Benefits of Steel Mace Training

The steel mace can play as much or as little of a role in your training as you want, and it can be used to achieve almost any fitness goal. You can use it as an addition to the barbell and other free-weight training, or as the sole piece of exercise equipment in your home gym. When you buy a steel mace, you get the following.

INCREASED STABILITY

Your muscles will only do what your central nervous system commands. You probably felt strange the first time you did a squat, a jiu-jitsu technique, or a dance move—wobbly or out of control. That’s because your nervous system couldn’t figure out how to get your muscles to move smoothly. As you repeated the movement, your nervous system learned how to better coordinate the actions of your muscles, and your performance improved.

Because the steel mace’s handle is so long, it increases the range at which you must control all of your movements—ultimately, to 360 degrees, as in the 360 overhead swing (the exercise the mace is probably best known for). This is a huge challenge for your nervous system, which will respond by reorganizing your muscle movements to ensure rock-solid stability.

Consider doing a squat while holding a kettlebell or dumbbell in front of your chest (a goblet squat). The weight will pull you forward if you let it, so focus on keeping your torso upright and sitting back into your squat to better activate your glutes and hamstrings. Imagine performing the same squatting motion while holding weights or a bar with arms extended overhead. The lever of your extended arms is longer, making the movement more difficult to control. To keep your arms and torso from swaying, engage your core and upper back muscles more.

Finally, imagine grasping a steel mace at the bottom of the handle and swinging it down in front of your chest as you squat, then up overhead as you rise (a barbarian squat). The mace—particularly the load on the end of it—is far away from your center of gravity and constantly moving. To avoid toppling over, your entire body must maintain alignment and muscular tension throughout the range of motion.

IMPROVED MOVEMENT SKILLS

Greater neural activation will result in improved overall movement. If years of sagittal plane-only training have caused you to run, shuffle, and turn like a clumsy robot in sports, the mace can help you move more like a jungle panther.

FUNCTIONAL STRENGTH

The kettlebell, sandbag, and steel club are all distinguished by having the majority of their weight located away from the handle, making them more difficult to stabilize and control when lifted. The steel mace offers the most offset loading of any of these implements. As a result, the strain on your core and grip is unparalleled.

Many times in life and sports, you will need to exert force on an unbalanced object. It is critical to prepare for this unevenness. “To assess someone’s upper-body strength, we ask each other, ‘What do you bench?’ But if I give the same strong guys who kill it on the bench press a steel mace, they suddenly lose control of their bodies in space. They are pushed around by the tiny ball on the end of the mace. “It’s kind of amusing.”

Because of the inherent imbalance in the steel mace design, you must train unilaterally—one side at a time. You know you have to do your next set with the macehead pointing to the right if you just did one with it pointing to the left. People who have neglected single-leg and arm work (such as lunges, one-arm rows, and so on) and as a result developed a weaker side will find that the steel mace helps restore muscle balance.

Steel mace training has a metaphor. “The mace was used as a weapon to overwhelm heavy armor.” “which demonstrated its limitations in protecting a warrior Today, we use the mace as a training tool to expose weak points in our own armor, such as muscle and strength “When you use the mace, you will be forced to address the weakest links in your kinetic chain.”

BETTER ROTATIONAL MOVEMENT

Trainers have a saying that “dysfunction hides in rotation.” Most people can perform a basic single-plane press or squat exercise without difficulty on their first day of training, but even experienced athletes struggle to maintain form when a rotational component is added to their exercise. Consider the difference between a basic lunge and a lunge in which you twist your torso as far as you can in the direction of your forward leg. Which do you think will be more difficult to perform without your legs wobbling, your back knee touching the floor, or your torso bending to one side?

The first step toward developing better rotation is learning how to avoid rotation when it isn’t desired, which you can do by simply treating the mace as a barbell and performing traditional lifts with it. “If we can do a squat, press, or row while making the mace appear evenly loaded,” he says, “we’re actually subjecting the body to a tonne of rotational stress—even if we’re not rotating.”

Avoiding allowing the mace to twist or bend you when performing these moves will make it more difficult for other forces to do the same to you in the real world (be it opponents in sports competition, or heavy furniture you need to carry upstairs). ”

When your nervous system detects stability,” it “allows you more range of motion,” including rotational movements. In other words, if you want to turn better, you must first work on not allowing things to turn you.

When you progress to rotational and swinging exercises with the mace, you’ll discover there’s no better tool for the job. As versatile as a kettlebell is, you can only swing it front to back and side to side, and while the steel club functions as a miniature mace, it lacks the different grip positions that the steel mace does, which provides greater training variety—so the mace stands alone for multi-purpose rotational training.

FUN!

If you can’t get excited about going to the gym and lifting weights from point A to point B, the mace might be the thing that finally motivates you to work out. Wolf claims that lifting the mace overhead gives you a primal rush that must be experienced to be understood. Because of its origins as a weapon, using it makes you feel like a warrior. Barbell curling? Not at all.

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