly that it becomes a wasted day. They’ll either treat it like optional speed fluff that sits somewhere beneath “real training”, or they’ll turn it into a sloppy, half-arsed heavy session where the bar moves slowly, the rest periods drift, and the only thing that changes is how tired they feel afterwards. Neither approach gives you what Dynamic Effort is actually for, and in strongman, that matters more than people realise. Because strongman doesn’t just reward strength. It rewards strength that can be expressed quickly, repeatedly, and under conditions that are never perfectly set up. The sport constantly asks you to produce output when your heart rate is already up, when your feet aren’t in the position you’d choose, when your grip is fried from the last event, and when the implement doesn’t move like a barbell. Dynamic Effort is where you train that ability on purpose, rather than hoping it appears because you’ve done enough heavy work.
At this point I also need to update how I speak about these sessions, because “Dynamic Effort” is accurate, but incomplete. In the way I run it now, DE days are also Developmental Effort days. The speed work is the spine, but the real value is the development of skill, rhythm, timing, and repeatable execution. On paper the lifts look simple. In practice these sessions are where you build the qualities that make your Max Effort strength usable on events. This is where your technique becomes automatic. This is where the bar path gets cleaned up without you overthinking it. This is where you learn to generate force fast and stay organised while doing it. It’s where you get good at doing good reps, not just hard reps. That’s the part that people miss, and it’s the reason Dynamic Effort becomes the hidden engine of the whole week when you commit to it properly.
The updated system is built around three-week waves, because three weeks is long enough to create a clear training effect and short enough to rotate constraints before staleness sets in. A DE wave isn’t just “do speed squats for a bit.” It’s a planned exposure where the demands are controlled. The loads are appropriate. The intent stays consistent. Then the constraints rotate and you start a fresh wave with a slightly different demand profile. That rotation is what keeps you progressing without turning every week into a repeated test of the same outcome. This is the part that makes Dynamic Effort repeatable and scalable across a year, rather than being something you run for a month, get bored, and replace with more heavy work until your elbows and hips start talking back.
Within those waves, you’ll typically see one of three progressions. The classic approach is straight weight for three weeks, then bands for three weeks, then chains for three weeks, which gives you a full nine-week run where the same basic movement is trained under three different resistance profiles. That’s a long enough exposure to build something meaningful without needing to change everything every session. Another option is to run straight weight, then bands, then chains across a single three-week wave, one per week, which works well when you’re in a phase where you need more frequent variation and you’re trying to keep the nervous system sharp without accumulating too much fatigue from any one constraint. The third option, and the one I use more often than people expect, is to keep the setup consistent and run the wave with a bar speed emphasis, where the progression is driven by execution quality, speed targets, and intent rather than chasing load jumps. That’s a powerful approach for strongman athletes because the sport is full of situations where the deciding factor isn’t “how much can you lift in perfect conditions”, it’s “how much can you move fast enough to win.”
In practice, that wave structure plugs into the week in a very consistent way. On Dynamic Effort Lower, you’ll usually see a fast squat pattern and a fast pull pattern, because that combination builds the exact qualities strongman demands without turning the day into a second Max Effort session. That might mean banded speed squats, box squats, or a straight weight speed squat variation, followed by speed deadlifts that match what you’re trying to develop at the time, whether that’s starting strength, positional discipline, or simply the ability to pull clean reps on a tight clock. On Dynamic Effort Upper, the same logic applies, just expressed through the implements and positions that matter most in strongman. This is where I’ll often run log work as the primary speed movement, either log from the floor when we need to keep the clean sharp and build fast leg drive into lockout, or banded log from the rack when the goal is to drill the press itself with high-quality, repeatable reps and less accumulated fatigue. You can do the same thing with axle, and depending on the phase and the athlete, I’ll rotate axle against chains to change the demand profile while still keeping the intent consistent, because the goal isn’t to collect random variations, it’s to keep the press fast, crisp, and technically stable while the exposure progresses wave to wave.
When it comes to actual loading, Dynamic Effort lives in ranges that are deliberately submaximal, but not meaningless. You’re usually working somewhere around the broad territory of roughly fifty to seventy percent of your best lift for that variation, depending on the movement, the athlete, the phase, and whether accommodating resistance is being used. If you’re using bands or chains, the bar weight itself is often lower because the resistance increases where you’re strongest and changes the total demand across the rep. If you’re using straight weight, the load can come up slightly as long as bar speed stays honest. And that’s the real rule that matters: Dynamic Effort does not care what the spreadsheet says if the bar is slow. You can’t claim speed work while grinding. If you feel yourself turning it into a strength endurance session, you’ve missed the point and you’re no longer training the quality that DE exists to build.
This is also why rest periods and set structure matter. Dynamic Effort is not a bodybuilding session where you chase a pump and fill time. It’s not conditioning disguised as squats. The goal is repeated fast outputs with consistent mechanics, which means you need enough rest to produce speed, but not so much rest that you turn it into a one-rep showcase. In practice, you should finish a DE session feeling like you did work, but you should not feel like you’ve survived something. Your joints should not feel battered. Your nervous system should feel switched on. Your technique should feel sharper at the end than it did at the start. That’s how you know you’re in the right place.
Where Dynamic Effort changes depending on the phase of training is primarily in the balance between development and expression. In the off-season, DE is where you earn your future performance. The emphasis is on building the actual qualities, cleaning up mechanics, raising baseline speed, reinforcing positions, and making sure your reps look the same from set one to set ten. You can run longer waves, you can take more developmental volume, and you can use the session to iron out technical constraints that have been hiding behind brute strength. The weight doesn’t need to be heavy, because the goal is to build skill and output that you can repeat. It’s the session that keeps you athletic while you build the engine elsewhere.
As you move closer to competition, Dynamic Effort becomes more about expression. You still keep the intent and speed, but you tighten the dose. You sharpen rather than build. The waves get more specific. The skill work becomes more event-relevant. The set choices become more deliberate, because at that point you aren’t trying to create a new capacity from scratch, you’re trying to make sure the capacity you’ve built can be accessed on demand. This is one of the reasons Conjugate works so well for strongman when it’s applied properly. The system already includes the mechanism for staying fast and sharp while intensity elsewhere rises, which means you don’t have to sacrifice your movement quality just to feel “strong enough.”
It’s also important to understand that pairing events with DE days doesn’t mean the events are automatically light. The DE label refers to the intent and structure of the main lift, not a promise that the whole session will feel easy. There are absolutely phases where the event work on those days is heavier, more demanding, and much closer to what you’ll face in competition, because that’s how you bridge the gap between being strong in the gym and being ready on the day. Early in a block, the event exposure might be more technical, more rhythmic, and more speed-led, where the priority is clean movement and repeatable execution. As you move into competition prep, that same slot becomes the place where you earn specificity: heavier runs, heavier picks, harder series work, tighter rest periods, and a more honest rehearsal of what the event will actually feel like. The difference is that even when the events are heavy, they’re still managed with rules and intent. You’re building performance, not just taking a beating, and placing that work on DE days gives it a natural home alongside the qualities that make heavy events successful, which are speed, coordination, transitions, and the ability to keep producing output under fatigue.
Dynamic Effort is where you build the opposite skill. It’s where speed becomes a habit. It’s where rhythm becomes familiar. It’s where transitions become smooth because you practise them under controllable conditions. It’s where you build fatigue tolerance without turning every week into a war of attrition. It is the session that teaches you how to stay organised when you’re moving quickly, and that matters in a sport where half the battle is simply staying coordinated while everything feels heavy.
If Max Effort is where you raise the ceiling, Dynamic Effort is where you stop that ceiling being theoretical. It’s where strength turns into movement. It’s where you develop a body that can accelerate, stabilise, and repeat output without falling apart. It’s where you build a strongman athlete rather than just a strong person who sometimes does events.
Events
The biggest mistake strongman athletes make with programming is treating events as something that sits outside the actual plan. Almost everyone understands that you need to train the events, but far fewer people understand where they belong inside a training week, how hard they should be, and what they’re supposed to achieve at different stages of a season. When you get that wrong, you end up with weeks that look impressive on paper but don’t build anything stable. You also end up with the kind of fatigue that never quite resolves, the kind of “always sore, always flat” training cycle where you’re constantly doing a lot and improving very little. The updated philosophy is simple and it’s practical: events are part of the system, not something you bolt on when you’ve got spare time, spare energy, or spare motivation.
