Unpaid And Underrated - 169 : There Will Be More Stones (ft. Big Rocks)

Episode Date: August 4, 2026

This week Joey is joined by a group of stone lifting enthusiasts for a deep dive on stones. Links Ü&Ü Hoodie Massenomics x Ünpaid and Ünderrated Colab Get Your Own Keith Head Follow The Podcast On Instagram @unpaid.underrated.podcast Online UnpaidInternPodcast.com On Youtube @Unpaid.Underrated.Podcast Our Guest Big Laurie on Instagram @thefulllaurie Big John on Instagram @jculbert66 Big Mike on Instagram @bigvikingstrength Big Andy on Instagram @sbd.andy Big Scott on Instagram @scottsliftingpage Our Hosts @keithhoneycutt73 or his orange gym, @thenowhinecellar @joey_mleczko Special Guests: Big Andy, Big John, Big Laurie, Big Mike, and Big Scott.

Welcome back, everybody, to episode 169. Nice. Of unpaid and underrated, the podcast for crew, by crew, hosted by crew, attended by crew. And in this instance, some guests of crew are here. I am one of the hosts, Big Joey, as always. One of us is always here, me or Keith, unless it's one of those roundtable episodes that don't have us. I am rambling because I am nervous to have so many of my friends on one podcast. and that doesn't happen very often.

Just to get it out of the way, well, it happens every week, but like not this many, do you know what I mean? Just to get it out of the way, I do want to thank Masonomics for sponsoring us this week. This week is one of my solo episodes. So it's very rare that I get to do an episode

where I decide what happens, who's on, and what we talk about. I think I get one a year. And this year I wanted to talk about rocks. It is one of the things I talk about a lot. I do appreciate Big Kyle the one week saying that, you know, he's a power lifter who's getting into Strongman and then one day he saw a rock and heard my voice in his head saying, I bet I can pick that up. And it's just because I have now become kind of known and unpaid

underrated as the guy who loves rocks. So what I did is I gathered a bunch of my friends who also love rocks, who might be better at picking up rocks than I am, not might, definitely are. And I wanted to get them on to talk about it. I know a lot of crew is not really professional at picking up rocks. I know a lot of you just picked up rocks for the first time at the Lived Hard Leave Easy a couple days ago. When this comes out, it'll be about two weeks ago. I know Cam came to my house for some insights on how to pick up rocks because he's never done it before. So I thought a Rocks episode was a great idea. So I'm going to do, I might call on you first to see, to get you who you are and, you know, while you're here.

I'm going to start with one of the crew. I'm going to start with Scott, big Scott down there. Some of you will remember Scott as the host of our Dungeons and Dragons episode, where he led us through a great fun journey through Aberdeen, South Dakota at the Lift Hardly, Veezy. Scott, how are you doing? I'm doing pretty good. I wanted to hop on here because like you, I also enjoy lifting rocks, but I'm a geologist, so I also very much enjoy talking about rocks.

Okay, okay, double qualified. I'd love to hear that. Let's go with John. Introduce yourself. John Calvert out of Muscoa, Ontario. I'm a lightweight master, strong man. And I do dabble in rocks as well. I'll go with Lori.

Hi, I'm Lori McDougall-Zucratch. I am a pro-strong woman just outside Toronto, Canada. I've been lifted for about, I don't know, 12 years. I like rocks. Yeah. If you've been listening to the past like five or six episodes, I've talked about Lori a lot, having, you know, gone to her house, lifted with her

and just become, you know, I would say relatively close with Lori. you've heard about her a lot. The next person, Mike, I've talked about you before on this podcast, several times. Introduce yourself while you're here. Mike Brown. I've been competing

in Open Weight Class Strongman for about seven years now. Ironically, kind of stumbled into rocks. It was my second ever competition, was the Canadian Stones of Strength, and just fell madly

in love from that point onward. Okay. And last but definitely not least, I think you've appeared on every episode for the past like four weeks. Big Andy, what do you up to over there? First of all, obligatory howdy-howdy for Keith because he's not on this week.

But I am not qualified to be here because I have not done a lot with rocks. The only qualification I have is that I flew to Scotland in January and picked up a couple of rocks there. So that's the only reason I'm here. But yeah, I've been lifting for a while.

I just tried my first strong man show this last week at the Lift Hard-Lavisi. Had a blast. So I'm excited to talk more about rocks and stones and things. Which rocks did you pick up in Scotland? I need to know. Well, okay, I'm going to pause because I think that's one of the questions that Joey has for us. Nope. Go.

Go. Okay, we're extending it. I love it. It's round two. I got the chance to travel through Glencoe up to, toward the Isle of Sky. But I picked up the Logie Kirkstone and the McRae Stone, the lighter of the two of each of those. And then I attempted the heavier of both of those.

The lighter ones I got to shoulder, the heavier Logie Kirkstone I got to my chest, and the heavier McRae Stone I got to my lap, and that was it. I attempted a couple of others. I wrote them down because I don't remember what all of their names are the James of the Glenn Stone, which I got it up to my chest, almost to my shoulder, and then the Invergary Stone, which is like 300 pounds, 130-odd KGs for those of you who are listening who used that unit of measurement. The rest of the world except you guys.

Yeah, yeah, really, that's true. I just know that our audience is very split. That one was frozen to the ground, being it was January. but I got a lot of good looks from onlookers and tourists, so still a win. Nice. Were you on like a stonelifting tour or just like going around picking up rocks? Nope, I was just there visiting family. And the one request that I had for the 10 days that we were there, I said, I want to go and pick up some rocks.

So the family was very kind and gracious and made the stop to let me pick up rocks. That's awesome. Good for you. It was excellent. Okay, I do have a list of talking points here. I'm going to get to some of them if everybody's okay with that. We've done our introductions. Just want to say, I'm not going to call on people. If somebody else wants to do that for me, that'd be awesome.

But I just want to talk about, I'm going to go first. When you first heard about stone lifting, I think I first discovered stone lifting via Instagram, and it was somebody lifting the Denny Stones for the first time. And it was a woman. forgive me if Lori, if it might have even been you, to be honest. But I think it was just somebody lifting

the dine stones. And I was like, wait, you can lift rocks. Like, it was just so silly. I think at the time I was just getting into power lifting. And it was just like, wait, you can just do that. Like, of course you can. That's what they've done for years. And like, I had an entire like epiphany.

And that's when I started just watching. wanting to pick up rocks and just I've never done it until recently like in competition. I've never done it as a like a weighted measurement. It was always just I bet I can pick up that rock. And now here we are hosting this. So I would say anybody else, John, you've been kind of quiet. Can I start with you? It started from Strongman.

It's certainly my first passion. And I was lucky enough that starting with Muscoa Strongman Club, there were already guys who were into stone lifting. Chris was, who competes at Stones of Strength as well with Big Mike. He's in the club. So from the start, we would play with Atlas Stones. And then, you know, we started to gather natural stones to use in our own competitions. So they're not historic stones.

Maybe one day they will be. But we've got a pretty good collection in the club. And we try to incorporate it into our, regional competition that we have every year. So I've actually got a good amount of mileage on, at least on those natural stones anyway, as part of competing in Strongman, which a lot of, especially in the states, it doesn't seem to happen that much. That's starting to change.

But natural stone lifting as part of Strongman is still not super popular, I would say, but it's getting there. It's funny because with that said, Atlas stones were always on my radar because I watch wrestling. So if anybody here has watched wrestling, you know that directly after wrestling was World Strongest Man. And they would show the highlights of World Strongest Man, especially in Canada on TSN, I don't know about down there. So if you just happen to be up late, you'd finish watching Raw, and you would see the highlights of World Strongest Man. So like Atlas Stones were always on the periphery, but they never occurred to me that they were stones or rocks. To me, they were

implement. Right? So then you, that's where I kind of got into where I'm at now. Mike, how about you? Yeah, I was going to say to piggyback kind of off of what John said. I did one strong man competition right when I started. And the guy who hosted that, uh, Jail Sharp, he was like, I'm going to put you in contact with my buddy Austin. He runs a stonelifting competition every year. I think you'd be great at it. I'd never touched a stone at that point, Atlas or Natural. Went out to

this guy's backyard, because that's where the competition was held for three years due to COVID. And just like quickly fell in love. Took one stab at it and realized I was naturally kind of gifted

at it. Not the least of which is due to the fact that I'm six foot four. but it just kind of came naturally to me and I really took a liking to it and now seven years later I've been all over the world competing in stone competitions. I've been to England. I've been to Norway. I'm going to go to the States in September for one.

And obviously the stones of strength in Port Hope every year now, which is a stellar competition, and that's actually the qualifier for Norway. And my stone collection has become quite extensive as well. I have the advantage of working concrete, so I just kind of bring stones home from the job sites every so often. I actually just brought home a new one tonight. Lucky duck. Yeah. The rest of us have to go finding them, which I'm sure we can talk about at some point.

That is one of the questions I wanted to talk about is how do you find rocks? Lori, where did you find rocks? What's going on? So my very first Strongman comp in May 2016 had like a natural stone carry where it was just like a Oosafel shape, so you pick it up and you walk it kind of thing. So I guess the whole time I've been in Strongman, I've had kind of like tangential stone-related events with like, you know, stone carries, Atlas stones. There's always, like, something with stones going on in Strongman, but it's usually only, like, one event.

Stone lifting as, like, its own sport and its own event. I didn't really get into until, like, 2022. When I went to Fayfort Power Week for the first time, they had the amateur stones of strength and the pro stones of strength, and I lifted, like, more stones that week than I had in my entire life. It was just, like, all stones all the time. It was super fun. It's really cool.

Yeah, you two just got back from Norway. Yeah. We're definitely going to talk about that. as much as we can. I just wanted to make sure Scott and Andy had a chance. Now, Scott, it sounds like you just live around rocks. Wet rocks in particular, right? Yeah.

Yeah, I'm kind of in a similar situation to Mike where I just kind of find them through the course of my job. But the key difference is I have a hard time progressing with natural stones because I'm limited by what I can pick up and load into the truck. So the heaviest stone that I have access to right now is about

220 pounds. Which, you know, it's a good stone. It's a sizable stone. Yep. Yep. But if I want to really try and push, you know, 250, maybe 300, like, that's, you know, I got to go

to the rock, you know. No, I think we'll talk about that at some point, too. And Andy, obviously, you went to Scotland to do this. Like, something triggered that. Well, you're talking about going to the rock. And as with most of my excursions into weightlifting, it all started with Big Kevin, who got me to go on a hike to a stone in the middle of Ohio. And I thought it was a lot of fun.

And then we were going to Scotland and naturally, there's something of a culture around it in different parts of the world more than others, certainly, even though it is growing, like you were saying before. And then we went to Scotland and I wanted to pick up a rock and just did. It was a very simple thing for me, but it meant a lot that my family was willing to go out into the middle of nowhere a little bit in the highlands and just watch me. move heavy rocks around for no real apparent reason to them. But they were, they were all good sports with it. And I just enjoy it. I enjoy lifting heavy things. I'm usually the default guy in the friend group or at work. If something heavy needs to get moved and it just transferred over to rocks and what have you very well. Yep. When, you know, one of my other questions was, were you aware of the historical and cultural significance of rocks.

