Mark Bell's Power Project - EP. 275 - Odd Haugen

Episode Date: October 25, 2019

Odd Haugen, aka. “The Norwegian Visegrip Viking”, is a legendary Strongman athlete, 1999 America’s Strongest Man and record holder of the Thomas Inch Dumbell Lift. Haugen is also a MAS wrestler, the president of MAS Wrestling USA, and owner of the Training Hall in Thousand Oak, CA. Subscribe to the Podcast on on Platforms! ➢https://lnk.to/PowerProjectPodcast Visit our sponsors: ➢Piedmontese Beef: https://www.piedmontese.com/ Use Code "POWERPROJECT" at checkout for 25% off your order plus FREE 2-Day Shipping on orders of $99 ➢Perfect Keto: http://perfectketo.com/powerproject Use Code "POWERPROJECT" at checkout for 15% off your order! ➢Quest Nutrition: https://www.questnutrition.com/ Use code "MARKSQUEST" at checkout for 20% of your order! ➢SHOP NOW: https://markbellslingshot.com/ Enter Discount code, "POWERPROJECT" at checkout and receive 15% off all Sling Shots FOLLOW Mark Bell ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybell ➢ Snapchat: marksmellybell Follow The Power Project Podcast ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/MarkBellsPowerProject Follow Nsima Inyang ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nsimainyang/  Podcast Produced by Andrew Zaragoza ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamandrewz #PowerProject #Podcast #MarkBell

All right. So we went down to Los Angeles not too long ago and we got to hang out at Quest HQ. That was an amazing experience. And not only did we get to hang out at Quest HQ, we got to hang out with one of the co-founders, Ron Penna. And that was like just blowing our mind. He was telling us all kinds of crazy stuff, hitting us with some knowledge that a lot of stuff that, you know, we just we just don't know because he's super smart, super sharp when it comes to nutrition. And what an awesome thing that that's the leader of Quest Nutrition. That's one of the co-founders of Quest Nutrition is this guy that has just this crazy wealth of knowledge on nutrition. Yeah. He legit just stopped his day. He stopped what he was doing, brought us into his office and we just talked. Dude is super smart. And like he was talking about all the cool things that we just talked dude is super smart and like he was talking about all the cool things that they're going to be doing but he also brought us a lot of quest bars he brought us a lot of snacks and treats and they were all really great especially those hero bars yeah i was chomping on some of those hero bars those were fantastic andrew what

do you got over there buddy i was going to say that ron has been one of the most uh impactful people that we've come across because of this podcast. So it only makes sense that we would team up with Quest Nutrition. So if you guys want to head over right now to questnutrition.com, enter promo code MarksQuest at checkout, and you will receive 20% off everything at questnutrition.com. You know, the gym over here has been pretty hot, you know, but I'm not wearing like a whole lot of clothes and sometimes I'm able to take my shirt off. Right. But with what you're doing with jujitsu, you're all bundled up. Yeah. Right. You're like, you're in a gi and stuff. Right. I mean, you must sweat out a lot. Yeah. Jujitsu on its own is a, it's a very, very sweaty martial art, right? You're wearing the gi it's, it's a heavy,

heavy thing. So afterwards you're typically drenched and the gi is drenched, but then on a hot day, you're sweating even more. You're losing even more water, electrolytes, et cetera. It just gets bad, really bad. And we've been learning a lot in this podcast about the importance and from guys like Stan Efferding, the importance of sodium. We know we need a lot of sodium. Are you taking in a lot of sodium and you're finding ways to take in a lot of potassium? I think you're a fan of coconut water and stuff like that too, right? Yeah, a lot of coconut water. I salt the hell out of a lot of my foods. I take some electrolyte supplements, but I add a lot of that because if I don't, I'm going to cramp up really, really bad. I'm just going to feel horrible when performing. Well, Perfect Keto has a great way of doing it

too, where you don't have to necessarily buy coconut water that might cost eight bucks or 10 bucks a pop. You can actually just supplement it with some capsules and they have calcium, magnesium, potassium, and sodium all in one capsule, which I think is a brilliant idea. So maybe, you know, after your jujitsu practice or on your way from lifting to jujitsu, maybe pop three or four of these capsules on your way to jujitsu practice and maybe get a little extra, you know, feel a little extra hydrated for those workouts.

Yeah, that seems like a great idea. Hydration is a huge thing. I highly recommend that you guys check out these Perfect Keto electrolytes. Andrew, how can people find out more information about this? Everyone can stay hydrated and in ketosis by going to perfectketo.com slash powerproject. Use code powerproject and get 15% off all Perfect Keto products. One thing I forgot to add is that when you're on a ketogenic diet, when you're on a low-carbohydrate diet, that is very hard to stay hydrated.

So check these products out. You're going to enjoy them, I'm sure. All right, so Mark, how lean did you get in your bodybuilding show? I got as lean as I could. You know, I was trying to be lean and tender. Not all of us can be tall, dark, and handsome. Some of us can be. You can tan.

But did you eat a lot of lean meat when you were getting ready for show? I did. And you want to know what else is lean and tender? What? Piedmontese beef. Ooh, tell me more. You better believe that. You know, the Piedmontese beef, what I think separates it out from a lot of the other companies is the fact that they somehow have the meat taste really tender and still have a lot of flavor.

But the fat reduction is amazing. It's unbelievable how much less fat is in the Piedmontese beef versus some of the other companies. You look at their ribeye, right? Their USDA prime ribeye is normally 30 grams of fat. Piedmontese is 10. Saturated fat normally 14.5. Piedmontese is 4.5. They literally cut it in, what, it's a third of the amount of fat? Yeah. Are these cows jacked and tan or what? Yeah. And the protein's more. It usually has 24 grams of protein in Piedmontese and your normal USD prime has 19. That, I literally don't understand how these crazy scientists make this happen. Are these natty cows? I think these are natty cows from Nebraska,

which makes sense because everything's bigger and better in Nebraska. Or maybe that's Texas. I think that's Texas. But Nebraska too, I guess. Where can they find out more about Piedmontese beef? All right, you guys can get lean just like Mark Bell and head over to piedmontese.com. That's P-I-E-D-M-O-N-T-E-S-E.com. Enter the promo code POWERPROJECT. That's all one word for 25% off your order, along with free two-day shipping on all orders of $99 and above. Baby hands.

What was baby hands? Saturday Night Live. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's creepy. Yeah. Creepy, yeah, having little baby hands. It's kind of scary. What happened to John? Who? John Cena. Oh, yeah, having little baby hands. It's kind of scary. What happened to John?

Who? John Cena. Oh, yeah, he kind of fell off. Let me get him back on there. He was, like, riding on here, I think. Make sure he's set on there. There we go. There we go.

Yeah, now everything is good. He might fall. Midway through the show, he might collapse. You never know. Not Cena. He might collapse. You never know. Not Cena. He's going to hang in there. Yeah, he should be able to figure it out. So, you know, I think that I've been lifting for a long time, but I don't know.

I don't know if I've been lifting a long time now that we have you here. When did you start your journey? When did you start lifting weights? At approximately 10 years old 1960 and then how'd you get exposed to lifting weights you know I'm I always thought about what why but probably because I saw it in like muscle magazines back then news we were getting in the newsstand like Strength and Health and some other Swedish and some mostly English magazines. And I must have seen those because I was bitten.

Do most people in Norway speak English? Yeah, now. Back then probably not so much. You spoke and were able to read English? Yeah, we were already learning it in school. I studied it extra because I was so interested in this thing and I was reading all the English and American magazines. I had Iron Man magazines back from 1936. I just bought back issues and kept buying.

So I had them all the way since the beginning. Probably read every Ironman magazine that was ever printed except for maybe the last few years. Yeah, that's amazing. And you just got fascinated with it at the age of 10. And then you just like, what'd you try to find? I mean, where do you go when you're 10 and you're into lifting weights?

How do you figure out, pick up some rocks or something in your backyard? Practically, because there was no gyms. There was not even a weight set or a dumbbell in my entire town, as far as I know. My first dumbbells I made up when I was 10 was basically out of birch wood with the handles in between. You made your own dumbbell. Yeah. And I used to have it like in big, you know, back then,

we practically had running water, you know. But my mother had this bathtub, which is like a sink bathtub, if you've seen it from, you know, probably here in the U.S. You would go back in the 30s, in the back country, where you had that kind of thing when you give kids from, you know, probably here in the U.S., you would go back in the 30s in the back country where you had that kind of thing when you give kids a bath, you know. And that tub I filled with water,

and I used to just keep the dumbbells in there so they kept, you know, they had the weight on them. Right. Because otherwise they'd dry up and get too light. So you work with a lot of strong people because you have your own gym in Southern California. And do you make some of these younger guys, do you make them first make their own dumbbell?

No. Teach them kind of the old school ways of doing things? Yeah, that's a long time ago. I still have the first dumbbells that I ever bought, I still have the first dumbbells that I ever bought, which was a pair of, I think, three-kilo cast-iron dumbbells, and I still have them. Do you kind of collect some of the – because you mentioned the magazines. Do you collect some old weights and stuff, too? I've got a couple of friends that do that.

Yeah, I didn't, unfortunately. The things they have are because my brother, my older brother actually kept it and I got it back when he passed away. But all the magazine, all that stuff was thrown away at some point. Oh, so he was in the lifting too. You guys lived together? No, not at all. But he somehow, because I went to America, so when I was like, I basically haven't been back

or living at home since I was like I basically haven't been back or living at home since I was a teenager so yeah he think he got it from my parents house and then took it to his house and he actually used it for a while who was like a big was there someone in particular that was a big inspiration when you kind of cracked open some of these magazines? I think Bill Pearl probably was my greatest inspiration. The five sets of five. Even now, you know, I mean, he's a fantastic guy.

Yeah, I actually read about all these different strongmen, and I think I actually had the benefit of not being in a commercial gym where people that were coming up with things, they weren't also necessarily the best things to do. I read absolutely everything, and I tried everything. I was particularly good at, because I was training by myself, lifting one-arm lifts, because the old strongman and barbell guys, they were lifting one-handed lifts before you start having the formal weightlifting.

And I was very good. I could almost lift as much on one hand as on two hands. He died. He bit. Yeah, John Cena just bit the dust. He was riding on my microphone. He fell off. I don't know what happened there.

Bill Pearl, I think he's the one that wrote a book called Keys to the Inner Universe. Yes. It's an interesting title of a book for a book that's about lifting weights, but I think sometimes that's the way that we view it because we're so drawn to it. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, that's a great book. I have a copy of it, but not back then. Of course, I didn't have any of those things, but the magazines were very good. And there was this pre-commercialization of bodybuilding and stuff like that, so the real articles were real articles written by people

that really were doing what they said they were doing, and there was a lot of good practical programs that you could use and stuff like that. Did you find someone in your area or in your town that competed in some sort of lifting or like what was the next progression from there um all the way till i was 16 years old i never trained with anybody other than the other i brought friends in and they trained with me for a little while and then of course they weren't as enthusiastic about it as me so so but at 16 i went away school, to secondary school in a big town. And there they have the gym.

And there I met all like-minded people in the gym. And we actually worked out in a, you know, basically like a health club, like back in the 60s. We had a health club, had chrome equipment and so forth. But we had some heavy stuff too. And some of them were weightlifters and some of them were just bodybuilders and powerlifting was some brand new at that time. And you know, within a year or so, I think we outlived that place. We were

too, getting too strong and too rowdy and we wanted to take away the chalk and stuff like that. And all of a sudden we said, after that, we went and opened our own place. So I was the first chairman and the founder of a club. I was only 17 years old at the time, but all the other guys were adults, but sort of like a little bit of an organizer. So we organized a club that's

called KK67 it's called Kraftsportsklub 1967 and it's been in existence since and it's still one of the premier powerlifting clubs in Norway. Back then it was weightlifting, bodybuilding, and powerlifting, which was the three strength sports that were available. So we did all of them. But because weightlifting was an official Olympic sport, we were able to,

because we were a weightlifting club, we were able to get the best equipment. We were able to get all the Lego bars, all the bumper plates, all the stuff like that. So we had a very well-equipped gym for the time. But anything I could find when I came to

America a couple of years later. So it was very good. We were actually selling memberships to other people to come and use it. So it paid for us to go and compete in competitions around the country. It didn't happen for anybody else.

