I knew something was off - just judging by the amount of times i’ve sat around a fire and drank beer and split woof with the guys, this guy seemed too strong to be having this much trouble 😂
Honestly my first assumption was that inefficiency was sort of part of the point here for exercise/sensory enrichment purposes - the folks hitting truck tires with sledgehammers to work out aren't trying to actually break down or flatten the tires. Never done hammer/axe stuff, but I train shoulder mobility and core stability with an indian club/trench mace I found at a thrift; weighs the same as some of the small free weights I got years ago to do forearm isolations, but it's way more fun for me to mess around with a club than to pick up dumbbells.
I'm sure thirst trapping is a big part of the motivator for posting it, though.
Yeah. It's a combo. I had a wood heater for many years, spent a lot of time splitting wood... Sometimes you split a hard one for fun... Sometimes you also do a lot of gym and want to find ways to show off, because you know you look good...
It's a nice, harmless dovetailing of multiple 'eh, why not?' impulses.
I constantly say "strong, like bull" with a vaguely Russian accent. It's like a catchphrase, I use it for encouragement or expressing approval. (I never knew where I got it, but I just looked and apparently it's from an episode of Quantum Leap.🤷♂️)
Many years back I was encouraging my (now-)ex gf in her studying for her Uni finals and said it.
She said being "strong, like bull" wouldn't help her pass.
So I said:
💪🎓🐂
"strong, like academic bull" , and that became our catchphrase.
And your comment is the closest I'll ever come to a relevant place to tell that story.
Clearly humans have known for tens of thousands of years there are better ways to do this... That being said this video seems like a Grinder profile video or something.
Three wooden wedges and a hatchet. Start a notch with the edge of the hatchet, insert a wedge, hit it with the flat of the hatchet, do the same for the other two wedges. Then just work your way along.
This is beast mode, and I can appreciate it, but there are def easier ways...
He’s just showing off. If he wanted to make it easy just make one or two more cuts with the chainsaw to turn that log into easily manageable rounds. No wedge or hammering required.
He’s using decent technique to avoid that happening for most of the video. It’s a wide stance and direct overhead swing so if something happens the axe will go between the legs, but towards the end he starts speeding up his swing and his technique gets really poor and dangerous then, while also getting closer to splitting the log which is when swings can get more dangerous because you don’t always know how the log is gonna split. You see him kinda realize this and slow down at the end and regain his form so he doesn’t hurt himself during the actual splitting.
My grandmother was a deeply bipolar woman, and she once tried to kill her husband with a sledgehammer, only for the head to come off midswing and hit her in the top of the head, knocking her out. I guess Carl had some weird trickster fucking with luck, because he died a week later of heat stroke.
There's a lot of shit in my family history that could probably be put to paper. My mom's uncle, for instance, was commander of a Green Beret battalion in Vietnam and we're pretty sure he was in MACV-SOG. He was missing in action for two weeks at one point, and stumbled into a MASH with 17 bullets in him, two of which were in his head.
I have split five cords of wood every year for decades. As an expert I can tell you several things about that man. 1) He has a giant fireplace or wood stove. 2) He thinks strength is more important than technique which is why one log had him breathing like a fat kid on a treadmill. 3) He is impatient which is why he is splitting green lumber, has no rhythm and fails to let the tool do the work. 4) Whatever demographic he is making this shirtless, bear video for he is doing an excellent job. I am not even gay and I enjoyed it.... Still trying to figure out where he is going to burn those behemoths.
Is the green wood why the axe keeps bouncing off? I've literally never had that happen except when I hit a knot, but I've never tried to split wood that hasn't been seasoned.
It would be a reason it's doing that, yeah. From where I'm sitting there's at least a couple of things wrong with this:
The log is much too tall. The elevation of the surface you're striking, relative to your own person, matters a lot when splitting logs. There's also very few good reasons to ever split logs this tall, so aside from creating thirst-content I don't see why in tarnation he's doing this.
The surface is dog-shit and it's eating a ton of power. Never split a log on soft dirt, it's absolutely atrocious.
It is indeed a very fresh log by the look of it, but it also looks pretty straight and without much in the way of knots and other annoyances. My first guess, although no firsthand experience since this don't grow where I live, is ash, but I also hear that's easy to split but that may be in reference to dry logs.
Might also be a shoddy cutting edge on the axe preventing good bite. A lot of people neglect the sharpness of a splitting axe and while I do agree there's little benefit in going from sharp to shaving sharp there's a big difference in going from dull to sharp.
My guess based on my experience is that it's primarily the ground that's fucking him over, with the height of the log being a close second. The freshness of the log could be a huge-ass problem but I genuinely couldn't say; We ain't got ash as far north as I am.
His technique also doesn't strike me as great but I can't critique that much. I learned how to split wood before I learned how to learn so I got nothing on that.
I've split logs that tall in the woods on the soft ground and did it in 5 swings tops. There's a knot from the branch on the bottom, and that's what is preventing him from splitting it. He probably also didn't check for splitting lines on the top of the log; every log has them and if you hit them right it splits fairly easy. Also, wedges are your friend. Great power, terrible technique.
He's holding his breath through contact until after the swing. Not just martial arts but every sport eventually emphasizes breathing out with the motion, e.g. as you begin to swing the bat in baseball. This is like... the basics of technique, before we get to working smarter not harder (green wood wtf)
lol… I don’t do it for the views but every time my wife has pulled up to see me splitting wood in the back yard or running the chain saw she asks me to come inside.
I don't know what it is either, but every time I have to do hard physical labor around the house (building a path, romoving a stump, trenching, cutting and splitting wood) she suddenly wants some attention.
Do the taxes, balance the budget... nada. Almost throw my back out and get sweaty, covered in dirt, wood chips and callused hands, then apparently I'm Brad Pitt all of a sudden.
Its hormone release. We're still animals, and humans subconsciously react to hormones. Humans were meant to touch the earth (dirt) and do labor. You smelled like something masculine, earthy, and wild. It's worked eons, there's no reason it wouldn't work now.
I am not saying none of this is true, but the fact that it also works when a closed window is between the person watching and the person doing labor means there is a lot more to it.
Mine too man apparently I made the mistake of chopping wood and during a girls get together and caused a fuss.
Edit: I should clarify, I am by no means an attractive man despite what my wife might say. I think it's something to do with actually chopping the wood
Id be fine with jeans.... the bottom half of a forest ranger uniform... aragorn's bust thru the doors outfit... I'm pretty open. Just not sloppy sweats that do absolutely nothing for his figure.
He’s mighty – but also mighty stupid. He’s not getting any mechanical advantage with that poor swing, and the soft ground is absorbing a lot of the force.
His form is terrible and the round is ridiculously long. You always slide your leading hand down the haft of the maul to increase the acceleration and power. And wtf is he using 3 foot logs for?
I just thought Canadians were all like Dwarfs in Discworld but with fleecy jackets and Tim Hortons cards. Indistinguishable to us, but presumably they can tell which is which, because they keep making more.
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