In the way I run Conjugate for Strongman now, the first rule is placement. You don’t put events wherever they fit. You put them where they make sense relative to the stress of the week and the qualities you’re trying to build. That’s why moving events belong beside Dynamic Effort Lower and loading events belong beside Dynamic Effort Upper. Moving events such as yoke, farmers, frame, sleds, and drags are neurologically demanding, structurally demanding, and incredibly exposing of positioning, bracing, and rhythm under load. They also carry a high systemic cost when they’re done heavy and fast, which they often need to be if you’re going to perform well in competition. Pairing them with DE Lower gives them a home beside the lower body speed work that supports them, and it keeps your week from collapsing under the weight of two separate lower-body strain days. Loading events such as stones, sandbags, kegs, series work, and platform loads carry their own unique cost profile, but they behave differently. They demand upper back strength, trunk control, and repeated extension. They also tend to punish you through accumulation rather than one single moment of strain. Pairing them with DE Upper gives you a consistent place to train them without forcing them to compete directly with your heaviest lower body work, and it keeps your upper body training connected to the real requirements of the sport rather than drifting into a detached pressing-only week.
The second rule is that events are programmed as a progression, not as a series of weekly max tests. There are times when you will take a heavy event exposure for a true top set, a top single, or a heavy run, especially when you need to test readiness, lock in confidence, or rehearse a specific competitive outcome. That has its place. But when events become a weekly trial by combat, the training stops being a plan and starts being a repeated stress test. In the short term you feel tough. In the longer term you accumulate fatigue you can’t account for, you start carrying soreness and joint irritation from session to session, your speed drops, and you lose the ability to actually improve the skill component of the event because you’re always surviving it rather than training it. Strongman isn’t a sport where you can just keep turning the dial up and expect the body to tolerate it indefinitely. Events are too specific, too awkward, and too expensive when they’re done heavy all the time. The system gives you a way to build them intelligently without needing to live at the edge every week.
The third rule is that event training lives on a spectrum, and it moves along that spectrum depending on where you are in the season. Early on, event work might be skill exposure. That means the goal is familiarity, patterning, and the ability to perform the movement cleanly without the session turning into a grind. You learn the implement. You learn the pick. You learn the footwork. You learn how to breathe and brace without panicking. You build positions that you’ll later have to hold under higher loads. As you move through the block, that exposure becomes a build phase. You still respect technique, but the work becomes more progressive. Loads rise. distances extend. Series become longer. Rest periods tighten. You start developing the specific strength endurance and repeatability that strongman punishes people for not having. Then, as you move into competition prep, the event work becomes specific peaking. This is where you shift towards the exact competition demands, the exact pace, the exact implements if possible, and the exact execution that will be required on the day. The work becomes more like rehearsal. Not mindless rehearsal, and not constant maxing, but a deliberate narrowing where the body and brain learn what the day will feel like and what they need to produce.
Now you always know what your event work is trying to accomplish. You aren’t doing yoke because you “should” do yoke. You’re doing yoke for a reason. You aren’t loading stones because you haven’t touched them in a week and you feel guilty. You’re loading stones with a clear aim, in a dose that fits the week, in a way that builds something you can actually use. The structure keeps you honest. It forces you to decide whether the event session is a technical practice, a developmental exposure, or a peak-specific rehearsal, and that one decision shapes everything else about the day.
If you want a simple translation line that makes the logic obvious, it’s this: Dynamic Effort days build movement quality and repeatability. Max Effort days build ceiling strength. Events teach you how to express it. That’s the entire method in motion. Without ME work, you cap your ceiling and eventually the events outgrow your base strength. Without DE work, you get slower, more grind-dependent, and less repeatable. Without event work, you become strong in ways the sport doesn’t always reward. Strongman performance sits in the overlap, and the reason this structure works so consistently is because it keeps those pieces feeding into each other instead of competing for space in your week.
This is also why the “just go heavy on events sometimes” approach doesn’t last. It creates progress when you’re fresh and motivated, but it doesn’t create a system you can live inside for a year. Moving events in particular punish that approach because they don’t just demand strength, they demand timing, speed, confidence under load, and the ability to stay composed while everything feels like it wants to knock you off line. Those qualities aren’t built by occasionally trying something heavy and hoping it carries over. They’re built by training the events with structure, with progression, and with enough repetition that performance becomes normal rather than accidental.
The ‘Block’ Goals: Strength / Skill / Peak and what actually changes
Most athletes can understand a training week. They can look at a split, see where the heavy work goes, see where the speed work goes, see where the events live, and they can follow that structure with confidence. Where things start to fall apart is when you zoom out and try to steer the year. Strongman isn’t a sport where you run one plan forever and hope the calendar sorts itself out. The events shift, the demands shift, your recovery shifts, and your priorities have to shift with them. So for the sake of making this practical, I’m going to use the word block here, not because Conjugate lives and dies by rigid block periodisation, but because it gives us a simple language for describing what the current focus is. Max Effort and Dynamic Effort work stay in. The structure stays recognisable. What changes is emphasis, specificity, and the way we dose event exposure relative to the rest of the week.
After fifteen years of doing this with real athletes and real competition schedules, the pattern is always the same. The lifters who progress the fastest aren’t the ones with the most perfect training weeks, they’re the ones who can keep the training week intact while the variables around it change. That’s what this system is built for. It gives you a structure that holds up when the sport gets messy, and it gives you a way to shift emphasis through the year without turning every new phase into a complete restart.
A useful way to think about this is that Conjugate for Strongman is always doing the same job, just at different magnifications. You’re always building a foundation that supports performance. You’re always raising the ceiling when it needs raising. You’re always keeping the body fast and repeatable. You’re always practising the events so that your strength has somewhere to go. The difference is that across a 12 to 15 week stretch of training, you’ll usually find yourself living in one of three dominant identities, and knowing which one you’re in makes the whole system easier to apply. It stops you from chasing everything at once, and it stops you from drifting into “busy training” where you do a lot of work but can’t explain what the work is meant to be producing.
The first identity is general strength development, and this is where most strongman athletes should spend more time than they think. This phase is about building the engine. It’s about making your base strength larger, making your muscle mass more useful, and building enough capacity that you can handle the training week without constantly having to reduce something. Max Effort work still drives progress, and Dynamic Effort work still keeps you explosive and technically sharp, but the variation selection is broader and the accessories do a lot of heavy lifting. Events are still present, because you don’t want to lose touch with the sport, but they’re controlled. That control might look like shorter runs, lighter loads, more emphasis on clean movement, or fewer event slots per week, depending on what the athlete needs. This is also where weaknesses get attacked properly, in a way that actually changes what you’re capable of. Posterior chain strength, trunk capacity, upper back strength, pressing structure, grip, conditioning, the things that make strongman feel stable rather than chaotic, this is where they get built. It’s the reason you can later handle heavier events without your body getting progressively more irritated every week.
The second identity is event skill development, and this is where the system starts leaning more strongly toward the sport without abandoning the training qualities that keep you improving. In this phase, events move up the priority list, not because you suddenly stop caring about strength, but because the event skill is what needs the most attention. This is where implements become more specific, technical volume increases, and the session design starts looking more like rehearsal and practice rather than pure loading. You’re still running Max Effort work and Dynamic Effort work because those qualities are what keep your training progressing, but the main lifts and the variations chosen often begin to match the movement problems the events are presenting. You might press with the actual log more often. You might pull from a height that matches the frame. You might squat in a way that reinforces bracing and posture that carries into the yoke. You might use constraints and simulations more deliberately, because at this stage they’re more useful than simply adding load. This is where the athlete learns to move efficiently, transition smoothly, and stay organised under fatigue. It’s also where a lot of strongman performance is won, because the difference between a good athlete and a great one is often the ability to stay fast, accurate, and confident while the implement is trying to pull them out of position.
The third identity is competition peaking, and this is where the whole system tightens up. Specificity rises, not just in terms of the events themselves, but in the rhythm and demands of the sessions. The point here is not to become the strongest version of yourself in a general sense. The point is to express what you already have in the exact format the competition is going to demand. Max Effort work is still present, but it becomes more selective and more strategic. Dynamic Effort work stays in, but the volume and constraints are managed so that speed and sharpness are maintained without carrying unnecessary fatigue. Event work becomes more like a deliberate rehearsal, and the fatigue margin becomes sacred, because strongman competitions don’t reward the athlete who trained the hardest in the final fortnight. They reward the athlete who turns up sharp, healthy enough to attack every event, and rehearsed enough that nothing feels unfamiliar. Execution becomes the goal. The best sessions in this phase often look almost too clean. They’re not chaotic. They’re not dramatic. They’re precise. You finish knowing exactly where you are, exactly what you can do, and exactly what you need to preserve.
