Convict Conditioning – Vol. 4 – Advanced Bridging – Forging an Iron Spine

Paul Wade’s Convict Conditioning system represents the ultimate distillation of hardcore prison bodyweight training’s most powerful methods. What works was kept. What didn’t, was slashed away. When your life is on the line, you’re not going to mess with less than the absolute best. Many of these older, very potent solitary training systems have been on the verge of dying, as convicts begin to gain access to weights, and modern “bodybuilding thinking” floods into the prisons. Thanks to Paul Wade, these ultimate strength survival secrets have been saved for posterity. And for you…

Filmed entirely—and so appropriately—on “The Rock”, Wade’s Convict Conditioning Volume 4, Advanced Bridging: Forging an Iron Spine explodes out of the cellblock to teach you in absolute detail how to progress from the relative ease of a Short Bridge—to the stunning, “1-in-1,000” achievement of the Stand-to-Stand Bridge. Ten progressive steps guide you to inevitable mastery of this ultimate exercise for an unbreakable back.

This home-study course in ultimate survival strength comes replete with bonus material not available in Paul Wade’s original Convict Conditioning book—and numerous key training tips that refine and expand on the original program.

Whatever you are looking for from your bridges—be it supreme suppleness, a tigrishly powerful spine, extreme resilience against injury, or a godlike level of strength-flexibility—it’s yours for the progressive taking with Convict Conditioning Volume 4, Advanced Bridging: Forging an Iron Spine.

Your Roadmap to Physical Glory—One Step At a Time…

In Paul Wade’s Convict Conditioning system, no matter what kind of movement you’re working on, you focus on a chain of ten progressive exercises. When you master one exercise, you move on to the next, and so on. Because the later exercises build on the earlier ones, they are sometimes called the “ten steps”. When you reach the tenth exercise, you will be just about as strong as it’s possible for a human being to be in that movement. For this reason, the tenth exercise in any chain is called the “Master Step”. How this all works will be crystal clear if you’ve picked up a copy of the Convict Conditioning bodyweight book.

Why you need a steel-whip spine

If you go into any gym, you’ll see lots of guys working hard to train their biceps, their pecs, their lats and so on. But perhaps the most neglected muscles in modern strength training are the muscles of the back—in particular the deep layer of muscles that run up and along the spine. These are the spinal erectors.

The spinal column and hips are an essential feature of any body that needs to be strong or athletic. This area is like the universal joint on a motor vehicle. All the pressure of running, punching, lifting and tackling goes straight through the spine—so if you want a body that’s explosive, powerful and as injury-proofed as possible, the best way to get it isn’t through working your “beach muscles” like your biceps or pecs. The best way to toughen up your entire body is by toughening up your spinal column.

Previous generations of prison athletes understood the role that the back and spine muscles play in overall toughness. In a way, prison athletes, certainly before the seventies, were lucky when it came to spinal training; they didn’t have access to the kind of distractions that athletes on the outside had. We’re talking about Nautilus back training machines, Cybex machines, hyperextension units or cable machines. Back in the day, convicts didn’t even have weights to train their backs with—no deadlifts, good mornings or cleans.

If prisoners wanted to build powerful back muscles, they had to access the more ancient, traditional methods, using bodyweight alone. Luckily for them, the very finest back training techniques are bodyweight exercises—variations of the bridge family of techniques.