Stop Using This Piece of Equipment

Stop Using The Tire!

Whether you’re slamming a sledgehammer off the tire or flipping it, you need to stop using this piece of equipment today.

Yes, slamming a sledgehammer against a tire or performing multiple tire flips will increase your conditioning but at what cost?

I’m not trying to say that using a sledgehammer and smashing it against a tire isn’t hard work or that it’s not going to improve your conditioning. What I am saying is I feel there is a better way to improve your conditioning than slamming a sledgehammer down on a tire (way too many risks involved).

Don’t get me wrong, there is a risk with every exercise we perform in the gym. There’s no getting around it. But some exercises have a much greater risk factor than others do. Just like some exercises provide a greater benefit than others do. When choosing which exercises to perform in the gym we need to think about the risk/reward of each exercise. We need to perform exercises that will give us the greatest amount of benefit with the smallest amount of risk. And I don’t think using the tire does this for us.

For example, let’s say you’re at the end of your summer training program and you have your big tryouts coming up in 2 weeks. You’ve been working your ass off all summer to try and make this new team. You’ve done everything possible this summer; you’ve gone to bed early on Friday nights while your friends went out to party because you had Saturday morning training. You’ve paid attention to your diet and made sure you didn’t eat any junk this summer while your friends were devouring McDonalds every day. You’re literally in the best shape you’ve ever been in. And now you’re only 2 weeks away from proving why you deserve to make this new team. It’s Monday morning and you’re using the tire to perform some sledgehammer smashes and all of a sudden you miss the tire and smoke yourself in the shin and break your tibia. It’s extremely unfortunate and now you won’t be able to display your skills and showcase your hard work at the upcoming tryouts.

So you have to ask yourself, was it worth using the tire?

Ok, so you’re reading this and thinking to yourself, I don’t use the tire in that way. I use the tire to flip it over (like the picture below) because it works on my leg strength and endurance and it’s safe because there is no risk in breaking my tibia with the sledgehammer. While this may be correct there is a different type of risk involved when flipping tires. Most hockey players are extremely tight in the hips and can’t keep their back flat (or slightly lordotic) when getting into a deep enough squat to get their hands under the tire to flip it properly. What ends up happening is they don’t use their legs to flip the tire (the whole point of the exercise) but they end up using their lower back to perform the exercise. Over time using these poor mechanics will cause an extremely sore back and possibly injury. If you look at the picture below, you can see that the person trying to flip the tire has a very rounded back because she doesn’t have the mobility in her hips to get deep enough to get her hands under the tire. As fatigue sets in, this form will only get worse and the chance of injury will increase greatly at this point.

So what I’m trying to say here is be smart with the exercises you choose to perform in the gym because each exercise comes with risk factors. We want to minimize as much risk as we can while trying to maximize and achieve as much benefit as possible.