Athena, Holding Your Hair, Whispering In Your Ear

For me a few are enough, one is enough, none is enough. This is not for the many, but for you. We are audience enough for each other.

The mace is a lot of fun and the workouts frequently leave me breathless and/or unable to further raise the mace. Mace workouts are a great way to get tired fast. In terms of "results," so far the biggest improvements I've seen from mace practice are in my mace proficiency, which is perhaps unsurprising. I feel significantly more confident in my ability to move a mace safely and swiftly through three dimensional space.

That said, I've also seen real non-mace related training improvements. My grip strength has significantly improved, to the point that I'm about to go up another notch on my grip training device after previously being stalled out for six months or so. I've also seen some serious growth in my overhead press. Even better, some intermittent tendon pain I have in my left arm has gotten much better since I started macing, so I'm assuming that I'm strengthening whatever muscle supports that tendon by whipping a mace around in my backyard like a lunatic.

When I was originally talking about maces to my wife and she was (unknown to me) lining it up as a gift, she asked how people knew what sized mace to start with. I repeated what I'd read on the internet, which was that it's probably better to start with a heavier mace than a lighter one because you can always choke up on the grip if its too heavy, but you'd need to just buy a new mace if it's too light. The internet also suggested that average-sized, moderately strong folks start with a twenty-pound mace because they'd train out of a lighter mace in a month or so. So I wound up with a twenty-pound mace.

Important lesson learned: I am not "moderately strong" by internet standards. Or perhaps mace Reddit is just full of shit. Or both. In any case, twenty pounds is much too heavy for me to use in the way that most mace tutorials suggest. I need to significantly choke up my grip, to the point that I'm sometimes gripping the mace more than half way up its haft. That said, I can still do almost all of the core mace exercises (360s, pull overs, etc.), but there are a few exercises I can't do yet because the haft obstructs the necessary range of motion. I am making progress at slowly working down the handle, but I expect it will be a fair few more months before I'm gripping it down at the bottom like those internet-mace-video-preparers (macecasters?). If I ever do get both hands down to the end of the handle, I'll know I've arrived as an Internet-certified "moderately strong" guy.

If I saw one of my neighbors practicing with an exercise mace (or any exercise weapon, really) in their backyard, I'm not sure I would be able to restrain myself from bringing it up in conversation with them. None of my neighbors have said anything about my backyard mace shenanigans, so I can only assume that I have either unobservant or very polite neighbors. Or perhaps their prior on me being a weirdo is so high by now that they just settled on "what's a mace, really, among friends?"

I can recommend maces for exercise, but maybe start with a lighter one than I did (unless you are actually "moderately strong" in the internet sense).