What matters most is understanding how these identities connect, because the system is not about flipping a switch from “strength phase” to “event phase” to “peak phase” as if they’re separate worlds. Your approach with events, and with everything else in the week, is to build a foundation first, then find an appropriate maximal strength level relative to the demands of the athlete and the competition, and then get specific from there. If your foundation is too small, event specificity just teaches you how to suffer with weights you’re not strong enough to dominate. If your ceiling strength is far beyond what the competition requires, you don’t need to keep chasing it at the expense of event execution and fatigue management. The job of the system is to balance those pieces honestly. Build the base. Raise the ceiling to what the sport demands. Then specialise so that what you’ve built can be expressed when it matters.
This is stable enough to run year-round, and flexible enough to emphasise what you need at the right time. Once you understand which identity you’re in and what that identity is meant to produce, you stop being someone who runs a template and you become someone who can run a system.
The New Layer: Constraint-based Rotation
One of the most persistent misunderstandings around Conjugate, especially when it gets filtered through strongman culture, is the idea that variation means randomness. As if the method is built on novelty for the sake of novelty. As if the point is to do a different lift every week because it keeps training exciting, or because it makes the programme look sophisticated, or because you saw a list of “Westside exercises” and decided to spin a wheel. That has never been what Conjugate is. Not in the original form, not in the way I’ve used it for the last fifteen years, and not in the way I coach it now. Variation has always been purposeful. The difference is that I’m now hammering that purpose home harder than ever, because strongman athletes need to understand this if they want Conjugate to become a system they can run long-term rather than a phase they flirt with for a few weeks.
Variation, in this framework, is not “different lifts every week.” It’s not “whatever bar I feel like.” It’s not an Instagram rotation where the goal is to collect cool exercises and give yourself the impression you’re doing something advanced. Variation is a constraint. It is a deliberate change in the demand that forces a specific adaptation, while keeping the underlying pattern familiar enough that you can still build it, track it, and progress it. A constraint can be as simple as changing bar position, range of motion, stance, implement, or start position. It can be a tempo demand that forces you to stay organised, accommodating resistance that changes the strength curve, or a time or density target that changes how repeatable the work has to be. The pattern stays familiar enough that progress is real. The demand shifts enough that adaptation has to occur. That’s why this approach works so well in strongman, because the sport itself is defined by constraints you don’t get to negotiate. The point is never to make training look clever. The point is to solve a problem while you build strength.
That’s why Conjugate variation works when it’s applied properly to strongman. Strongman exposes you. It exposes weak positions, weak links, weak postures, weak transitions, weak bracing, weak grip, weak upper back, weak hips, weak triceps, weak confidence under awkward loads, and weak ability to repeat output when you’re breathing through your teeth. The job of variation is to take that list of exposures and turn it into targeted training decisions. You aren’t rotating movements to avoid progress. You’re rotating movements to keep progress moving while the body stays healthy enough to accumulate weeks and months of real work. The pattern stays close enough to build skill and output. The demand changes enough to force adaptation. That balance is the entire reason variation is useful.
This is also why the best Conjugate programming doesn’t start with the exercise list. It starts with the diagnosis. What are you failing on? Where does the lift break down? What does the event demand that you’re currently not producing? What position are you losing when you fatigue? What part of the movement is costing you time, energy, or confidence? Once you can answer that, variation becomes obvious. The lift selection becomes a decision, not a preference. It’s the difference between a programme that looks busy and a programme that actually builds.
If your variation choice doesn’t solve a problem, it’s decoration. That doesn’t mean it has to be boring. It doesn’t mean you can’t use aggressive variations or weird setups. Reverse band Hatfield squats with chains are completely fine, and in the right context they can be an incredible tool. The only requirement is that the choice has a purpose. Maybe you need to overload the top end safely because your lockout strength is behind your start strength. Maybe you need to build confidence under heavier loading without smashing your spine. Maybe you need to teach yourself to stay upright and organised while you move load fast. Maybe you need more total tonnage in a pattern without the same joint cost. In those cases, the variation is doing a job, and because it has a job, it becomes trackable, repeatable, and coachable. It stops being a gimmick and becomes a lever you can pull.
This is where the system starts to feel less like a template and more like a decision tree. A template tells you what to do. A decision tree tells you how to choose. It gives you rules that scale with the athlete, the season, the kit available, and the constraints of real life. Once you understand that variation is constraint-based, Conjugate becomes far easier to apply to strongman because strongman itself is a sport of constraints. You’re always dealing with imperfect objects, imperfect conditions, and imperfect recovery. A system that can adapt without losing structure is exactly what you need, and constraint-based rotation is the mechanism that makes it possible.
The practical outcome of this is that your training stops being an endless chase for novelty and starts becoming a controlled process of solving problems. You rotate movements to target what’s limiting you. You rotate demands to keep progress moving. You keep the pattern familiar enough that the strength is real. You manage the stress so you can train through the year rather than burning out in cycles of enthusiasm and collapse. That’s what variation is doing in Conjugate for Strongman, and when you treat it that way, the method stops being misunderstood and starts being unstoppable.
The Updated “How To Peak Anything” Layer
If the first three articles in this series were about building the foundation of Conjugate for strongman, this is the layer that turns that foundation into something you can steer on purpose. Because there’s a difference between training hard and getting stronger over time, and being able to aim your training at a specific date, a specific event line-up, and a specific performance outcome, then arrive there ready. The earlier series explains the structure, the logic of Max Effort and Dynamic Effort work, and how events can live inside that system without turning your training into chaos. What’s changed since then, and what has matured the entire approach, is the way I now think about peaking. Not as a separate “phase” that appears once a year. Not as a last-minute deload where you rest for a week and hope your body turns into a weapon again. Peaking becomes something you can produce on demand, because the system is built out of repeatable units that can be stacked, adjusted, and aimed.
The simplest way to explain this is that three-week waves are not just a Dynamic Effort tool. They’re the universal unit of sharpening and peaking across the whole system. This is one of the most useful realisations you can have as a strongman athlete, because it gives you a consistent rhythm for progress without needing to reinvent the wheel every time you want to perform well. A three-week wave is long enough to create a clear training effect, long enough to run an exposure progression, long enough to practise something and make it tighter, long enough to feel a measurable shift in execution. It’s also short enough that you can change the constraint before fatigue, staleness, and joint irritation start building up in a way that clouds the signal. In strongman terms, it’s long enough to improve a movement, but not so long that you get trapped in a single groove and start leaking performance elsewhere.
Once you understand three-week waves as universal units, Conjugate becomes far easier to direct. You stop seeing the programme as a weekly schedule that repeats until you get bored, and you start seeing it as a sequence of exposures that can be organised toward outcomes. You still have Max Effort and Dynamic Effort work. You still have event training paired with DE days. None of that goes away. What changes is that instead of running those pieces indefinitely and hoping the timing works out, you begin stacking waves to produce readiness at the exact moment you need it.
This is also where strongman peaking becomes fundamentally different to the way many people think about peaking for a barbell lift. In powerlifting, you can often run one unified taper. You want the same thing on the platform every time: maximal expression of squat, bench, and deadlift. The competition day is predictable. The lifts are stable. The implements don’t change. The movement patterns are tightly controlled. In strongman, the demand is distributed across event types that don’t behave the same way. A heavy yoke is not a heavy deadlift. A log for reps is not a log for max. A stone series is not a sandbag medley. A max frame pull is not a farmers run on a turn. The fatigue cost, the technical demands, and the qualities required to perform well are different across those events, even when the weights look similar on paper.
That’s why strongman requires layered peaks. Not one generic “deload week.” Not one simple taper where you just reduce volume and hope everything comes up together. You need a method that can sharpen multiple qualities at once while still respecting the fact that you can’t peak everything to its absolute highest point simultaneously. The goal is not to be perfect at every event at the same time. The goal is to arrive at the competition with the right blend of ceiling strength, speed, rhythm, execution, and fatigue resistance across the entire line-up.