It sounds like none of us were really already aware. Like, we just kind of stumbled into this. Or is anybody, anybody counter to that? Like, I know that when I first saw the dinnies, I was like, what is that? And then I went and learned about the dinnies, and then I got into rocklifting. But, like, I wasn't aware before that

of the idea of cultural or historical stone. It was the, uh, it was the road documentaries for me, for sure. after I'd already started Strongman. So, you know, do a couple Strongman Sundays and then, oh, let's go down the YouTube rabbit hole. I'm hooked. And those were some of the first things that popped up.

So that was, and then Strength Unknown with Martines as well. So I just kind of devoured all of those documentaries. And that's where I learned about it. I was going to say the same thing. The rogue documentaries are an amazing starting point for anyone that wants to understand the cultural significance of stones. They cover kind of three historically significant countries for stone lifting, the Basque region in Spain, Iceland and Scotland,

because those are three countries where it's very important to the culture. And yeah, just like what an amazing couple of productions, just the production value, the athletes involved, the whole thing. You could really just feel the passion that these people have for the stonelifting culture where they come from and how deep-rooted it is in the kind of the identity of their nations and things like that. We don't have like a big one in Canada at the moment. I think ours is borrowed mostly from Scotland. Yeah. And there's there's a very large Scottish population in Canada. That's why we're such avid

Highland Games participants and you could go to pretty much any festival in the summer in Canada and they'll probably have a Highland Games which is kind of fun. I mean, it took me out of retirement. Like I did the Stones of Strength and that was the first thing I've done in,

I want to say three years, the first actual competition I've done since the Lyft had Levisi in 2023. Right? So this is like, I finally got interested. Ironically, we also have the largest Icelandic population outside of Iceland in Gimley, Manitoba, of all places.

Weird. Yeah, they host an Icelandic festival there every summer, and there's a big strong man competition involved in that. No, you're going to make me go to Manitoba? Right, of all places. We do have a game that we like to play here.

I am going in order right now, but if somebody sees something they want to just dip into, just dip into it. It's a game called Least Fun Most Fun. Scott, do you remember how to explain Least Fun Most Fun? Yeah, I do. So we'll be given a topic and we will have to explain the least fun thing about that topic as well as the most fun thing about that topic. Now, normally you guys wouldn't have had this in advance, but I did give this because some of you aren't familiar with how the podcast works. I am only going to pick three of you, if that's okay.

I'm going to go first, Lori. Least fun, most fun. Stone lifting. Least fun is when there's a stone and you're trying to lift it and you can't lift it because either you're not strong enough yet or you don't have enough technique yet and you're like fighting it and you're trying again and again and again

and it keeps like just evading you. And then most fun is when you finally get that stone that you've been fighting forever. Yeah, I, I, I don't disagree. John, least fun, most fun. Lease fun, as I learned a few weeks ago with Bex, is traipsing through the bush, getting eaten alive,

and waiting for the most patient stone lifters known to man to try it one stone 68 times while you're bleeding to death. And the most fun is similar to what Laurie said. For me, it's figuring out the stone, what we call reading the stone. Finally finding your right hand holds, finally finding that one little trick that gets it either to your lap

or from your lap to your chest and so forth. That's figuring it out. The technique is it's so much more rewarding to me than just brute force. Okay, I lied. I'm asking all of you. Mike, least fun,

most fun, stone lifting. Oh, I'll probably catch a lot of flack for this, but least fun is any ditty stone event I know the culturally significant set of stones but my God

does it hurt the hands it is probably one of the most painful lifts you can do in Strongman or in stone lifting it's made a massive resurgence in both amateur and professional competition and it just eats your hands up most fun definitely

gonna have to just piggyback off of what the other two said finding that kind of sweet spot with a stone and it just moving after struggling and struggling and struggling with these things suddenly you're like second-guessing if it was ever really that hard and the kind of moment of elation

when it finally breaks wind off the ground or gets up to your chest is just surreal Yeah. My favorite stone that I have out in the gym is, it could have been 10 training sessions before I finally got it to the shoulder. And now it's like an old friend. I can go out there any day. I know right where to put my hands as long as I've warmed up a little bit. Bang, shoulder. It's something. As opposed to a barbell. It's always going to be a barbell. It's always going to move the same way. You know. Yeah. I have one. Out in the bush and the town I live in, it weighs 500 pounds on the dot. And I've battled with this thing for three years now. And the most I've got is a bit of wind underneath it. But the day I broke wind underneath that thing, I was hooting and hollering in the bush.

And then I turned and looked at my camera and realized I was filming the wrong way. I was filming the path, not filming myself. Yes. But, yeah. it's pretty special because no two stones are the same so each one takes a good deal of figuring out and I think it's more rewarding that way

than like your typical gym lifts like a deadlift or an overhead press. Scott least fun most fun. Least fun is definitely the stone kisses. I am You just get cut up, bleed all over.

But, you know, that's the sport. You deal with it. Most fun, I would think, is scouting the stones, especially stones that you intend on bringing back to your home gym or wherever you train. You know, you just kind of out in nature. Oh, no, I don't like that one. That one's got a weird angle or that one's a little too sharp. and then you find the perfect one and it's like uh you know it's like a almost like a beam of light coming down from the heavens just like that's the one andy you're up well least fun most fun all right

my personal experience least fun was trying to lift stones in the snow my hands just about froze right off it was terrible i could not get a grip and chalk does nothing because the chalk just gums up because of the yep yep yeah that was not a great experience uh uh most fun just this last weekend. I used a tacky towel for the first time. Oh my God, was that awesome. That was incredible.

I was like, I could just stick my hands to it and pick it up. I was like, this is incredible. I had so much fun with it. God bless the tacky towel. How did you do in the event? Did you get all four stones?

I am proud to say that I got all four stones and I won that event for our weight class. Very good. I personally, I personally hate tax. personally hate tacky, but I've only ever used it once, and I've never tried tacky towels. So, like, I'm always open to new experiences, but I will say, yeah, the at the Stones of Strength, John gave me some tacky to try for the first time, and I have never ran so far to the cleanup,

or so fast to the cleanup station as I did that day. I like spray tacky a lot because it, you know, it's less aggressive than full tacky, but it's a lot easier to get off. And I was also the last person to try the stone. So like my beard was gumming up in the tacky and like sticking the grass all over. There was grass everywhere. That was an awful experience. Personally, I will say least fun, most fun.

Both answers to me are the stone kisses. They are the least fun aspect because I think this is the first Sunday I've walked into work or Monday morning, let's say, where I've walked into work without bruises and cuts all over my arms. But that also tells me I didn't do anything on the weekend, right? It's kind of like the calluses from deadlift that I used to really enjoy. Because there were times, like, literally I'd be sitting on the couch and I'd just be rubbing the calluses. And I'd go, I'd go for a deadlift right now and would just walk downstairs and deadlift. Just because the calluses remind me I could and should.

And the stone kisses for me were the same thing. It's just every Monday I'd walk in and they'd go, you were lifting stones, weren't you? Because I'd have bruises anywhere from my wrist to my shoulder based on whatever stones I was picking up. And so not having them kind of said to me, like, you took a break. That's nice, but get back out there and, you know, go do the thing you love. So that's my least fun, most fun. Can I ask a question, Joey? Of course again. Please. I'm talking too much. I'm hearing the, like the expert stone lifters who are who are on. You guys are talking some big numbers. And that's a wildly impressive to me. And B, I want to know like what's the stone, like, what's the stone,

what's one that stands out to you as being like a really cool one that you're really proud of of lifting? Okay, I'll start that one off. Definitely a two-parter. The Hussafel Stone in Iceland, probably being next to the Denny Stones, like one of the most iconic stones in the world. It does not get said enough that that thing is brilliant to lift. It has the most beautiful handles.

It's really well balanced. it's great for carrying because it's a nice wedge shape. And even though it is the heaviest natural stone I've ever lifted and done a carry with, it didn't feel like it. Like it is just so, so nice. And the location is gorgeous to boot, which doesn't hurt my feelings either. And then my other one was before I feel. found the 500 pound stone. There was a 385 pound stone on a nature trail near my house,

and I fought with that thing for like a year and a half or two before I finally got it, and now I have it at my home gym, and it's hands down my favorite stone. Kind of looks like a giant, like, uh, dragon's tooth. It's a very interesting shape, and it is just like a beautiful, like navy blue color and has this like really interesting uh like white line kind of running across the surface just a gorgeous stone and i love that thing we we do live in an area um it's called the canadian shield and uh it does stretch from pretty much i would say eastern canada about to the middle of canada and it is laced with deposits of granite and balcet and balsic and all of these amazing stones where we can find really cool stuff like that.

We are very lucky to do that. John, I think you're a little closer to some of that than we are, but it's not a far track from us. I was going to bring it up since there's a geologist here. But yeah, like I'm right on the sort of what you call the doorstep of the Canadian Shield. It's right where it starts to go from where the Carolinian forests are up into the deciduous forest, and then the Canadian Shield ramps up from there. So it's kind of sort of like the crumbling edge of it. And so because of that, there's rocks everywhere.

And I live in the middle of nowhere, so I can just walk down my country road. And I can pick up 20 rocks if I need to. The only downside with the stones here is a lot of them are very sharp and abrasive. Yes. There's not a lot of really nice, smooth stones and unless you go dunking in a river, which I'm going to have to start doing because I can't keep collecting all these stones that are just cutting people to ribbons. Did you want to answer Andy's question while you were talking? Oh, yeah.

I mean, for mine, they're Atlas Stones, because that's my first love. I love natural stones. They're great, but for me, it's Atlas Stones. And the best one is, well, two of them really would be Rebecca's 300, which I finally loaded at her kitchen day last winter. That was a big deal for me. I didn't think I could do it, but I did it. And then she also, yeah, absolutely.

And then before that, she also let us. play with the world muscle power tour Atlas stones. I think that's what they're called. So it's sort of an historic stone. It's the same stones that John Paul Sigerson loaded in the 90s and O'D Wilson and the

strong men of that era. And so me and Mike got a chance to play around with those and it was really cool. No tacky, of course. Not allowed to. And they're, I don't know what they're made of, but it's such a unique material. It's really it looks porous, but it's got, it's, it's, it's

It's hard to explain, but very, very difficult to lift. I think the 250 was the biggest one I could load without any tacky. Those ones are exceptionally difficult to lift. Like a 300-pound Atlas Stone is like child's play for me most times. And lifting that 300-pounder with no tacky and it's just exceptionally smooth and difficult to get a grip on. Really unique set of stones, those ones. Lori, do you have an answer to Andy's question? If you can remember what it was at this point?

