Shot peening (sp?)

Not to discourage you from finding some nice rods, I just wanted to answer the original question about shotpeening rods, since someone is bound to search for it sooner or later.

Shotpeening rods strengthens them by hardening their outer surface. This gives stress risers less of an opportunity to form, basically it makes the rods less likely to break/snap.

This would be helpful if you had strong stock rods, and you wanted to safeguard even more against breakage, but in your case it would probably be better to get beefier-than-stock rods. (shotpeening helps, but not that much).