Training for Tree Planting Part II: Alternatives to Heavy Lifting

If in the course of your preparations for planting you are unable (or unwilling) to engage in heavy weight training, but still want to develop the explosive power and heavy load-carrying capacity required to excel at planting trees, there are alternative to pumping iron. These methods can also be used in conjunction with a weight training regimen to get the benefits of both styles.

The main alternative to moving a heavy object in order to gain strength, is to move a lighter object very quickly. The same fast twitch muscle fibres are used for fast movements like sprinting and jumping as for heavy lifting. Track stars can squat and deadlift huge weights, Olympic weightlifters have a faster sprint (for 10 metres) than Olympic sprinters and a higher raw vertical leap than high jumpers, and most champion powerlifters engage in speed training with low weights in order to improve their bench press. It’s pretty well established that speed generates strength, and vice versa.

In the previous instalment, I mentioned ‘High Intensity Interval Training’ as a way to develop explosive speed during your cardio workouts. Another alternative is just to run 100 metre dashes alone. If you don’t have a track nearby, just pick a spot roughly 300 feet down the road from your driveway, and run to it as fast as you can. This will be a different sort of run than the lengthy jogs people go on to build stamina and burn calories. Instead, you should treat these sprints as strength training sets, meaning, you take nice long breaks in between each sprint, and limit the number of sprinting ‘sets’ to four or five. Running as fast as you absolutely can four or five times is surprisingly taxing, and is quite comparable to doing four or five sets of squats. Of course, squats carry their own sets of advantages, just as sprints have theirs, and that’s why I strongly recommend cross training when preparing for tree planting.

The other main alternative to weights is jumping. Like sprinting, jumping mimics weight training by putting sudden stress on your muscles and moving your body very quickly. Legend has it that the Shaolin Monks in medieval China developed incredible jumping power by digging a shallow hole and then repeatedly jumping in and out of it. Each day they would dig the hole a little deeper, thereby increasing the distance they had to jump. Eventually the hole would be so deep that the monk would effectively be jumping higher than his own height.

Repeated Box Jumps are the simplest and most popular form of Plyometrics training. Just leap up onto the box, and then imediately hop backwards down again, jumping back up onto the box as soon as you land. Use a box that is %80 to %90 of your maximum vertical leap.

Today, this method of training by jumping up onto an object and then back down again is called plyometrics. It develops strength in the legs both by the stress of jumping up onto the target, and the stress of jumping down and landing again. Modern plyometric training is done using padded, incrementally tall platforms that make the training very safe and comfortable, allowing the trainee to jump his/her hardest without having to worry about tripping or getting injured.

However, for the purposes of tree planting, I prefer the Shaolin method. This is because the act of jumping and then furiously digging to deepen the hole trains most of the muscles used for planting, both in the upper and lower body. If you just did Shaolin jump training as your sole preparation for planting, I wouldn’t be surprised if you’d have a pretty successful season.  Like with sprinting, it’s best to treat these ‘jump sets’ like strength sets, and take nice long breaks in between, limit the number of sets to four or five, and limit the number of jumps per set to around six to eight. This isn’t about endurance; it’s to build maximum power, which means you have to stay fresh and at your best. If you try speed or power training when you’re tired out, you’ll just under perform.

On a final note, if you can already jump more than a few feet high, you might want to start off by picking a rock or something to jump on and off of, and when that gets too easy, start digging a pit from which to jump onto it from. Otherwise you may find yourself having to start off by digging a three or four foot hole just to get started jumping. Which I guess really wouldn’t be such a bad thing.

Click here for Part I