I guess I'll just go with heaviest stone that I've lifted because it was recently at the Canada Stones of Strength in June. There was a stone medley that went up to 252 pounds. And I think the biggest stone I'd lifted previously was maybe like 220, 2.30. So I wasn't really expecting to be able to finish the medley. But then I got to the end and I got it up and over. And I was like really excited. It was super fun.

It was awesome to watch. It really was. And you know what? I'm glad you brought that up. I haven't weighed in on much of my feelings of the Stones of Strength, being it was my first competition in Stones. But I want to say that what you were doing looked way more fun than what me and John were doing. I'm going to finally put that out there.

You guys had such unique and interesting events, and we had like press this, lift it, walk with it. So can you tell us about what that medley was? because that medley had historical significance as well, because I think it was based on the concept of specific stones that you had to get to a specific height. So tell us about that medley, because I kind of really wish I was doing that medley.

So there were two medleys that we did. The one that I was talking about, it was just loading stones over a caber. So it was just they got progressively heavier as they went. They started light. They got heavy and you just had to load all of them over. I think it was like a six stone medley. the second medley was kind of going through like the different stages of lifting a stone so it was the first one was the heaviest one you had to get wind beneath and then the second one was to lap the third one was to shoulder the wait sorry lap and then chest and then to shoulder and then the last one was a small one so you press it overhead so that one was super fun too and i have that coming up again in the jantog games in august so i'll look forward to that

yeah i would have much rather would have much rather done that than the stupid dinnwick yeah can confirm it's i lifted those dinnies like they weighed nothing took one step and crumbled like a bambi like it was awful so i i will touch on that briefly i do agree with you guys that the women definitely had more fun events the reason the men's are so uh static like it's the same four or five events every year at the Stones of Strength is because it's the same ones you do in Norway after you qualify. And like,

I thought I was prepared being the winner of the Canadian Stones of Strength. And then I went to Norway and realized there's levels to this stuff. Like, some of these international guys are absolutely monstrous. Okay, with that I can understand a little bit, but also, you know, from a first time, I was part of the first novice class they've ever done. And I don't know that, right?

Like I had a week and a half notice that I'm coming into this event, but then I'm watching the women, you get to do Hussavall carries and you got to do these medleys and you got to do all this stuff. And I'm like, Dini Walks. So I get it now. That makes more sense. But damn, you guys, you have a little more fun. And this was the first year that they like dramatically changed the women's events as compared

to the men's events. Yeah. There's only been a women's class in Canada for three years now. Thank you, Rebecca. Yeah. Thank you, Rebecca. And the previous two years, they had just done the exact same events as the men, which again is all right, but it adds a little flavor to the show to change things up.

And certainly I think it might be worth mentioning to Devin, who is the athletic director for the men's side of things, that it might be worth throwing something else in the mix. There was supposed to be one other event on the women's side, which was the Matthew Stones, which is like two stones and they're chained together. And it's maybe, I don't know, like it's five foot chain. So you've got to pick one up, carry it as far as you can, run back, pick up the other one, keep going forward and forward.

So it's like kind of a hateful event. But it sounds super fun. I was really looking forward to it. And then Beck's got like injured training that. Like I don't want to break everyone with this event. Yeah, that sounds least fun, most fun. Sounds really fun. That sounds really fun.

That sounds least fun, most fun. Let's have a quick check in. So Lori, John, and Mike and I are all part of something that we just called Ontario Picks Up Rocks. We don't have like an official name. And it really was just we all kind of found each other through one person, which was Rebecca, who I wanted here today. But hey, she's having a rest. She's doing her stuff. You know, I understand why she's not here.

And, you know, it's really cool that I found you guys because I think a lot of lot of us have become kind of close. I think me and Mike and Lori see each other a lot right now, which is kind of wild. I'm making my point to be at more events than I've ever been to, but I think like we've seen each other now at least once a month for the past probably three to six months. Do you guys have any, for Scott and Andy, who is not really, you know, part of the Ontario crew, obviously, do you guys have anything like that that you're aware of or anything that you want to be a part of?

well hold on hold on being in minnesota i'm close to the ontario yeah yeah you might as well be at this point yep except that's way way way up on the end of ontario yeah it's like a whole other world for us no i we don't have anything like that uh at least not not around me admittedly i'm i'm a bodybuilder um so i a very strong bodybuilder i i felt strong this weekend, but you know, everybody's strong when you go to Aberdeen. I haven't really looked into it outside of just doing my own research to find rocks that I can go and lift when I'm in different places. But it is one of the things that I look at. I do quite a bit of travel for my work with the military, and I do look at a couple of different things anywhere I go and travel somewhere.

And rocks is one of them. So it's not a particular community that I'm part of, but it's definitely something that, like, an interest with, peaked and it's continued to be an interest, which I'm very grateful for. And it's a really simple one too, or it can be, I guess. It can also be very difficult and complicated, but it can be very simple. And I appreciate that a lot. Scott, I mean, again, you're like rocks on two levels. What about you? Is there anything around where you are? So, um, the name is escaping me, but there is someone who put together a, like a hiking trail with various, like,

stonelifting checkpoints. Yeah, that's amazing. So there is a, like a stone lifting community in my area. I live in Maryland. There is a stone lifting community in my area. But I,

I also am part of a, just like a general strong man group. And we get together just about every Saturday. and, you know, we train all of the events that we're, you know, training to compete. And very frequently, it's either Atlas Stone or Natural Stone of some type. I mean, I asked for a reason. That was a bit of a leading question is just so I can tell people, if you are thinking you're listening to this and you're thinking,

I want to get into rocks, I have questions about rocks, stones like that. There's obviously communities everywhere of people that are dedicated to this type of thing. I'm lucky to have one all the way through Ontario, where I have friends on the southern points and the northern points. It sounds like Maryland has them. It sounds like, Andy, you found some across the country. If you are wanting to get into it and you're kind of new to it, there are people out there that can help you find stones to try

and might even go with you to show you how and stuff like that. I asked for that, that was kind of a leading question. I wanted to hear kind of about all that. For sure, to piggyback off of that, one of the things I've found that is really helpful is if you're like active on Instagram or other social media just um just kind of start following people that live stones yeah um like I've never been to Scotland or Ireland but I'm pretty chummy with two different guys one from each country there that are kind of like the stewards of

stone lifting in their respective country. So Jamie McGregor in Scotland, he's kind of the go-to guy. He has all the knowledge, all the locations, the stone lifting etiquette, he'll gladly put a stone tour together for you

and help you find all these places and lift all the stones in the way they're intended to be lifted. And then David Kjowen in Ireland, who has pretty much single-handedly revived stonelifting culture in Ireland.

Just people like that. And these guys are so friendly and so nice and so willing to help. They'll put stone tours together. They'll figure it out. They'll help you find a community. And likewise, if you're from the States or from Canada, it's pretty vast tracks of land. So there's just guys all over the place.

Just a couple off the top of my head. like Sean Urquhart from, I'm probably going to screw this up, from Ohio, I think. He's a very passionate stone lifter. I can't think of his actual name

off the top of my head, but his Instagram handle is stew squash. Sometimes that's all we got. Yeah, yeah. His name's Stuart. So Stuart is like a traditional Basque stone lifter. He does all like the cubes

and the cylinder. and things that are really unique to the Basque stone lifting culture. And he has a gym. I don't know if it's his gym or just a gym. He keeps his equipment at, but he's super knowledgeable, super friendly, always willing to help. I know on the west coast of Canada, we've got Dave, caveman Dave, who always does like the most outlandish things with lifting stones.

He's super friendly. he runs the Northern Gathering, which is essentially the Stones of Strength competition, but out in Edmonton. So yeah, there's guys all over the country, all over the states as well, and generally speaking,

even though Strongmen look big and scary, we're all a very friendly bunch, and typically stonelifting, especially because it's such a tight-knit community, people tend to be really willing to help you find stones or find a community in your area that lifts stones and kind of point you in the right direction.

It is a bit like a niche within a niche, right? You know, like you might be in a strong man and been doing it for a number of years and never touched a natural stone. Exactly, exactly. But then when you do, suddenly you're on this podcast with me. I'm going to go one question and then there are some things I specifically want to talk to, to Mike and Lori about. Roundtable, anybody go when you want to go,

dream place to lift a rock. It doesn't have to be specifically a rock that you want to lift, but where is like the ultimate if I could travel there and pick that up? Like, it sounds like you've already done it.

So you're free, free to answer that again. Like, give me anything, anybody. Where is like the coolest place you could think to go pick up a rock? Okay, so I'll jump in quick on that one. Absolutely.

Northern England, where I've been doing the King of the Steins competition for the last two years. The most gorgeous place I've ever lifted rocks. Fetfor in Norway being a close second, because they're both on mountains. And there's just something about lifting a heavy rock on top of a mountain that is so surreal. But the Northern English countryside kind of looking down, off the mountain from the slate quarry where the competition is held is just stunning

you know you can see the rain clouds in the distance which is very typical of English weather and there's like flocks of sheep just frolicking out in the fields and it just it all feels so

kind of just out of this world and just the kind of energy and like serenity of lifting stones in places like that is unmatched. Very good. John? Japan. I would love to go and lift the Chataishi.

I think I pronounced it right. After watching that Strength Unknown episode, that would be pretty amazing. That's similar to what Mike was saying, the vibes. It would be crazy. Scott, you're not muted what's up with you um so my dream place to go would be north ireland

specifically um the giants causeway i don't know if any of you guys have ever heard about that but it's um like six-sided columns of basalt that like jut up out of the ocean uh they're all about 12 to 18 inches across so they're kind of so like the chunks of stone that would have falling off are kind of Basque-esque. But in my opinion, that's one of the coolest geologic features on the planet. And I would love to just go see it, you know? Man, that's a cool answer. I'm going to jump in and second that because I was lucky enough, I lived in Ireland for a year,

a number of years back, and I was lucky enough to go and see the Giants Causeway. Scott, you're absolutely right. I couldn't have said it any better myself. That's an incredibly beautiful place, not just from the standpoint of rocks, which I know you appreciate much more than I do, but just the culture and the weather as rainy and lousy as it may be sometimes,

it just encapsulates what Ireland is so well, and it is gorgeous. So I hope you get there very, very soon. Would you happen to go to the distillery that was nearby? I can't remember the name of it, but it is the oldest licensed distillery in the world, and it goes back to like the 1500s. I went past it. We did not have time to stop in, unfortunately.

Yeah, there were lots of distilleries and breweries that were visited over the course of that year. I'm not ashamed to say that, but that was a cool one to be able to go and just be near, be around. I mean, that whole Belfast as a city and Northern Ireland is beautiful, but being out there on the coast especially was just surreal. And then Lori, and you're actually going to lead me into the next section anyway. Yeah, I'm going to have to go with Scotland. Because Scotland has, like, so much culture and history around their stones, like, all their stones are like, they're talking. There's books about them. You can read up on all these stones and all the history behind them and why they're there and why they're important. And I think that's just like really cool. Hey, so why don't you just go like do that in two weeks? Yeah, I think I will. So I'm flying to Aberdeen on July 29th. Aberdeen, Scotland, not Aberdeen, South Dakota. As the real life, I've hardly lived easy just a place yet. Just missed you.