During that time, I saw some pictures. I don't know how old you were, but you looked like you were in some bodybuilding trucks and you were flexing. So did you do some bodybuilding then too? That was my primary thing. I was primarily a bodybuilder. Really? too that was my primary thing i was primarily a bodybuilder really yeah i uh my first bodybuilding contest was at 17 i got the third in mr norway junior and then uh next year i won it and in

at 20 i won the senior mr norway dang But meanwhile, I also competed in powerlifting. I was junior national champion in powerlifting. Yeah, you look great in that picture right there. Oh, yeah, that's, I think, from, yeah, from winning Mr. Norway, I think, junior, I think. Yeah, that that's great that reminds me of like a frank zane type pose right yeah yeah did you do any uh olympic lifting also yes i uh was age group champion and then uh later i even won the nationals in uh nationals and juniors in uh

in weightlifting as well what do you think of some of the, like, the way that strongman is right now, like with how big some of these individuals are, kind of modern-day strongman. You got Brian Shaw and Hap Thorpe-Jornsson and Eddie Hall kind of leading the charge. What do you think of modern-day strongman? Well, for a while there, I thought that,

God, you had to be that big to win. But then, Martins came and showed them that you don't have to be so big to win.

and, yeah, what's his body weight? He still looks big. Yeah, but he's, 340. Oh,

okay. 340, yeah. Yeah, he's probably more, you know, 340, 6'3",

340, so he's not that, I mean, it's big. Would you like to see any changes to the sport so that guys don't have to be over 350 pounds? Or do you kind of like the way that it's set up? I think it's okay. I think one of the big problems, they're bigger because you have more food,

you have more things to do, and people are specializing on it earlier, and bigger, more talented people are coming into the sport. So that's one of the things. But it shows just the fact that Martins can win the World's Strongest Man and get second at the Arnold is that you don't have to be that big. But when I was competing at World's Strongest Man level, I think I was 299, 300 pounds most of the time. And that was pretty much the average.

There were some people who were smaller and there were some people who were bigger. is that they are stop or start again using events where you need to have grip strength. Not that grip strength is the most important, but I think grip strength kind of normalizes things a bit. There's no drugs that are going to make you stronger grip, in my opinion. Maybe there is, but I don't know. It's not about your body weight. It's not about your body weight. It's not about your body weight either. So if you have at least one of the events out of five or six events

that involves grip strength, it kind of normalizes and makes it less extreme in that sense. Do you know why they got rid of that? No, it extreme in that sense. Do you know why they got rid of that? No, it goes in waves, you know. I mean, a lot of the events they have in competition restarted. I mean, like the axle lifting and stuff like that, it was something that I started in my contest and then everybody else started doing it.

And, you know, it goes in cycles. Somebody else come up with a good event and people do it. And then it depends on the promoter, know what they what events they put in there and sometimes if they feel like they oh well i have a weak grip because a lot of people lifting weights are still a weak grip because they use straps all the time and never never even focused on it um they say ah but take that out so you don't need to worry about that part. You probably still crush a lot of these guys when it comes to grip, even now at your age. You're 60 how old?

69. 69. Yeah, I'm actually current world champion in the open class in a couple of events. And what type of events do you do for grip strength? I like the more lifting type events. do you do for grip strength? I like the more lifting type events.

I'm currently in the world championship in the one-arm rolling thunder lift and in the double overhand axle deadlift. How much can you pick up like that? My best is 220. A kilo. Yeah, like around 440, right? Yeah. Oh, my God.

And then what about if you were to pick up a... 484. 484. 484. 484 is my best. And the world record is 237.5. It is 521, 523, I think. Is that Felix?

No, no, no. Felix has never... I've never been beaten by Felix in that particular event. Try to pull up a picture of him. We tied 220 both at the same

time and there's, in legitimate competition I've only seen one other lift between the 220 and the 237.5 and that's a 225 kilos that the Russian guy. Kirill Serkev, the bench presser. The big bench presser, yeah.

Yeah, he can pick up the, yeah, he picks up the rolling thunder kind of casually. Yeah. It's amazing. Yeah, he's very strong. Yeah. He did 225 in the, I think, the world championship I didn't go to. I wasn't there.

I think I saw a video where they're like, this is like near a world record. And he's just like in the middle of like a workout. And he just like picks it up with each hand, you know. He's a monster. Yeah, he's very good. That's insane. When it comes to grip, like how does someone, how do you even, how do you build that up? Because I know it's problematic for a lot of people.

In my case, I probably have natural strong grip, but of course I've lifted weights since I was so young and used my grip the whole time. And when I started in strongman competition, which I started when I was in my mid-40s. I usually would win the farmer's walk because of the grip. Here's a shot of Mark Felix

with the biggest damn hands you've ever seen in your life. Yeah. Unbelievable. So you're saying to build up grip strength, what are some things? Actually, now I focus a little bit more on it than I did before when I was in strongman competitions. But the main thing is that you use your grip when you're training. There's really no reason for using straps on everything. You can see people in there

doing pull downs with straps. They do everything to make it easier. But instead, if you want to be strong, you want to make everything more difficult. So easy way to do it easier. But instead, if you want to be strong, you want to make everything more difficult. So easy way to do it. I hate to waste time just sitting there training grip. So I only do grip training very limited and a little more now than I did before. But before I never did any.

I was just using axle when I was deadlifting. I was using thick grip on other things doing bodybuilding events i may even do like a like lateral races with the with the holding the hub or the plate just to work my grip at the same time because let's face it if you're doing it like a concentrated on your shoulder, the weight is very light. So why not get some grip strength

at the same time? So you mainly employ like fat grips and just using thin grips. Yeah. Do a lot of that type of thing, yes. Where did some of these lifts come from?

You mentioned the axle lift. When you were doing Olympic lifting, were there other lifts that were in there that aren't in there anymore, like the continental press, where you take the weight and rest it on your belt, and then you try to figure out a way to hoist it overhead?

Did you? No, that was before my time. That was still before. No, but I was still, when I started lifting, they had three lifts. There was the press, the press, the snatch. The press, yeah.

The press, well, it's supposed to be a strict press. You clean it any which way you can. And usually you did a power clean for it, and then you press it, and you're supposed to just press overhead. No knee bend, no nothing. But they took it out, I think, out of the Olympics by 1972 because some guys were getting so efficient at it. Lean way back?

Yeah, they were doing bench presses, basically. And then it became supposed to bend more than a certain way, and then it became political who got the lift and who didn't, and they basically took it out. Plus, it was also very dangerous, of course the way they it developed if if they kept it strict it's a good it's a good lift so people cheating with their lifts is not anything new no no it's been around for a while for a long time oh yeah everybody coming up with something they need to do that with the squat and powerlifting you just get rid of it yeah everyone's always trying to cut them

high right yeah how about the arch and the bench press? Have you seen like people's arches on the bench press? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the bar just moves an inch. Yeah. How about when it comes to like something like a bench press, have you been able to be proficient at that too? Because it sounds like you're good at all kinds of different lifts.

No, I've never been very good at bench press. I always liked bench press, but for the last, you know, 20 20 years i haven't really done much bench pressing because uh in strongman you don't really need it but i like bench press as an exercise my best bench press in competition was 222 and a half that's over 500 pounds yeah no almost i think 490 something yeah right yeah 490 490 uh yeah it's amazing when you talk to people that are strong when they say they're not good at something they're like i only squat like 700 pounds what about squat same thing about 700 pounds yeah yeah wow yes officially in competition I think you know other than in in in strongman of course I lifted more but there you all kinds of cheating

in you don't really know what how it's done but I'm for that kind of lift for competition squat 705 is my best or 3 to 320 something I really love about strongman is they just they're just they're like hey like whatever way whatever the hell way you want to get the weight up just do it whatever way you can right yeah so like I've done like in squatting cars and stuff like that and for max weight and stuff like that I think in Ireland I remember going against against Sven Karlsson and and big Glenn Ross. Ross about 450 pounds huge squatter and stuff like that and probably squat a thousand pounds even back then could do a 1,000 pound squat. I was very competitive

when it was that type of squat where it was not normally depth and I think it was from bottom up. Wow. So it's more of a, you know, it's just really a strength, it's not a technique, but just strength type of thing. So yeah, I had a pretty decent legs strength from that standpoint, but not, I've never been that great in powerlifting. Of course, I didn't start really doing powerlifting and learning how to do it properly until in my 40s. How much weight can you do on a regular deadlift

with a regular bar double overhand? Have you ever tried that? I never tried for max, but I used to train with Josh Brian. Oh, yeah. Very strong. He was training and he came and trained with me and stuff like that. And I did 605 from my toes, double over him, because that was the weight he was using with straps.

You had to show him what's going on, right? Yeah. But I don't care about lifting any more than I can lift with my hands. Yeah, so everybody listening, I mean, just please go, next time you hit the gym, try 135 and do your normal progression upward.

Try double overhand, no hook grip, no straps, just some chalk, and see where you end up. You know, it's very, very difficult. I think the best I've ever done is like 425 or something. 605, that's unimaginable. Well, like Martins, in his warm-up going up, he goes up over 600 pounds in the double overhand. And then he puts straps on when he gets heavy.

Yeah. How old is Martins? He's 29. I think he just turned 28 or 29. And where did you meet him? How'd this happen? He saw the, I think back like, this is like eight, nine years ago

when he saw we were having the LA Fit Expo, the O'Donnell Strength Classic, and he caught hold of them and asked if he could compete. And they said, yeah, you're to compete. You're to contact Ode. And they gave him my phone number. He called me and talked to me and said, yeah, you had done an amateur competition back in Boston.

And he said, yeah, I want to compete. I said, you know, you better come out and check out what the weights are because this was a pro am, so it was very heavy weights. So he came out and he said, yeah, no, you're right.

I can't lift these weights. But he says, but I want to go do it so I said you just come out here and train so we started training with Miriam

like 8-9 years ago and he's had a very fast progression to this yeah and he was going up you know every year he got stronger and stronger

but it was only in 2000 so this was 2011 probably or 12 11 first time I let him compete compete in that competition was in 2015, and of course then he beat all the pros as an amateur.

Wow. Holy shit. What makes him different? Like what makes him special, you think? Well, his dedication. But real special is that he actually prepares for this stuff. He prepares for his training better than most people. Really proud of him

from the beginning. First of all he had very good lifting technique from the beginning. It's something that his father his father had been a weightlifter back in Latvia growing up before he went to university.

And so he taught his son really well in terms of his squatting and everything else. He came as a, he was a trainer at 24 Hour Fitness when he came to me. And I know that though the trainers at that time was being trained quite well in terms of the training people, nobody in the gym knows how to squat, nobody's going to deadlift,

they don't know how to lift, basically. And he just had this perfect technique on everything. So, yeah, that was one thing. And the other thing is the fact that he just prepared. Back then, stretching, activating muscles and getting ready for lifting. Nothing is done by, haphazardly. He does all the little stuff that no one wants to do maybe.

Yeah, yeah. It's not in a typical mind in our meatheads to want to do. Yeah, we don't want to stretch. You don't want to stretch. You don't want to do that shit. We want to lose heavy weights. Yeah. But he does all the other stuff and he does it very well and he's so that's what i think it makes him different

is he's so athletic and so flexible and stuff like that you see him when you you know he did that this story about that uh the world record on the uh was it stone you know the the barbell squat the squat the lean over squat yeah the lean over squad and we were actually that was for at the arnold's he did it first time right so uh it was just a few months before then that uh terry todd called me at the time and uh said you know uh we want to have Martins compete in the Arnold's, but we can't because they had this qualifying thing and he had been injured so he couldn't go to the qualifier. So he was not.

