Farmer’s Walk Complexes

By now steady-state cardio is vilified by most personal trainers in favor of conditioning. Great! Steady-state cardio’s as boring as Speed 2. (we get it — the G’damn boat won’t slow down. End the movie already!) It can also be more harmful then beneficial if the trainee is malnourished or has muscle imbalances (I’m not getting into the cardio is evil discussion. It’s been done… well. Read this if you want to know more.

I went through a period living in Australia where I did cardio a lot. Maybe it was the combination of warm weather, beautiful scenary, and the chance to hang out with a gorgeous German runner (Schwing!). About 2 years ago I decided that steady-state cardio was evil and I would never do it again. Yet I didn’t want my heart to blow up when I turn 50. So I started researching. I tried:

1. Sprints at a 6:1 rest:work ratio. HR actually exceeded 100% (I’ve gotten it up to 205). The sprint was done for 30s. (I don’t have any videos of myself doing it but here’s my buddy Paul running instense sprints. Talk about training like a maniac!

2. Kettlebell training

3. Barbell complexes (I’ll write about these in a future blog post)

4. Farmer’s walks

5. Prowler pushes and pulls (these are great but most commercial gyms don’t have a prowler. If you want to know a great way to replace the prowler in any commercial gym check out “No Prowler? No Problem“.

The Problem

Actually every one of these conditioning protocols posed different problems:

Sprinting for 30s all out at close to 100%MHR is insanely hard and I don’t wish it on my worst enemy. I found it neurologically taxing and couldn’t focus on anything else for the rest of the day. It’s also unsafe unless you have a woodway treadmill or access to a track.

Kettlebells have a steep learning curve. They’re a great tool but I’ve stopped teaching them largely due to the length of time it takes for a client to effectively get the form. Beyond the basic swing it takes a long time to grasp a clean or jerk. Even the swing requires a large amount of coordination and strength to do safely and effectively. Unless you’ve gotten proper instruction please stop doing swings immediately. Every time you do a swing wrong a little piece of Valery Fedotenko dies.

Barbell complexes also require a highly trained person to do properly. Also, most trainees grip isn’t strong enough to endure a full set.

Farmer’s walks are boring. Clients want an engaging session and I like to do stuff when I workout. Carrying a weight from one end of the room to another isn’t exciting.

Prowler exercises are tough to do purely because many gyms don’t have them. If you’re lucky and your gym does have a prowler then push away. Know that I’m as jealous as a contestant on the biggest loser watching a real trainer work with their clients once they finish the show.

The solution - Farmer’s walk complexes

I recommend these for everybody. They’re versatile, safe, have a very small learning curve, great for beginners and advanced trainees alike and are an amazing conditioning tool. They can be done thousands of different ways. I’ll give you a couple protocols packaged together with videos later in this post.

How to do a farmer’s walk complex

There’s one rule – Don’t put the weights down. If you do a ninja will come out of the shadows and cut you. Not a big gruesome cut. A small cut. But enough of a cut that you don’t do it again. Beyond that have some fun with it. The idea is to choose a number of exercises and combine them with farmer’s walks in a circuit.

For a beginner you may choose 2-3 exercises and a 100m total walk lasting around 1min whereas an advanced trainee can take 150-200m and 4-6 exercises lasting 2-4 min. I like to choose a variety of large power exercises. Ideally you’d do these outside or on a track but most gyms will have 10-15m open areas that you can use. If you’re acting like a maniac people will stay out of your way. If they don’t get out of your way — drop the weights once. The minute they see the Ninja they’ll never bother you again.

Be creative and mix and match exercises. The sky’s the limit. If you want to really have some fun do a couple of exercises and run to a machine before finishing up the set. Check out example 1 below. Some areas to make the complex easier or harder could be the difficulty of exercises, length of walks, weight of DB’s, rest in between sets, length of the entire complex.

Some exercises I often use are the clean, clean and press, thruster, biceps curl, squat, deadlift, bent over row, pushup, renegade row, shoulder press, and the alternating neutral grip shoulder press. These are all done with a pair of DB’s

Complex examples (beginner to intermediate)

Complex 1

1. Seated row *8
2. Walk 40m
3. Seated row*8
4. Walk 40m
5. Deadlift*8
6. Walk 20m
7. Straight leg rases (lying down) * 15
8. Crunches *20

1. DB clean *8
2. Walk 40m
3. Plank on weights with mountain climbers *16
4. Walk 40m
5. Thruster *10
6. Walk 20m
7. Squat *8

Complex examples (more advanced)

Complex 3

1. 8 curls
2. Walk 40m
3. 10 deadlifts
4. Walk 40m
5. 15 pushups on weights
6. Walk 40m
7. 8 curls

Complex 4 (watch me complete this complex in the video below — this hurt)

1. 8 clean and press
2. Walk 40m
3. 8 squats
4. Walk 40m
5. 16 Pushups to renegade row
6. Walk 40m
7. 8 push press

When to put farmer’s walk complexes into your program

I love to include a conditioning day into most of my clients programming. So if they’re working out 3 times a week I may do 1 upper body, 1 lower body, and 1 full body conditioning day. The full body conditioning day would include the farmer’s walk complexes.

From time to time I’ll include a complex set in the middle of a clients workout if I feel that they’re being a bit lazy. They work great when you want to teach yourself to work harder.

The beautiful thing about farmer’s walk complexes is that they don’t take a long time. If you only have 30minutes — perfect! Throw down two different complexes for 3 sets each with 1.5min in between. Assuming the sets take 2 minutes to complete you’re workout will last 20min and you’ll have gotten more out of it than most everybody else in the gym put together.

Lastly, these are a fun tool when training with a partner. You could switch turns creating the complexes and pushing each other through them. It’s a lot more interesting than just carrying weights back and forth.

Bonus tips

• A nice way to lengthen the set if grip is becoming an issue is to drop down into pushups on the weights. It keeps you working but rests the grip.
• Power exercises work very well. I love using thrusters and DB cleans.
• Form will suffer. This is fine. The key is to use exercises that are safe and allow for some cheating. The thruster is a great example. it’s pretty hard to hurt yourself pressing the weight above your head even when you’re exhausted.
• These act as nasty finishers to any program.