The Denny Stones when I'm there. So I'm going to be the first Canadian woman to live. the dynastones. Nobody has lifted them yet. Yep. And I know you're going to get it because I've watched you do pretty much it. Yeah, I feel pretty good about it. I hit full dine weight in February this year. I've been training since last July. I wanted to give myself a full year of runway in case I like hit plateaus and got stuck and couldn't move up. But I got just all the way through and hit it like six months early. So I feel I feel pretty good about it. Okay. So are you allowed to use straps on the Denise, the real denies? For women, we are allowed to use straps.

Okay, men are not? For men, they will only count it if you do it with no straps. Okay, yep, that's good to know. Chalk, obviously. Chalk, yeah. Yep, of course, of course. Are you going to do any other stones while you're in Scotland? I haven't planned any specifically, but we are going to be there like a couple days before and one day after. So I'm going to be staying with Sunny Bradley and a few other folks, and I know Sunny has some stones in mind that she wants to lift, so we may just go out and pick up some extra stones while we're there.

I think I asked you this a little while ago, but will you be the lightest to have ever lifted it? No, so Chloe, it's taller than you, isn't she? Yeah, Chloe did it when she was a U-64. I was a U-64, but I'm not currently, so I won't be the smallest. It's still amazing. I just, that would have been a neat little candy on top, I guess. Yeah, I will be one of the oldest.

We have actually like a bunch of master's ladies going this year to do it together. So it's going to be me and Kiki from Norway and my friends Pauline and Teresa. We're all going to lift the Dini's together. Oh, and Annika Karhu is going to lift them again. She's lifted them before. But I think she's going to go to break her record for the hold. So there's going to be a bunch of us like over 40 going to lift the Dini's tone. So it's going to be super cool because I think so far there's only one woman over 40 who's ever lifted them.

So you're going to be a gang. Yeah, I can't wait to see that. But I mean, that all comes off right off the back of you and Mike went to FIVOR. We did. Yeah. So obviously, I want to hear some about that. I got to see it based on your Instagram posts from both of you. Talk to you about it a little bit.

Mike didn't get to talk to you much about it because obviously you were competing the last time I saw you. So, like, you were locked in. So if you guys want to just take a few minutes between the two of you, The rest of us can kind of chill. If we have any questions, we'll ask. But I just want to hear about what it was, why you went, and some of the events, and, you know, overall thoughts and feelings on it. So for sure, I know Lori's been there a few times, so she'll definitely have a bit more of a well-rounded answer on this one. But as a first-timer up at FFOR, just what an experience, a handful of things.

just to rifle off. The location, absolutely gorgeous. It's, like, nested up in the mountains. You know, you don't have views like that anywhere around where we live. There's just cornfields for 100 kilometers in every direction here. So, like, visually just stunning. The community up there, unbelievable. Everyone, even though you just met them, they treat you like your best friend.

It was a pretty special experience. and not just other athletes, but people who are kind of like celebrities in the stone lifting space, like Stevie Shanks, who if you don't know, has the most recorded lifts of the Ditting Stones, I think, ever out of anyone.

You know, Magnus for Magnuson was up there, four-time World Strongest Band. You had Nathan Payton, professional nutritionist. He serves basically 90% of all. all the international professional strong man. And then some pro-strong women too, like Aaron Murray, Sonny Bradley, you know, women who I've only ever seen on television at like the Arnold and the Rogue Invitational and things like that.

So it was kind of surreal just like hanging out with these people and them treating you like you're, you know, just another person to sit around and chat with about lifting stones. and then obviously the events themselves pretty grueling two days, six events across two days for the world's strongest stone lifter a good variety

a ditty stonewalk a stone loading race where you had to kind of like run them down the field and then run back for the next one overhead stone press max Atlas Stone rather than an Atlas Stone medley, which was kind of a pleasant change of pace.

What do you get on that? I got a 405 pound Atlasone, so 180 kilos. Hell yeah. Narrowly missed the 440, which would have been huge, but the 405 was a PR for me anyway, so really pleased with that.

And then the heavy stone thrill, kind of redundant for me because I also threw in the World Highland Games championships the same weekend. So, like, I had my fill of throwing stones, and realistically, it's probably my worst event of the bunch. Just, all in all, just, like, what an amazing experience and what an amazing place. Amazing people. Like, if you ever had a chance to qualify for any of those events, or even if you went

and did, like, the amateur stuff. Stones of Strength up there to qualify for the Pro Stones of Strength the following year. I would highly recommend it. It is just an absolutely unreal experience. Never had anything else like that in all my years doing Strongman so far. Laurie, your thoughts? It's literally the best place in the whole world. I love it.

It is my favorite place, hands down. not just the place, but like the place and the people on that week, like the way that they put it together, the community is like so strong because you're all basically like living together for like a week and a half. So you're having meals together. You're hanging out. You're playing games. You're competing. It's just like it's not anything like when you just like go to a strong man competition and you go home after. It's like you are in it and you're immersed and like these people are your family by the end of it. It's like you are right in it. Like, it's really cool.

I have to tell you, that sounds a lot like the Masonomics crew at the Lift Hard Live Easy classic. You know what? It kind of does. And I think if you like that, you might like the Lift Hard Live Easy because having been to two of those, part of the reason I retired was because I did the Lift Hard Live Easy and was like, it's never going to get this good again. Like, I'd never want to compete again because this is the best it's ever going to get.

Yeah, I'm almost upset that. it's all the way in Norway because like boy if I had the money I would be there again in a heartbeat yeah I'd yeah that's part of the reason I didn't go to Aberdeen

I just don't everdeen South Dakota it's just traveling kind of sucks right now okay so I think I'm gonna start getting into some like generic stone stuff if you guys are okay with that just kind of move on to the like how can we teach people

most specifically the three John, Lori, Sandra, Scott, I know you have a lot to add here. But what could you teach me and Andy who are just like, obviously not professionals, but kind of just like, enthusiasts? We'll call ourselves stone lifting enthusiasts. How can we learn more and how can we just kind of get better at it? So one of the first things I think that when I was learning,

I was just grabbing rocks. Like I would just see the first rock I ever got. I've told this story and I'm paying underrated before. It was actually from my dad's front yard. And it's a big piece of granite. And it's maybe a foot and a half. And I remember going, can I have that?

And he says, that's really heavy. It took me and two friends to get it into the back of my truck. And then I was like, well, that sounds like a challenge. And within a couple weeks,

I had it over my shoulder. Right? And then from then on, it's 108 pounds. It's called the Wyatt Rock. I nicknamed it after Bray Wyatt, who is, you know, my favorite wrestler and he taught me a lot of other things. So I named it the Wyatt Rock

because that's what I wanted. And then I found another one just driving down a country road and I saw it laying there. And I was like, I want that. And I got out of the car and grabbed it and threw it in the car and then felt like I was stealing something. So like, and then the other one I have, I haven't lifted. I got to flip it. We were talking earlier about like our favorite rock lifts. And it was this one. Um, so this rock was living in my dad's back garden and a rain had slid it into the neighbor's ditch. And the neighbor had the tractor out and he had a shovel out and they had everything they could to try and get it back to where it goes. And I shared it with you guys in our stone chat and I said like, I'm going to move this fucking rock.

Um, I could not get air under it. I thought it was maybe 200 pounds. I think it's three to four. And I was able to. flip it twice back into the location it's supposed to be in. I'm very proud of that. That's a heavy-ass rock. I could not get air under it, but I got it to where it needed to go.

So as like a new stone lifter, and, you know, Scott, it sounds like you have some questions around this too. How do you find the rocks that you want to bring home and how do you see a rock and where do you go? Like, how do you prepare? What do you wear? Where are you looking? The three of you guys, if you could teach us.

So honestly, I think you're right on the right track. That is absolutely the mentality to have. Obviously, there's things you could do like accessory-wise at the gym that can help you build the strength to lift heavier rocks. But in terms of just like breaking into stonelifting and kind of becoming more passionate about it and finding your own stones to bring back to your house or your home, gym or wherever it is you train um it's just that like if you're out for a nature walk and you see a nice stone laying on the side of the trail just have a crack at it like the worst that's going to happen

is that it stays laying where it's laying like you know so um and that's kind of just how my collection has grown over the years i just there's a lot of uh like bush trails and stuff uh because i live in a small rural town. There's a lot of that in the area. Every winter, the river in my town pretty much dries up completely before the spring. So it gives pretty ample opportunity to go down into the riverbed and find nice stones, which is where I got some of my nice smooth ones. Like John said, it's kind of tough when you live on the edge of the Canadian Shield. You get a lot of really kind of sharp stones, which are great, because they, they have nice handles and good edges to grab onto,

but the flip side of that is instead of stone kisses, sometimes you end up with like full-blown slices, which can certainly put a damper in your whole situation. Like, I know Rebecca was dealing with a pretty serious slice from one of her stones she picked up recently. So bad she actually had to go get stitches. But yeah, it's just that, you know, like start small and work your way up.

Eventually you'll find kind of the breaking point where you can't lift the stones off the ground anymore and that's like kind of your progressive overload. You know, you just keep going back to that place and keep taking a crack at it. And one day maybe it'll break wind, you know? So I still have two in town here that I have yet to be able to lift

and kind of my golden rule is if I can't lift it at least high enough to get it on the wagon to wheel it back to my house, it's staying where it's at. And certainly, like, I would say pants, like jeans, things like that would probably help. That way you're not slicing up your legs. Maybe a long-sleeve shirt, but I tend to lift stone shirtless anyways, because that's kind of just my style. But, and as John said early on in the conversation, a lot of these places tend to be out in nature. I don't know how bad it is in other places, but certainly in Ontario, the mosquitoes are a real pain in the ass.

So just like bug spray, a good amount of hydration and snacks, because you'll probably be out for a while. like anything you would bring for like a nature hike, you know? That tends to be a good selection for going to find stones. Yeah, I think having patience and having persistence are like two super important traits when you're stone lifting. Like don't just go pick up a rock and if you can't pick it up, just walk away and never try again. That's not how you get better at lifting stones. It's like every stone has like a bunch of different ways that you can pick up. it up. So if it doesn't work one way, try flipping it over, try flipping it sideways, try flipping

it a different way and see like where you can get different handholds on it and where you can maybe get like a clasp around or where you can get your hands under and just kind of keep trying it until it comes up. Like Sunny, when she did the, the Driftick Stone in Iceland, she was like the first one to ever lift it for women in the world. She was the first and she basically like invented a new way of lifting it because all the men who had lifted It previously would go, like, wideways. Like, they'd put their arms around and they'd lift it up. But for her, like, leverages, she just, like, couldn't do it that way.