But do you think he could set world record in doing the Milo Steinborn squat? Yeah. And I said, how much is it? He says, 550. I said, yeah, is it? He says, 550. I said, yeah, I'm 100% sure.

And just at that moment, Martins was staying in my house at the time. So he just walked past me. I'm sitting in the chair and he was behind me. I said, Martins,

do you think you could do more than 550 on a Steinborn for the lift? He says, you know what it is? Yeah, I know what it is.

I never tried it, but yeah, sure I can do it. You did like what, 562, right? Yeah, I know what it is. I never tried it, but yeah, sure I can do it. You're like, what, 562, right? Yeah, he can do a lot more. There's a little bit every year, too. He's got a strong belief in himself. Yeah.

So the funny thing was this. I don't know if you know Terry. Yeah, a little bit, yeah. When you're on commentary, it's at least an hour. So an hour later, when I finally get off the phone with Terry, I go to the training hall, and sure enough, there's Martins in there trying out the Steinborn. And he's already, first time he tried it, he went up to 500 pounds.

Oh, my gosh. Yeah, I would just add that he's really good for the sport of strongman like um i've seen a handful of these competitions and i don't think anyone is more animated up there on the stage i remember uh i forgot the uh the event but were they like they're pushing the um again i don't know what it's called but there's going in a circle yeah the conan circle yeah that's the one true conan circle at the arnold yes yes yes he destroyed that event and then um you know you're looking around i think half thor is getting ready to go and then you look up and he's just at the top of that circle just screaming

it's just like he got everyone so fired up and you don't see that from any other competitors you know you'll see half thor and shaw like they'll get excited they'll scream you know they'll do whatever they got to do. But nobody really takes it quite like that. And I think that's so important for the strongman sport right now. There's really nobody else like him. Yeah, he's a good personality. Yeah.

He's a good guy, first of all, but it comes across when he does the videos and stuff like that. His personality comes through and, you know, people, maybe one thing on the air and something else outside, but he's a good guy, generally speaking. What amount of conditioning is required for strongman? Because some of the events, it seems like it takes a tremendous amount of conditioning, and my small understanding of strongman and doing things like farmer's carries and stuff,

it seems like you've got to be in shape for the sport too, right? Yeah, you've got to be in good shape. It's a fitness for the sport, obviously, and that goes with hours of training, training the events and the accessories. But I think that what maybe Martins does better than other people is that he doesn't do heavy weights all the accessories. But I think that what maybe Martins does better than other people is that he doesn't do heavy weights all the time. You know, he's a 900 plus deadlifter.

I think 975 is the best he's done in deadlift, right? But you never see him, you hardly ever see him do 900 plus deadlift in the gym. I mean, once in a while, he'll do, you know, heavy, heavy deadlift for him. He goes up to maybe like 800 something, 855, something like that. And then, you know, before a big competition,

he may go over 900 and do a few reps. Is that some of your training philosophy as well? Or do you kind of think that like, let's do it on the platform? Yeah, sometimes less is more. You know, if you, I think that, like, let's do it on the platform. Yeah, sometimes less is more. You know, I think one of the biggest problems with a lot of the athletes today is that they're all the time just training hard,

heavy, heavy, heavy, heavy, heavy, heavy. And, you know, it just translates into heavy and strongman is very heavy. So they get injured, you know, and stay injured. hand is very heavy so they get injured and stay injured. Not that Martin has his share of injuries also but he is very intuitive and back off right now. He's supposed to be competing in Dubai but he's not going to because he still had this nerve problem with his neck that translated into taking all the strength out of his one arm. But he's come back already. He's almost ready to go again.

But he's going to wait and probably do the team championships in the UK for the world team competition. I think he will do that because there's a team and they can kind of, he's working with Rob Kearney and they will probably kind of take turn in such a way that they can together do really well. And then he's going to do the Arnold

USA at the Santa Monica Pier and qualify for the next year's for the Ohio. Do some of your lifters, do they do actual cardio training? Is there any reason to do sprints on a bike or anything like that? Not a lot of that, no. Walking and being generally fit I think is very important, but not necessarily if you don't need to do a specific cardio.

How about for a lot of maybe undersized strong men that are listening to this and they want to be like Martins or they want to be able to compete against bigger individuals, is there anything special that they need to think about in their training or they just need to work hard? Well, they need to think about in their training or they just need to work hard well they need to work hard obviously but uh but i think that uh like uh less is more sometimes and uh if they're smart and learn the events better uh technically there's there's always a mechanical advantages to a lot of things now martin Martin's weakness, or he considered his weakness, is

his overhead. But at Arnold's, he gets two reps at 450 on the log. And he wins it. It ties with all the other guys. But a lot of times, you'll see him doing more technique on the dialogue because he doesn't have the press, just the regular static press of some of the other guys like Thor, Half-Thor for example. He uses no technique. I mean I think his overhead could be so much higher if he actually learned how to do properly. But he's so strong, he still wins without doing it live. But you could see it in training.

When he and Martins trained together, they were just super heavy, I think it was a log, they were doing log lifting with maybe like 370 or something like that, and they were doing reps and doing sets, and I think they were just supposed to do five reps on, five by five almost, I think that's what they were doing, I could be wrong, but it was something like that and martin's you know easily did five reps and then thor barely could do the first first set with five reps because this technique is just just pressing it you know and it's very uh not very efficient and then the next set martin's does the same thing and the next thing next and and and thor's performance steadily went down because he was all depending on his strength and not using any technique yeah i think that's a big thing that people can get from that because like like you said he's not doing heavy work all the time but his technique and

andrew and i we were on martin's instagram yesterday and i was looking and looking at his lifts and it's just the way he moves you can just tell that he just moves so well for the size that he's carrying he moves like he's a hundred and something pounds as a weightlifter but it's it's it's crazy how just how how good his technique is yeah it's it's that's if you if you're smaller you got to be better yeah yeah you know and and in strongman you can be just as good as anybody else i think that uh yeah what's what's happened with the uh the deadlift over the last few years because And in strongman, you can be just as good as anybody else, I think. What's happened with the deadlift over the last few years? Because, like, you know, you're mentioning that Martins does around a 900-pound deadlift.

But the deadlift really exploded. Like, a common deadlift for strongman, I would say, maybe like five or eight years ago was like 800. And it was a little more uncommon to see 900. And you weren't really seeing that. And now it's like I think there's been four, five, six, seven guys to hit up over 1,000 pounds. Yeah, what has happened is that over the last five to eight years, they started having a deadlift in every strongman competition. It's become like besides it's the main event.

And to some degree, that's unfortunate, but it's been great for deadlifting. I think he has this, you know, deadlifting is just unbelievable where the level of deadlifting has gone to. That's because they train it all the time.

But I think it does require a special body type to be really good in it. Some people do much better on a deadlift. At my best, maybe 750 deadlift, a conventional deadlift. But if you put the side handles on 900 pounds would be no problem for me to lift because of my belt right and then uh yeah somebody like you mentioned glenn ross earlier um someone like him he might struggle a little bit more with something like a deadlift if you're shorter framed and thicker it might be a little more difficult yeah right he didn't but yeah yeah he was a big deadlifter too yeah he was uh he was pretty good on not pretty good he was amazing with the uh the

setup that they used to have at the arnold with the hummer tires yes they don't really do that one as much anymore i haven't seen that one in a little while and even his deadlift though he didn't lose his positioning when he was doing that like you notice i don't know if it's maybe because of his height but a lot of the other strongmen, like, their hips are leaving him when they start. But him, his deadlift was so good. This guy's pretty good. And him, too. Yeah, yeah.

But Brian has become a very, very good deadlifter as well. Obviously, he's one of the best there is also. But he has so much size to do it with. Yeah, his deadlift has progressed a ton. Who's the strongest person? Who do you think is the strongest person that you've ever seen is? I think the most accomplished strength athlete

I've ever seen is Cendronas Savickas. Yeah. athlete I've ever seen is Cendronas Savickas. Yeah. And, yeah, he's probably, he should be very close to the title of being the strongest man that ever lived, I think. Yeah, I mean, he won like seven or eight Arnold Classics in a row.

Yeah. Something like that, right? Yeah, and he won the world, I think, three, four times. Plus he won the IFSA World Championship, which was sort of like a parallel competition. So, yeah, no, he's just amazing, and he's still in great shape. And he competed on the very highest level for 25 years. Wow.

His first World's Strongest Man, I think, was in 1998, I think. it like in the very highest levels for 25 years wow you know his first first world strongest man i think was in 1998 i think what do you think made him different i don't know he's just this mind now he he was obviously very big also he was uh at the biggest over 400 well over 400 pounds over 400 well over 400 pounds um but uh not so tall the physics four six uh six four but he you know as a kid he he he uh tied for uh for gold at the i think the 2000 ifsa you know the ifsa um ipf uh world championships i mean he's a very accomplished powerlifter technically and IPF World Championships. He's a very accomplished powerlifter technically and everything else. And he

but the amazing thing is that look at his terrible overhead but he's so strong. He just presses anything. It doesn't matter. Like I've seen him at the Arnold's when he was doing the refereeing and he's doing the axel, and you know, he's practically on his toes when he's pressing overhead and he still goes up.

And I remember only like, well, 2002, we both competed against him, I competed against him four times, no, five times total, but four times prior to World's Strongest Man in 2002. And he beat me twice and i beat him twice and in overhead we were about the same you know we were lifting uh back then you know we didn't can choose the weight so whatever it was but you know our our our axle or or at that time the log was around 350. Wow. 350 to 370 maybe.

But he is already on, at 300 pounds, it looks like he's going to fail. And then he goes, next one. And he still could do it. But he wasn't, by no means, he was kind of like we were right there, you know, some of the best, but not the best. But then he just took off from there.

Yeah. Mariusz Pudzianowski was very dominating. We're seeing him on the screen here. Yeah. Would he be able to thrive in the kind of land of the giants that we have now? I don't think so. He was an unbelievable athlete,

but he depended a lot on his strength, his technique, his deadlifting wasn't particularly good, but he would never give up. I mean, he was like the energizer bunny. Yeah. He just kept going. He was very lean for a strong man. Yeah.

He was shredded. He looked like a... Three, you know, and I don't know what year this is, but he was probably over 300 pounds here, and he's not that tall. What about someone like Benedict Magnuson? Benedict Magnuson had some amazing strength, and, you know, as far as a deadlifter, he still has the highest deadlift, I think, without straps.

He still has the highest official powerlifting deadlift, and as a power lifter he was pretty darn strong and as a strong man he was he did pretty well but it seemed like uh maybe he was a little distracted and maybe not focused but he seemed like he had a lot of talent lots of talent very strong guy obviously when you have that kind of deadlift you can do pretty much uh anything and he's very athletic too athletic too but uh yeah i think it wasn't what he wanted to do probably more than anything else uh you gotta want to do it but he is one incredible deadlifter so i think he'd kind of like to just do the deadlift and uh it thrives on that the deadlift is is uh would you say in your opinion kind of the centerpiece of strongman it has become so and and truly in some ways uh you know picking up a weight from the ground is pretty basic and primal so and did you use a lot of uh forms of deadlifting like in your career

just to kind of have a strong lower back for all the different events so it may be like whether you deadlifted in a competition or not it still might be really important to have that type of strength right yes deadlift was always a core event squad and deadlift was a core event in in training for strongman and uh but when i competed it wasn't very often that we had actually, I don't think I ever did a conventional deadlift in the strongman competition. There was always some kind of apparatus or something like that whenever we had it. Do you ever use hook grip in your training,

or do you always use double overhand or straps? Has there ever been a reason for you to hook? Hook? Yeah. grip in your training or do you always use like double overhand or straps has there ever been a reason for you to hook uh hook yeah yeah no i know i would love to be able to it hurts too much yeah yeah you had you had to practice uh a lot before you uh before you can do it and i and bothered with it because i feel like if i'm gonna do double overhand, may as well do it open hand and get stronger. Yeah. But. Your phone? I don't know who, somebody's phone.