Three-week waves let you do that because they let you peak different qualities on slightly different timelines while staying inside the same system. You can keep raising the ceiling on one lift while sharpening the expression of another. You can keep your Dynamic Effort work fast and crisp while shifting event exposure toward the exact competition demand. You can run a heavier emphasis on a static event for three weeks while keeping moving events more technical and controlled, then flip that emphasis in the next wave without losing the structure of the training week. It gives you direction without instability.
This is where wave stacking comes in. A single three-week wave can create a noticeable performance shift, but it’s when you start stacking waves that peaking becomes a deliberate outcome rather than a lucky coincidence. A six-week peak is essentially two waves back-to-back, and it tends to be the most reliable option when you want to sharpen performance without having to overhaul the entire training process. You can build in the first wave and express in the second wave. You can adjust constraints between the two to refine the exact sticking point you’re trying to solve. You can use the first wave to reinforce positions and technical rhythm, then use the second wave to narrow specificity and rehearse the competition demand. The athlete doesn’t lose the feeling of training hard, but they start feeling sharper rather than simply more exhausted.
A nine-week peak gives you three waves to work with, and that’s where you can create something more complete. You can build, sharpen, and then rehearse. You can develop the quality, then focus it, then express it with more specificity. You can take a lift or an event from “currently improving” to “ready to perform” without having to rush exposures or force heavy tests too early. In strongman, nine weeks is often the sweet spot when there is a meaningful competition coming up and you want enough time to get the event execution genuinely stable while still driving the underlying strength in the background. It’s long enough to make changes, short enough that you can commit to it fully.
The other reason this matters so much for strongman is that the sport doesn’t just demand one peak per year. It often demands multiple performance targets across a season. You might have a qualifier, then a bigger show, then another event a few weeks later. You might need to hit a gym test day for a specific event, then two weeks later perform on a different line-up. You might have a comp where the pressing is the main separator, followed by a comp where moving events decide everything. If you only know how to peak once, or if you treat peaking as something that requires you to shut everything down and rebuild from scratch, you either never peak properly or you spend the year in a cycle of constantly trying to recover from your own peaking attempts.
Wave-based peaking solves that. You can run multiple peaks inside a larger training arc because the waves are built into the fabric of the system. You aren’t stepping outside the method to peak. You’re simply changing which constraints are being emphasised and which exposures are being sharpened. The weekly skeleton stays the same, and that stability is what makes it possible. You’re still doing Max Effort work. You’re still doing Dynamic Effort work. You’re still building muscle and durability. You’re still practising the events. You’re just directing the spotlight more deliberately, and tightening the gap between training outputs and competition outcomes.
This is also why I’m careful about how I talk about this. The point of this layer isn’t to throw templates at you. Templates are useful, but only if you understand what they’re doing. If you don’t, you end up trying to copy someone else’s numbers and wondering why you feel flattened two weeks before a show. The point is to understand the concept: three-week waves are the tool that lets you aim your training. They let you build readiness as something repeatable. They let you run strongman like a sport, rather than like a weekly test of toughness.
And the most important part is that this doesn’t require you to abandon the foundations. It doesn’t require you to stop doing Conjugate work in order to peak. It doesn’t require you to throw away variation and suddenly only do competition lifts. It’s simply a refinement of how you sequence exposures, how you manage fatigue, and how you shift specificity over time. Strongman demands multiple qualities at once, and the three-week wave is the unit that allows you to keep those qualities in play while still sharpening toward a specific outcome.
That’s what’s new since the earlier series. Conjugate for strongman was always a system for getting stronger and better at the sport. This is the layer that turns it into a system for performing on command.
You can read more about this approach HERE.
Strongman Peaking: Why It Must Be Event-Specific
Peaking for strongman only works when you accept one basic truth: you are not peaking for “strongman” as a concept. You are peaking for a specific show, with a specific event list, with specific implements, with a specific order of events, under specific conditions, on a specific day. That sounds obvious, but it’s the difference between arriving ready and arriving tired. Strongman events vary too widely for one generic approach to work every time. One competition might be log for reps, a heavy yoke into sandbag medley, and a deadlift ladder. Another might be axle for max, stones for series, farmers for distance, and a throw. Even when the names of the events look similar, the way they behave can be completely different. Pick heights change. Handles change. Frames are shorter or longer. Farmers are swinging or stable. The log is a different diameter. The stone platform is higher. The floor surface is different. The same athlete can feel like a weapon at one show and completely out of rhythm at another, purely because the demands shifted. Event-specific peaking is how you remove that randomness and replace it with preparedness.
The first reason peaking has to be event-specific is that strongman is full of skill events, whether people like calling them that or not. A yoke is a skill. A log clean is a skill. A stone lap is a skill. Farmers with a turn is a skill. Even a deadlift ladder becomes a skill once fatigue and time pressure enter the equation. Those skills are not sharpened by intensity alone. They’re sharpened by rehearsal: repeated exposures at the right dose, with the right constraints, in the right order, under the right rhythm. If you only touch an event when it’s heavy, you learn how to survive it. If you touch it consistently with purpose, you learn how to execute it. Execution is what wins when the weights are close, and in strongman the weights are usually close at the level that matters.
The second reason is that grip can bottleneck your entire peak even when you feel strong everywhere else. In a barbell meet, your grip is mostly a background player. In strongman it can become the limiting factor that ruins your ability to express strength across multiple events. Farmers, frame, axle holds, sandbag series, stones, even the log clean, all of these can drain your hands and forearms in a way that changes the rest of your day. If grip is underprepared, you don’t just lose the grip event. You lose your ability to keep your posture, keep your positions, and stay confident handling implements for the rest of the show. That’s why grip work and grip exposure have to be planned through the peak, not crammed in at the end as an afterthought.
The third reason is that rep events and max events do not taper the same way, even when they involve the same implement. A max log is about a single expression of ceiling strength, technical efficiency, and confidence under load. A log for reps is about repeatable output, rhythm, and breathing under fatigue. Those qualities overlap, but they aren’t identical, and the way you sharpen them changes the final few weeks. A max event typically benefits from heavier exposures earlier, then a gradual reduction in strain while speed and readiness come up. A rep event benefits from maintaining rhythm, maintaining turnover, maintaining clean transitions, and keeping the nervous system fast enough that the implement doesn’t feel glued to you by rep four. If you taper a rep event like it’s a max event, you often arrive strong but rusty. If you taper a max event like it’s a rep event, you often arrive well-conditioned but underexposed to heavy strain. The peak has to match the demand.
The fourth reason is that the CNS and structural cost of events differs massively, and treating them as equal is one of the fastest ways to ruin a peak. A heavy yoke run is a full-body neurological event. It’s not just legs. It’s spinal loading, bracing, footwork, speed under compression, and a level of systemic fatigue that can bleed into everything else for days. Heavy stones have a different cost profile: they’re very demanding on the posterior chain and trunk, but they also smash the arms, biceps, and connective tissue in a way that accumulates fast. Heavy log pressing has its own cost: shoulders, elbows, upper back, and the kind of neural fatigue that can make your next session feel slow even if your muscles feel fine. The point isn’t to fear these events. The point is to respect them. Peaking is the art of choosing the right exposures at the right time so you arrive sharp rather than drained.
So what does an event-specific strongman peak actually look like in practice?
It starts with understanding that as you approach competition, the goal of the training week shifts. Early in the build, you’re still developing qualities. You’re still building the engine. You’re still attacking weaknesses and raising ceilings. As you enter the final stretch, your training becomes narrower and more deliberate. The heavy work doesn’t disappear, but the way it is expressed becomes more selective, because your fatigue margin becomes more important than your appetite for suffering.
The first change you’ll notice is that intensity begins to drop at the right time, but only for the work that carries the highest cost. This doesn’t mean everything becomes light. It means the training stops trying to prove itself every session. Heavy exposures still exist, but they become fewer and more intentional. The goal becomes leaving sessions with clarity rather than crawling out of them. When you handle heavy loads in this phase, you do it with purpose: one strong exposure, clean execution, then you move on. You don’t keep pushing until something breaks because you want to feel like you “earned it.”
At the same time, speed, rhythm, and transitions rise in priority, because those are the qualities that make strength usable in competition. This is where you start caring more about how quickly you can get the first rep, how clean the clean is, how smooth the pick feels, how confident your footwork is under the yoke, how tight your turns are on farmers, and how repeatable your stone series feels when your heart rate is high. This is where most athletes either level up dramatically or fall apart, and the difference is usually not strength. It’s execution under fatigue.