So she turned it sideways, and she got her arms all the way around. And she clasped them, and she got it up. And now, like, everyone's doing it that way because she, like, invented this new way of lifting the stone. She's, like, so cool to me. As somebody who still really has no idea what they're doing, it gives me a huge amount of comfort that the answer to this question really is see rock, pick up rock, and then a bunch of trial.

That gives me so much joy in such a simple way. And yeah, the patience thing is that's probably the main reason I went on that little stone lifting tour with the Americans when they were up here. And just why I like watching someone like Mike do it or whatever, especially if it's like a first time on a stone, coming from Strongman, everything in my brain is telling me 60 seconds, 60 seconds, 60 seconds, 60 seconds. And that's the exact opposite of what you want to do in stone lifting. You may have to lift a stone in 60 seconds at a competition, but to learn the stone, to read the stone, you have to

take your time. And it's a struggle for my brain, but I'm learning. Yeah. And even like in competition, if you know it's going to be time bound and you're not going to have time to figure it out, you should be trying to figure it out before the comp, like in warm up, like catching all the stones, figuring out where the handles are, figuring out where to line them up. I've even like taken pictures of stones before so I know okay when my feet are here the stone should be here and this is how I want to pick it up because that's how you get those fast picks. Yeah, prime example. Austin Stodcher, the guy that used to be the athletic director for the Canadian Stones of Strength, he and I have become quite close and he was so adamant that when I went to Fivor to go find the stones, we would be overhead pressing the day before.

And he's like, I don't care if you have to spend all day hanging out with that damn stone, figure out how to press it over your head because a zero really hurts in strongman competitions. For those not to know, if you don't lift a thing in a strong man show, you get zero points for that event. And zero points, especially when you're on a field of 10 plus athletes, hurts because the guy that gets first is getting 10 points and you're getting none. So patience is definitely key. and just finding what position works for you, because everyone will lift a stone a different way. Like, I constantly see videos of guys lifting the Hussafel stone,

not in the traditional way. It's very, like, shield-shaped or, like, kind of pizza slice shaped. Yep. So typically, like, the classic way of lifting it is with the point down between your legs. But I've seen people lift it upside. down to that and have kind of the flat side against their legs or sideways. Just everyone has different length of legs, different length of arms, different length of torso, different grip strength, different, you know, forearm strength, because forearm strength

really plays into stone lifting as well. So just really finding what works for you and enjoying it. that's that's the number one way to get into stone lifting yeah and if you can do it sorry go no obviously you go if you can do it with a friend or friends or a group helps a lot because then you you start deciphering the stone together you find little tips and tricks and the more experienced guys will have a better idea of this or that and that can make a big difference as well it's very similar to one of my strong points and strong man, which is sandbag lifting.

And I'm sure, I think you mentioned you're going to talk about it in the future, but sandbags are a rough analog to stones, the very similar movements. And there's a dozen ways to pick up a sandbag, too. It varies depending on your leverages, your height, your width, the length of your arms, your grip, all that kind of stuff. So whenever you see a tutorial on YouTube where a guy says, well, here's how you lift a standbag. No, that's one way to lift a sandbag.

Yeah. There's always 10 ways to do it. And that's true of stones as well. actually to piggyback immediately off that point when I was in Norway, my wife and I were visiting a museum in Oslo. And for some reason, all the museums in Oslo are on like this little island. You have to take a ferry to. And as a result, there's like four museums on one property, and there's these nice little walking trails leading between the museums, and they're all lined with these nice big stones.

So, of course, in typical Mike fashion, I decided to pick one up. up, and I could not, for the life of me, figure out how to get a purchase on this stone. And ironically, my wife, who's only ever done, like, two novice stonelifting competitions ever, figured out how to lift it. And she was like, oh, like, you know, tip it up on end and, like, clasp around it. I think you have long enough arms to do it that way. And sure enough, thing flew off the ground immediately after that, and I got it up to my shoulder. So, you know, it's, it's just one of those things. Like, even if you're with somebody that's

inexperienced, their eyes might just see the way. All I was going to say is like, you know, for me, my, my, my, my latts and back and shoulder are stronger than my forearms and grip, right? So when I'm doing specific things, it just helps if I can hug it a little harder, right? So, you know, finding that specific way of getting my arms all the way around it is easier than trying to pick it. Right? So I just wanted to say, like, yeah, I'm kind of the same way with what you guys are saying. This is going to be a little different. Feel free to answer this or not answer this.

What's your worst stone lifting accident? I think people who are nervous getting into stone lifting might want to hear about these. and I know that actually I just want to say thanks Andy amazing for you to join it sounds like you really need to go to bed bro

it's about that time for me but it was such a fun time great to meet everybody I can't wait to listen to the rest of the conversation when the episode comes out but until then you'll stay silly

and good luck in your future stonelifting ventures it sounds like you're off to a strong start and I hope we inspire you to go do more. Oh, there will be more stones. Don't worry. All right, love you, dude.

See ya. I was going to say, I remember at the Crew Falls I went to, which would have been about, yeah, a year, two years ago. Crew Falls is an event in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, where a bunch of us go and we just, we go to a gym. It's called Los Campionis in Sioux Falls. And my friend Trond decided he was going to pick up a rock, and he put it up over his head, and didn't he drop it? directly onto his head. Yep. And cut a part of his scalp off.

And... He always says, no one does that. He's like, don't worry. You're not going to drop it on your head. It's fine. Yeah. Unfortunately, Trond did. And I'm only bringing it up because, hey,

Trond is one of the funniest, coolest guys, you know, that I've ever met. But, I mean, this kind of stuff happens, right? There are small accidents that if you're nervous are going to happen, that you can't be afraid of. So for some of the stone lifters here, I don't have one specifically because I've never really gone over

what I think I should go over but obviously I've tried rocks like the big one in my backyard that just like I couldn't get and I went out there cold I went out there stupid and you know I will tell you my neighbor saw me trying and came running out

and being like don't try it don't try it it's too heavy and then I was like I'm gonna show you which is stupid but again I've said it before I'm not stronger than anybody I'm just stupider. So do you guys have anything that maybe you just want to like relate? Something that like, don't worry. This kind of stuff happens.

Stone kisses is the big one. Yeah. Yeah. Like don't where I actually, the picture I took on the way to do this with you guys of me putting, that's my lightest stone. It's my biggest and lightest. We'll get into how that works in a few seconds.

And I just said to Morgan and I was like, well, if I'm going to talk about stones, I want to go pick up that stone before I go do it. and my shoulders all cut up because I don't normally do it with no shirt on and like that like that kind of stuff happened is there anything you guys want to like be ready for let's talk about yeah for sure so uh generally speaking uh stone kisses like they they kind of seem painful and like uh like an inevitability when you lift natural stones or at the stones really because uh once you get heavy enough with Atlas Stones,

they will absolutely leave bruises all over your body. My worst ones are from Atlas Stones. Yeah. I went to Cam's house and for the first time ever shoulder at 150 pound Atlas Stone and the next day went to work. And my entire biceps on my right side and my forearms were yellow. And they were yellow for two weeks. So definitely like if you're going to get into stone lifting,

just know that that kind of thing is an inevitability. The stone I just brought home from the job site this evening, it probably won't see it on camera, but I absolutely shredded my upper bicep, just loading that into the back of my boss's truck. It had a bit of other, like, other, like, grit kind of cake to the surface, and I didn't bother cleaning it off before I lifted it, and that stuff just shredded my arm.

generally speaking, that's usually the worst of it. I have lifted everything between a 40-pound stone and a 500-pound stone, and I've not sustained any serious injuries. The worst ever was I was training, loading a natural stone over a bar, which typically you don't do. If you're loading a natural stone, usually it's onto a plastic stone. platform. Occasionally you might run into it over a bar like what the women did at the Stones of Strength

this year in Port Hope. But yeah, I was loading in a natural stone over a bar. It was only 250. But when it hit the crash pad, it actually bounced back towards my feet. And it rolled my right ankle because it just like rolled right over my right foot. And like that sucked. But, you know, I'm not exactly like a quick or agile guy. at 300 pounds.

So that's just something to be aware of. Like with any, anything. And that kind of stuff happens. I think, Lori, did you see Taylor's foot after provincials? I was there.

Yeah. So I didn't see it happen. And I'll say, I didn't even realize. She was walking around like nothing happened. And then the next day had a book on. She was like, no,

it's fine. It's fine. For those of you that don't know that are listening. Taylor Peck is another strong woman, a pro strong woman. And what an absolute beast. She's A, an incredible woman.

B, yes, absolutely took a keg to the foot and walked it off for the entire event. And then the next day in her Instagram stories had a boot on. And I was like, what? Like, you weren't even limping.

But, uh, yeah, wow. Yeah. So, you know, that,

that happens. It does. The only one I would like absolutely express a lot of caution. with is overhead pressing. Yeah. As soon as you introduce pressing the stone over your head, there's a whole new swath of risk factors,

namely, like what you said with your buddy Tron, dropping it on your head. That's a very obvious one. You just got to be really careful if you're going to overhead press stones. And just because you can do 100, let's say you can do a 200-pound barbell overhead press, that does not mean in any shape or form that you can do a hundred pounds stone overpress.

Oh, absolutely. So they do not translate. I'm easily in the like low to mid 300s for overhead pressing a barbell. And in FFOR, I failed to press a 225 over my head. Like it's a whole different ballgame. And you just have to approach that lift in particular with a lot of caution. Make sure you have crash pads so you're not damaging the stone. Make sure, you know, probably do it with somebody else spectating so that if you do drop the damn thing on your head, you have someone to call an ambulance for you.

Yeah. But generally those are the things to look out for. Otherwise, I've seen guys tear their biceps doing heavy atlas stones. Yep. Because that's, yeah, that one end, like, I specifically remember the first time I tried out. Atlas Stones. It was in Aberdeen. It was at the Massonomics gym. And Megan Stone was teaching me. And she just happened to walk in and I saw her there. And I was like, can you teach me Atlas Stones? And the first thing my friend Steve said, you guys both know Steve. Actually, I think everybody here knows Steve.

And he was like, don't tear your bicep. I don't want to hear you cry all the way back to Hamilton. And so obviously I didn't go that heavy, but like you can clearly see how that can happen. Because you don't want to curl an Atlas Stone. Don't curl an Atlas. stone it's tempting but it's stupid yes and and it just happens by accident because I think sometimes if the diameter of the stone isn't that significant you kind of get that comfortable feeling like oh yeah I could just like swing this with my biceps I'll viper this no problem yeah absolutely don't do that the notable one that I can think of with that was Larry wheels the pro powerlifter.

He had a short stint in Strongman a couple years back, and it ended with him training with, I want to say the Stoltman Brothers. And this was around the time that Tom was training for the Atlas Stone World Record. He was going for like 300 kilos or

something crazy. And Larry was training with the Stolmins brothers and tried kind of just keeping up with them. And on like the third stone of a five stone run just blew his bicep clean off his arm. Like, it's one of those things where, again, you just, just be smart about it and approach it with caution. And typically everything will be fine.

