One-Hand Mace 360 Progression: When You're Ready, and How Many Reps

You earn the one-hand 360 through the two-hand work first. Once you're there, it runs the standard volume cycle at the same mace: 5 sets of 5 reps per side climbing to 20 sets of 5, inside and outside trained as a pair. Nothing about the math changes when a hand comes off. What changes is everything else.

Should you even do one-hand mace work?

Honest answer: one-hand work is mainly the realm of the club.

You can absolutely do one-hand work with a mace, and it pulls on your shoulders in a way the two-hand version doesn't. Some of us prefer one-hand work, and that's a legitimate preference. But it's worth knowing where the tool comes from. The mace descends from the gada of Indian wrestling training, a wooden handle with the weight at the end, and that tradition is mostly two-handed. Sometimes one hand, but the heart of it is two hands and rotational force. A modern steel mace also carries its weight a little differently than a wooden gada, stiffer handle, same idea.

So the one-hand 360 is real training with a real progression, and it's also slightly off the tool's main road. If what you want is a deep one-hand practice, the club's single-arm track is the native home for it. If you want your mace to demand more from you at the weight you own, keep reading.

Where does it sit in the path?

After the two-hand 360s, and after the 10-to-2. Finish the two-hand climb in both directions, take the stop out with the 10-to-2, then take a hand off.

And here's the thing that surprises people about the order of the implements themselves: the mace is basically an advanced version of the club. If you've already mastered the mill and the reverse mill with a club, any mace movement you pick up should be simple. The patterns are the same family, the mace just runs them on a longer lever. Coming to the one-hand 360 as a club lifter is arriving with the hard part done.

What changes with one hand?

The mace doesn't know a hand left. Your body does.

The hardest part is drawing the circle behind your back correctly. With two hands the club's path behind you is braced from both sides; with one, the timing and the beat at which you move your body shifts, and how you pull with your lat to bring the mace back over to the front feels different. None of these are new problems. They're the same issues the two-hand 360 has, exaggerated by the long lever and no longer shared between two arms.

That's why the prescription doesn't change. Same mace, same 5s, same climb. The load didn't get heavier. The margin for a sloppy path got smaller.

How many, and at what weight?

The same mace you ran your two-hand cycle on, and the standard climb: 5 sets of 5 per side, one set added at a time, to 20 sets of 5, 100 reps per side, inside and outside together. Then the usual milestone: density, weight, or complexity.

What opens up after

This is where the mace stops being a two-movement tool. Once the one-hand 360 is yours, the mace can get complicated in every direction: mace squats, twirls, the flow-mace route if that's your taste, and loaded work for the rest of the body, offset rows, offset overhead presses, leg and back work with the weight out on the lever. The 360 family is the gate. What's behind it is a whole toolbox.

What goes wrong

The same things that go wrong on the two-hand 360, with less room to hide them. The circle behind the back degrades first, and because the timing is yours alone now, a rushed beat shows up as a wobbling path instead of a shared correction. If the path stops looking like the path, the set is over. The program repeats sessions, it doesn't punish them.

Doing the arithmetic

Standard. Two directions, one hand at a time, one set added at a time, counted honestly. The system in this article is free to run with a notebook. Perside just never forgets and never rounds in your favor.

Your first session

The mace from your two-hand 360 cycle. One hand, inside 360s, 5 sets of 5 per side, then outside, 5 sets of 5 per side. Slow beat, full attention on the path behind your back.

If it feels harder than the weight says it should, that's the missing hand, not a sizing mistake. Next session, 6 sets. The ladder decides the rest.

Perside programs volume and density cycles for maces, clubs, and kettlebells. See the full progression at The Path, or size your first mace at getperside.com/learn/start.