THE 20:57 FROM CANNON STREET RUMBLES ABOVE,
shepherding flocks of office workers from the glass and steel finance factories of the City back toward the comfort of home. Unbeknown to these weary commuters, down in the railway arches below, a small group of men is engaged in a gruelling, primal test of strength. The departing train sends shockwaves through the half-tonne tyre which our hands are holding in a white-knuckle grip. Sweat drips from my chin and flows between the 4in-thick treads, pooling on the concrete floor below. I glance at the two men on my flanks. Each face contorts in anticipation.
The command comes. On the count of three, slowly, stubbornly, the tyre rises. We double our efforts, releasing a chorus of strained groans as we lever our thighs between concrete and rubber. Tomorrow, my knees will be swollen, my shoulders a deep shade of purple, and my hands bloody; but for now, we drive. With a final, arduous heave, bodies quivering, we upend the incongruous lump of industrial equipment. This object – rough, uneven and unwieldy – wasn’t designed to be lifted by hand, yet lift it we did. The satisfaction is full-bodied, but fleeting. With unthinking masochism, we push the tyre onto its side so it lands with a groundshaking thud, then go at it again.
While men of a certain character have long been drawn to battles with inanimate objects, it’s the nature of the weight we’re shifting that is changing. The number of independent gyms swapping out squat racks for Atlas stones is rising; and they’re seeing their attendance figures swell as fast as their members’ muscle mass. The Welsh national team used similar training drills to prepare for the last Rugby World Cup and it’s Chris Hemsworth’s method of choice when it comes to getting his Thor on. In short, strongman training is now a big deal.
But is it a deal you want in on? When it puts such brutal demands on the body, is strongman training really a sensible option for the weekend warrior in search of a change-up? And can it provide huge results without breaking you? To find out, I am embarking on a strongman regime of Valhallan proportions.
BLOODY BUT UNBOWED
My quest for strength begins in the Commando Temple gym, occupying two railway arches in Deptford, southeast London. One of the best-equipped and most highly respected strongman facilities in the country, it looks more like a salvage yard than a gym. Beer kegs share shelf space with stones plucked from Welsh quarries; circus dumbbells rest alongside anvils with painted-on nicknames like ‘ The Beast’; and next to the collection of Atlas stones arranged in ascending order of weight sits a box of 6in nails for people to work on their grip strength… by attempting to bend them.
The strongman principles are simple: you do your best to lift, carry or pull stuff. Heavy stuff. Unorthodox, uncomfortable stuff. Not just barbells, with their evenly distributed loads and carefully engineered hand holds, but rocks, anchors, trucks, tree trunks, people, planes. The sort of stuff that bashes your shins, bruises your joints and tears up your palms. It’s the physical manifestation of the idea that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.
“Strongman is pretty sexy,” adjudges Rob Blair, the ex-royal Marine commando who has seen newcomers flocking steadily to his gym in recent months. “You’re thinking: ‘My god, I get to throw all of this crazy kit around.’ As a training method, strongman is so mixed and varied, you just can’t get bored of it.”
Certainly, my sessions with Blair over the following weeks are anything but dull. The first time we meet, he drops a 40kg stone at my feet, telling me to grab it and thrust it up onto my shoulder. Back in my regular gym I can barbell deadlift three times this weight, but with all of its awkward angles and irregularities, I struggle to even get a firm grip on the rock. My sorry attempts leave my hips and clavicles with painful black-andblue mementos of my ineptitude. “They’re puzzles those things,” reasons Blair, who, at a solid-but-lean 6ft and 80kg, looks nothing like the sort of human bulwark you’d normally associate with strongman. “It’s a simple bit of kit – it’s just a stone! – but you have to suss it out, think about it. Lifting it taxes your mind as well as your body.”
Like most of the ‘toys’ (his phrase, lovingly employed) that Blair has acquired from farmyards to quarries and everywhere in between, you won’t see these stones at your high-street gym.
“STRONGMAN MAKES YOU FEEL POWERFUL. AND POWER IS VERY ADDICTIVE”
“You can’t just throw a half-tonne tyre or some natural stones into a commercial joint and tell people to get on with it,” says Blair. “They’d rather have a £4000 Cybex running machine that everybody knows how to use, and that everybody’s going to be safe using. Here, we don’t want to be seen anywhere near the running-machine crew. A lot of independent gyms are now setting themselves apart by having these toys available.”