Probably Ed Cohn calling us. Yeah. That's funny. Earlier he was saying that Ed Cohn is basically is basically you know like what was like a six eight person stuck in a five you know eight person's body no six foot four six four there you go yeah because they got like the same hand size but of course you know ed cone's like what a foot two feet shorter than you no two or three feet shorter he's gonna stab me next time he sees me a foot shorter i don't even think we've talked

about his hands on this episode just yet they look like tennis rackets they're they're massive yeah well i i'm hoping that he punches you today that's what i'm hoping that he punches you and not yeah you got some wide wide. Is your family heritage? Are people big in your family? No. Really? No. This is actually a testimony to weight training

and resistance training when you're growing up. I was, like I said, I was very intensely interested in this thing and it was the training all the time. But that also meant that I also watched what I ate and stuff like that. So there's always high protein meals and I drank a ton of milk and ate a ton of potatoes. Standard part like that. Yeah, yeah, right. Potatoes and milk had to be like the most biggest part of my growing up and lifting weights.

And the tallest, I have a very big family actually, extended family if you look at all from my parents, brothers and sisters, there were so many of them. But nobody was big. My father was probably a 5'7", 5'8". And my mother was like 5'4", 5'5". Something of that range. Wow. And my brothers were, my brother,

like one that's like five, one that might be six foot tall. That's probably the only other person in my entire family that is six foot or higher. And I have one brother that's like 5'7". He always was like half my size. And, you know, I was weighing 120 to 140 kilos,

and he weighed 60 kilos. Yeah. When you came here, too, like you played, I think you played in the NFL, right, for a little bit? Very short. When I, in college, I got got I signed to the Redskins okay and but didn't pass the physical during this I went to many other camps but I couldn't didn't get on the squad because I I tore my my groin running track. In the conference championship,

I tore my groin in the finals. I got the finals in the 100-yard dash in college. And tore my, but in the process, tore my groin. Probably shouldn't, I didn't do that much training on the running. I was doing most lifting, but I was very fast. But it's, you know, not very efficient probably.

So I tore it. Tore my groin really bad, and it wouldn't heal very fast. So I didn't make it and I came to California and then next year I went and tried out for the 49ers and signed as a free agent for them, played a few games, had a bad ankle sprain that put me into injured reserve and then was let go after the season

started and of course I didn't get picked up. I could have probably gone back the following year but I went to grad school instead. Did you play football in college? Yes. It was a small college. I was the first one ever somebody signed NFL from my college.

That's really rare. I mean, a lot of times people that go professional in a sport, a lot of times they've been playing it since they were really young. You didn't have exposure to American football until you moved here, right? Did you play in high school? No. Well, I was here one year in high school as an exchange student, and I played then.

So I had a little bit bit idea of what it was. When I came back to come to college, I had to go back and finish high school in Norway, too. So I graduated from high school here, and then I had to go back and finish school in Norway. And then I came to college, and when I came to college, I had just won Mr. Norway. And all I wanted to do was do bodybuilding when I came here,

but like I said, there was no weights and the weight room was so poor that when somebody started pushing me towards, hey, you should come play football, I went to start playing football. Well, it didn't have much success the first year because they put me in middle guard, I remember, like in the defense defense. I had clueless what was happening around me. I just couldn't knock the crap out of me. I mean, I was the strongest and fastest guy on the team, but I was totally inefficient. So they figured out they'd pull me out and put me on the outside as a defensive and outside linebacker type position and then I excelled for the next two years and the NFL started looking at me.

After that did you head into more like did you head into like Olympic lifting did you head straight into strongman training or was it bodybuilding? It was pretty much bodybuilding yeah and I just did everything else as well so in college like I said it's like I bodybuilded

I competed in AAU Junior University of America while I was in college I think it was in the middle of the football season so you can imagine I wasn't exactly

in the best shape but I competed and I met a lot of guys that became very big in bodybuilding from that time. But anyway, I also competed in wrestling and in track. And in track, like I said, I ran 100. So I ran a relay, I ran 100, I high jumped, shot put and discus. Damn, that's a lot of range. So in shot put and discus, of course, in our conference, I think I won every time.

I think I was mostly almost undefeated. But I was competitive in 100-yard dash, too. Why do you think some of these other countries are so strong, like Norway and Finland and Iceland? Any theories on that? got any theories on that I no

I think it's just a focus when but there you know there's a lot of there's also

genetics obviously but the Icelanders you gotta be it's like only 300,000 people there and and they are so many people

they're so strong not only strong the CrossFit girls are unbelievable. Yeah, they're crazy. There's also some guys in CrossFit from there too. That's very unusual. It's survival.

It's sort of the same with African-American here. They survive some incredible things over 400 years that make the, it's only the strongest guys that survive. So that's why you have a very, very, very lot of fantastic athletes. But it's, you know, it's sort of like your circumstances. I think in Norway it seems like, of course, Icelanders and Norwegians are essentially basically the same.

Or they may be more Norwegian than, Icelanders may be more Norwegian than Norwegians because Norway gets mixed, you know, is closer to the continent and is more mixed. And the Vikings brought back more people from all over the world but it seems like in just like

pure strength sport when most of the Scandinavian focus on that they get very good at it

and also in very endurance sports and stuff like that because you've seen some fantastic endurance athletes

and of course we have them with the best cross country skiers in the world, and so forth like that. So, you know, I think it's just a matter of, obviously there's, you know, what people focus on, you know? Yeah.

What about Mikhail Kokylev? He was pretty damn good at, like, a lot of different things. He had Olympic lifting background, strongman background, powerlifting background. That's a pretty well-rounded strength athlete. Yeah, very similar to Martins in the sense of his technique and stuff like that, but he was very accomplished. He was all-Russian champion in Olympic lifting,

and I think he didn't continue the Olympic lifting because of getting busted on the anti-doping type program but great guy fantastic athlete and again when you first come into strongman it was very interesting you can see him in a competition and he's doing deadlifts, right? And you're looking at him doing it. It looks like he can do 50 reps, you know? He has nine reps and they're like absolute picture perfect and they look like there's nothing. And then the 10th, oh, and then stop.

But that's from his, he got over that, but that's how he'd be in the beginning because in Olympic lifting, they learn, they don't stress on anything. If it isn't done, it's not done. You know, you can't press out. I mean, any little press out on the jerk or on the snatch is no lift, so they don't do it.

So they learn, they're like disciplined. You, boom, you done? If you have to struggle, stop. It's no lift. So on a deadlift, obviously, it is a struggle, right? So he has this fantastic technique on deadlifting, but didn't have, you know, the idea that you've got to just struggle to finish it. And, of course course he finally yeah this

is probably an example of it he'll it looks like every rep is like nothing and then he says yeah he always makes it look beautiful you're like oh my god how's he able to lift like that yeah as a trainer i just love to watch him deadlift it's just like martinez too the same thing it's this perfect uh form there's eight god you got the right video i think probably what i'm thinking about almost that that barbell is sitting in our training hall by the way oh yeah yeah that's cool says nine and it looked like it was nothing right yeah right now he's starting to get gassed a little bit maybe you kind of see that a lot from the russian lifters like they they go to pull on a weight and it doesn't seem like it's going right for them and they just they put the weight down and

they just like wave to the crowd and walk off see yeah he's like forget it yeah because he's not used to that yeah he should have he probably uh after doing uh strongman for a little while and getting that weight he probably couldn't done 15 reps on i think yeah as a training philosophy though like it it makes sense in terms i guess you know lasting for a long time i mean of course you want to push through it but he's like hmm i might it might not go well for my back just drop it yeah but that wasn't wasn't what it is yeah it was just the fact that his his uh he was trained not to strain on the lift if you strain on the lift it's on the lift so it doesn't help you strain and finish it but you don't get it anyway but in of course in powerlifting or in strongman you can

strain all you want and if you get it up you get the lift so no he learned how to do it he could squat 400 kilos deadlift 400 kilos what else incredible feats of strength doing like in exhibitions back to back

he is total legit no fake weights nothing but him he is a super athlete. Yeah, he's unbelievable. He should have been a world strong as man. I don't think it didn't line up for him. It takes a lot of concentration too.

I mean, you have to have a really good, you have to have a good year. You might even need a couple other people to have a bad year. Yeah, of course. And a lot of things got to line up. And you got to, like you said earlier, it's got to be something that you really want to do yep and it's got to be something that you're

super uh you stay super connected to and uh dedicated to how have you been able to live for so long like we just talked dropped a little bit about longevity how have you been able to train for so long well i as you're getting older you're getting a little smarter, luckily. So I know when to back off also. And, you know, I look at it like this is a lifetime activity. So for me, this is what I'm going to be doing. I remember when I first walked into that gym I told you about when I was 16 and I was hanging out with these old guys. Old guys that were probably like 25, 30 years old at the time,

you know, real old guys. For me, I was only 16, 17. And they said, oh, yeah, this is what we're going to be doing. We have one foot in the grave and the other one in the dumbbell. You know, this is what we're doing. And that's what was stuck with me. Yeah, you had to know how to back off, but you need to, you know this is what we're doing and uh that's uh that's always stuck with me yeah no yeah you had to know what to back off but you need to you know you i i mean i'm i found myself you know overdoing it at times also you know you you think you you at one point and

you yeah get off and then you come back and you try to jump right back in. You don't take your time to build it back up and I'm certainly guilty of that as well but I think common sense has prevailed most of the time so that's why I'm still here. You look like you're in pretty good shape right now. Do you pay a lot of attention to

your nutrition as well? Yeah, I watch what I eat and I'm trying to keep my weight down a little bit and i'm down around 120 kilos right now 265 ish and which is a lot light as i've been in a long time but i also i also kind of getting back into cycle of training because i was off for almost six weeks four weeks for uh because I got ill after a surgery and really couldn't train. And then I had to travel for two weeks and go to Japan and go to Russia and do that stuff. So it ended up being like six weeks of not really any kind of focused training.

And at nearly 70, it affects you more i think i mean i i could have done that in the past and probably not felt much much of it but now i feel like i really had to build up from scratch what do your uh children think today are they sometimes like dad like dude you're nearly 70 years old the fuck? Crazy. Do any of them work out? Yeah, I think all three of them are active, but none really. Not weight training? No, not really.

How about the surgery? What was the surgery on? The surgery was actually just getting rid of, I had like a lipoma on my shoulder and on my back. I've been there for 35 years. I remember when I started seeing it, but it hasn't really changed. And every time I talk to doctors,

they say, ah, no big deal. You can take it out or you can leave it in. There's obviously nothing wrong with it. But you can take it out so we can schedule it. And I never found a time in my schedule where I, because if you do it, you're going to have to stay put and not travel or not compete, certainly. But the reality was that if it was just for the surgery,

I would have been back in full training after one or two weeks. But I had the anesthesia shut on my urinary system. Oh, wow. So I, worst thing that could happen to you, I guarantee you that it was not a nice thing. Yeah. Yeah, so I really couldn't do it. I've been walking around with a damn bag down my leg

for a month, you know? Gotcha. That's brutal. Yeah, no, the surgery was totally perfectly fine. The doctor said you know never anything seepage, no nothing, it just healed like in a few days. I swear I could have, I would have been lifting, based on what he was telling me, we had to be ahead of the surgery, you know it was many weeks. Yeah. Based on what I saw, it would have been a few days, and I would have been lifting.

I would be a little careful, obviously, because the incisions were pretty long. They were like up to four inches. Wow. So that's pretty long. So you wouldn't want it to be tearing open. But nothing, it was very good. But my body shut down,

so I couldn't do anything for a month anyway so how'd you lose weight just uh careful way eating just paying attention yeah paying attention pretty much um the uh losing weight would be very easy if you just gave up the beer. That's difficult to give up. A couple of beers after training is very important in my opinion. And I'm not going to deny me that. So I ought to deny myself something else instead. But yeah, I could probably lose another 10 pounds probably.