Yeah, there's a lot of go out and try new things, but there's also a lot of don't be stupid. I think it is like be strong monk, monkey, go unga bonga, do whatever you got to do. but also like don't at the same time do those things that maybe you don't think you should be doing. Yeah, stones are sturdier than people. Yes. Yeah, that's a very good way of wording it. I'm going to go ahead and knock on wood as I say this, but I don't have any stone lifting injuries. You know, not counting like various bruises and scrapes and things, but I've been injured by us.

I mean, me either, but I also like, I don't, well, besides the stones of strength, I've never really gone out of my own wheelhouse, right? Stones of Strength, I think, was the heaviest I've ever done. No prep, no training, no nothing. And obviously it showed because I got zero in the entire games. But I mean, zero in my, somebody tried to say the other day, like, didn't you get last place in the competition? And I meant you mean last place in the 10 strongest people to do that event in Ontario. Yeah, I did.

What else you got to say? There you go. Like, oh, no, I'm the 10 strongest person. Were you competing to be, were you competing to be competitive? or were you competing to have fun though? And that's the other point too, right? Like, I went in as novice. I was there to try something I've never tried before.

But I don't have a competitive bug. I don't have that, like, desire to go out and, like, be the first or second or third in anything. So to even be there was me just saying, like, I want to do this. Like, I just want to be here and do this and participate in this. But again, it just comes down to, oh, I'm sorry, was I the 10th strongest person in Ontario to lift these stones?

Is that what you're saying? Because you weren't there doing any of those. Anyway. Everyone on the couch at home. I sure did. And you also got a 225 stone to your chest, which is nothing to sneeze at. You did good. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. I did see somebody today unable to move 200 who weighs a lot more than me. And then I was like, but I almost got that to my shoulder. Holy crap. I was like, ooh. For once it's the opposite of the Instagram effect. actually feel kind of strong right now.

So we'll get away from the bad news. Favorite competitions. And I'm going to say, I literally only know of like two or three. So I think if you guys have any insight into competitions that you have felt are really interesting that people can look forward to. Obviously, Highland Games look for one. I'm sure there's one and I'm sure there's stones there. But like do you guys have, obviously Fafor is going to come up.

Yep. Is it Fafor for both of you? G and Arnold are going to be my top three. Now the Arnold is a big one amongst the people listening to this right now. I would say for me,

obviously I'm a bit biased, but King of Stains in Cumbria, Northern England there, fantastic. Just really nice guys, really great location, really interesting stones,

actually, because it is at a active slate mine. All the stones are slate, which is interesting coming from a place where virtually all the stones are granite. Slate is wildly different to lift. Sharp edges,

different density, just almost impossible to lift if it gets wet. It's a very interesting kind of medium to put your hands on compared to lifting just granite stones all the time. Well, congratulations. You just made the best segue of this entire podcast because Big Matt Sanchez, Fat Matt,

wants to know what material makes a good or bad rock. And I think this is Scott's wheelhouse. Now, I was saying I have a granite rock that is smaller than my other rock. I don't know what the other rocks made of. It's smaller, but still 20 to 30 pounds heavier than that rock. So I think now is a very good opportunity, Scott, for you to teach us a little about rock density. Yeah, so rock density really comes down to what the rock, like the mineralogy of the rock. Sorry.

Lost my train of thought for a minute. the rocks that are igneous and metamorphic that have higher magnesium and iron content typically are heavier um the best rock that i have it's about 185 and it's like the size of it's not much bigger than a volleyball like it's really small and dense and it's a uh uh rock called diabetes. It's an igneous rock. It's, you know, means it's volcanic. And it's just super dense. And the lighter rocks are usually more in the sandstone vein. Sorry, Joey, I was just, sorry, Joey, I was just kind of going. Didn't realize that you were going. Please do. No, keep going. Always keep going.

me having to feed does not negate what you're saying. The larger rocks that I have are from, so you guys are in a good area being up north. You have a lot of rocks that are scoured out by glaciers. So a lot of the glacial tail rocks are typically smoother. My personal favorite rock is a big chunk of sandstone that had been ground down by glaciers. I got it up in northern Pennsylvania. And it's, I mean, it's bigger than my torso, but it is definitely not the densest rock because it's made up of the lighter materials.

It's made up of sandstone. But it's nice and smooth because it got ground down by glaciers. And it's a lot more comfortable to lift, I'll say, just because it doesn't have the sharp edges. everything's nice and round and flat and smooth. Yeah, definitely. That's the case with me too. I've got a handful of really nice riverstones that probably spent the last, you know, several thousand years at the bottom of a river.

Like, so smooth and so nice to lift and you don't really get your forearms and your biceps and stuff torn up. It's a much more comfortable lift. But I recently brought home. a pink granite stone from a job site that is just so rough it's like sandpaper on the surface it makes it a little easier to grip onto but it is horrendous on the arms and then i also have a sandstone which is definitely more porous than some of the granite stones you can see little like pock marks in the surface and and there's clearly a spot where part of it

has chipped away and you can you can kind of see the interior workings of the stone and see that there's little kind of pock marks in there as well so that sort of thing like i thought this stone looking at it was going to be like 375 to 400 pounds and it actually is only just over 300 pounds which is is interesting and and on the flip side of that the uh the fullsterger's stones at Dritvik in Iceland are that nice, like, old igneous rock. It's volcanic. It's been worn down on this beach for, you know, hundreds, if not thousands of years. And it is just like impossibly smooth for a natural stone.

It's crazy. It's like a giant pebble, basically. Well, that's another thing. too is that the denser stones will hold up better too to like drops their you know they're harder material they're packed more tightly

than you know like your sandstones like you were saying chunks chip off and they get sharp but like the like you're saying the I have zero fear dropping my granite rock at all right because it is so dense that like yep that thing's going to move things before it breaks but the other rock

is probably sandstone to be honest and like, yeah, that one might splinter. Yeah, up around you guys in the Canadian Shield, there is a lot of that igneous and metamorphic rocks. So you guys can find some good rocks. But in, you know, you go over to Ireland and Norway and Iceland, all of those are all like basalt. The Hussafelstone, the Folsterger Stone,

those are all those old basalts. And that's why they've held up so well for, so long because they're just super dense, super tough material. I don't know if a stone is going to be resistant to breaking or not. Is it just about the density of it

and the size to weight ratio or are there like other factors? The size to weight ratio is the easiest to tell by in the field. Another way that you can tell is the Moe's hardness scale.

if it basically is a way to tell like how tough a rock is to damage the best thing to do is if you've got a pocket knife on you try and scratch it with the pocket knife and if it can be scratched with a pocket knife then it'll probably crack and chip and break at some point is there like um like on the field like thing you can buy that like lasers them and tells you the density or anything like that uh if there is it's several thousand dollars Okay, that's out of our wheelhouse. Thank you for all that, Scott. Again, incredible information that I think, you know, even professional rock lifters would be interested in knowing that kind of thing. I think one of the, go ahead, Lori. Here we segue from here into like stone lifting safety and like not breaking historical stones.

Yeah. Buy crash pads. They're cheap. Yeah, crash pads. Yeah. Yes. Well, crash pads can be cheap. Tires are relatively cheaper if you can find them in the

side of the road. But I think that, yes, I do want to get into that, Lori, but I think that's where I want to end things is with that, like, specific lesson. Because I talked about that about two or three weeks ago on this podcast, but I think I want to hear it from you and Mike as well. There is one thing I wanted to ask that I never got to ask before we get into questions from my followers, which are all crew members. How do you weigh a stone?

Okay. I know how, but I want to hear how, like, the way you guys do it in the field. John, it looks like you want to go. I only know because I saw like the true professional way to do it a few months,

a few weeks ago. Um, you buy a cargo net off of Amazon, a good heavy duty cargo net, a big heavy duty fish scale. Uh, and then you, usually the two biggest guys in the group hold it up.

And then they hang the rock in the net, which is then hanging off the fish scale. You can probably do it off of a yoke. If you're in your gym, You could do it off a tree as well, I suppose. But I had the fish scale already, but I was using like a toe strap, and it was a real pain in the ass to get it wrapped around the rock. But the cargo net was perfect.

I watched them do it to five of Bex's stones. It was very straightforward, very accurate too. Yeah, so that's exactly what I do. I just kind of do it the dumb way with a ratchet. strap because I tend to be by myself when I weigh these things. So I just, I just slap a ratchet strap around it, crank it as tight as it'll go, hook it up to the scale. And then I bring, just like a lat pull-down bar for a cable machine and hook it up to the other side of the scale and then just like zirch or lift the thing. And I'll just, I'll set my phone in front of

the screen of the scale and just record it and just watch the recording back. and that's always a nice reference too so I can remember what certain stones weigh because I've got it on video. Okay, because here's what I was doing. I would weigh myself and then calibrate the scale and then pick up the rock and stand at the scale. Yeah. And then it would Bluetooth to my phone and tell me the weight.

And I know that that has like, that has an end. Like there's going to be a point where I can't do that. Yeah. Yeah. So that doesn't work. well for me because obviously my scale maxes out at 400, I already weigh 300. So yeah. So that's what like that was one of those things where I didn't realize it until I saw you guys doing it. Right. So that's when I was like,

okay, I think we need to talk about that too. Like people need to hear. But yeah, before I had the proper like, uh, as John called it like a fish scale or I call them crane scales. It's just like the the hook with the screen and the carabiner off the other side. Um, before I had that, I was just actually putting a blanket or like a towel on my scale and then gingerly as gingerly as possible kind of rocking the stone over onto my scale. That does not always work and it's kind of inaccurate because unless the actual center of mass of the stone is center of scale, it's probably going to give you a slightly inaccurate. reading. That end. A lot of those scales are made out of glass these days.

Yep. And glass and stone, don't go too well together. I've broken two scales before I finally decided to go out and do it the proper way. You know, I have a heavy duty scale that goes up to like 660 pounds and it just has like the little thing off to the side. The genius thing, the one I wish I had, yep. I just roll stones onto that and then see how many. Yeah.

Yeah, I think they call it like a livestock scale or something or grain scale. That would work too, yeah. Okay. Thank you so much. This has been amazing. And like I said, I think that one of the big takeaways I want is that we can kind of get people who maybe are just getting into it or hear me talk about it all the time on this podcast, kind of get it from, you know, various levels. We've got a geologist. we've got an enthusiast and we've got three people who do this all the time.

So I think that that was really amazing. I want to thank you guys. There are some questions that came from my followers who are members of the massonomics crew. Specifically, Joey Achevara, he's out of Ohio, wherever Rogue is. He's from there. And he asked a lot of great questions, but I'm going to go in order here. So Tanner from PowerLocks, Nebraska.