As a general anchor, heavy exposures for the most expensive events tend to stop around ten to fourteen days out, especially for the big hitters like heavy yoke, heavy stones, and maximal or near-maximal overhead. That window is not a superstition. It’s a practical recognition of how long those events can take to fully dissipate from the system. You can often feel recovered from them before you are actually sharp again. Your joints might feel fine, but your bar speed is down. Your coordination is slightly off. Your confidence is lower than it should be. Ten to fourteen days gives you time to recover, sharpen, and regain that springiness that separates a good run from a slow grind. It also gives you a buffer for real life, because strongman athletes don’t peak in ideal conditions. They peak while working, travelling, managing stress, and living like humans.
This is also where Dynamic Effort stays in longer than most people expect, but with tighter control. DE doesn’t vanish in the peak. It becomes one of the most valuable tools you have because it keeps the nervous system fast, keeps technique crisp, and keeps you feeling athletic while the heavy exposures become more selective. The difference is that volume and constraint selection are managed more carefully. You don’t need massive DE sessions in the final week. You need clean speed, consistent execution, and enough exposure to stay sharp without building fatigue you can’t afford. When DE is handled properly here, you don’t arrive at the show feeling like you’ve had a week off. You arrive feeling switched on.
The event work in this phase follows the same logic. You still practise, but you practise with intent. A moving event session might shift from heavy runs to shorter, faster runs at a slightly lower load with a focus on footwork and acceleration. A loading event might shift from heavy singles to series at competition weight, or to controlled runs that reinforce the exact lap-to-load rhythm you need on the day. A log session might shift from grinding heavy presses to fast singles with clean lockouts, or timed clusters that match the competition pace. You are rehearsing performance, not chasing fatigue. That’s the defining feature of an event-specific peak.
If you take one thing from this section, it’s this: strongman peaking is not just about reducing volume and hoping your strength rises. It’s about getting specific in the right places, early enough that it actually makes you better, then giving yourself enough room to arrive sharp. The weekly skeleton stays intact. The Conjugate engine keeps running. The difference is that every choice becomes more deliberate, because at that point you aren’t trying to build everything. You’re trying to express what you’ve built, on demand, under the exact conditions that decide the outcome.
The Updated Weekly Options - 3, 4, 5 days without breaking the method
One of the reasons Conjugate works so well for strongman is that it scales. It works because the weekly skeleton is stable, and once you understand what each day is responsible for, you can expand or compress the week without losing the method. That’s the upgrade that matters here. The earlier articles in this series were written around the classic split because it’s the cleanest way to teach the system. It’s the version that most athletes can run, most gyms can accommodate, and most seasons can sustain. Since then, the system has matured into something more flexible, with a four-day base as the default, a three-day option for people who need it, and a five-day hybrid model for advanced athletes who can actually recover from it and benefit from the extra exposure.
The simplest way to understand this is that Conjugate doesn’t change when you change training frequency. The distribution of stress changes. The density of exposure changes. The method scales up or down by changing how often you touch certain qualities, not by deleting pieces of the system and hoping the gaps don’t matter later. That’s why these weekly options work so well. They all keep the same backbone. They all keep Max Effort work. They all keep Dynamic Effort work. They all keep events inside the structure rather than floating as an optional extra. What changes is how much room you have for technical work, how much fatigue you can afford to generate, and how much specific practice you can include without it interfering with the rest of the week.
For the majority of strongman athletes, the four-day split is still the best place to live. It gives you enough exposure to build everything that matters, without turning your week into a recovery puzzle. It allows you to train hard, progress consistently, and still have enough energy left to work, sleep, eat, and live like a human. It also protects you from the most common strongman mistake, which is doing too much too often, then wondering why everything feels heavy all the time. The four-day structure gives you the right balance of strain and speed, and it gives you two event slots that you can manage intelligently across the season. It looks like this:
Max Effort Lower
Max Effort Upper
Dynamic Effort Lower + Moving Events
Dynamic Effort Upper + Loading Events / Event Practice + GPP
That’s the backbone. The session details change, the movement choices rotate, the event emphasis rises and falls based on the time of year, but the weekly responsibilities stay the same. You get a heavy lower exposure that builds the ceiling, a heavy upper exposure that builds pressing strength, a lower speed exposure that keeps you athletic and repeatable, and an upper speed exposure that keeps your pressing crisp while giving loading events a consistent place to live. You also have space for accessories, for structural work, for trunk and upper back development, for grip, and for the kind of GPP that makes strongman sustainable rather than self-destructive.
The reason I call this a base is because it works in every phase. In the off-season it builds the engine. In pre-season it sharpens the sport qualities. In comp prep it becomes more specific without needing a total rewrite. Most athletes do not need more training days than this. What they need is better intent inside the days they already have, better progression across the weeks, and better control of event exposures so they build rather than drain.
The five-day hybrid split exists for a different athlete. This is for the lifter who can recover from more exposure, who is experienced enough to keep quality high across the week, and who is either deep into competition prep or at a level where the extra slot actually makes the system work better rather than simply creating more fatigue. It’s also useful when the demands of a specific competition justify an additional day because the event list requires more rehearsal and more precision. In this structure, you aren’t adding a day because more training feels productive. You’re adding a day because you need more room for skill work, event practice, and specific weaknesses, without cramming everything into four sessions until those sessions become too long and too messy to execute properly.
The five-day version keeps the same engine, it just spreads the work out. You still have Max Effort Lower and Max Effort Upper anchoring the ceiling. You still have Dynamic Effort Lower and Dynamic Effort Upper anchoring speed, repeatability, and developmental quality. The difference is that you now have a fifth slot that can act as a flexible event or skill day, depending on what the athlete needs at that stage of the season. That extra day can be used for moving event technique, loading practice, throwing work, light overhead rhythm, grip exposure, or even a dedicated GPP and trunk session when the main week is already heavy enough. The point is that it gives you a place to develop without forcing everything into the main sessions.
I’ve written about this in depth in my breakdown of scaling the system for advanced athletes, because this is where most people get it wrong. The five-day option works when the extra exposure is placed deliberately and when it reduces chaos rather than adding it. The goal is not to turn strongman training into five days of punishment. The goal is to distribute stress in a way that keeps performance rising while fatigue stays manageable. If you want to explore the full logic of that model, you can read it here:https://www.teamjoshhezza.com/post/five-days-of-conjugate-for-strongman-scaling-the-system-for-advanced-athletes
Then there’s the three-day option, and this is where Conjugate becomes genuinely valuable for lifters who have real life constraints. I suppose this is the method compressed. It’s what you run when you’re busy, when recovery is limited, when you’re managing stress, when you’re juggling work, family, travel, or simply when you need training to support your life rather than consume it. Three days a week can still build serious strength and serious strongman performance if the week is structured properly and the exposures are chosen intelligently. The key is that you aren’t trying to do a full four-day week in three days by cramming everything into sessions that last forever. You’re choosing the exposures that create the most return, then cycling priorities across waves so nothing gets ignored for too long.
This is where the idea of exposure density becomes very obvious. With three sessions you have fewer slots, so each slot has to carry more responsibility. You still need a heavy exposure, you still need a speed exposure, you still need event practice, and you still need enough accessory work to keep the athlete durable. The method doesn’t disappear. The distribution changes. This is why Conjugate is so resilient. You can compress it without breaking it, because the system is built around training qualities concurrently and rotating constraints strategically, not around doing the same lifts on the same days forever. If you want the full template and the reasoning behind it, I wrote it as a complete standalone resource here:https://www.teamjoshhezza.com/post/the-ultimate-3-day-conjugate-template-built-for-strength-life-and-longevity
Across all three options, the rule stays the same. You don’t scale Conjugate by removing pillars. You scale it by adjusting how often you touch each quality, how specific the event exposures are at that phase, and how much total stress you can recover from week to week. If you get that right, the system becomes something you can run in any season of life. If you get it wrong, you end up chasing an ideal training week you don’t actually have the resources to execute, and strongman is too demanding a sport to survive that kind of mismatch for long.
So if you’re looking for the simplest decision rule, here it is. Start with four days unless your life genuinely can’t support it. Move to five days only when your recovery and your competitive demands justify the extra exposure. Use three days when consistency is the priority and the goal is to build strength and performance over time without the programme collapsing under the weight of unrealistic volume. The method is the same in every case. The difference is how densely you apply it.
