For 40 years the World’s Strongest Man competition was largely considered a fringe event for the freakishly strong. These days it draws a global TV audience of 220 million—that’s more than golf and the NFL. So why, more than ever, are we fascinated by human feats of strength? What does it say about our potential? And might you have the same power in you?
“The thing is,” says Mitchell Hooper, “as your body is capable of more, you tend to give less of a sh*t what it looks like.” Hooper knows of what he speaks. In a previous life, the 28-year-old Canadian was a competition bodybuilder, all dehydration, popped veins, fake tan and five percent body fat. Today, he’s more the man-mountain required to be recently crowned
the World’s Strongest Man.
“I think it’s important to point out that I am the best strongman in the world [right now] but I’m not necessarily the strongest man in the world,” he quickly adds, munching, somehow disappointingly, on a packet of mini rice cakes. “Of course to be ‘strong enough’ [to take part in the competition] is still a very high bar—you have to be able to put 500lbs above your head. But a lot of time it’s not about that—it’s about putting 400lbs above your head but multiple times. These days to win you need your strength to be agile.”
You need a lot of it too. Some of the record weights we’re talking about being lifted at the annual no neck showdown are insane: 310lb with the circus dumbbell—a comically large dumbbell lifted over the head; 552lbs for an Atlas stone—a boulder lifted 4ft onto a platform; a 500lb wrecking ball held up for two minutes, 20 seconds; the keg toss, throwing a 55lb weight over a 25ft-high bar. And watching very large men (or “relatively huge men,” as Hooper puts it) lifting unspeakably huge weights is now a massive form of entertainment.
World’s Strongest Man—established 45 year ago and the signature event—claims global TV viewing figures of 220 million, eclipsing many mainstream sports. Some of its most famed participants are cult figures—2017 winner Eddie Hall has more than three million Instagram followers. There are many other strongman events around the world too—the likes of ‘Giants Live’ or the ‘Arnold Strongman’, established in 1989 by one Mr. Schwarzenegger, as well as regional events, from Europe’s Strongest Man to, yes, the Middle East’s Strongest Man, a two-day annual event held in Dubai and drawing some 75 athletes from around the world. One of its very Dubai-ish challenges is hoisting US$2m in gold bullion bars inside a steel carriage.
Indeed, these competitions are also entertainment in the way that dry Olympic power-lifting isn’t. The locations, for example, tend to be hot and exotic—despite this being a sport in which the outsized entrants can have trouble regulating their body temperatures. The variety of events covers both the functional—throwing, carrying, moving recognisable exercise weights—but also the cartoonish, memorable, spectacular and fun. Down the gym you don’t get to carry a fridge/freezer on your back, lift a car, pull a train or transport aircraft over a 100ft course or, as with the 1980 event at the Playboy Club, squat bunny girls. It has always acknowledged that throwing logs and lifting boulders is more televisual than barbells.
No wonder the early editions of World’s Strongest Man drew celebrity sportsmen from other disciplines, as well as arm wrestlers and Lou Ferringno, TV’s Incredible Hulk, even if these days strongmen are all full-time pros at being professionally strong. It may look more meathead than brainbox but now it’s more a thinking strongman’s game, one that requires strategic playing to one’s strengths.
Why is Hooper so good at heats like the shield carry—how far can you carry a 200kg shield-shaped lump of metal (answer: in his case the width of a football pitch)? Because “that’s when it’s beneficial to have a smaller torso so the implement is closer to the muscles acting on the implement,” he says. Hopper has an MA in exercise physiology. He’s all about the science.
What also explains the spectator numbers for these strongman events? That often the participants are showmen. That’s not just in their spectacular size—there’s a good reason why basketball player and later World’s Strongest Man winner Hafpor Bjornsson was co-opted to play The Mountain in Game of Thrones—but often in their manner: the primordial grunting and eye-popping grimacing, the fist-pumping, the sometimes cutting remarks to their rivals and, occasionally, the outright animosity. That between champs Eddie Hall and Bjornsson could, in the end, only be decided by a boxing match, held in Dubai last year and inevitably billed as the ‘heaviest match in history’.
“In fact,” argues Natalia Petrzela, associate professor of history at The New School University, New York, and author of Fit Nation: The Gains and Pains of America’s Exercise Obsession, “it’s not just that most of us tend to live pretty sedentary lives that make what these men can do impressive, it’s that they represent a brute kind of masculinity, which is thrilling for men prevented [by the current culture] from acting that way. It seems almost transgressive.”
