Superman meets his match in Superkid
Grand Rapids, Michigan: Superman has met his match. Three-year-old Liam Hoekstra can lift fivepound weight, shift furniture and put gymnasts to shame.
According to the Daily Mail, he has 40 per cent more muscle mass despite being smaller than most children of his age — this is due to a rare genetic condition, which means his body has very little fat while his muscle fibres are enlarged.
He has a fast metabolism and needs to eat constantly consuming as many as six meals a day.
By five months old, he was able to do the iron cross, a move which involves gymnasts holding the rings straight out on either side of his body while holding himself up. By eight months, Liam could do a pull-up and at nine months, was climbing up and down stairs.
Liam, from Grand Rapids, Michegan, America, was adopted at birth and soon impressed his new parents with his gymnastic prowess. However, they realised that something was unusual about his new abilities and took him to consult doctors, who diagnosed myostatin-related muscle hypertrophy.
Despite his extraordinary physique, Ms Hoekstra and her husband Neil have resisted doing many interviews about their son. “A lot of TV stations wanted to do the World’s Strongest Boy type of stories,” Ms Hoekstra said.
“They weren’t interested in the science behind his condition ... and I, as his mother, wasn’t going to put him on some kind of freak show.”