Learn the benefits of the strength-training tool and how to use it to improve your performance in all directions of movement.
Do More With is a series highlighting equipment around the Club that can help you reach your fitness goals. In this installment, we highlight the landmine attachment, available on the Club floor.
Walk into the Club ready to do barbell work, and there’s a good chance you’ll head straight to the power racks or weightlifting platform. While that equipment can surely give you a solid strength-building workout, you shouldn’t overlook the landmine attachment.
If you’re unfamiliar, the landmine attachment is a heavy, hexagon-shaped piece of metal that sits on the floor, says Chris McGill, a Tier 3+ Personal Trainer at Equinox Encino. It’s equipped with a small sleeve that holds one end of a 35- or 45-pound barbell and can pivot to any angle. The result: a strength-training tool that can be used for nearly any lift in any direction of movement. “The landmine basically is a one-stop shop and allows you to do all your workouts in one centralized area,” says McGill. “It's exceptionally efficient.”
Here, McGill breaks down all the benefits of the landmine attachment and shares tips to help you use it during your next workout.
RELATED: Do More With: Pilates Ring
Why Train with the Landmine
A landmine-style barbell can be used to hit all of your basic lifts: squats, deadlifts, overhead presses, rows, you name it. But unlike a barbell on its own, the landmine attachment allows you to train in the transverse plane of motion, helping to build strength and power during rotational movements, says McGill. “We have a lot of tennis, golf, pickleball, and even racquetball [players], and those are all sports that involve some level of rotation or multi-directional motion,” he explains. In other words, if you want to perform your sport at your peak, you need to train across planes of motion in the Club, and a landmine will help you get the job done.
The landmine attachment can also provide additional stability during moves that challenge your balance, says McGill. Think of a single-leg Romanian deadlift. With a kettlebell or dumbbell, you need to rely on your own core strength and balance to stay upright throughout the entire movement. But if you were to perform the exercise landmine-style, you would have an additional anchor point on the floor providing support, making you less likely to topple over, he explains. “The landmine itself allows you to do [an exercise] in a safer way, especially if you don't know how to use the equipment very well,” he notes. “I think being safer, especially early on, is a smarter way to go about it until you have a certain level of mastery. Then, you can progress your workouts accordingly.”
Progressing also comes easily with the landmine attachment. Say you’re ready to advance your goblet squats. With a dumbbell or kettlebell, the load you use is often limited by how much weight your grip can support, says McGill. Since the landmine fixes one end of your barbell to the floor, it’s often easier to hold onto the bar and perform the exercise with heavy loads, he adds.
How to Use the Landmine
The landmine attachment can be used for just about any resistance-based exercise. You can do goblet and sumo squats, bent-over and single-arm rows, overhead presses with one or two arms, or combination movements, such as thrusters (a squat into an overhead press), says McGill. During the latter movement, “you’re anchored to the site so you're more protected than you would be if you were using purely free weights,” he explains. “Because you're anchored, you can actually add tempo to it: You can slow it down a little bit. You can hold it at the top to add more stabilizing elements to your upper press. You can hold at the bottom to add more to your legs. It allows you to have a lot of variety.”
The landmine also comes in handy when your Club is lacking a hack squat machine, suggests McGill. Stand with the landmine behind you and rest the free end of the barbell on your shoulder. Walk your feet two to three steps forward, lean back slightly, and start squatting, he says. “Because [the barbell] is on one side [of your body], it actually has a little bit of a balancing component to it, which you normally don't get from a squat machine,” he adds. “You don't have the machine…doing all the work for you, so there's a little bit more work that you're doing and you don't have to go as heavy.”
RELATED: What You Should Know About Lifting Weights and Pelvic Floor Health
But one of McGill’s favorite ways to use the landmine is for core work, as you don’t need to get up and down from the floor, McGill says. Try a standing chop, with your arms extended out in front of you, your elbows soft, and the barbell lifted a few inches above your shoulders. As you chop the bar down toward your left hip, your right foot will pivot toward the left. You’ll drive the bar back to the center, pause, then repeat on your right side. “Essentially, you're getting all the rotational components of [the exercise], you’re adding some shoulders and leg motion, and it also becomes cardiovascular because you're using so many different muscle groups to rotate into each [chop],” says McGill. You can also perform an anti-rotation chop, during which you keep your feet planted and core stable as you lower and lift the bar from hip to hip, he says.
When you’re ready to take your workout to the next level, progress your landmine exercise by adding weight plates, increasing your reps, changing your stance from standing to half-kneeling, or switching up your tempo, suggests McGill. During a slowed-down anti-rotational chop, for instance, “that time under tension will make your body feel like you've added 100 more pounds even though you haven't changed the weight,” he adds.
Still, when you first begin incorporating the landmine into your routine, stick with basic movements you know you’re capable of accomplishing before trying elaborate combinations you see on social media, McGill recommends. “I would caution against doing anything outside of your scope because it's new,” he adds. “The beauty of the landmine is that you can kind of go at your own pace. It gives you a lot of variety and a lot of leeway to learn, so don't feel like just because it's a new tool, you have to do a lot more complicated things.”