But this was actually my goal to get down to this weight. So I see if I can stabilize at this and get strong at this weight. Yeah, it's hard because now you're starting to work on getting stronger again. Yeah. And then you're going to want to kind of like pack on the side. It comes down really fast too when you're doing that. So if you're trying to keep it down, that makes it a little harder to get the strength, I think. Yeah.

Back in 99, that's when you won America's Strongest Man, right? Yeah. Do you remember what your nutrition and your training looked like back then? Yeah, it's very similar to now, actually, in a sense. I was training specifically for Strongman, but I also did some, you know, but I used to, you know, I adapted pretty much the Westside way of training to Strongman. Oh, wow. But I involved, but I did, you know, the squatting and the deadlifting and the bench press and stuff

like that, but it was also, I had the log lifting and all the other stuff. So it was really geared towards strongman. And I think one of the things, we were talking about longevity, that I think is very important. I do a lot of explosive work instead of just very heavy stuff. So I limit the amount of absolute lifts, and that's the same back then. I would maybe do So I limit the amount of absolute lifts. And that's the same back then. I would maybe do once or twice a week

or some kind of absolute, but most of the training were dynamic speed training. Wow. And lighter weight. Yeah. And do you continue to maintain that through your training even today? Yeah.

Oh, wow. Yeah, I still use bands and sometimes chains even. I put that to moderate my training. So maybe just deadlift like two or three plates with a band on there and just move fast. Yeah. Like move with proper form and move as fast as you can. Fast as I can, yeah.

And then you do that on squats and stuff like that too here and there? Squats, squats, squats, and some bench press in and then some of the overhead. I don't do as much overhead because I had a problem with my shoulder, but yes, I think doing Dimanigo Strong, doing that, you back up on the weight so it's not as hard on your body.

You really get almost the same results out of it. You do have to do the heavy stuff to be able to be used to doing heavy stuff, but you don't have to do heavy stuff all the time. And you can see the same thing with Martin. So I don't think he thinks in it in the same terms, but he's doing basically the same thing. He's working technique and speed and stuff like that. And he does more reps than I ever did

because I always did very few reps. Like, you know, always less than five reps. Two, three reps usually. And he sometimes does like, as he circles through, he'll go all the way up to 10 reps and stuff like that in some stuff. And doing more reps can help keep

the overall amount of weight that you're using down. That's the same way too. Yeah, yeah. Kind of the same idea. You back off quite a bit. Right. I see him now because he's trying to get back. Instead of doing regular squats,

he's doing front squats. But he put on five plates and does he's doing front squats. But, you know, he put on five plates and does eight, ten front squats with weightlifting style. So it looks pretty impressive. Yeah, it's really good. How do you think he's going to fare this year? Because now, I mean, I know that he wasn't a surprise before, like he was a formidable athlete already.

But now it's like he won, you know? So now he's got a bullseye and he's not going to, uh, like quote unquote surprise anybody, you know? So the competition level is probably going to get a little stiffer. Yeah.

Uh, there's a, I think his best competition is going to be from Mateusz and from Thor, half Thor, Mateusz Koskowski and this new kid this new kid from Ukraine, Novikov. It's incredible. Small guy. I don't know, he's 5'10", maybe?

Yeah. And under 300 pounds. Unbelievably strong. Wow. Yeah, so there's a lot of young guys. And then Tom Stoltman from... So the competition is very stiff, but I think that Martins, if he's healthy,

he could take both the Arnold's and the World's Strongest Man. Yeah. But, I mean, you know, you have to be healthy and you have to hit it right. Yeah. But he's good in every event. You know, it's not like he doesn't have any weaknesses unless he has an injury.

Mm-hmm. On that note of injury, because, like because you were mentioning it a little bit, how do you generally approach that? Because obviously it's going to happen here and there, but how do you approach your rehab? I know it's a really general question, but are there concepts that you use to work past it? Yes.

I think it's really important that you don't quit doing all this stuff because that's typically what people do. Oh, I'm hurting my back so I can't do anything. Well, you can figure out how to work around it. You've got to work around your injuries. You've got to work around the muscle. I mean, if you work out and you do anything, it's better than nothing.

And if you are injured, you've got to continue working on it. And even the area, but try to avoid hurting it. If you can avoid hurting it, I think it's all good. As long as it doesn't hurt, it's all good. I'm not talking about it's going to hurt, no pain, no gain type of thing, but when it comes to injury, it's a different type of pain. That pain you don't want to have in your training.

You don't want to irritate it. You don't want to continue, because it's going to be a never type of pain. That pain you don't want to have in your training. You don't want to irritate it. You don't want to continue because it's going to be a never-ending problem. But if you can train and you do everything you can, as aggressively as you can, without feeling the injury, I think you'll rehab much faster. I came off of, I was 56 when I tore my biceps.

Oh, man. And rehab. And I said, oh, shit. Because I'd been thinking, at that point, I said, you know, if I have a big injury, that's probably what's going to stop me from this. I tore this up.

As soon as I had it done, and I decided that's what it is, so I had to go over to the doctor and get it rehabbed. I was totally motivated that it's going to come back. And I geared my, as soon as I was

out of surgery, basically, and off the drugs, which was it takes a couple, three days to kind of like get deep, you know, get away from the pain medication or get them out of your system so you can function properly, I started training.

And the only time I put anything on my arm was when I was squatting and doing things so that I could, I didn't have a cast on, but I had this cast you put on. And you put it on when you're training so you don't hurt it. So I did squats on my Viking press machine, like a leveraged squat type of thing.

I did deadlift on that with one arm and used straps so I could get some weight up on it. So I was able to do all the major things even with this. When the doctor said that, I'll release you for rehab in six weeks. That's the standard. In five weeks, I told him, you gotta release me, I gotta get the rehab. And when I went to the rehab, five weeks, one week earlier than I was supposed to,

the physical therapist tested me, he says you are 99% on everything, your range of motion, everything is perfect. I can't do anything for you, I can take your money, you can continue coming here, but I can't do anything for you. Whatever you're doing, continue doing it. And in 12 weeks I did, after 12 weeks I said, continue doing it. And in 12 weeks I did, after 12 weeks I did,

we had a set up with stones, and I did six, a series of six stones at 12 weeks, full weight from low 200 to 400. Wow, after tearing your bicep. Yeah, and that was 12 weeks. Wow. That's when I, you know, a little more apprehensive, probably wasn't as fast as I was before I did it

because I was really concentrating to make sure I had it right, but I did it. And I noticed that some of the guys coming back from it, I think they're not approaching it right. You need to activate it. You need to make sure that you don't hurt it. Because when you cut things and put it back together, a lot of little things get deactivated.

We have a lot of little muscles that we really don't know what they are. And those little stabilizers and connectors and stuff like that, they get so bad. So if you start doing it, when you start doing it, you can start doing it with one pound, you know, doing curls with one pound or with no weight. You can't go with five pounds even if you can't do it because all of a sudden you start hurting. Well, it's nothing getting injured, but you're hurting those muscles. They are so deactivated that you can't do it so you got to be really really careful and go really really small

steps but start really really low and but then you can go really fast i think very be very aggressive do you ever uh you ever figure out or sit down and think about like why like just why like why are you doing this like why have you lifted for so long is it just something you simply just love you love the challenge of it what do you think uh gets your gears going why you stay connected to it so hard well i think it's uh i think i kind of decided that that's who i am you know i'm strong and if I lost strength, I would lose who I am, I think. You've got to keep lifting. You've got to keep doing it.

What's the craziest person you've ever met in this sport? Because there's got to be a couple of... When we watch this sport and we see the guys bleeding out of their nose and we see someone yelling at the camera and stuff, you had to have run across some wild characters or seen some wild stuff. Like, what's the kind of craziest person you've run into?

That's very simple. Johnny Perry. Oh, I've heard of him. Have you heard of him? Well, I couldn't tell any of the stories that he's going to tell because they are too absolutely wild. But I do have one story.

You've got to love people like that, right? This is in 2001, right? Right after it was actually 9-11. So this was on the 17th of September. They still had this big strongman thing in St. Louis, and we flew in from Europe me and Sven and some other Europeans flew in to compete in it it was just to show support for 9-11 and stuff like that so they had it in St. Louis and Johnny Perry was in it and one

of the events we had was this platform squat you know where they had a girl sitting on top was up like that so it was like a really heavy, went up to really heavy weights. It was a partial squat, but it was very heavy weight. And he, something popped in his back. It like popped, and he was like totally out. They had to ambulance him to the hospital. Oh my God. And stuff like that. So he's in totally out. They had an ambulance into the hospital. Oh my God. And stuff like that. So he's in the hospital.

I think he's in the hospital all night. Morning, he shows up. He shows up the next day in cowboy boots and jeans and goes in and we were doing

the throwing for height. He goes in there and wins. He wins. Everybody's like, weren't you just in there and wins. He wins. Everybody's like, weren't you just in the hospital last night? Yeah. In jeans and the cowboy boots, I remember that.

But, I mean, the stories you could tell about him is they're not for the air. That's great. I really appreciate and love the kind of old school strongman stuff um they they had some events that were just you looked at them you're like this is just not smart like like the one where they're pushing like a trolley or something and then every time they try to stop the trolley like people are getting squished and like run over by it like i've seen a some old clips of Don Reinhout, legendary power lifter, you know, pushing some of these things.

And I just thought it was cool because at that time they had like pro wrestlers jump into it. You had Ken Patera, who was a really prolific Olympic lifter. And then you also had like NFL football players jumping in on it. And it just seemed like,

it seemed like almost like a very unorganized sport where today like people specifically train for strongman these happen to be strong men that kind of came in and just did the sport because they were strong yeah there was just an ad hoc at that time you know they just put together some events and did it yeah and these guys were very strong, like you said, but they weren't trained for it. So there were a lot of injuries back then too. But mainly because they weren't prepared

to do what they were doing. Even though the weights weren't very heavy compared to what they are today, but now people are training. I mean, there are guys coming out, teenagers. We have teenagers training that's going to want to be strong. Are there some events where you're just like, this is just going to hurt everybody?

Try to stay away from that. Yeah. There are some events that I think are prone to some bad injuries. For example, the Conan's Wheel, not the Conan's Push that they did at the Arnold. That's a really good event. But, of course, it's only going to be there, because it's so difficult to put something like that together, but when you're carrying the front

carrier like this with the weight, and you end up having a lot of weight, it's okay for the lighter guys, but the biggest guys, sometimes they're not, they're not able to, the weight gets too far ahead of them, and they get their knees out front of them, stuff like that. You see some really bad injuries. I think Cendronas tore both his quads on it back in probably 2000, 2001, something like that. And Mark Phillippe just killed his leg on it. First he tore one leg having a car fall on it, and then next year he comes back and he tears it on the

on on that event but you can tell i have from just watching it and i saw hugo gerard did the same thing he was leading the competition that we had the world's strongest man super series the mohegan sun and he leading the competition by far he was really this was going to be his year he probably would have won the world's most manager and he's carrying that thing and it pops. But you have to very often, these guys don't train it

and they don't do it right. If the hips are forward, it's all that way, it's just like doing a sissy squat, basically, when you're walking like a sissy squat, you have all this shearing power on your knees, it's terrible. You have to crack your hips and be in it like this, you have all this shearing power on your knees. It's terrible. You had to crack your hips and bend it like this. But that's much easier if you're a thin or tall, thin person than a thick, heavy person. What do you think would be the best way for somebody to train for an event like that? Like using a Zurcher or what?

Yeah, a Zurcher. But you got to event, basically, or do things like that and learn how to walk without sticking your knees way out in front of your toes. It's the same thing with squatting. You got to keep your toes back, your knees back, right? And when you start walking with 600 pounds in your hands and you make a wrong step and you your knees are out front it's bad you mentioned uh utilizing the west side barbell method how have you done that with strong man because i know like you know we have these events and you said it's important that you practice the events um but a lot of the events especially like particularly when it comes to like world's strongest man maybe you don't even know what you're preparing for but i guess there would be like four or five similar things that you'd be

preparing for right you got a carry overhead press of some sort right right because they so like i applying the principles to all the all the heavy stuff you know you do your dynamic and you do super heavy stuff depending on what they are. Sometimes events are just repetition anyway, like tire flips and stuff like that. You're doing it fast. But you're right. For Rosner's men, they're not month out at the most, what the events are.