Certainly there’s an appealing bluntness to such competitions—you lift the weight, or you don’t. And a sense of no holds barred excess too, from the weights themselves—“really
raising the bar, no pun intended, on the kind of heavy weights you see lifted even down at
your local gym these days,” Petrzela notes; to the participants’ equally huge diets; to—historically at least—the lack of regulations as to how the competitors got as strong as
they did. When in 2004 the then dominant strongman Mariusz Pudzianowski was asked when he had last taken anabolic steroids, he quipped “what time is it now?”
Indeed, that over-the-top performative element is all in the long tradition of strongmen, right back to the sixth century BC Greek wrestler Milo of Croton, who was said to eat 20lbs of meat and drink 18 pints of wine daily, and once carried a four-year-old bull around the stadium at Olympia, before proceeding to eat it over the course of the day. Many ancient cultures have hosted their own competitions of strength, from Mongolia’s Three Games of Men, to Scotland’s Highland Games. In more recent times strongmen were found in circuses, fairgrounds and what were called ‘freak shows’. And even now, Hooper suggests, that’s part of strongman appeal: “You have those [spectators] who are interested in the sport and its exploration of performing at the limits of what’s humanly possible at the moment, and there are those who want to see the shortest person, the tallest person, and the strongest, just every extreme imaginable. And, sure, some of the [strongman] guys are more WWE…”
The golden age of the vaudeville strongman ran from the 1850s to the 1950s, many of its performers becoming massive stars in their day. The German strongman Eugen Sandow, for instance, was such a celebrity he became one of the first people ever to be filmed, by Edison Studios in 1894. A cast of his body went on international tour. The likes of Louis Cyr would lift a horse off the ground, push a tram uphill and lift 500lbs with just one finger. Louis ‘Apollon’ Uni refashioned a pair of railway wheels on their axel as his barbell. Arguably they were also the vanguard of today’s full-fledged bodybuilding and fitness cultures.
“I think our interest in feats of strength like these goes right back to the Greek myths—Hercules, Apollo and so on, which is why a lot of the performers named themselves after those figures—while the circus was all about ordinary everyday life made extraordinary,” explains Professor Vanessa Toulmin of the University of Sheffield’s National Fairground and Circus Archive. “Their abilities were seen as somehow supernatural, even if the early strongmen explained then that it was more about training.”
Nor, she stresses, were these performances only about male strength. Strongwomen also subverted traditional ideals of female beauty and fragility with a more progressive presentation of female physical power—one which would somehow be lost over the 20th century until only recent years, when female bodybuilding, wrestling and boxing have found renewed acceptance. Laverie Valee, known as ‘Charmion’, was filmed for the Library of Congress. Kate Brumbach—who performed for the likes of circus pioneers Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey as ‘The Great Sandwina’—would snap iron bars and hold her husband above her head using just one arm.
“Yet while you can find a tonne of images of Brumbach lifting things, you won’t find a single one of her flexing her muscles,” points out Alyssa Ages, modern-day strongwoman and author of newly-published Secrets of Giants. “Our acceptance of muscle on women has waxed and waned in the decades since but while we’re arguably in an era now in which women are encouraged to be super strong, there’s still this invisible line between an okay amount of muscle and what is considered ‘bulky’ and therefore deemed undesirable. [So] we still have some work to do before all levels of musculature are widely accepted.”
Not that it was just about displays of strength back then. “[For male and female performers alike] there was also an erotic element to it,” says Toulmin, “a more polished and legitimate, less ‘side-show’ expression of what, thanks to a fascination with Greek statuary at the
time, would come to be seen as the ideal body.”
All this, in turn, would also come to shape new ideas of masculinity in particular. Toulmin says there was a popular newspaper cartoon of the time in which, on their way to see a strongman show, a wife turns to her somewhat weedy husband and cuttingly tells him that “tonight I get a see a real man”.
Certainly, even as the defined muscularity of bodybuilding is very different to the height and bulk of World’s Strongest Man competitors, in both cases size—which implies strength—has long shaped our intimate perceptions of masculinity, for good or ill. That is why, it’s been argued, while other extreme feats of athletic performance are impressive—running fast, or for a long way, jumping high or far, or throwing an object over distance—the fact that most of us more typically have need to apply strength purposefully in our day-to-day lives makes displays of extreme strength more recognisably extraordinary.
