Everyday Systems

just curious.

Welcome Rebecca! I believe there are a number of "Shovelgirls" out there. I'm pretty new to Shovelglove myself. This is my 4th week but I really enjoy it and can see definite tone. (I use an 8lb sledgehammer.)

Shannon, do you mind telling what your routine is? I'm not really sure where to start. I already have a simple dumbbell routine but it takes me 20-30 minutes. The 14-minute shovelglove routine is very intriguing. I don't have much time after work (that I'm willing to give to a set amount of exercises) but I would like something that is still weight-bearing and tones and strengthens.

Thanks!

Hi Ams09 -- I'm doing a very, very basic routine to start. I plan on trying other movements later on. I do chop the wood, churn the butter, shovel the snow and flip the lever. For the first few sessions, I did reps of 7. Now I'm doing reps of 30 and then start all over again until the timer goes off. Normally I get through 2 complete sets plus a third set of chop the wood, sometimes a bit more. The 14 minutes is great because I can sneak it in while my daughter is playing and do my cardio before she wakes up in the morning.

Oh, this is great, Shannon, thanks! I don't have a sledgehammer yet. I think I'll start out with a mop or broom as others suggest until I can get the moves down.

The gals are definitely involved in Shovelglove. . . I've had mine for nearly a year although I had a medical issue (unrelated to the sledge!) that kept me from using it for a while. I have only a six pound hammer but I'm pretty much of a wimp. . . I hope to move up at some point.
Check up Paul's wife and mother-in-law's pics as they shovelglove in Thailand. . . pretty impressive!

http://everydaysystems.com/bb/viewtopic.php?t=5167

Yup there's definitely women who shovelglove. I use an 8 lb hammer. And I really do love it. I've been doing it very steadily since Dec. 2008 though I discovered shovelglove a couple of years earlier. In fact, I learned about it from a weightlifting site for women: mistress Krista's http://www.stumptuous.com

Not sure how many of us there are, but there's definitely several shovelgals.

jules

I came over from Stumptuous too. This is the most fun training I've ever done. I do a mixture of everything, between ten and twenty reps, and quite a lot of Hindu squats too, in fact out of all of me my legs have got the most muscly doing this.

I started out at eight pounds, I'm on ten now and I just bought a 14lber today. It's heavy, so I'll be working my way up to it.

I've been thinking about upgrading my hammer for a while now -- moving up to a 10 lber. However, I'm not sure how much longer I'll be living where I'm living now. And I sort of anticipate moving hundreds or even a couple of thousand miles when I do, so I'm waiting to upgrade for now.

My usual shovelglove routine is 14 minutes of hammer work. My default setting is the shovel movement so if I can't remember what else i'm wanting to do, I throw in a set of shoveling until I think of something else to do.

My most frequent moves:
shoveling
tuck bails
churn butter
chop tree
flip the lever/no name

and some non-canonical moves: (if by canon, I mean developed by Reinhard)
gondola rowing & reverse
canoe rowing & reverse
pumping water

and I do what are basically squats and stiff-legged deadlifts with the hammer -- alternating hammer head to left and hammer head to right. I make these moves full body. So I squat and then when i stand up, I lift the hammer over head. I do the same with the deadlifts.

I also do one handed shoulder presses, left and right. I'm sure I could come up with an analog for this but I haven't. So there!

Right now i'm doing a 6 week program of bodyweight squats. I'm basically using the hindu squat. http://www.twohunderedsquats.com which I learned about in another thread on this forum -- though the focus of the thread was the onehundredpushups.com site. I'm keeping this squat portion of my workout separate from shovelglove. So basically 3 days a week i do the bodyweight squats and then i do 14 min of shovelglove after it. With the other two N-days I'm just doing 14 min of shovelglove.

I just started the squat thing this week. Based on my initial test, i was supposed to start with week three of the program. I did and I'm surprisingly not very stiff today. Woot!

At any rate, I credit shovelglove with the majority of the inches I've lost around my bust, hips, and waist. I still have a ways to go, and I am doing no-S as well. A couple of times a week I work out with my adjustable dumbbells -- but was mostly doing deadlifts and squats with that. During this bodyweight squat program, I'm skipping all other squats (so no hammer and no dumbbells.)

On the surface it might seem like shovelglove is some ridiculously macho-nerd man thing, but the manual labor movements that inspired it are by no means exclusively masculine (churn butter, in particular comes to mind) -- and as you can see from the responses here, there are in fact quite a few "shovelgirls."

We did not, however, have such an awesome term for them. So thank you!

Reinhard

I'm very proud to be a Shovelgirl. Genius!

jules wrote: A couple of times a week I work out with my adjustable dumbbells -- but was mostly doing deadlifts and squats with that.

This part caught my attention. What kind of adjustable dumbbells do you have?

jules wrote:I'm basically using the hindu squat. http://www.twohunderedsquats.com which I learned about in another thread on this forum --

FYI=This is a bad link. You need to edit the spelling of "hundred."

This is sort of a warning message. I read about the 200 squat thing so I did 200 squats. I figured since I am always hiking in mountains I would not have problem. I did 14 minutes of shovelglove then 200 squats without stopping and then 14 more minutes shovelglove. The problem is that I used to do hindu squats every day but have not done them for a long time, so even though I did the 200 squats without much problem, for the next 4 or 5 days I was in great pain. I am almost 56 years old and do not recover so quick. Funny thing was next day I went to Buddhist temple with rest of village(though I am not myself a Buddhist) and when I knelt down like everyone does in wat I could not get back up due to pain in my legs. So if you do 200 squats I would say work up to it slowly and don't do what I did.

Hope you feel better Chiangmaiboss.
That amount seems very extreme to me.
I see no reason to have to do such a quantity of squats to achieve healthy strong legs.
I'm sure if a person did 30 to 50 squats per day they would be fine.
For me I can really feel it if I do 50.
Most important is maintaining a habit, not having five minutes of glory and then 3 months of pain from an injury.

Debs

I have read some horror stories about excessively high reps on exercises if it's done regularly. One particularly nasty one that comes to mind was a guy that did 1000 pushups a day. His elbow cartilage basically disintegrated. Once in a while as a feat of strength and endurance is cool but as a regular part of a training regime it’s pretty stupid.

When I used to do the combat conditioning program I used to do 100-150 hindu squats a day but some people do much more than that. I only did the 200 squats the other day because it was a PT test on the internet site and I just wondered how I would do. The fact is I now do the elliptical machine at gym 45-60 minutes a day plus hiking in mountains, so I probably won't keep doing the squats regularly any more. I am almost 56 years old like I said and I am not trying out for the Olympics, just trying to keep healthy as long as I can. Especially since here I do not have health insurance.

Yeah. I knew you weren't doing it as a regular thing. Just wanted to let the less knowledgeable people know about the potential issues.