But you're prepared, generally speaking, to all the events. I kind of old school in the way that I like to see people just come in and do the events, whatever they put in place on them. Because when we were competing in Europe and running on the tour, they kind of generally told us what there's going to be and we get there and give you something

totally different. Yeah. But it's the same for everybody. But the problem with it obviously is that if you have it that way, there's always somebody that knows

and training specifically for them. And so there will always be something in the event. So in the US it's always been since, for the last 20 years you'd say what the events are, the weights and everything like that and everybody trains for it. But personally I don't like it. I like better if you pull it out of

a hat. And I have done a competition where we had we were going to do five events and we had a bucket of five, a bucket of five so we had five buckets of five events and then we pull it And we had a bucket of five, a bucket of five. So we had five buckets of five events. And then we pull it, you know, two days before and then load it into the truck and take it. So you had to have a lot of equipment if you're going to do that.

Yeah. But we did that in one competition. But it's obviously kind of a little bit of a mess. So training for a strongman, there's a lot of training that goes on in a gym, right? Like you're going to train three three four days a week in the gym and then you must uh probably get outside at least once or twice a week to do the actual events right yeah and well in our case we train inside and out the events so but uh yes i think that you uh if you could be a good strongman you should incorporate

uh events in almost every training day. Oh, okay. Somewhere else. Yeah. Some version of it. Yeah, deadlift day. That's a very important event. Got it.

Like for me, I think that you could do a lot of different types of deadlifts, of course. Why is an exercise like breathing squats, I don't know if you guys utilize them, but why does an exercise like that become popular for strongman athletes?

Breathing squats? Yeah, like a lot of strongman guys that I've seen in the past, they'll do like a rep, and then they breathe, and then they go, and they just like see how many reps in a row they can do with a certain weight. Maybe it's because of like, you know, sometimes in the Strongman, World's Strongest Man, they'll add a keg to like each squat the guy does i know like jesse marundy and guys from years past you know i don't know if it's popular to still use it anymore but yeah i don't know if that's a i'm sure people are doing that but i don't think it's a smart thing to do i think that you should be breathing i think but it's it goes to the fact that like people doing

the yoke and stuff like that, they hold their breath when they're doing it, but you don't need to. I mean, you can have all the power, particularly if you have some mouth guard or something, you bite down, breathe through your nose, and you breathe the whole time instead of holding it. And when you set it down and you had to go back or something like that, you're not out of breath. But if you're holding your breath, you're dead.

It's going to be too difficult. The yoke carry, what kind of weights are they carrying on that thing? like that you're not out of breath but if you're holding your breath you're dead yeah yeah it's gonna be too difficult yeah the yolk carry what kind of weights are they carrying on that thing there's 17 1800 pounds something like that right no they have gone up to that in a couple instances but uh no at the arnold's i think they had uh you had 1300 and then you went to 1560 or something like that but it's only for short. It's just too hard. How much weight were we using that day? I was thinking about that.

What were we using? We had 25-pound plates, I think, on each side. Yeah, but that's not good. I think that yoke is one of those events that probably better if it stayed around 1,000 pounds or less for the strongest guys. Is that because like a danger thing, you think? Yeah, it's much compression, and you were moving with the weight. It's a really weird exercise because it compresses you down.

This is my two. He is a little over 300 pounds and 6'5". Wow. It's amazing strength. Look at this. He's 23 years old. It's like kind of running across the stage with it almost yeah the the weight kind of compresses you down it's almost

like you feel like you have like no say in like being able to stabilize it do the athletes do your athletes work on you know trying to stabilize their core through specific exercises or is it mainly like hey man you just got to carry heavy stuff in order to make this work uh you certainly gonna have to carry heavy sometimes but i think we what we try to do is to do a train with what we call a stability yoke or or a chain yoke but you just have the same bar but you have chains down to the weight and you you can go significantly less weight and but the instability makes it very hard to do wow and like lately like for like now in this uh we rehab martinez that's all he is doing but he goes up to 700 pounds even on that so uh and run with it but uh i think that's a very very good way of

being good at it uh my good friend and a former world strong you know 2001 world strongman sven carlson when he was uh competing he was considered the uh one of the best or maybe the best in in yoke and he he never had a yoke to train on. He trained with like 600 pounds on a bar and with chains. Wow. And he would walk with that. He'd run with that. But that's the heaviest you can get it up to, and he got very good at it.

You know, I know competition is competition and what they give you is what they give you. But, you know, you mentioned the Conan's Wheel. You mentioned like the Yoke Walk. They should probably try to stay under a certain amount of weight. Do you think that like they're not taking the safety of the athletes into consideration or is it just like that's the way it is? I think that obviously it's not a regulated sport, so it ends up being some crazy stuff being done.

And I've been a big proponent that the Arnold's, I don't think we'll see this lift again. Maybe we will, but I don't know. Hopefully it will be, maybe they'll do it again, but later, because they have more space. It had to be so heavy, because there was so little space to do it in. That's their biggest problem. But maybe we'll see it again now that they

are doing a strongman arena. So a lot of stuff is not going to be on the stage. It's going to be on the strongman arena. Then maybe it'll be a little more normal. One of the great events or signature events of the Arnolds

have been that frame, that big timber frame that they carry up the hill. But of course, it's up the hill and it has to be short and it has to be heavy because it's just on the stage, right?

But then they started doing straps on it and that's just crazy and that's when a lot of people had injuries because it's just on the stage, right? But then they started doing straps on it, and that's just crazy, and that's when a lot of people had injuries because it's not just doing it in a competition, but training for it because it's just too much weight. You can carry too much weight if you put straps on.

So you had like 1,100 pounds on your hands, and you're walking up a hill with weights that is moving and very, very dangerous. So I had worked very hard to have them if you can have that event just do it with the grip right yeah so you know you don't have to have a super you have to be strong but you don't have to have like you don't want to be a grip guy to be able to do it you got to be just strong because Because I know that the back, they first started with it, the best guys on it was Cintronas and like Sven Karlsson and stuff like that.

And neither of them had a particularly strong grip. I mean, if you could test them on the grip strength in terms of lifting things, they wouldn't be at the top. They'd be more in the middle, but they're very strong guys, and they could run fast with less weight, no straps. So I think it's important, particularly when it's short like that.

There's really no reason. Having the background in bodybuilding, do you think that most people should utilize some types of strongman in their training, like just simple grab some dumbbells, do some farmer's carries and movements like that? Yeah, I think that's very important because you want to work out for function. You want to be able to, it's really no reason to be strong

pushing a weight in an apparatus. That makes no sense whatsoever and it's not really making that all that much stronger anyway. But yeah, incorporating some strongman events, just like farmer's work is a very good one because it works the whole body. Even lifting stones or stuff like that or lifting sandbags and stuff like that, very good because it's using the whole body and it's very functional. Like double overhand grip deadlifts and stuff like that?

Absolutely. Yeah. like double overhand grip deadlifts and stuff like that. Absolutely. Yeah. I think my philosophy about doing double overhand deadlifts is that you can limit the amount you lift and you can have it. It's very interesting when there's one body, if it's a max lift in one part of your body,

that's a max lift even if it's not your max deadlift. Yeah. You'll find it. I find it, for example, one of my favorite lifts is the Saxon bar, which is the square three inch by four inch. So you grab it, pinch grip it, and you lift it. I'm more often on that lift than anything else, and you can't call it heavy, my heaviest is around 120 kilos, and as I get on top here and put it back down, I almost black out, because you're using so much power, even though that's an easy deadlift if it was a bar,

I use so much power, using so much of my body to hold on to that plank that plank yeah that it almost blacks me out wow yeah we teach people you know when they grab the bar to go do a squat or bench or deadlift this is really you know grab the bar with everything that you got and that way when you do squeeze the bar you get energy from your fingertips all the way into your hand all the way into your forearm and we talk about like you know getting tight and it's like if you're going to get tight well the easiest way to do it is to really bear down on the bar because then your your whole arm is going to be locked in a little bit better yeah activate it yeah a lot of these things is neuromuscular i mean you can see how strong

people can be without getting bigger too i mean you see the weightlifters are just unbelievable what they can lift and do without gaining any weight. So it's just a matter of neuromuscular connections and efficiently lifting. So I think somebody can be very strong without being too bulky. And I think you will see a future of strongmen that may not be so big,

they will be big because the biggest guys are going to be the best guys probably on the on the on the on the on it but you'll see people they're not necessarily that big and heavy maybe they'll be later well and even something like a performance enhancing drugs and only do so much for the muscle yeah and it really is not the game here for strong man or power lifting is the central nervous system yeah you know how do we you know get the central nervous system on board with what we're about to do? Yeah.

I would think that drugs probably mostly help on the recovery and stuff like that more than anything else and that you can train more in that. Maybe why that would be better. But I don't think that would help much on grip, which is more nervous system dependent, I think. I always thought the biggest impact that a steroid would have is mainly just on your overall body size. You're just going to be bigger.

Bigger, yeah. Then it's going to be a little easier to lift. Yeah. Tell us a little bit about the Thomas Inch dumbbell. What is this thing about? Well, it's a dumbbell that was, I guess, dates back to the early 1900s. Thomas Inch. It has 1900s. Thomas Inch.

It has nothing to do with Inch. Thomas Inch is the name of the guy, the famous English strongman that traveled around and he had this unliftable dumbbell. Apparently he had a number of them, but the main one, the unliftable one, was like 172 pounds. But he had some lighter ones too, so I think he faked it at some times.

And there's other reasons why he may have faked some of this stuff, but he has some lighter ones too, so I think he faked it at some times, and there's other reasons why he may have faked some of this stuff, but obviously nobody could lift it, because even today with a lot of strongmen, you go and take it into a gym, very few people can lift it. So we haven't had very many people walk into the training hall

and be able to lift it. So you own it? I have two replicas. Okay. Yeah, so we have two replicas sitting there and I have a challenge for people that think they're strong and to come and try something. like that. They are easy for me, but very difficult for most people. And can you, or even could you at some point lift it up and put it over your head? I lift it over my head, but not taking it with one hand from the floor, no. I haven't been able to. It's actually one of my goals is to be able to do that.

I don't know if that's maybe time has passed me along, but I'm still going to have like a secret goal that I'm going to be able to clean and press that sucker over my head. How many people have been able to, I think I've seen Mark Henry maybe do that before. Mark Henry did it. I think Pfister has done it.

Maybe Hugo Girard, but I don't think that was on an actual... These guys are picking it up so easy, it's ridiculous. So the middle of it is like the circumference of a Coke can? Yeah, it's two and three-eighths, almost two and a half inches. That, I was... I think this was in 66, I think, in 2006. It looks like it says 2016. Yeah, 2016, I mean, yeah, 2016.

What's 10 years? But anyway, the year before my in the training hall at my house I did it at my 65th birthday and I did it for 65 times but I did it in 5 minutes in a little over 5 minutes so I have a video of that

here they gave me 10 minutes but I hadn't trained for it at all and I had I had an oncoming flu and I I was due for hip replacement yeah uh so it was i i barely survived it put it that way i got six i got 63 reps okay i was shooting for 66 but i uh i mean when i did 65 i was standing there holding it, holding the last rep, and I could have continued.

I saw that. But on here, after the 63rd, I couldn't, the 64th, I couldn't even pull it up on the floor. It's amazing to watch you pick it up because you have it like in your fingertips. Yeah, you end up after a while, you just end up being almost like a pinch grip. Yeah.

But that's the central nervous system kicking in, you know? Wow. Because I couldn't do that. I couldn't go up and do that. Uh-huh. I mean, there's no way I could go and just grip it in my fingertip and be able to finish it.