The Squat Issue (the clarification everyone needs)
The squat question comes up constantly in strongman, and it always carries the same energy. People either don’t want to squat because it doesn’t feel specific enough, or they want to squat exactly like a powerlifter because it feels like the most “leg strength” thing you can possibly do. Both of those instincts miss the point. In a serious long-term strongman build, squatting is not optional. It doesn’t have to look like a competition powerlifting squat, and it doesn’t have to be the only way you build leg strength, but some form of squatting needs to be present year-round if you want an athlete who is hard to break and able to express strength across the full range of strongman demands. Strongman is a sport of bracing, posture, leg drive, and repeated force production under awkward load. Whether you are picking stones from the floor, driving through a log clean, moving a yoke, standing up with a sandbag, or trying to stay tall under farmers, you are constantly asked to produce the same fundamental qualities that good squat training builds.
The reason squatting gets misunderstood is that people try to judge it based on direct carryover alone. They want a squat variation that looks like an event, or they want to skip squats and just do more events because that feels like it should be enough. The reality is that squats do three jobs in a Conjugate strongman system, and none of them require you to pretend you’re preparing for a powerlifting meet.
First, squat work is a diagnostic tool. Squats tell you what’s happening in the athlete’s system in a way most events won’t, because the barbell gives you a consistent and repeatable input. You can see whether the athlete is losing position, whether their bracing is inconsistent, whether their hips shift, whether one side collapses, whether their torso angle changes under fatigue, whether their knees cave, whether their speed disappears, whether they’re relying on one joint strategy to do everything. Events hide those things because they are chaotic by nature. Stones don’t tell you if your left hip is weak, they tell you that the stone is awkward. A yoke doesn’t tell you your brace is inconsistent, it tells you the yoke is heavy. The squat gives you a clean view of the athlete under load. It lets you identify what fails, where it fails, and what needs strengthening before the sport forces the issue.
Second, squat work is a force builder. You can build leg strength and hip strength through events, but the cost is high, the skill demand is high, and the exposures are inconsistent. Squatting gives you a reliable way to load the legs heavily with predictable progression, which is exactly what strongman needs because strongman events are hard enough already. If your lower body base is too small, every event becomes a grind. Your pick heights feel lower than they are. Your yoke speed drops instantly. Your stones feel like a deadlift into a good morning. Your sandbags turn into a war. Squatting increases the base, and that base gives you options. It lets you handle heavier implements without turning your training into a constant emergency.
Third, squat work is a transfer tool. Not because squatting is identical to strongman events, but because the qualities it builds transfer everywhere. The trunk stiffness required to squat well under load is the same stiffness you need to stay tall under a yoke. The ability to sit into a position and drive out of it is the same quality that makes heavy carries feel stable rather than wobbly. The ability to maintain posture under fatigue is the same skill that stops your stones turning into a collapsed hinge and a rushed lap. The squat teaches the body to accept compression and still produce force. Strongman is full of compression. If you aren’t trained for it, you will feel it everywhere.
This is also why squat quality matters even when squats aren’t your favourite lift. If squat quality collapses, something else compensates until it doesn’t. You might still be able to pull heavy because your hips are strong enough to brute force a deadlift. You might still be able to load stones because you’re willing to round your back and fight it. You might still be able to yoke because you’re stubborn and you’ve got a good pain tolerance. But compensation has a cost. Eventually it shows up as chronic hip irritation, knee pain, adductor strains, lower back fatigue that never quite leaves, or the slow erosion of movement quality that makes every event feel harder than it should. Maintaining strong squat patterns isn’t about chasing a squat PR for its own sake. It’s about making sure the athlete has enough structural balance and enough lower body resilience that the rest of the sport doesn’t steal from the same tissues over and over again.
In a Conjugate system, squat variants are how you solve that problem without running the same lift forever. Each variation has a job, and that job is why it belongs in the rotation.
A front squat is one of the best tools you can use for strongman athletes because it reinforces posture, bracing, and clean strength without needing maximal loading to create a meaningful stimulus. If an athlete collapses forward under load, struggles to stay tall in carries, or loses position in the clean on log and axle, front squats are a direct way to build that capacity. They also teach you to stay organised in the hardest part of the lift, which carries over beautifully to the kinds of positions strongman constantly forces you into.
The safety squat bar is one of the most useful squat tools for strongman, full stop. It sits in the sweet spot between hard and recoverable. It drives upper back and trunk demand hard. It lets you load the legs heavily while keeping the shoulders and elbows in a safer place, which matters when you’re also pressing logs and axles through the week. It’s also an excellent balancing tool for athletes who tend to fold, shift, or lose posture. If you want a squat variation that builds strength while keeping the athlete training consistently, SSB work is almost always a smart option.
The box squat remains one of the best force-building variations you can run, especially when the goal is explosive strength and control under load. It teaches the athlete to sit back, stay tight, and then drive hard with intent. That ability to produce force from a dead stop is massively relevant in strongman, where picks are rarely perfectly elastic and where the first step on a carry often decides whether the whole run is smooth or chaotic. Box squats also give you a controlled way to manage range of motion and stress, which can be useful when an athlete is carrying fatigue or when you want to push intensity without letting technique unravel.
Then you have variations like pause squats and Zercher squats, and these are where Conjugate starts looking like strongman without turning into random circus training. Paused work builds positional strength and patience under load. It teaches you to hold posture and keep bracing even when you’re stuck in the hardest moment. Zerchers are a great trunk and awkwardness transfer tool, because they force you to brace hard, stay upright, and carry load in a way that mimics the discomfort and demand of sandbags, stones, and natural objects. They aren’t there to look cool. They’re there because strongman punishes athletes who only train comfortable positions.
The point of all of this is that squatting in Conjugate for Strongman is not about running a powerlifting squat cycle on the side. It’s about using squat patterns as a consistent, programmable way to build the qualities the sport demands while keeping the athlete healthy enough to accumulate real training over time. You rotate variations to solve constraints, build force, and reinforce positions that will later be tested under awkward objects. That’s exactly why this is still Conjugate.
“Where People Go Wrong”
Most of the confusion around Conjugate for strongman doesn’t come from people being lazy or stupid. It comes from strongman being a sport that rewards effort, and from Conjugate being a system that uses variation, speed work, and multiple training exposures in the same week. Put those things together and it’s easy for an athlete to start doing the right ingredients in the wrong order, at the wrong intensity, with the wrong intent. On paper it still looks like Conjugate. In reality it becomes a week of hard sessions stitched together with optimism. The method only works as well as the decisions inside it, and there are a handful of mistakes that show up so consistently that you can almost predict them before the athlete tells you what they’re doing.
The purpose of this section is to clean those mistakes up in a way you can actually apply.
Trying to Max Events Every Week
Strongman athletes love proving strength. That’s one of the best things about the sport. You get to pick up real objects, carry them, load them, throw them, press them, and you get immediate feedback on whether you’ve got the job done. The problem starts when that turns into a weekly requirement. If every event session becomes a heavy test, you stop training the events and start surviving them. You also end up stuck in a loop where you can’t build a base, because every week is dominated by fatigue management and joint irritation rather than progression.
The reason this stalls progress is simple: events are expensive. They’re awkward, the leverage is rarely ideal, the positions change rep to rep, and the load hits you in places that don’t recover like muscle does. Your hands, your elbows, your biceps tendons, your hips, your adductors, your spine, your feet, all of it takes a toll. If you max events weekly, the body adapts by getting better at tolerating punishment, but it doesn’t reliably adapt by getting better at producing output. You also lose the ability to build skill. Skill is built through repetition and clean execution. When everything is heavy, the movement becomes messy and the only thing you practise is fighting. There is a time for heavy event exposures, and sometimes you do need to take them, but when the entire year becomes that, you’re trading long-term development for short-term satisfaction.
Treating Dynamic Effort Like Cardio, or alternatively Half Arsing it.
Dynamic Effort sessions are where people either leave a huge amount of progress on the table or they accidentally turn the day into something it was never meant to be. The common mistake is treating DE as a conditioning session, or treating it as “light day” where you just move around quickly, get sweaty, and tick the box.
