12/28/2023 0 Comments Wood chopper absBut there’s an important and fascinating difference: the underhand chop is a hip closing movement. This means he pushes a lot of energy through his feet, and in some respects, LaVoie points out that this movement pattern resembles a Russian kettlebell swing. It comes straight up and straight down your midline.” And the ax needs to match up to the middle of your body, right between your eyes. “The feet need to match up to the knees, the knees to the hips, and the hips to the shoulders. “You cannot be a good woodchopper without good alignment,” O’Toole adds in his thick Australian accent. But if you don’t have a good core strength, you just can’t do it.” ![]() When I chop for too long, I feel it in the shoulders, back, and legs. (She felled twenty-eight of them in two minutes.) “It’s an all-body type of workout. “It’s absolutely zero to one hundred, immediately,” says Erin LaVoie, who has broken multiple world records in the underhand chop and is the current holder of the Guinness World Record in Christmas tree chopping. (That’s running in place on a partially submerged log as it spins.) Today, we’re looking at perhaps the most iconic event: the underhand woodchop. In other places, like the Lumberjack World Championships in Wisconsin, events also include tree climbing, bucksawing, and logrolling. Some, like the Aizkolaritza games in the Basque Country, are marathon events that involve chopping wood for up to forty-five minutes at a time. (Seems plausible.) Another states that woodchopping as an event originated in 16th century Basque Country, where it’s said that a man needed to run a marathon and chop through ten logs to gain permission to propose to his would-be wife. Today, countries all over the world hold versions of the woodchopping and lumberjack events. Legend has it that the first modern woodchopping contest took place in 1870 as the result of a drunken bet between two Tasmanians in a bar. Indeed, while the swinging motion might look like an arm exercise to the untrained eye, experienced strength athletes will notice that wood chopping is primarily a core exercise that also recruits the grip, shoulders, back, and hips. “You need to get strong and stable in the core, hips, and back. “Your average event lasts about a minute, so it’s like a sixty-second sprint, but it takes months of dedicated training,” says Laurence O’Toole, seven-time winner of the annual Easter woodchop competition in Sydney, which is widely considered the de facto world championship. It’s an astoundingly effective combination of strength, speed, cardio, agility, and flexibility that can benefit almost any athlete. ![]() ![]() Swinging a bladed weapon in a fatigued state isn’t what most people would call a healthful activity, but those people don’t know the truth about woodchopping.
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