And I don't know if you guys saw, but I do have those. Husker power locks. So those spinning locks that lock on to any size barbow. Amazing dude. He's been on this podcast and he actually asked a really good question. Are stones an accessory or a main lift? Personally,

I think that depends on what you're training for. So I want to hear is there anybody that disagrees or has any insight into that? How do you define a main list? Like I would say main lifts would be like your compound lifts like deadlift, overhead

press, bench press, squat. Generally speaking, I would consider stone lifting a compound lift. Typically, especially if you're, you know, trying to get better at it, you're going to just keep trying to find

like that next heavier stone. And really, like, it's always working your whole body. so for sure I would say a main lift definitely I almost couldn't even think of a situation where it would be an accessory no me either and anything where you could use it as an accessory

you could use a sandbag instead and it won't cut you to pieces yes yeah and much more gym friendly friendlier on your floors friendlier noise wise like when it falls to the ground it's not going to sound like somebody just fell down the stairs. The movement of stone lifting specifically to shoulder, and the same with Sandbag, it is like you was saying, it's a full body. It really has every, it's not just a compound movement, it's all the compound movements.

It's a deadlift into the lap. It's a front squat. It's triple extension. And then you finish on your shoulder. It's everything, and it's sort of a row as well as you're picking it up off the ground. So it's all of them together. Yeah. And then if you go so far as to press it overhead, you're adding, getting it all the way up to your chest and then adding a press.

So realistically, it is like all the compound movements rolled into one. Okay. So everybody agrees. There's not a single one of us that has a very in position on that. Murph, friend of the podcast, what's the name of your favorite stone? Lori, you want to go first on that one? I'm going to go ahead and say the ditties because they are very top of... Of course.

John? I haven't had the chance to lift any historic stones yet, so it would have to be my stone, the Jansen stone. I'm going to say the same thing. Yeah, two years in a row we used it as for the Muscoa Mayhem Strongman show, and it stays in my gym as well. It is a nice stone to shoulder. I like the shape of that one. it's nice. I would say

far and away, my favorite one is the oh, I'm going to screw up the name. The Buttermear Stone from King of the Shains in England. So all the other stones in that competition are just kind of the way they were cut out of the quarry

or out of the mine. They're very blocky because they're slate. They've got sharp hard edges. But the Buttermier stone is like the polar opposite. I don't know if they just found the best shaped stone in the whole world. But it's almost like the shape of the number eight. So it's kind of like fat at the top. It tapered.

Oh, did he cut out for anybody else? Yeah. Yeah. I'm so excited to hear about this stone. I know. Me too. Now it's on figure eight. He's back.

He's back. back, Mike. Oh, sorry. Yeah, you cut out there. You cut out right when you were saying it tapers in the middle. Okay, so, yeah, so the stone, it tapers in the middle, and then it's fat again at the bottom. And, uh, and it's just beautiful. Like, it's, it's smooth.

It's nice to carry. It's actually quite tall. So, yeah, you pick it up from ground when it's standing up right by just giving it a hug around the tapered point. Um, it's 385 pounds. And it's for the max. distance carry event. But my God, is it just

beautiful to carry. It's smooth on the arms. It's just such a beautiful stone, too. And it has the King of the Shines logo laser engraved on the face of it.

And then on the back, if the record gets broken, they laser engrave the name of the current record holder on like a bullet list on the back, which is awesome. There's only...

Yeah, that's cool. I think there's only two names on there right now. Because no one's been able to beat the record. That was set the second year, the competition ran, and the competitions only run three or four times now. If you have a picture of you doing that, send that to me.

I absolutely do. Yeah. I can send that over. Yeah, I'll make sure I post that after this episode comes out. Scott. So my favorite my favorite stone to lift is the big piece of sandstone that I was talking about earlier. It's a red sandstone.

It's shaped like a big guitar pick. It's about 220 pounds. I call it Roxanne. Of course. If I could suggest, oh, sorry. I thought you were done. Sorry.

No, I was pretty much done. Go ahead. I was going to say, like suggest just a, brief aside here, and I think Mike could probably, or Lori, what is the protocol for naming a stone? Yes, yes, let's talk about that. I've talked about that in like a, I half know this way about two weeks ago on this podcast, and I would love to know more. So, generally speaking, just the place it was found, a lot of stones are often named after the location they're in. Prime example being the Hussafel stone.

It is in Hussafel. That's the name of the region of Iceland. And it's just like on a guy's farm. So that's the significance of its name. It comes from Hussafel. It is the Hussafel stone. I had said that to name your own personal stone, you have to lift it in the way that you think that that stone should be lifted.

So if you have like a chest stone and you can chest it, then you get to name it. And if you have a pressing stone, once you press it, you get to name it. Am I, like, crazy off on that one? No, no, that's a fine way to do it. Sometimes they're named after people.

Like, we have a set, two sets of kind of Dini Stone-style stones in Ontario for the men. One is called the Paul Boundy Stones. Paul Boundy was the Highland Games and Stonelifting Athlete, who did both disciplines for quite a long time. So those were named to honor him.

And then Rebecca has a set called the Gibson Stones, which is named after our close friend and strongman Matt Gibson. He's been doing Strongman for probably a decade. Really nice guy. And when she had her set of Dinny Stones made, she called them the Gibson Stones as kind of an honor to Matt, which is awesome. And then there's some kind of funny naming conventions like the Japanese

because they've had written language for so long. A lot of their chikariishi have interesting things carved in the surface. Like, you know, this stone belongs to like Tatakatsu, and then Tadikatsu's neighbor would pick it up and put it in his front yard and carve his name in it instead. So, you know, there's no real one right way to name a stone. It's just whatever feels right for that specific stone, I would say. Okay. Amazing.

Yep. Great information. Sean at Colonial Barbell. He's a gym reviewer friend of the podcast. I'm going to keep saying that because literally everybody who submitted questions has been on this podcast before. What's your least favorite position to carry Stone? Dany Carey? Dany Carey?

Definitely. It's painful. Yeah. It's very unpleasant. Lori. Duck walk. Duckwalk, yeah. Wait, you've duckwalk stones?

You can't. I don't want it. be worse. Yeah. Like, when I was volunteering to help at the Stones of Strength this year, I was resetting

the stones for the men. And if they hadn't gone far enough to wheel it back with the dolly, I was just duck walking it. And yeah, that was pretty awful. Yeah. Okay,

good answers. I love it. Everybody's just like, Denny. It's the worst. Yeah, it is. And I don't even get to

train it. I don't have room, so I might have to, like, I was thinking of drilling into my two stones. Like, I know they're not that heavy, but like, at least practicing walking with lighter stones might be better than never practicing. That or always a solid option. Rogue and Cerberus both make ditty stone rings that you can

just attach to pins. See, I have those. Yeah. But those stay in my gym because that's where all my plates are. Yeah. I don't want to carry all my plates outside. Because my gym's like eight feet. So like I can't. There's no walking.

I would walk like four feet and then four feet back. Well that's what I did to train for stones of strength. Yeah. Where that got me. You can't even just do like marches. Yeah, I was going to say marches are a good option. If you don't have a ton of space, obviously it's not quite the same because it doesn't really simulate the way they like swing into your legs when you take a forward step.

But definitely it gives you an idea of like, the grip strength you need to keep them when they're like jiggling back and forth. So the next one, two, three, four are from Joey. So Joey wants to know, are the dinnies an actual stone lift or are they adjacent to a stone lift? And I think is, yes, you're lifting a stone, but it's technically a deadlift. Like, is there a difference between what you guys would call that versus like a typical like stone to shoulder or stone to chest. Because it has rings?

I guess so. I, it was one sentence and I'm kind of see where he's coming from. I would still classify it as a stone lift because you're still lifting two stones. Yeah, like it's literally a stone. Even though they are like ringed. So it's a very different lift that if you were to just pick it up off. Actually, I told the story of how you asked if we've ever done a Jefferson deadlift. and if you know anything about massonomics,

they actually hold the scorecard for the world's top Jefferson Deadlift because they started this thing where everybody said, sumo is cheating. So they said no conventional is cheating if you don't Jefferson Deadlift. It's all cheating.

And so when you asked us that, when we were at your house, that's why me and Steve looked at each other like, wait, is she messing with us? Is she actually in crew and knows this joke? Because, yeah,

that is kind of what the Denny's are. They're a bit of a Jefferson Deadlift. left, right? Yeah, for sure. If you do them in the straddle style, definitely. But no, I would say definitely they are a stone lift. I don't think they get disqualified from that just because the steel rings or the iron rings. And realistically, they're so important to Scottish stonelifting culture.

Yep. That I think it would be kind of criminal to discount that as not being a stonelift. 100% agree He also wants to know This one's really quick We can do this round Do you prefer Atlas or natural Natural?

Natural Atlas Why not both That's such a I'm in the both category as well I'm going to say so far Natural I don't hate Atlas

I just don't have enough experience with it Yet You don't like tacky Well, I mean, I can still try it without tacky. Everything else I do is raw. Like, I rarely wear. The only thing I wear now is straps for deadlifts on volume, but that's because of my tendinitis. So I'm willing to try Atlas Stones with just chalk.

And like I was saying to you at Stones of Strength, you can buy sleeves that will protect your forearms all the way up to the elbow. Yeah. And just put the tacky on that. I've even seen some lifters, some do hands only and no, forearms. I've seen guys do forearms only and no hands. Yeah. So you, you could play with it. And I also could, I also could shave my arms or put something on there to protect that. Because I think that was part of what day. Yeah. The free wax job

is always a bonus. Yeah. I'm a very hairy man pretty much from the eyebrows down. And like, yeah, that tacky ripped out things. I'm probably the hairiest guy in strong man right now. And like, I catch so much flack for being. shirtless when we do atlas stones at competitions. As well you should. As well you shouldn't. Right. Every other guy has no chest hair, no body hair to speak of.

And I'm like Sasquatch. So yeah, that's definitely part of the reason I don't love doing Atlas Stones. So when I train them, I try to do them tackyless as much as possible. It'll just make you a better Atlas Stone lifter anyways. If you can lift an Atlas Stone without tacky, you can bet your ass you're going to be able to lift it with tacky. Yeah. We're fun with tacky.

Yeah, it is fun with tacky. And just to kind of get some reasoning behind the Atlas Stones for Natural Stone things, I think I prefer natural stone just because every single one of them is different. Where with Atlas Stones, it's almost like a gym lift. Like, it's a uniform shape. You know what it's going to be like.

I mean, as long as the stone isn't like dusty and dirty and covered in old tacky and like bits of grass and stuff, it's typically a pretty straightforward thing to do. So. And that's granite. There's granite stones. Yeah, the granite out of the stones are an interesting

variation of that because they're very kind of like, I don't want to say porous on the surface, but they're very... They're cranky. Yeah. It's like all your taggy gets in the holes and then you don't have any more taggy on?