When DE is done properly, it has structure. The loading lives in a range where the bar can actually move fast. The sets and reps are chosen to reinforce speed and technique. The wave progresses across weeks so you build something measurable. You leave feeling switched on rather than flattened. The whole point is to develop force production and movement quality without accumulating the same joint cost as constant heavy work. In strongman, DE also becomes developmental in a broader sense. It’s where you build rhythm, transitions, and the ability to produce output under a clock. If you treat it like cardio, you strip it of its purpose and you lose one of the most valuable tools in the whole system.
One of the most common speed work mistakes in strongman is a lack of specificity in Speed Work for events. A great example is how this shows up immediately on the yoke . Beginners often set the bar height wrong, usually too low, which turns the pick too difficult and slow and makes the entire run harder than it needs to be (although some do it too high as well). They think they’re training “yoke speed” but they’re really just learning how to survive a bad setup, with poor posture and wasted energy from step one.
At the other end of the spectrum, elite competitors can fall into the opposite trap: their speed work is either so light that it never forces the positions and cadence they’ll need under real competition loads, or it becomes vague “conditioning yoke” or "fast yoke" that looks fast but doesn’t rehearse the exact rhythm, bracing strategy, and footwork timing that wins runs on the day. The same pattern shows up across farmers, frame, loading medleys, even throws. Speed work only matters when it transfers, and transfer requires the constraints to match reality. That’s exactly what Dynamic Effort days are for in a strongman system: you use them to build repeatable, technically correct speed under the right conditions, with weights and setups that teach you how to move like you need to move in competition, not just how to feel quick in training.
I do think for most people they do still need to more 'vague' base but this should never come at the expense of reinforcing poor mechanics across events.
Running Random Variations
Variation is the word that attracts the wrong kind of attention. People hear “rotate movements” and they interpret it as “do something different because it’s interesting.” They build programmes around novelty, not adaptation. Every week becomes a new bar, a new stance, a new range of motion, a new constraint, and by the end of the month they’ve done a dozen different lifts but they can’t point to one quality that has clearly improved. It feels like Conjugate because the movements are changing, but it isn’t Conjugate because the decisions aren’t solving anything.
Variation is only valuable when it targets a constraint. The movement choice should have a reason. It should either build a specific weak position, protect a joint that’s taking too much stress, or reinforce a skill that the athlete needs for their events. If the variation doesn’t change the demand in a purposeful way, it’s noise. The job of Conjugate variation is to keep progress moving while keeping the athlete healthy enough to train year-round. That only works when variation is a tool, not a personality trait.
Overloading the Week With “Extra Events”
Strongman has a unique way of convincing athletes that more is always better, because the sport itself is so broad. There’s always another implement you could practise, another event you could touch, another medley you could run, another run you could take, another weight you could try. The problem is that strongman isn’t improved by chaos volume. It’s improved by consistent exposure in the right places, with progression that builds over time. When you overload the week with extra events, you don’t just add work, you add interference. You take recovery away from Max Effort work. You take quality away from Dynamic Effort work. You take clarity away from your progression. You also end up with sessions that drift into being long, unfocused, and exhausting, because you’re trying to squeeze the entire sport into one week.
The weekly skeleton exists to stop that happening. It gives events a home. It gives you clear places to build moving events and loading events without forcing them to compete with everything else. The goal is not to practise every event all the time. The goal is to practise the events that matter right now, at the right dose, while the system continues to build the qualities that will make every future event easier to learn. If you treat every week like a full competition rehearsal, you end up rehearsing fatigue rather than rehearsing performance.
Not Understanding What Fatigue Actually Is
The biggest reason strongman athletes mismanage training is that they treat fatigue like one thing. They think fatigue means feeling tired, or having sore muscles, or being unmotivated. Strongman fatigue is layered, and if you don’t learn how to recognise the different types, you end up making the wrong adjustments. You either push when you should refine, or you back off when the system is actually working.
Joint fatigue is the obvious one. Elbows, shoulders, hips, knees, hands, all the places that take repeated stress from awkward objects. It tends to build quietly, and once it’s there it doesn’t resolve with one easy session. It needs intelligent exercise selection, better distribution of stress, and sometimes a change in exposure rather than a complete stop.
CNS fatigue is different. This is the heavy, flat feeling where everything moves slower than it should, where you feel switched off, where your timing is slightly off, where the weight doesn’t feel heavier but you feel less able to express force. This is the kind of fatigue that shows up after heavy yoke exposures, heavy stone sessions, maximal overhead strain, and repeated high-intensity work without enough recovery room. If you try to solve CNS fatigue by just “trying harder,” you dig the hole deeper.
Grip fatigue is its own category, and in strongman it can ruin your entire week if you don’t respect it. Your hands can be the limiting factor even when the rest of your body feels capable. If your grip is shot, your pulling patterns change, your posture changes, your confidence changes, and suddenly everything else feels harder than it should.
Then there’s trunk fatigue, which is one of the most under-recognised issues in the sport. Strongman hammers the trunk through carries, picks, loads, cleans, bracing under awkward objects, and repeated efforts while breathing hard. When the trunk is fatigued, technique collapses across multiple events, not because the athlete is weak, but because their ability to stay rigid under stress has been drained. This is the fatigue that makes someone look fine on a single heavy rep and then fall apart when asked to repeat it.
The reason Conjugate for strongman is structured the way it is, with Max Effort, Dynamic Effort, controlled event placement, and planned variation, is because it accounts for these different fatigue types without needing you to guess every week. The method is built to survive reality. It’s built to keep you training when the sport is demanding, when your life is busy, when the kit isn’t perfect, and when your body isn’t fresh. If you understand where people go wrong, you don’t just avoid mistakes. You learn how to run the system with the kind of control that makes long-term progress inevitable.
How To Run This Starting Monday
If you’ve read this far and your brain is buzzing with options, that’s normal. Conjugate gives you a lot of tools, and strongman gives you a lot of moving parts, so the easiest mistake to make is trying to do everything at once. The goal for your first run through the system isn’t to build the perfect programme. The goal is to build a week you can actually repeat, then run it long enough that you can learn from it. You don’t need to overcomplicate this. You need a structure that makes sense, two or three decisions you can commit to for a few weeks, and enough discipline to keep those decisions stable long enough to see what they produce.
Here’s how you run it starting Monday.
The first step is to pick your weekly split. For the majority of people, the four-day option is the right place to start because it gives you enough training exposures to build everything that matters without turning recovery into a full-time job. If you only have three days available, run the three-day model properly rather than trying to squeeze four days of work into three sessions. If you’re advanced, recovering well, and in a phase where you genuinely need more event practice, then the five-day hybrid can make sense, but you earn that by proving you can run the base structure without losing quality. Whatever option you choose, your job is to commit to it for at least a few weeks so you aren’t constantly rewriting the week around your mood.
Once you’ve chosen the split, you need to choose one Max Effort lower pattern and one Max Effort upper pattern. Notice I’m saying pattern, not exercise. You’re not marrying yourself to a single lift forever, and you’re not trying to find the wildest and craziest variation you can think of. You’re choosing the category of stress you’re going to build your week around. For Max Effort lower, that might be a squat-dominant focus or a pull-dominant focus depending on your current needs and the demands of your events. For Max Effort upper, that might be a press that is closer to bench strength development, or it might be a heavy overhead exposure if that’s what the sport is demanding right now. The goal here is simple: pick something you can strain on, something that you can progress, and something that makes sense for your body and your kit.
After that, you set your Dynamic Effort work up with a bit more structure than a lot of people are used to. You choose one Dynamic Effort lower wave and one Dynamic Effort upper wave, and you treat them as your three-week developmental engine. Keep the movements simple enough that you can focus on speed and execution. On DE lower, you’re usually working with a squat pattern and a pull pattern, and the job is bar speed, rhythm, and repeatability. On DE upper, you’re building speed and timing in your press, whether that’s straight bar bench work or implement-based pressing depending on what you need. If you’re using straight weight, stay in sensible loading ranges where the bar actually moves fast. If you’re using bands or chains, keep the setup consistent and let the wave progress do the work. The moment the bar slows down, the session stops being what it’s supposed to be. DE days are not there to make you tired. They’re there to make you better at producing force quickly and cleanly.
