5 Ways LeverBells Elevate Your Workouts

I actually got into the fitness industry when I was 18, let’s say you double 18 and I’m older than that now. Yes, while still in college I worked part time as personal trainer at a commercial gym in Mesa, Arizona. Sharing that is intended to help you understand that I made A LOT of mistakes in my training career and as my wife likes to remind me, I’m old!

In all seriousness though 25 years ago, you never thought of using tools in the gym other than what was already supplied. That meant barbells, dumbbells, cables, machines, and maybe some medicine balls. About a year later stability balls started to become more of a “thing” and I was considered a “renegade” for bringing one to the gym (man how old am I?!).

Several years would go by until many of what we considered standard training tools (suspension trainers, super bands, kettlebells, and yes Ultimate Sandbags) would be introduced. So, if anyone could have been the cynic, it would have been someone like myself. With such tools I really only cared about one thing, would it make the training of my clients better. What do I mean? Would it allow me to solve the issues I had in helping clients understand how I wanted them to move and perform.

To this day my attitude is the same. I don’t get caught up in “secret” this or that tool or because something is 100 or 1,000,000 years old. My concern is does it make training better? When it comes to tools like LeverBells I get both sides of the coin. One thinking, “oh c’mon is this Game of Thrones?!”, the other thinking “huh, that is really intriguing.”

I was more on the intrigued side when I actually got introduced to maces around 2008. While I don’t always succeed, I try to be a good student when I learn something new because I know as an educator I appreciate the same. There wasn’t a heck of a lot of information about maces at the time other than referencing how old time Hindu wrestlers used them.

Why does it matter if Hindu wrestlers used them? Actually, for centuries, these athletes were some of the most impressive in the world. Talk about having an amazing combination of strength, mobility, power, agility, they had it all! Wanting to learn how such incredible athletes develop such skills is quite fascinating. I tried to read as much as I could find as the modern book on Hindu Wrestling Training had yet to hit Amazon.

The reality is that like most things there were A LOT of things these athletes did from training to lifestyle and to mental training that we could learn from. However, the “coolest” thing was this thing called a “Gada”. Not only did this tool have physical development qualities to it, but also religious. Guess what, it is where the idea of fitness maces came from.

Now, I did what I advise so many people NOT to do when they learn new things. Taking a small part of a much larger lifestyle and system doesn’t tend to result in the same development that the athletes we are trying to emulate achieve. However, the training method I thought was most practical for me was the mace.

It was interesting, it was fun, it was different, but to be honest, I couldn’t trace any specific training benefits with this training. Most importantly, I found trying to have my clients really benefit from the use and enjoy the training to be very difficult. For me, that is the litmus test if I am going to keep going down that training path or tool. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t think the mace was completely useless, but I have limited training time and I needed to prioritize things that have the biggest impact to my client as well as provide a positive training experience.

Fast Forward To The LeverBell

It couldn’t have been only me during that time, that had a similar experience with maces. Most of my peers in my circle all knew about maces, but had the same thoughts about them. So you could imagine when around 2015 or so that maces were made in their design you see now and pushed by larger fitness companies did you see a renewed interest.

I kept an open-mind, heck, after all I am the guy that hopefully made people completely think differently about sandbag training. With that open-mind I watched and read a lot of material on their use. I kept hearing things like “grip strength," “shoulder stability," “core stability," “multi-planar training," “cardio," and so forth. Hey, those all sound positive and things I want my clients to achieve. Of course I wanted to know more and when I reached out to a lot of those promoting the benefits of maces, I didn’t get a lot of why’s. In fact, I remember one infamous interaction I had with a big mace fan that said (not making this up) upon me questioning him why a certain mace exercise was good, he responded with, “it makes for a really cool social media pic!”

This could have been an isolated incident and I wouldn’t have soured on maces, but believe it or not, I got a response of a similar nature from others as well as I was being a “hater” for asking why they did certain exercises. That DID sour me on maces and I was ready to move on.

When Perform Better decided to come out with “LeverBells” I admittedly raised an eyebrow. However, having been a customer for well over a decade and working with them on many projects I always knew they had purpose so I was willing to give the LeverBell a chance. My first question, why not just call it a mace since everyone else did.

Having it explained to me that they wanted to change how people used and thought of the tool, it made a lot of sense. I can’t tell you that for years I regretted calling our sandbag the Ultimate Sandbag because it is so much more and very different from what people are familiar with. Something I could relate to, we discussed how the LeverBell could be a valuable tool for anyone looking to achieve better functional fitness. How so and is it worth renaming the tool to a LeverBell? Let’s look at 3 ways I have found the LeverBell to be very helpful and thinking differently about the tool can help many.

#3: Multi-Planar Training

I could do a whole post on why multi-planar training is essential in our progressions, but let’s just realize we move in 3 planes of motion, pretty much everything in life and sport, so we are well served in making it part of our programming. That is largely what we mean by “stability” as well as builds better “movement vocabulary”.

Now, LeverBells are not really any better at multi-planar training than any other tool. So why use it Josh? Because of the valuable progression that it offers and helps us fill in some important holes in training. People think that the off-set load of the LeverBell makes it unique for multi-planar training, except you can hold a kettlebell, dumbbell, and even an Ultimate Sandbag on one side of the body and get multi-planar effects. So, what does the LeverBell offer?

