How to Progress in Heavy Club Training: The Complete System

The first in a series documenting how PerSide programs fixed-weight implement training.

Heavy Club swinging is possibly the oldest form of weight training that we know of. Persian wrestlers were swinging wooden meels (Persian wooden clubs) centuries before anyone bent a barbell. Although it is the oldest style of training, there is barely any documentation on how to progress and why club training is important.

Why clubs need their own system and math

A club is not a dumbbell or a barbell. The mass is leveraged and sits at the far end. Every movement fights against this leverage and your body adapts in different ways. This changes programming in two ways.

Firstly, two handed and single handed club work are different exercises with different training modalities. Two handed club training is time under tension work. The club moves through a big continuous circle and the limiting factor is how long you can keep working, not how many reps you achieve. The goal is to get used to movement in the transverse plane and get your body used to traction, the pulling on your muscles and tissues. Traction is the opposite of contraction and does not get trained as much through traditional barbell and dumbbell lifting. Single handed club work is rep based and progresses like anything other type of training (although the program is a bit more complicated).

The reason the program has to be more in-depth is because you cannot microload a club. Heavy clubs come in fixed jumps. 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 35, 45. On a barbell, you can add a 2.5lb plate to each side to progress. On a club, that 5lb jump is actually a very big deal because leverage is a multiplier. A 15lb club can exert multiples of its weight in force on you due to the leverage. The club program has to build your capacity at one weight until the next weight is safe, and that structure is the whole game.

The two-handed track: timed sets

Two handed club work runs on 30 seconds on, 30 seconds off. One set is one minute. You start at 5 sets (5 minutes of alternating work and rest), then add sets until you reach 20 total minutes. That's the whole progression: 5 minutes to 20 minutes at one weight.

Twenty minutes of continuous 30/30 work with a club is a real accomplishment, and finishing it means the weight is no longer a challenge at volume. That's graduation. Move the weight up, increase the complexity (move to single hand), or increase the intensity (40 seconds work 20 seconds off). Generally, the two handed work is used as a primer for single handed club work.

Most men start with a 15 lb club. Most women start with a 10. If that feels insultingly light on day one, good. Day one is not the test, minute fifteen is the test.

The single-arm track: volume cycles

Single handed club movements progress in a set order, because each one feeds the next. Inside circles and outside circles, then pullovers and shield casts. These then combine to make the mill. The mill is the destination. It is the most complex single arm pattern and is one of the most primal movements a human can do as it is the throwing pattern. If you are looking to generate force using the whole body, this is the pattern to train. From throwing punches to swinging a tennis racquet, this movement pattern is fundamental to all athletic endeavors.

Each movement runs a volume cycle. You start at 5 sets of 5 reps per side and add sets over sessions: 6 sets, 7 sets… all the way up to 20 sets of 5 for a total volume of 100 reps per side. From there you can choose to go heavier and re-run a volume cycle at a heavier weight, move to a more complex movement, or run a density cycle on this weight (more reps per set).

The adding is slower than it sounds and that's deliberate. Fixed-weight training punishes rushing. Tendons and soft tissues adapt more slowly than muscle. The traction on your joints from the pulling of the club away from you works your body in a different way. Additionally, all of these movements are skills. Your brain and nervous system benefit from repetition of the movement as it gets wired as a skill you have.

What graduation actually looks like

The progression above generates a strange and useful property. You always know exactly where you are. There's no "what should I do today". Today is one more set than last time you completed at this scheme. There's no ambiguity about when to buy the next club. The ladder tells you what is next.

That's also the honest sales pitch for doing the arithmetic with software instead of a notebook: none of the math above is hard, but it has to be done every session, for every movement, without wishful thinking on the days you'd rather skip ahead. That's what PerSide automates. The system in this article is free to run with a notebook. The engine just never forgets and never rounds in your favor.

Where to start

Two-handed pendulums and circles at 15 pounds (men) or 10 (women), 5 sets of 30/30. Both tracks can run side by side once the basics feel stable. Add single-arm inside circles at 5 sets of 5 per side. Everything after that, the Path decides.

Starting with a kettlebell instead? See what size kettlebell to buy first.

Own a mace too? See the steel mace 360 progression.