Now you choose your events, and this is where a lot of people overthink themselves into doing nothing. For your first run, you pick two events to run submaximally, one moving event and one loading event if you have access to both. Submaximal does not mean easy. It means controlled. It means you choose a load you can execute well, at a pace you can repeat, for a dose you can recover from. The point is to practise the event, build the skill, build the rhythm, and build the tolerance, without turning every week into an all-out test. If you can only access one event regularly, use the second slot for an event simulation or a closely related pattern. You’re aiming for consistency of exposure, not a highlight reel.
Once the main work is anchored, you fill the week out with accessories, and this is where Conjugate for strongman is won or lost long-term. You build accessories around weak points and event demands, not around whatever you feel like doing after the hard stuff. Start with what the main lifts and the events are asking for. If your upper back collapses in carries and your front rack is unstable, you need upper back volume and trunk stiffness. If your log stalls because your triceps are behind your press, you need pressing support work that actually targets the sticking point. If your deadlift locks out but your start is slow and your bracing wobbles, you need work that builds positioning and starting strength. Strongman exposes weak links , but it also makes them easy to identify if you pay attention. Your accessories should be the part of the programme that closes those gaps before they become injuries or competition-day failures.
Then you run it. That’s the whole point. Run three weeks, review, rotate constraints. Three weeks is long enough for you to see what’s improving and what isn’t. It’s long enough to feel a shift in bar speed, execution, confidence, and tolerance. At the end of that wave, you review what actually happened. Did your Max Effort outputs move? Did your DE work stay fast and controlled? Did your event work feel smoother, quicker, more repeatable? Did your recovery hold up across the week? Did any joints start talking to you in a way that suggests you need a different constraint? That review tells you what to rotate next. Sometimes that means changing the bar. Sometimes it means changing the range of motion. Sometimes it means keeping the pattern and adjusting the constraint. The system moves forward because you’re making decisions based on feedback, not because you’ve decided you need endless novelty.
If you do those steps, you don’t just end up with a week that “looks like Conjugate.” You end up with a week you can repeat, progress, and refine. You’ll know what each day is for. You’ll know what you’re trying to improve. You’ll have a structure that can survive real life. And you’ll have enough clarity to say, with confidence, that you aren’t just training hard. You’re training towards something.
When Reality Breaks the Plan (And How the System Survives It)
Conjugate for strongman is built to handle disruption. Events change. Implements change. Training weeks get interrupted. Recovery fluctuates. The system absorbs that without needing you to rewrite everything from scratch.
Then life throws the real curveballs. Injury. Travel. A gym closure. Work turning feral. A competition being moved. Family situations that wipe out training for a fortnight. These moments require decisions, and the quality of those decisions determines whether you keep moving forward or lose months of momentum.
The structure works because it has a clear hierarchy of priorities. When you understand that hierarchy, you can make intelligent compromises that preserve progress even when the written plan becomes impossible to follow.
The weekly skeleton holds. Training frequency might drop, but the logic stays intact. Lose a training day and you run the compressed version properly. Lose access to an implement and you pick the closest constraint that trains the same quality. An event changes and you assess what transferable strength you already own, add controlled exposure where it fits, and let the base do its job. The skeleton keeps decisions calm, targeted, and productive.
Max Effort work stays. Dynamic Effort work stays. Everything else adjusts around those anchors. When volume has to come down due to fatigue, injury, or life constraints, you reduce from the support layers while keeping the engine active. ME and DE drive adaptation. Events express the strength you’ve built. Accessories keep the body durable enough to train consistently.
Rebuilding happens in stages. Two weeks out from illness or injury means re-establishing rhythm first. Bar speed. Positions. Confidence under manageable loads. Let the system stabilise, then build back toward intensity. The first week back is where you set the conditions for productive training again.
Injury changes the route, not the destination. A compromised shoulder shifts your pressing options without deleting pressing from the plan. A back flare-up changes range, implement, and demands while keeping the pulling pattern alive. You train around the constraint, then use accessories to rebuild what supports it. Strongman forces adaptation, and Conjugate already contains the mechanism to adapt without losing structure.
Last-minute competition changes get handled with clarity. If an event changes six weeks out, you adjust exposures intelligently and build competence without derailing the rest of the peak. If an event changes two weeks out, you assess whether you have transferable strength and basic competency, take one or two clean exposures to build confidence, then execute on the day. The base you’ve built does the heavy lifting.
The system survives disruption because it’s built on repeatable principles. The weekly skeleton, the hierarchy of training priorities, and the wave-based structure give you flexibility without losing momentum. When reality forces changes, you make decisions that respect the logic of the method. That’s how you train through the year without restarting every time life shifts the ground underneath you.
The System Now: From Template to Toolkit
When I first started writing about Conjugate for strongman, the goal was to give people something they could run. Something structured enough to stop strongman training being a vague cycle of “hard sessions” and fatigue, but flexible enough to handle the reality of the sport. The early version of the system was intentionally simple in its presentation, because that’s how you make it usable. It gave you a strong weekly template, clear principles, and a way to integrate Max Effort work, Dynamic Effort work, and event practice without letting the week collapse into chaos. For a lot of athletes, that was the missing piece. They didn’t need more information, they needed a framework that made sense and could be repeated.
What has evolved since then isn’t the philosophy. The foundation hasn’t changed. The weekly skeleton is still recognisable, the Conjugate logic still sits at the centre, and the goal is still the same: build strength that can be expressed in strongman conditions, across a season, without breaking the athlete. What has changed is the precision. The system has become a year-round framework rather than a single template. It now has decision rules that make it easier to choose what to do next rather than copying a fixed plan and hoping it fits. It has wave selection logic that lets you steer your training based on feedback, readiness, and competition demands, instead of treating variation like something you apply blindly. It has event-specific architecture that makes strongman peaking far more deliberate, because you’re no longer trying to “get strong and then figure it out.” You’re building strength, speed, skill, and event execution concurrently, then narrowing focus in a way that matches the exact demands of the show you’re preparing for.
That shift is the real evolution. The system used to be something you could follow. Now it’s something you can operate. You can scale it up or down depending on your training frequency. You can apply it to different types of athletes with different constraints. You can run multiple performance targets inside a season without needing to tear everything down and rebuild from scratch each time. You can take the same weekly skeleton and drive it toward off-season development, skill acquisition, or competition sharpness, simply by adjusting specificity and exposure rather than rewriting the entire programme. That’s what makes it a toolkit. It still gives you structure, but it also gives you direction.
This is also why the original Conjugate for Strongman ebook has been discontinued. It wasn’t scrapped because it was wrong. It was discontinued because the system outgrew it. The ideas expanded. The application became deeper. The decision-making became clearer. The peaking logic became far more refined. The method stopped being something that could be contained in a single early resource and became something that needed a full framework around it. The foundation remains, but the structure built on top of it is now larger, more complete, and more usable for athletes who want to run Conjugate for strongman as an entire approach to training rather than a phase they try for a few weeks.
That’s the point of this fourth instalment. The original series gave you the foundation. The years of coaching, writing, and refining since then have built the application. What exists now is the toolbox: a system that can build you up over months, hold you together through a season, and sharpen you for a specific outcome when it matters.
Where We Go From Here
If you want to keep running this system long-term, the next skill isn’t learning another list of exercises. The weekly skeleton will carry you a long way, but the athletes who get the biggest benefits out of Conjugate for strongman are the ones who stop thinking like people who follow programmes and start thinking like people who operate a system. They understand what each day is responsible for. They understand what each wave is trying to produce. They can look at a training week, a set of event demands, and a body that has real limits, and choose constraints that move performance forward without breaking the athlete in the process.
That’s the evolution you’re aiming for. You don’t need to train with less intent. You don’t need to become cautious. You need to become deliberate. Strongman rewards aggression, but it punishes uncontrolled aggression over time. The system is what keeps that edge sharp while the body stays intact. It gives you a way to train hard, stay athletic, keep building ceiling strength, keep practising the sport, and keep showing up week after week without spending your whole career in cycles of rebuilding from injury and exhaustion. That’s what longevity looks like in this sport.
If you’re new here, the best next step is to read the original three parts of this series, because they give you the foundation and the logic that sits underneath everything you’ve just read:
And if you want the full depth, the full decision-making framework, and the complete programming application across the year, that’s where the newer resources come in. They expand this system into the kind of detail you can run for an entire season, refine over multiple years, and apply to any competition demand without losing the structure that makes it work. You’ll see them linked here once I’ve added them in properly.
LOL OKAY MAYBE I LIED AND YOU CAN STILL GET THE ORIGINAL EBOOK -
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