Is there a particular like. See, I can do the 64th. Is there like particular technique to this or is it mainly just you grab the damn thing and just pick it up? You just grab the thing and don't try to overthink it. It's nothing. But I think my hands may be

particularly well suited for it because they are wide so they fit in there just perfectly. So maybe they're particularly well suited for it. You got crushed by that workout, huh? Must have been sore for two months. It was terrible. I mean, picking up stuff for your grip,

like not only working your hands, it's working your entire body, right? Yeah, you do 172 pounds for 63 reps, that'll fit any weight that's hard. Yeah, you're lower back. But when you had to squeeze an all-out lift each time, it was tough. Most impressive lift you've ever seen?

I don't know. I think probably most was I think the most impressive thing I've seen in a strongman competition was at two o'clock in the morning

down in Central America where we had a competition and it was like and you had a throwing event. So it took forever. As many as 5,000 people when you started, it was nobody left when they were done. And the last event was a car walk in sand in like really miserable,

like a yoke, you know, with a car. I mean, and we were half asleep. That was the other part is like, you know, by that time he was just so tired and sleepy.

I remember I put on all put on more belt and protective gear than I'd ever done, and I thought I could kill myself, and I never got even close to finishing it. And most people, it was exactly the same thing, whether they could pick it up or do anything with it. And then this guy, Chad Smith from Texas, picked it up and fucking ran with it. He's like, everybody, quit your bitching.

But he's so big that it probably wouldn't have been half as fast if he didn't have the weight on his back. Wow. Yeah, that was one of my favorites, the most impressive, Chad Smith. He's a really, really talented strongman. He didn't continue, but... strongman. It didn't continue. Have some of you guys ever had too many beers

and then challenged each other and ended up in the gym? Anything like that ever happen? Not too much. Back in the back days, everybody were more party-oriented. Now they're more so serious. They don't even hardly drink, I think, most of the time. Taking out all the fun, man. I know.

I mean, the half the fun about strongmen should be to have the beer afterwards. I know in here, like, any time, we don't even really utilize the Rolling Thunder that much, but any time we do, it becomes a dick-measuring contest, and everyone's got to try it. Yeah, yeah. Everyone thinks they're going to win the day. the day yeah it's funny uh we have a lot of times you know in the if you have people coming over you know we the grip stuff comes out all the time grip party yeah because there's a lot of uh

you know it's easy to do so everybody can kind of get in get involved in it yeah yeah it's a lot of fun what about the the hub hold? Some people will pick up the middle of a plate. Some people are strong enough to do a 45-pound plate. What's your best on that? Well, I've done the plates because we used, I've had it in a medley competition where I had to lift it up.

Not a great event for me pretty much because you have these hubs that you add weight to and stuff like that. Right. But most I've done

is 25 kilos or 55 pounds which is not that good. Right. But that's where shorter fingers are better

than longer fingers because you know, you leverage. Yeah, sometimes people have. And you have to hold it like this. Now I've done

over 85 pounds on it when I could grab it any which way I have to. And you have to hold it like this. Now, I've done over 85 pounds on it when I could grab it any which way I wanted to. But you had to grab it in a certain way and it doesn't fit my fingers. What do you think maybe is the most challenging grip thing that you've come across? I see people picking up the blobs and all the different things.

The blobs, they're tough. But it's a certain type of strength. Everything you do in grip is it. Your hands have a lot of different muscles and your leverage on your fingers, your forearms. There's so many aspects to it, and somebody that's really strong in one thing

can be just terrible in the others. I'm a good example. I'm terrible at just doing grippers and stuff like that, maybe because I never really liked it, so I don't really do it. Oh, like the iron grip or whatever? Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I would say without no training, without ever seeing them before,

I'd probably do better than most people in that because somebody handed me a number two over the table and I could easily squeeze it. But I don't do any better than that now so you know because I don't train it you know so it's one of those things so it's different you don't use your thumb a lot of the I think my thumb isn't particularly long but it's I think it's pretty strong and that of course helps on all the thick bar lifting and it helps on like a punch of pinch grip lifting like uh like the saxon bar but i like things where you put more weight on it i don't like this little bittly bitty bitty

shit that you had to lift with your i like it with heavy weights so you had to be more of an all-around body strength uh not just not just the fingertips in terms of uh competing because you've been you've still been doing competitions, are you still going to be competing this year, next year, etc.? Yeah, I'm hoping to compete at the FedExpo again in January because I have 12 or 13 different events,

but I think I'm going to compete in a couple of them or two or three of them in the grip. Yeah. The axle, double over an axle, the Rolling Thunder, and the Saxon Bar. I think I'll compete in those three. And is it just in open or is it an age category? No, no, I would only compete in open.

Wow. What, like, I guess, because most people wouldn't even think about competing at this point. So what, like, I guess, what's your goals with it and how have you been able to stay doing it so long? I know you mentioned your training philosophy before, but is there anything else? Well, I mean, you had to set little goals, uh, all the time to keep training. And i'm sure you guys see the same thing you know mark you're doing this for a long time too you you had to

have a little goal figuring out okay i'm gonna get better or do something competition is a good thing to do it uh so the uh my my goal is to go back to russia in May and do the World Championship, the APL, which is the Arm Lifting Professional League Championship again. I won the Open in both, in the 125 kilo categories, Open in this last May, and I'm gonna try to go and do it again.

But I want to do get better lifts because uh for some reason when you've traveled there i my lifts are like way down but still win so it's okay so everybody else is down too but uh you know you like to yeah make some big one on the world stage right yeah it makes it makes it tough um have you done some grip stuff with ed cohen before have you ever messed around doing some grip stuff with Ed Cohn before? Have you ever messed around doing some grip stuff with him? No, Ed never dares to do it. I keep saying, Ed, you've got to come and try this out, and he will not try it, I think.

And all of a sudden he starts talking about an injury or something, huh? Yeah, he says, no, he won't do it. I have asked him many times, but there's a challenge, Ed. Yeah, where are you at? Next time I see you, you've got to do a grip challenge. You have the same size hands as me, and you don't have to lift them as far as I do. He's got that short little body, right?

Yeah. How's your body holding up? You feeling good? Back feels good? Shoulders feel okay? Stuff like that? Yeah, right now I feel pretty good actually, yeah. That's great.

Got anything over there, Andrew? We were doing some of those like the hub holds like you were just talking about. I was around much stronger people than I am and everybody just walked up to a 25-pound plate, got chalk got chalk you know got ready to go and you know it was a struggle and I looked at it and I just walked up and I picked it up fairly easily yeah and then Mark's like yeah I think like skinny guys have a little

bit better easier grip because their fingers are a little bit more uh like you can just like kind of claw down on it have you seen anything like that where like maybe like a certain body type actually is better fit for a stronger grip well certain type of grip of course that's what i'm saying is like every every piece of implement is a different uh different dynamics because we are are you know our built is so different. So, yes, a lot of the most amazingly different people can surprise you. Yeah. Like the Inch Dumble, I brought it to a lot of trade shows. We have been to the UFC Fan Expo in Las Vegas. And I had 500 people go through try it and nobody were able to do

it including some very famous baseball player, very famous MMA, they couldn't do it. And of course I did it all day long and whenever they did that I usually did like 10 reps for them to show them that this is looking really easy right it's frustrating a hell lot of people right but I we we were in one show and I'm not 100 sure which one it was but um we had Brian or Brian too it was in the dot fit booth at the show so it must have probably been an uh international the ursa show in las vegas at that time and we had a ton of people going through and of course nobody did it either brian would lift it or i would come by in a suit and tie and lift it you know like to kill them because nobody could do it but in that show we had three people that was one of the

only shows that i've seen that we had more than one person be able to lift it off the ground. And one person was a... I said, I almost going to bet somebody. I guess this guy is so cocky. I guarantee he's not going to do it. But luckily, I didn't bet on it. He lifted it. But I found out afterwards he was an NFL linebacker

for the New England Patriots. And so he had long hands and he lifted it. And then a high school football player, one of the youngest guys I've seen do it. He just finished high school or was a senior or something like that. But he was able to lift it. Like one time got it off the ground. I don't know if we didn't make them deadlift it, but if you can get it off like mid leg or something like that, because most people can't get it off the ground. And then this really regular looking guy, he may have been 200 pounds maybe. It could have been more but look

really regular looking average Joe walks up and says what is this? And oh what do I do? Oh just lift it. And he grabs it and lifts it. And I said what the hell are you doing? And he's a BMX bicyclist.

His grip depends on his grip holding on to the handlebar, I guess. Wow. Yeah, he lifted it. I was so impressed because he didn't look like

he had ever lifted a weight. Were his hands particularly big or just normal size? No, kind of normal size. I don't think you necessarily had to have a really big hand to do it because it's so big

that you can't get your hands around it anyway my hands aren't around it anymore than this and you see when i do my new reps i'm almost grabbing it like fingertipping it almost you know so now i think it's uh it's more you know it's you have to just be able to crush crush it with your hands do you have to train i know you mentioned that you just kind of like implement it along with your training but do you have to train like the individual fingers or anything like that or um i don't no no but i mean you know there are people that are really into grip sport and into arm lifting and all they do is train for this stuff and they do you know they're much more specialized and they work on

much more events and stuff like that i kind of like i like it probably mostly because I'm good at it. And I like it as a way of keeping me from lifting and doing and getting stronger overall. So, yeah, I don't do anything that specialized. I get challenged on doing all these different things. We just did one when you do in the town. We have this pyramid. I mean, it's really a pyramid you try to lift. And when I tried it, I had trouble lifting it without any weight on it.

So they started doing it. And of course, now it was a challenge. So now it's a little different. So I ended up actually setting world record on the 28 pounds. It was only 28 pounds Wow, but but that was like I couldn't do I If I just walked up to it, I could barely lift the damn thing without any weight on it. Hmm

That sounds like it would be really hard. Yeah Nothing to grab you get the rules for you Apparently that you could lean it over a little bit, but you can't have your fingers around it. It has to be just on those pyramid sides. And, you know, obviously the weight has to hang down, not turn it, you know, inverting it. And, yeah, not the kind of lifting I like to do but uh it was fun when you you know you get a

challenge you you do a little bit better that was after beating uh martin's uh uh record on the ug uh their their rolling handle yeah lift wow you could still beat him on some stuff. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, he's getting tough to beat on. Yeah. I can beat him like on the inch dumbbell. We've had a little challenge, Eddie Williams from Australia was in,

and we have this, I have this, I call it the vice grip biking gauntlet. We have two, these all have the same size handles. They have two 120 pounder dumbbell, two 140, two 160, and then the inch dumbbells. So you do five on the first, three on the next, and two on the 160, and then you do one. Try to lift the last, two at a time now. Try to lift the last two at a time now.

You had to lift them both at the same time, which is very few people can do. So we ended up, I said, okay, I'll make it easy on you guys. We can just do one on each instead of doing all of them. And Martins got it, but Eddie couldn't get the two when you get to it. It's pretty tough. He has a pretty good, strong grip too.

When's your birthday? January. Okay, you're going to be 70. You'll be also celebrating 60 years of lifting, I guess, right? Yes, yes. Kind of kicked all this off at 10 years old. Yeah. What's kind of the coolest thing or the most fun thing

that's happened to you in this process? You own your own gym, and you've been able to work with some high-level athletes and stuff and get somebody like Martine to the World's Strongest Man. What's something that maybe has happened for you that you're really proud of or something that was unexpecting of a 10-year-old kid who's thumbing through a muscle magazine? I don't know. I mean, I've been all over the world traveling because of it of course so that's a great thing but you know the gym i have now is just you know like a little side we just moved out of my garage into a commercial space

and that's basically because we needed more space but i was in the gym business before i had a bunch of gold streams including the gold streamsms in Hawaii. So that's one of the reasons why I had the Hawaii connection. But I don't know. No, just the travel and meeting people from all over the world, I think it's been. That's amazing. I think a lot of people would love to do that. Yeah. Back when Mark was doing just strictly powerlifting, that's all he was doing.