To Blair’s mind, strongman offers an antidote to the green juice and scented towels of modern fitness culture. He believes it appeals to the innate human desire to test ourselves against the world. “For thousands of years, people were using odd, unconventional objects to build up strength, and they didn’t even think about it,” he says. “Men used to go out hunting, fighting and building for a living. But the way life is going, we’re becoming more desk-bound, more sedentary. Some men go with it and degenerate. Others want to go out, get dirty and thrash around the place a bit.”
If all that sounds too red-blooded for your taste, you might want to chew on this – a recent Yougov poll found that just 2% of young British men would describe themselves as ‘masculine’. Can it be mere coincidence, then, that so many of us are trying to reconnect with our inner caveman? “There’s something really satisfying about flipping a tyre, throwing it to the ground, hearing that loud noise and thinking: ‘I just did that,’” says Blair. “It makes you feel powerful. And physical power is very addictive.”
HEAVY MONEY
If power really is a jones, then there’s a particular breed of human who acts as the ‘junkie’ of the strongman world. This group is so devoted to the pursuit of strength that they’ll put their health on the line to secure their next fix.
For decades, the World’s Strongest Man competition has been as much a fixture of the Christmas TV schedule as The Italian Job or a Morecambe & Wise rerun – fondly regarded yet rarely more than half-watched. To all but a devoted few, the spectacle was often seen as more novelty sideshow than serious sporting contest. However, over the past 12 months, that has begun to change. And this is thanks in no small part to 29-year-old Eddie Hall, six-time winner of UK’S Strongest Man.
Last summer, Hall made history by becoming the first person to deadlift 500kg. The video of the heavy-metal-bearded, mohawk-sporting Hall pulling half a tonne of weight up his oak-thick thighs, locking out the lift, then collapsing in a 28-stone heap on the floor in front of the assembled masses, went viral and captured the imaginations of millions of viewers, myself among them.
To glimpse Hall in the flesh, I head to Newcastle’s Metro Radio Arena to watch him compete in the inaugural Ultimate Strongman World Championships. The brainchild of the five-time UK’S Strongest Man, Glenn Ross, this event is intended to break the World’s Strongest Man franchise’s vice-like grip on professional strongman competitions and to capitalise on the mounting mainstream fascination with size and strength.
Ross believes that just as Usain Bolt’s title of World’s Fastest can sell out stadia
and bring in hundreds of millions in sponsorship money, so too can the World’s Strongest. “Strongman doesn’t have the recognition that it should, but that’s partly because it hasn’t been staged with the required gloss,” says Ross. He wants to grow the Ultimate Strongman brand into one that rivals arena-filling titans like UFC or WWE. “In future, the plan is to do 20 global events, with thousands watching, and create a proper series, just like Formula 1. I want this to become the number one sport in the world, because as far as I’m concerned, it is.”
TEARING DOWN WALLS
It’s an ambitious goal, perhaps, yet here in Newcastle a capacity crowd has turned out to watch Eddie Hall compete alongside some of the sport’s biggest names. These include six-time World’s Strongest Man, Zydrunas Savickas; two-time champion Mikhail Shivlyakov; and the in-form Laurence Shahlaei, the reigning European champion from Cheltenham who last summer beat Hafþór Björnsson (AKA The Mountain from Game Of Thrones) to the title. The fans roar as each man enters the arena with all the audiovisual fanfare of the pay-per-view UFC bouts Ross wants to emulate.
The 12 competitors toil through five events, including a super yoke walk – a 20m dash against the clock with 450kg of railway track hanging from their shoulders – and the iconic Stones Of Strength, where five orbs, from 115kg up to an obscene 175kg, are lifted onto shoulder-high barrels. The size and shape of the athletes’ muscles – arms thicker than most men’s thighs, traps up to their ears, 60in barrel chests – borders on the cartoonish.
To the shock of the crowd, Hall has to bow out just 2m into the yoke walk after tearing a muscle in his leg. Four gruelling hours of lifting, pressing, sprinting and flipping later, it’s Hall’s fellow Briton Shahlaei who comes out on top. Afterwards, I introduce myself to him. As we shake, my hand is lost within the prodigious paw he uses to press 200kg above his head.
