Two international rowers with access to every facility in Europe, at five in the morning on Manly Beach, doing the half of strength work that never happens in a gym.
Manly Beach, Sydney. 5.00 a.m.
There is no parking left in the streets behind the beach.
The car park doesn’t open until six, so people leave their cars wherever the streets allow and walk down in the dark with wetsuits and boards and towels. Some will swim round to Shelley Beach and back. Some will run the sand until the tide comes up to meet them. Some are already out past the break, sitting on their boards, waiting for the light.
Our group trains here every other morning. Hard men, aged between 45 and 70, all with a lifetime of competitive sport behind them — an events promoter, a banker, an estate agent, finance men, entrepreneurs, a former Wallaby captain. And a judge, who is a multiple Australian and world masters champion.
This morning there are eight of us, because two international rowers are out from Switzerland.
The surf life-saving club has a gym. Gym is a generous word for it — it is closer to a shed, with a rack, a chin-up bar and the basics. Everything a rower actually needs is in there.
And we take the kettlebells out of it, onto the sand.
Then we rotate. One group walks the beach with a bell in each hand — walks, not runs, because nobody runs in soft sand carrying kettlebells. Another runs the same stretch in weighted vests. Push-ups. Sit-ups. Beach sprints. The surf rescue board paddled out and in. A swim past the break to keep the surf lifesaving skills most of us learned forty years ago and have no intention of losing. Swap, and go again.
Here is what I think, without softening it. The squat and the deadlift are not the problem. Stopping there is. Almost every strength programme written for masters rowers ends at the barbell, and the qualities that fail you at 700 metres are the ones the barbell trains least.
Keep the rack. Then pick two heavy things up and walk thirty metres. Both, not either.
The hands are the connection, and grip is measurable. The PURE study — Leong and colleagues, The Lancet, 2015 — followed 139,691 adults aged 35 to 70 across 17 countries and found every 5 kg fall in grip strength carried a 16% higher risk of death from any cause and 17% higher cardiovascular death, adjusted for age, education, employment, activity, tobacco and alcohol. A mortality study, not a rowing study, and I won’t dress it up as one. But a deadlift loads the grip for six seconds. A pair of kettlebells carried the length of Manly Beach loads it until you put them down, and then you turn round and go again.
The carry adds what the bar cannot. Stuart McGill’s laboratory at Waterloo ran strongman athletes through farmer’s walks, suitcase carries, yoke walks, tyre flips and stone lifts, modelling trunk activation and spine load throughout — Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, 2009. Their conclusion is the whole argument here: the carrying events demanded different qualities from the lifting events, and loaded carrying would therefore enhance a lifting-based programme rather than duplicate it. Not replace. Enhance. The caveat, before you find it yourself: the carry data comes from three athletes. It describes what a body does under load. It does not prove what it will do to your 1k.
And note who else was on the sand. The two Swiss have access to everything a national programme provides — platforms, plates, force plates, a strength coach who writes their week. They have not given any of it up. They simply also walk kettlebells up a beach at five in the morning, out of a shed, in a rotation with men up to thirty years their senior. Nobody talked them into it.
And when you’ve earned it, the suitcase carry. One bell, one hand, walk. Your whole opposite side spends the length of the beach refusing to let you fold. Every rower has a side that quits first, and almost nothing else in a rowing programme goes looking for it.
Now the part that argues back.
McGill, Marshall and Andersen, Ergonomics, 2013 — six participants, carrying buckets. Thirty kilograms in one hand produced low-back compression above 2,800 newtons. Split that same thirty across two hands and it fell to 1,570, a drop of 44%. And the line that should stop you: thirty kilograms in each hand loaded the spine less than thirty in one.
The one-arm version is, spinally, the most expensive way to move a given weight. Which is precisely why the men on that beach carry two. Double bells first, for as long as it takes — and in a group running to seventy, that is not a theoretical caution.
Then, and only then, order the single-arm work properly. Light and long. The asymmetry is the stimulus; the load is not. Twenty kilos in one hand for forty metres will locate your weak side. Fifty will locate your L4.
Plainly, then. Keep the squat. Keep the deadlift. Keep the chin-up bar. Then add thirty metres of heavy ground to your week, because the thing that goes in the back half of your 1,000 is not your leg strength, and no amount of adding five kilos to the bar has ever fixed it.
Afterwards, sun up, coffee arriving, salt drying on us, the judge said it: “This has got to be the world’s greatest workout.”
Nobody nodded out of deference to the bench. They nodded because a man with world titles had said the quiet thing out loud — that a shed, a beach and a rotation beats most of what we pay for. And because we had done it alongside each other, which is the one component no equipment supplies.
The actual programming
The loads, the distances, where carries sit alongside your barbell work and your water work across a season, and when you’ve earned the single-arm version — that’s in the strength section inside Faster Membership, beside the plans rather than bolted onto them. Written for masters bodies, not twenty-five-year-olds. If you’d rather test the idea before deciding anything, pick two heavy things up and walk thirty metres. Two trips will tell you whether I’m right.