Steel Mace 10-to-2 Progression: When to Start It, and How Many Reps

Finish the 360 first. Then run the 10-to-2 as its own volume cycle at the same weight: 5 sets of 5 reps per side, adding a set roughly every week of training until you reach 20 sets of 5, which is 100 reps per side. The 10-to-2 is a continual 360. You go from one side to the next without stopping, which means you skip the rest position, and that is the whole difference.

What is a 10-to-2, exactly?

A 360 where you never come back to rest.

In a 360 the mace swings around your head and returns to the rack position in front of your body. That stop is a real position, and holding it is part of the training. In a 10-to-2 the mace head swings through and reverses at roughly the clock positions the name comes from, trading sides continuously. Same path around the head. The stop is deleted.

The technique comes from the Indian style of swinging the gada, which differs from a steel mace in that the handle is usually wood instead of one solid piece of steel. A wood handle has more flex than one solid piece of steel. It swings a little differently too. The 10-to-2 carries that tradition of continuous swinging over to the modern implement.

Should I learn the 360 or the 10-to-2 first?

The 360, and the reason is not technique. It is tissue.

What goes wrong with the 10-to-2 is that you never learned to do the 360 and hold the rest position, so you skip it and miss out on a part of your development. The rest position is not dead time between reps. It is where a leveraged weight teaches your body to carry load, and it is best trained with a heavy club rather than a mace, though that matters less if your mace is heavy enough.

If you are arriving here without the 360 progression behind you, run that cycle first. All of it, to 100 reps per side.

What skipping the rest position costs you

Mace training, club training, and kettlebell training all share one idea: the weights are leveraged. They pull on your soft tissues in a way that does not happen to the same extent with dumbbell or barbell training. That pulling causes adaptation in the fascia and soft tissues, and it takes longer than muscular growth.

The rest position is where a lot of that adaptation gets built. When you get good at it, the load begins to transfer into your lats and your hips naturally, instead of hanging off your arms. There is a sort of bounce that shows up when you hold the rest position well, and that takes maybe three to five years of training to develop. Not three to five weeks. This is the slowest clock in the whole system, and no amount of enthusiasm moves it.

The 10-to-2 removes the position where that learning happens. Run it after the 360 and it is a harder expression of a pattern your tissues already own. Run it instead of the 360 and you are borrowing against an adaptation you never built.

How many 10-to-2s should you do?

You can run a basic volume cycle with the 10-to-2, and that is exactly what you should do. Five sets of five per side, climbing one set at a time to twenty. The reps stay at 5 for the life of the cycle. Each new set count holds for a full training week before the next is added.

The work is counted in reps, same as the 360. If a session goes badly you repeat it rather than being punished for it. Pain, or a set that genuinely fails, steps you back one rung and you climb through it again.

Do you need to train both directions?

The movement alternates by nature, so there is no inside and outside pair to schedule the way there is with 360s. But you do need to switch hands. The bottom hand is the one doing most of the work if you are doing it correctly, so halfway through your sets, swap your grip. Balance in the 360 comes from programming two movements. Balance in the 10-to-2 comes from your own hands.

What weight should you use?

The same weight as your 360. The 10-to-2 is basically a different way to do the 360, one that allows for more continuous movement, so there is nothing about it that calls for a lighter mace and no reason to reward yourself with a heavier one at the same time as a harder movement. The ladder is 7, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, and it will still be there when this cycle is done.

What comes after the 10-to-2

The same three doors as every completed cycle. Run a density cycle at the same weight. Go up in weight and restart the climb. Or go up in complexity, which from here means one-handed 360s.

Not one-handed 10-to-2s. Honestly, at that point you are better off just doing a 360. The one-handed version of this movement gives up most of what makes it worth doing, so the complexity path routes back through the one-hand 360 instead.

Doing the arithmetic

None of this is difficult math. Five sets became six, six became seven, counted honestly across both grips and however many implements you run. It is also the part that quietly stops happening once the novelty of a new movement wears off. The system in this article is free to run in a notebook. Perside just never forgets and never rounds in your favor.

Your first session

The mace you finished your 360 cycle on. 5 sets of 5 per side, switching your bottom hand halfway. Rest as long as you want between sets, and end the set the moment the path stops looking like the path.

If five sets feels short after twenty sets of 360s, good. You are not being tested on effort today. You are being asked whether this movement is safe fifteen sets from now. Next session, six sets.

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.