Multi-planar training makes the need to resist forces much more challenging. This is a great benefit, especially for injury resilience, but has to be progressive like any other quality. Where the LeverBell can shine in this regard is the fact we can make such training very progressive with one size. For example, if I hold a Leverbell horizontally as I lunge (holding the ball side on that of the back leg for more cross patterning loading) I emphasize more of a need to RESIST lateral forces of the lunge. I can make that somewhat subtle by grabbing close to the ball and progress it simply my increasing how I move my hands away from the ball. That allows me to work with different ability levels quite seamlessly while also building to the ability to be more reflexive with kettlebells and Ultimate Sandbags being loaded on one side of the body.

This works a bit differently for diagonal patterns that LeverBells work for as well. In our system of DVRT we like to begin people doing lift/chop patterns by grabbing the outside of the Ultimate Sandbag and pulling apart because that is a great position for the shoulder to engage the lats and core. Over time we can add progression (because the lever arm of a lift/chop is large) by using a LeverBell where the load is not mostly one end, but we can work our way further away from the ball to get a very different stress.

We should address that most people incorrectly classify the use of 360 drills (those where the weight travels around the body) as “rotational training”. Remember, when we classify drills we do so by what the body is doing, not the weight does. So, such drills are actually resisting rotation, but as you will see they can be very helpful in teaching rotation as well.

#2 Grip

Why is grip an important concept to think about in training? There is a lot of research pointing to our grip being correlated to rotator cuff and overall shoulder health. Makes sense then that we should use exercises and tools that integrate grip with our training. However, just gripping really tightly isn’t what we are referring to in helping shoulders.

How we position our arms impacts whether the grip helps our shoulders and the intent behind how we grip. For example, when performing a kettlebell swing we try to “break” the handle of the kettlebell so we bring in our lats and engage the core to provide stability to our torso.

LeverBells are great for teaching these concepts because they can be easily positioned to teach concepts like “breaking the handle” which informs our client on how to use their core better and stabilize their shoulders. Instead of using cues like “use your core” we want to use tools and cues that teach people how!

#1 Core Stability

That leads us to “core stability” in regard to LeverBells. I put it into quotation marks because core stability isn’t just training the abs. As spine expert, Dr. Stuart McGill explains, “The core, more often than not, functions to prevent motion rather than initiating it, which is contrary to the approaches that many trainers employ in designing exercise for their clients. Good technique in most sporting, and daily living tasks demands that power be generated at the hips and transmitted through a stiffened core. Pushing, pulling, lifting, carrying, and torsional exertions are enhanced using this basic technique of hip power generation but are compromised when the spine bends causing what is often referred to as “energy leaks.” Interestingly, these task classifications greatly assist the organization of program design (think of building exercises to fulfill a push, pull, lift, carry, and a torsional buttressing task rather than specific isolationist exercises for the abdominals, back extensors, latissimus dorsi, and the like).”

LeverBells help us teach smarter core stability through 3 primary methods….

Press Outs:

In our DVRT system we teach about using the Ultimate Sandbag for a drill we call Press Outs. Cleverly named because we press the weight out from our bodies. However, the task is less important than the intent. Done properly we actually teach how to create more stability through the core as we move into less stable environments. This provides us greater mobility in the extremities as well as better control in movements that require mobility, stability, and strength at once.

Diagonal Patterns:

As I already discussed, diagonal patterns can be integrated in proper progressions with LeverBells. Our body works in diagonal patterns and that is why famous therapeutic systems like PNF make them a priority. The great part is we can use diagonal patterns with the LeverBell for a host of functional movement patterns.

Stability/Mobility Patterns:

People tend to think higher level training is just dictated by load. In fact, the ability to have mobility at one segment of our body as we create stability at another is a far more advanced strategy than just trying to increase load. LeverBells allow us great opportunities to teach these concepts.

Shoulders?

Do LeverBells help people’s shoulders? Yes, but not typically in the way they think! I hear this as a benefit to such training, but people often get confused to really why and it will impact how you train. Since the most famous drill with such tools are the 360 (which I described above) people see the shoulders moving in typically missed ranges of motion and assume this is the benefit of such tools, not quite.

Is it good that the shoulders are moving through these ranges of motion? Absolutely! However, it is important to remember the shoulders aren’t really driving or controlling the weight. There specific techniques to use the core and lats to do so. Such drills could help shoulders by working on more reflexive core stability but it is an advanced drill where you would need to assess if the lifter has proper thoracic and shoulder mobility to get into those ranges of motion without compensation.

Where LeverBells do help shoulders is teaching how to use the grip properly, how to engage the core in a way that provides proper stability, and how to use the lats to help stabilize and control shoulder movement. When you understand these concepts you see how LeverBells can be a valuable tool as long as they are used with proper intent and progression to teach your clients great functional fitness.

Sample drills with the Leverbell:

Josh Henkin, CSCS

Josh is an international educator on functional fitness, as well as consultant for U.S. Marines, U.S. Army Special Forces, Division I programs, and injury prevention programs Physical Therapy Clinics, Fire, and Police Departments. He has worked with fitness professional in over 13 countries and his L.I.F.T. online certification shows how to teach and use tools like LeverBells in an integrated system. You can save 30% for a limited time CLICK HERE with code “pb30” and get Continuing Education Credits from home!