The 34-year- old is buoyed by his victory. “Strength sports are becoming more and more popular,” he says. “People are fascinated by how strong someone can be, and we do some crazy stuff. You’ll see us flipping cars, pulling airplanes – stuff which for the normal person is just insane. We’re big guys and the whole thing is larger than life. As a kid I was fascinated with superheroes, and I think that’s part of the appeal for people watching the sport today.”
Shahlaei’s 25-stone frame is the product of seven meals and 7000 calories a day – the minimum amount required to maintain his phenomenal muscle mass. “I’ve become bigger to try to keep up with some of the huge guys [Hafþór Björnsson is 6ft 9in and almost 30 stone], but once I’m done with strongman,” he pauses and allows himself a laugh, “I’m going to do Crossfit. I love training, I love sport, but I don’t want to be 25 stone forever.”
The sport takes a huge toll on athletes’ bodies. “I’ve torn ligaments, tendons and multiple muscles,” says Terry Hollands, a veteran with a cockney accent as thick as his neck, who dislocated a finger during the evening’s tyre-flip event. “It’s just part of it, and we accept that. When you’re pushing your body to the limit, things will break down eventually. And unfortunately the tendons and the ligaments don’t get as strong as quickly as the muscles do.”
Hall, meanwhile, suffers from sleep apnoea. This is the likely product, say experts, of over-training. He has to wear an oxygen mask to sleep in case he stops breathing. Strongmen may be growing bigger and stronger – and growing the sport’s fanbase – but at what cost?
STRONG BONDS
Back in the relative discomfort of the Commando Temple, sleep apnoea is not my most pressing concern. That would be the 70kg Atlas stone that keeps escaping my feeble grip and landing with a thud close to my toes. Even so, in the weeks since I replaced all other forms of training with a strictly strongman regime, I’ve enjoyed every session. I’ve even taken a perverse pride in nursing my various scrapes. But while the weights of my lifts have steadily increased, I’m yet to see a noticable difference in my physique. Strongman training may be popular, it may be fun, but is it really any better than regular resistance training?
I dial up one of the only people to have studied precisely this, Dr Paul Winwood from the Toi- Ohomai Institute of Technology in Tauranga, New Zealand. Winwood and his team took two groups of rugby players – one who trained using traditional resistance workouts, and another adopting strongman principles and apparatus – then measured changes to their strength, speed, agility, stability and power over time. Each group bested the other on certain performance markers, but there was one key area of difference:
“The strongman group had an increase in muscle mass which wasn’t seen in the traditional group,” says Winwood. “Most of what we do in the gym is lifting weights in a vertical plane – up and down movements – and isolating one muscle or muscle group. But take a strongman exercise like a farmer’s walk: it’s a loaded gait pattern. There’s carrying, you engage all the core musculature, and that works in synergy with a host of other muscle groups. More muscle mass being used means more lactate being created, and probably more growth hormone and other anabolic hormones being created, which may have influenced that muscle mass.”
And that is the beauty of strongman training: picking up unorthodox objects and carrying, flipping or pulling them around engages every muscle in your body. While pressing a barbell overhead does wonders for a handful of mirror muscles, the same lift using a half-full keg that sloshes and shifts throughout will force you into a full-body workout.
So, is strongman training objectively better or more useful than your usual weights-room routine? Not necessarily. But it is a hell of a lot more fun, and when it comes to a sustainable long-term training plan, that goes a long way. “One thing we didn’t measure – and I really wish we had – was the psychology of the two groups,” says Winwood. “The training culture in the strongman group was phenomenal. They palpably felt that they were part of something special; they worked hard and bonded really well as a group. We didn’t see that in the traditional training group.”
The following evening, as the commuter trains trundle overhead and my partners and I flip that half-tonne of rubber for the 15th and final time of the night, I feel every bit of the bond Winwood describes. The group at the Commando Temple is made up of salesmen and paramedics, teachers, students and businessmen, but for the 90 minutes we spend together, toiling over the tools of the strongman trade, we are brothers. We are warriors. We are men.
“LIFTING A KEG THAT SLOSHES AND SHIFTS IS A FULL-BODY WORKOUT”