Anyone who has had to carry, say, a 40 litre bag of compost—weighing in at 29kg—can understand what it means when Mitchell Hooper deadlifts 420kg. Or 14 bags of compost, all at once. “And, yes,” he jokes, “I get asked to open a jam jar [at home] at least twice a week. But if I opened a jam for someone else it would be infidelity.”
Certainly, ask Hooper and it would seem that his superhuman talents are as much mind as muscle. Of course, certainly physical attributes are preferable: in strongman performance atypical height (always over 6 feet) and weight (around 190kg) are as much about the physics of shock absorption, and of counterweighting the objects lifted, as they might be indicators of power.
Conditioning matters too. A mix of Viking genes, a whey and fish-rich diet and a certain cultural hardiness might explain why, relative to its tiny population, Iceland has supplied a disproportionate number of World’s Strongest Man finalists.
But that some psycho-physiological state not yet fully understood is tapped when pulling off these stupendous lifts is also indicated by news reports of ordinary-sized folk who, faced with a life or death situation, somehow find their own incredible strength. In 2012 22-year-old Lauren Kornacki came home to find her father trapped under his BMW after the jack had collapsed and, remarkably, having through frustration worked herself up into some kind of frenzied altered state, then lifted the car off of him.
The search for super-strength—or the development of super soldiers or state-sponsored super athletes—has led to the development not only of performance-enhancing drugs but to some strange experiments, not least those in the 1920s by scientist Walter Canon, who found that exposing the nervous systems of stressed cats and dogs to a blast of adrenal hormones allowed them to tap hidden “reservoirs of power”. It was Canon who coined the term “fight or flight”.
Studies in the 1950s by biomechanics scientist Vladimir Zatsiorsky led to his observation that while most athletes were at their maximal heart rates at the end of their effort, power lifters had the ability, through mental preparation alone, to achieve that before attempting a lift. Other experiments have shown that people can be hypnotised and even just shocked into moments of enhanced strength.
Perhaps this still emerging investigation of strength is also why Mitchell Hooper isn’t convinced that, as some suggest, we’re nearing the peak of human physical strength. After all, it wasn’t until 1953 than the first 500lb benchpress was done. This year saw a new record of a staggering 1,350.3lbs set. Sure, as individuals our muscle size may be limited by the amount of the protein myostatin we each produce. Or the amount of explosive ‘fast twitch’ fibres our muscles contain. Both are genetic. But there’s more to a lift than that, from your arm length to the synchronisation of your effort, to your agility and emotional balance.
“Yes, I’m genetically gifted in strongman, but I think [you need to] get away from [considering] genetics of the body and have to start talking of genetics of the mind,” Hooper suggests. “The fact is that I can persist at things for a long time. I can be consistent in my training—I don’t miss a day, a set, a rep. It’s not a psychological effort for me, even if I do have to work hard to expose that special combination. I know I’m nowhere near my limits at the moment.
“But while [the limits of strength] are not a finite number—someone deadlifts 502.1, and someone will come along and do 502.11 —if we look at the historical data and track improvements over time then we’re not [as a species] anywhere close to what’s possible either,” Hooper adds. “I think in 20 years’ time there will be 10 versions of me all capable of destroying anything I’m capable of. Partly that will be exposure—getting the best athletes into strongman, and for strongman to move forward we have to think like athletes and train like them. And partly [greater strength] is just what I believe we’re psychologically capable of.”
That, or course, won’t stop us wanting even more. Intriguingly, studies by David Frederick, professor of health psychology at Chapman University, California, suggest that 98 percent of men want to be more muscular not to feel healthier, not to be more attractive to women (indeed, men tend to overestimate the amount of muscularity that women find attractive) or to be better at sports, but above all to feel stronger.
“What we haven’t yet looked at is whether the appeal to men of size [as an indicator of strength] is more a matter of functionality or display, says Frederick, “though certainly we tend to admire, or envy, anyone who does anything that indicates an unusual skill, and in the physical realm especially because that tends to suggest a level of commitment [to training, for example] that can even be detrimental.
Even in nature displays of testosterone are valued because of their cost to energy.” That’s what Simon Waterson—author of Intelligent Fitness and the personal trainer who whips Daniel Craig and Tom Hiddleston, among others, into shape for their action roles—is
always asking his clients. “Why do you want to be stronger? I get it all the time now, clients who just want more and more strength,” he says.
“It’s like some deep instinct, because it’s not as though these men need this strength in their day-to-day lives. Of course, men are competitive in the gym, and some men want to look strong without actually being strong. But for others, more strength suggests some kind of progress. They can’t get enough.”