It's like, what's my baggy going? It's all like, in the stuff. Yeah. Is that what those power of tour stones were made of? No. Those ones, I think, are just like

a really well done concrete, like almost better than any stones I've ever seen. And that can vary too. Like concrete mixes are as varied as any other thing that involves stones. You can get

finer mixes of concrete. You can get more coarse mixes of concrete. So that's definitely, I think, the case with those ones. But there is somebody on Facebook Marketplace in the area right now selling a set of seven granite Atlas Stones, the same style as what we used in Fed for. So if that's something you're into, feel free to send the link for that to the group chat.

Yep. Okay, I'm going to do the, I think one of the, the most interesting ones that everybody, especially after Lived Hard LeVizzi, is going to want to hear. This is also from Joey E. He had another one. I'm going to skip that one for now.

Post-Lift skincare tips. So, like, what are you doing to treat your stone kisses, if anything at all? You could be like me and do nothing and just let them suffer and enjoy them. But maybe you guys have any other insight than my insanity. Honestly, I'm the same as you. Damn it.

To be frank, like, I'm so heavily tattooed all my arms that half the time I don't even realize I have bruises or cuts on my arms. Yep. All my tattoos are red and black. So it's part of the fun. It's just like wound roulette. Am I wounded today from lifting stones? Who knows? Where did I go the other day?

It was actually after Lori's house. And I saw somebody and I was like, oh, yeah, I was just out of friends lifting stones. Jones and she's like, oh, are you all cut up? I'm like, no. And then I looked down and I was. I was like, oh, crap. Yes. Yes, I am.

Yeah, I don't do anything either for the arms. When I saw that question, I thought for a second, all he means calluses. But I would assume anybody who does powerlifting or barbells would know what to do about calluses. So, yeah, when it comes to my, the stone kisses, nothing. I don't, I don't leave it alone. Okay. I'm sure there's like, Laura, you're, any different answer? Oh, just, just wash them.

Like, don't have open wounds with dirt rubbed in them, like maybe. Oh, of course, yeah. Yeah, I mean, yeah, exfoliate, exfoliating shower. I don't have any, like, soap affiliates, but I will just tell you if you have any affiliate, any soap with sand or grit in it, just wash them. And then after that, let them go. I'm sure there's like creams or something. Yeah, I was going to say, actually.

If you are Canadian, uh, just because cannabis is legal here, uh, some CMEA creams, like the, the topical creams can work wonders on bruising. Yeah,

I, I have one specifically that I use from Nova Scotia that uses, uh, sea kelp. Yeah. Uh, and that stuff is the best. Like it's,

it's, it fixing everything from bug bites to bruises to everything like that. But like, I, I just don't bother because like, me, yeah, yeah,

it'll go away quick enough anyways. Yeah. Until the next. next time you do the same thing. I even, whenever I compete, I always wear short shorts. I get made fun of for it. What other kind is there? Exactly.

So I've always got, and I'm very white. So I've always got, my thighs are always cut to hell too when I do stones. It just doesn't bother me, really. It just goes away. Just got to live with it. Then I think my last follower question is actually to come from Scott. Yeah. So I want to know how.

How, if at all, does training differ between training for an Atlas Stone event versus training for a natural stone event? Okay. So, definitely the obvious and glaring difference is tacky. Generally speaking, you're never allowed to use tacky on natural stones. where tacky is kind of the go-to for Atlas Stones sometimes you'll find an in-between where you get to use things like a tacky towel

where it doesn't really leave any like outstanding globs of tacky on you, it just kind of makes you a little sticky and you'll see sometimes at big international competitions like the Rogue Invitational and the Arnold and stuff when they do the stone events there they'll allow the guy's tacky towels.

But yeah, I don't think there's really any big difference training-wise for either. You just need to be aware that Alice Stone is a very uniform. The lift is going to be the same every single time where natural stones are all different. So as we all kind of stated earlier, you just got to go and be,

patient with the thing and figure out its purchase, its angles, its handles, what works best for your body, and that's really all you can do. Also, when you're training for natural stones versus Atlas stones,

like the more different kinds of stones, you can pick up the better. So just like pick up every rock you can find. Like don't just pick up the same rock a bunch of times. Like with Atlas stones, you just you pick up the same one and you go like again and again, again, but with natural stones, you want to pick up, like, a bunch of different ones. And you want to, like, keep challenging your brain to figure out, like, okay, this one's

heavier on one side, so I want to, like, position it this way kind of stuff. Yeah, your lifts and your accessories are going to be the same, like, apart from the stones. I mean, it's still going to be dead lifts. It's still going to be front squats or zer squats, one of the other. Those are going to be your meat and potatoes when you're in the gym to prepare for stones. some people don't have access. I wasn't sure with your question whether or not you're talking, do you have access to stones or not? Some people don't have Atlas stones anywhere around, right?

So in that case, sandbags are a rough analog. You can at least get all of the same movements, even if you can't get the specifics of the stone down. And in fact, Cerberus, Inclusive Fitness, and Valkyrie all make sandstones now, which are round sandbags that mimic an Atlas stone. That's what I was just going to say. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

You can do that too. Yeah, I've got one of those. I've got, um, I've got one from grain strength out in Alberta. And already. Yeah, she makes it round for the purpose of like, it can be the weight that you need it to. But if you puff it and I was telling somebody at, um, at provincials, uh, pool noodles, rubber mulch, just anything you need to do

is fill it to the weight you need it to, and if they're slack, puff it up with this weightless puff stuff to get it as big and thick as possible, and that's a pretty good way to kind of like mimic an Atlas stone.

And as I said earlier, it'll be much nicer on your gym floors or your home gym floors. I can send you a picture later, but there's a sidewalk that runs down the side of my house and two years back, there was a lot of Atlas Stone events. I was training Atlas Stone to Shoulder for Stones of Strength, and I was teaching one of the newer amateur strongmen

how to just lift Atlas Stones. And we both dropped stones a couple times, not onto the crash pads, and there's like two or three chunks of my sidewalk are just obliterated now. Yeah, that'll do it. Okay. I think we're going to round it out. I said one hour minimum, two hours max.

We're already over two hours. I'm just going to hit every one of you with a game that we play on every episode. I'm going to do one per person. It's called unpaid or underrated. Essentially, I'm going to hit you with a subject. And you just have to tell me if this subject is unpaid because nobody wants to be unpaid. That sucks.

Or underrated, more people should know about it. I'm going to start. I'm going to go in order here with Lori. Lori, unpaid or underrated, traveling for stones. Oh, underrated. Absolutely. You have your druthers. Do you want to expand on that?

Just everyone should travel on those stones. It's the best. Okay, John, unpaid or underrated. I get the feeling I know where you're going to say. I type this out like 45 minutes ago. Unpaid or underrated, using sandbags to train stones. Extremely underrated, especially for old guys like me, you have tendinitis and it's a little gentler on you so yeah definitely underrated uh okay uh mike

unpaid or underrated stealing rocks from farmers underrated absolutely uh if if you got friendly farmers in your area they'll probably pay you to get the stones off their property like yeah farmers don't want big stones in their fields and you'll you'll often find just like big stones piles of them like next to the ditch so I did I did one day I think I'd share this with you guys and then I was like this big pile of rocks let's go get one and I went and grabbed one and threw it in the back of the car and then Morgan was like I think those were actually the end of a ditch and I'm like oh no we stole rocks they're coming for but like I also know that farmers are like get this off my land this sucks yeah so the the prime example being uh we did in a way job like a month or

two back for this farmer in Peterborough and like a kilometer down the road from the job site there was literally 500 meters of ditch just filled with massive stones. Yeah.

Like of every shape, a variety you could possibly imagine. And I was just like walking along on top of them looking for which stone I wanted to pluck and bring home with me. I'm so jealous. Yeah, the farmer pulls up and he's like, are you okay, pal?

And I was, like, yeah, I'm just going to lift some of these stones, if that's cool with you. He's like, take them all. The one garage where I was going to to help fix my brakes, my buddy sends a picture in our group chat. And he's like, I moved all these rocks today. And I just want to just let everybody know that me and Joey have very different feelings on moving rocks. And so when I went to the garage, I walked to the back and I was like, I think he'll let me grab some of these, and he was like, I bet he'd pay you to. They're just all over his land.

He wants them off. Yeah. Actually, this one might be hard for you, Scott. Unpaid or underrated, buying rocks from like landscaping companies and stuff. Unpaid. Yeah. You know, literally. That's half the fun.

Get out and find them. You know, they're out there. You know, there's tons of public land. Just go for a walk and take one. You know, the elites don't want you to know that the rocks in the park are free. Big rock. Only trespassing if you get caught. Yeah, yeah, eventually.

I just want to thank you guys, honestly, for coming on. Thank you for giving me some of your Wednesday night. I know some of you don't even know what this podcast is. And all of your contact has been through me. So I just generally appreciate you guys. I'm glad that we've become friends. And I can't wait to see all of you again. I don't know when that's going to be.

Lori, I'm seeing you pretty soon, actually. John, like maybe November and Mike, I'm sure we'll cross paths at some. We bump into each other with alarming regularity. Yes, it is. It is kind of wild. Scott, I'm sure I'll see you soon.

Next time I get down there, you get up here. I would just love if you guys could give me your Instagram handle. And if you're on gym radar, tell me your gym name. And if you're not on gym radar, get on gym radar. Otherwise, who are you? Tell my followers where to find you. And we'll go with Lori, John, Mike Scott, myself. Okay.

My Instagram is the full Lori, all one word. I am on gym radar, but I forget that I have my gym. So I'll have to find it and send it to me. That's okay. I'm sure I'll find it. I didn't know you were on there. What? What?

Oh, man. So she's at Jason. She's crewed Jason this whole time. I knew it. John. I keep meaning to do Jim Radar. You're going to have to walk me through that. That's because I do have a pretty thorough home gym.

On Instagram at J. Calvert 66. You can also find me through Muscoe Straw Man Club on Instagram as well. Mike? I am big Viking strength on Instagram, all one word. I am not on Jim Raider, though I. definitely should be as well. I've got a pretty extensive home gym at this point, and we are upgrading the gym.

We are building a shop in the backyard, breaking ground on that soon. So hopefully before snow falls this year, I will have a proper gym fully built in the backyard, and I'm going to amalgamate all my equipment to one space because it is scattered all over my property right now.

Scott? You can find me on Instagram at Scott's lifting page. You can find me on Jim Radar at the doghouse. And I am, of course, Joey underscore Mlesco, M-L-E-C-Z-K-O. You can find me on Jim Raider at the DILF Dungeon. I hope some of you have been enjoying my stickers that you got. I think two of you got those stickers last time I saw you.

Scott, did you get one in Aberdeen? You've mailed me one before. No, did you get the new one, the metal one that my wife made. Oh, no, I did not. I missed that one. yeah, Cam had those, and they're limited edition. They might be gone soon. Beyond that, you can follow my podcast at an unpaid intern podcast.

That's our website as well. Other than that, follow Keith at Keith Honeycutt, what is it, 76, 74, 77, or the no wine cellar. And until then, see you next Tuesday.