He had the wherewithal to know people want to see this. I'm going to start filming it. When you were in the middle of training like crazy, hanging out with all these strongmen, did you foresee the future of being like, this is going to be a gigantic sport someday? But did you foresee the future of being like, this is going to be a gigantic sport someday? Well, we always hoped to be, and we invested a lot of time and money in it.

I was part owner of the World's Strongest Man Super Series. So we did that for several years, but we could never really make any money on it, and we finally just basically abandoned it in a sense because you couldn't get the sponsorship. We were so close in getting sponsorship, like the major, major players involved, the car companies, and then they get down to the final decision. What about doping?

And they killed it. Because you can't say that you didn't know, but you're not testing, so you couldn't say it, and they didn't want to get involved, or rather put their money into sailing or something like that, that it's non-controversial. So, yeah, it was very tough

to get the real good sponsors. You know, they only could get the supplement companies and some equipment manufacturers and stuff like that. But we had a good run. We did a competition at Madison Square Garden. So that's a nice cap, you know, feather in your cap. So that was a lot of fun.

But I think he has the potential to be big, but, you know, it's not been organized, but it's getting bigger, and I think, you know, YouTube is going to really make this thing happen because one of the problems with it for our shows was we had them on in Europe. All the things were on Eurosport or even we sold it to a lot of national television stations. But it was very difficult to get into the U.S.

You had to pay money to get in. They don't buy, pay you. No, you go and sell the advertising and you do it. But we never had really that. We had it on US TV one season, but that was it. Now, of course, you don't really need the TV anymore. You need to put it on YouTube. All the people that we want to reach are on YouTube.

So I think the potential now is to be really big I think. You know you have a lot of these guys with a huge following. Martin's YouTube channel went from zero in November of last year and now we're in October and he's at 120,000 subscribers I think or something like that. And it's growing fast so I think yeah, that's a great potential. So with the sponsorships falling off and it kind of, I don't want to say not going anywhere, but it just not exploding the way you guys had hoped, what made you keep going?

Why didn't you just stop and then go, I don't know. I mean, I know you started your gyms and stuff. Yeah, I had a passion for it. I mean, that wasn't the only thing I was doing. And my partner, it wasn't his only thing either. He had a chain of gyms in Europe. And I was, during most of this time, either working for my own organization

and for 24-Hour Fitness. Got it. So, I mean, if you're able to talk about it like have you seen a huge difference in you know you just mentioned like the sponsor didn't want anything to deal with it because of like the peds and whatnot has that changed the game up quite a bit or i mean and again speak on it if you want to if not we can move on well i i can talk about it but i really don't know much about it because i think they don't talk to me about it. They know I'm against it, so when you're against it, somehow.

And I don't project onto other people that, you know, like, what I see a lot about drugs, that I think there may be some people that are using a lot, there may be people that are using hardly any, and maybe some are using nothing. then maybe people are using hardly any and maybe someone using none and nothing but by projection people that are trying to get there always thinks that everybody is doing it and I don't think that's the case because when I I competed to without doing it and I know that several other guys that I was competing with were drug-free and you can be very strong but you know it's not an organized sport choice no no no testing, so, you know.

It seems like Rogue Fitness has stepped up a lot to, you know, bring more attention to World's Strongest Man. Yeah, Rogue is fantastic, obviously, for a lot of strength sports.

I mean, they have just been tremendous at supporting the strongmen at Arnold's and now they're also doing the World's Strongest Man and,'s and now they're also doing the world strongest man and of course uh there are terrific people as you know you do business with them and they're just fantastic uh for the sport of strongman or crossfit yeah and uh weightlifting probably they're probably even putting strong something at that as well yeah they've been huge

with with crossFit especially. I actually think that at some point that they'll just, I think they'll maybe buy CrossFit. I kind of have a theory that they might be doing that actually pretty soon. I've just been kind of keeping my eye on the whole thing the whole time. But in terms of Strongman, it really kind of could help elevate Strongman if it continued to get to be seen by more people. And then my personal view of it is, like, if they shape the events a little bit

so the athletes could be a little bit healthier, a little bit smaller, I think it would play to a larger audience, you know. And I know that's not their main goal. They want to use heavy stuff. But I think if it was brought down a little bit and they said, hey, this guy, you know, was able to carry this thing, you know, half a length of a football field or something, and the athlete was more aesthetically pleasing, the athlete was like leaner, I think people would be more excited about it, just like they are with CrossFit.

You know, people get so excited about CrossFit, a lot of it's because you got these incredible bodies going on. Yeah, I mean, that's what's great about CrossFit. People get so excited about CrossFit, a lot of it's because you've got these incredible bodies going on. Yeah, I mean, that's what's great about CrossFit is that you have the average-sized people and they are in fantastic shape, both the women and the men. Yeah, it's very impressive. Yeah, I think that Rogue is doing fantastic things for that

as well as for Strongman. But their involvement in World Strongest Man, I think it's going to just improve. And I see if you look at the events at this past Arnold Classic in Columbus, it was a little more different. Events were very classic, but they were not as, they were heavy as hell,

but weren't injurious. Yeah, and then Rogue is building a lot of stuff for the events, which makes it look aesthetic. You know, they got the big haystacks, and they got a lot of stuff making things look real powerful and just kind of cool. course the best event is the the natural stone lifting because it's my stone yeah that's my tombstone oh is it yeah that that uh was that in was that in last year's arnold was it the last two last few years yeah that looks really hard it is very tough one uh but there's a funny story about it.

It's like Terry says we want to because that's another event that I had been trying to get him to do is to do some shouldering the stone because you always have this difference in height of people and there's always complaining about that's too high and it's too low or whatever you know. Hey lift it up to your shoulder. That's how tall you are, that's how far you need to lift it. So I thought the good event would have been like you have 10 stones, different height, and they just go and have to go up the ladder and see who can lift the heaviest stone to their shoulder.

But Terry had a different idea. He says, we want to get a natural stone to do this stuff. And he says, we have one, natural stone to do this stuff and he says we have one but I'm not sure about it so he says do you have any ideas

I have a stone that they probably can use it's my tombstone my ex now gave me I think

maybe on my 60th birthday I think may have been when I got it it's an actual tombstone no it's a big stone,

but it has my name engraved in it and stuff like that. My date of birth, but not the date of death. Not predictions on it. But anyway, so we have used it in strongman competition before, but basically just to load it and stuff like that. And it's a very tough one to just lift up.

How much is that way? It's 400 and I think it's 411 or 419 pounds, something like that. You pick it a very tough one to just lift up. How much is that weigh? It's 400, I think it's 411 or 419 pounds, something like that. And you pick it up? It's very hard, yeah. Very hard to put up. Pick it up off the ground?

Yeah, you see. And you put it on your shoulder? Yeah. 400 pounds? Yeah. You see, some of the guys can't lift it off the ground.

Oh my God. The strength of these athletes is just unreal. But the funny thing is when you're picking this, so he says, you know, can somebody put it on their shoulder? And I say, yeah, I'm pretty sure they can because, you know, I used to pick it up and lift it up,

not on my shoulder, but I put it up on the, you know, on the four foot high pedestal and stuff like that. And I think maybe I could have at some point to get it out of my shoulder. So he says, can you... So he asked, can you check, have Martins check it? Because Martins wasn't competing that year, right? Not the year before this.

And so I said, Martins, you've got to go out and try the stone and see if you can shoulder it, because we need to see if we can use it in Arnold's. And of course, he went out there and lifted on his shoulder the first time he tried it. I wonder how many competitors couldn't even get it once. The first year, I think, Martins got three or four reps. And then two people got one rep, and everybody else got none.

Wow. Man. And I don't understand, like, we had the Stonewall, they saw this, the first time everybody saw it was the day before

when we exposed them to it and we showed them how to do it i mean but you know none of them really tried it um uh only the smart guys tried it like uh to because it's so different you can't just grab it and it's so smooth or it seems like it's it's unbalanced so totally un seems like it's smooth. It's unbalanced. It's totally unbalanced. It's just awkward. What do you think about like on some of the competitions, like they're not announced till like fairly close to the competition.

Do you think that can help like prevent like some injuries? Or do you think that can help like get the athletes in better like shaped? That way they're safer when they're doing the movements? Well, in the world, that's what ends up being they only uh you know you only get about a month or so if that in some cases uh i think yeah if it could be uh done fairly i think that's the best way to do it that people don't know but uh that's not the case anymore. They're always afraid if it's a competition in Chicago, somebody in Chicago is going to know how to do it and know the events and nobody else don't know it.

That's the problem. Oh, my gosh. Probably a lot of complaining, right, when people say I'm a strong man, especially on a local level because then people are like ah you got this you know yeah you apparatus out of your own gym you know yeah right yeah strong man i've always found it to be really fascinating even the way that some people uh even make like people will home make like some of these products some of these you know stones and they'll load

they'll load up you know a ball basically and they'll load up a ball, basically, and they'll throw actual weights in there sometimes, right? They'll throw five and ten pound weights in there. Of course, stones are not difficult to have made with cement because he almost got it, but he didn't see what he does. He's almost gotten it. Oh, there you go. No.

He couldn't control it, so he didn't get it. Wait. Oh, so he... That wasn't good enough. He didn't. Yeah, you got to have it up there for a half second or so, right? Yeah, you had to have control over it. It's sort of like an overhead lift. You control and get a down signal, basically.

What I always found so inspiring about Strongman is that this is stuff you got to really seek out like you you can train the gym we talked about that already you can deadlift and squat and you can do overhead presses and stuff but you have to figure out a way of getting a hold of these uh this apparatus and these different implements otherwise you're you're not going to be good at it so sometimes people are driving a few hours to go meet with somebody else who pulls it out of their shed. Yeah. You know, or like I know a lot of guys have a lot of equipment and storage units. It's a very thankless sport.

There's not a lot of money in it. And if you own all the stuff that you would need to, you know, do strongman and be exposed to all these things, I mean, you might spend a few hundred thousand dollars on all the equipment. Now, you don't need that to be the best. You don't need that to be the strongest, but it helps, right? It helps if you get all these things. Yeah, yeah.

Like, of course, this is one of those things you can't have. You can go and get a stone. Every one of these guys had stones, same weight and heavier that they were training on, but nobody had that stone, nobody. And even now, the stone is locked up at Rogue in between the first and second year, and it's still locked up there.

And we're not going to use it anymore, then I'll take it back. But if you're going to use it, it's going to stay there so nobody has the advantage. And your body type really makes a big difference too because, again, like you were saying earlier So nobody has the advantage. And your body type, you know, really makes a big difference too. Because again, like you were saying earlier with the Conan wheel, if you have like kind of like a belly, then the thing gets,

or you're a thicker person, the thing gets away from you more. So in this one, it doesn't really help you to weigh a crazy amount of weight. No, or to be tall. Yeah, you got Hathor who's got to like bend over like crazy to get this thing having long arms might help though huh to be able to bear oh yeah that helps and I I think he he ends up getting a rep also one rep on it you have to hold it up and just do it with one arm, huh? Yeah. But it takes everything out of you to try to fight a thing up there. But he didn't. We were just showing him how to do it the day before,

but he wouldn't take to it. And so he was messing around to get it started, and he finally went to the position we told him to do. And you've been able to pick that one up, but just not. I haven't ever done it on the shoulders, but just not. I have never done it on shoulders but I've picked it up and put it on like four foot platforms

and that's the first time I got it so I was pretty good at strong lifting but here is also the grip strength that comes in. On this thing here

it helps to have strong hands because you have to balance it. You're grabbing it and holding it more so on this thing here, it helps to have strong hands because you have to balance it. You're grabbing it and holding it. More so on this natural stone than it is on the round stone, but still even in the round stone, a good grip helps because you control it.

Because you never get it perfect, right? So when you get it, if your hands can make up for a little imbalance, that makes the difference. Thank you so much for coming up here and being on our show. Really, really appreciate it. Thank you. Great to have a strength legend in the house for today. Thank you, sir.

Appreciate it. Hey, thank you. Strength is never weakness. Weakness is never strength. Catch you all later.