Cardiovascular Training
Conditioning With a Prowler Sled
Nov
Prowler sleds offer a unique form of cardiovascular activity, allowing you to scale the resistance activity as your strength and conditioning improve. Unlike traditional methods of conditioning exercises, Prowler workouts can be so challenging that the post workout fatigue has earned the name “Prowler flu.”
What is a Prowler Sled?
Take a traditional weighted sled and add a compact form of a football lineman push exercise, and you have yourself a prowler sled. This piece of fitness equipment glides across flat surfaces while offering any amount of resistance you want it to have.
Prowler workouts are great for athletes and everyday people. We can use it with moderate weight for a resistance based aerobic workout or with heavy resistance to develop explosive power and strength.
Why Cardio With Resistance Matters?
High intensity interval training (H.I.I.T.) is cardio that is thought to be more anabolic and more effective for fat loss. Traditional forms of high intensity aerobic exercise use our body to produce quick movements for brief periods of time followed by slower pace or rest in between.
Performing H.I.I.T. workouts with progressive increases in weight resistance helps to further develop our aerobic system without requiring more time. In traditional cardio exercises such as a treadmill, the primary means of improving is in speed, distance, and time. You can only progress so far with speed and resistance requiring you to spend more time exercising.
By minimizing the need to add additional time to your workout through increased resistance, you are helping to protect muscle mass. This form of cardio requires less repetitive movements, which can help with injury prevention.
Benefits of a Prowler Sled Training
To start, using a prowler is fun. It is a great addition to any athletic performance strength training program. The competitiveness of the exercise gives you further ambition to increase your strength and overall performance.
The prowler sled helps to develop the lower body in a movement pattern it is familiar with. Whereas a squat is used to develop overall strength and muscle hypertrophy, those movement patterns are not as common to us as walking and running with resistance.
Using a prowler will develop the lower body without adding spinal compression, as we may experience during a barbell leg exercise. This makes it a fantastic assistance exercise to support your lower body strength goals.
Like the prowler push, using the prowler for pull exercises engages the back muscles in a way that a traditional movement pattern that we experience doing manual labor. This form of sled work works the lower back, lats, upper back, and traps at the same time.
Prowler Sled Exercises
A little creativity goes a long way with prowler exercises. Below, you will find the commonly performed movements that give you the biggest bang for your buck. These exercises will support your weight training efforts as a finisher exercise or you can perform them in a single conditioning workout.
Prowler Push
The prowler gives you two different ways to perform a sled push. You can use the high handles to engage the quadriceps and glute muscles. Or you can use the low handles to increase the hamstring and calf muscles.
Prowler Chest Press
This prowler exercise is like the sled push but by releasing the weight, you are forcing your pecs to contract. A sled push is a great exercise to use as an assistance exercise for the bench press.
Rope Sled Pull
For this exercise, you will need either a set of battle ropes or traditional rope with heavy tension. By walking backwards and pulling the sled, you are going to require everything your hamstrings and calves can give to the exercise. This is a fantastic exercise for injury prevention by developing the posterior chain and creating balance in the lower body.
Squat and Rope Pull
Like a traditional prowler pull, this movement builds the back muscles. But by adding a squat between each pull, you are making it a full body exercise. If you want a case of prowler flu, you must try this exercise!
Getting More From Prowler Sled
As with any piece of home gym equipment, get the most out of your purchase. Using a prowler strictly for conditioning exercises is great, but you can use it for many other training purposes. Below are just some of how you can use your prowler sled.
Storage For Weight Plates
A prowler has two rear and one middle post that you can use to hold your weights. This is good for anyone who does not have a weight tree or has more plates than their rack or tree can hold.
Battle Rope Exercises
Keeping your battle ropes attached to the prowler is a quick way to add more conditioning to your workouts. Even in a garage gym, you should have enough room to lie out your ropes at full length. Now you have an additional station for your circuit training routine.
Landmine Attachment
With most prowlers weighing between 50-75 pounds and the option to use them as storage for weight plates, this becomes a piece of equipment that is hard to move. You can add a landmine attachment to the end hook and all t-bar exercises.
Low Pulley Attachment
Do you have a DIY high pulley in your gym? Maybe it’s connected to a pull-up bar or anchored into your ceiling? You can use your prowler to attach a low cable pulley for seated rows, cable curls, and other exercises.
Should You Buy a Prowler Sled?
A prowler is certainly not the first piece of gym equipment that should be on your list, but it may come sooner than you think. A rack, barbell, and weight bench are enough for hundreds of strength training exercises. To bring your fitness into balance, adding conditioning equipment should be your second purchase if you want to build a more complete workout program.
We should use a prowler in a space between approximately 10-40 yards. If you are not willing to create the space or pack it up and travel to a park, then this is not the piece of equipment for you. Purchasing a basic sled would be a better option as a lightweight portable solution.
Home Gym Prowler Sled
