At the 1980 World’s Strongest Man, one of the events was bending a steel bar. Ten of the biggest, strongest human beings on the planet lined up to try it. Bill Kazmaier won. Know why? He was the only one who finished it. Nine of the ten strongest men alive at that moment could not […]
Author Archives: marmiger
Dustin Poirier described what losing to Islam Makhachev’s grip actually felt like: “When he gets the grip locked in, it’s immediate blood shutdown. Usually you feel it slowly fading away. The darkness started to come in as soon as he got the grip. Yeah, he’s so fucking strong, man.” That isn’t cardio. That isn’t technique. […]
Most home gyms look the same when you walk in. Rogue rack against the back wall. Calibrated plates stacked neatly on the storage pins. Texas power bar in the J-cups. Trap bar leaning in the corner. Maybe an Echo bike by the door. Five thousand dollars of equipment, and somewhere on a high shelf there’s […]
“If you want a handshake that makes other men question their masculinity, pick up short steel bending.” — Brian S., Dawsonville, GA That’s one of 140+ customer reviews on the SSB site. Real name, real city, real guy who paid for the membership and wrote that himself. The hard part of buying any fitness product […]
The box is on your kitchen table. You’re about to spend the next month figuring out whether this is your sport. Most guys’ first 30 days follow a predictable arc. Big win in session one. Modest gains through weeks 2-3. Then around day 25-30 either a clear “yeah, I’m in this” or a “this isn’t […]
You bought a CoC set two years ago. Closed the Trainer the first night. Knocked out the No. 1 within a few weeks. Ground on the No. 2 for two months and finally closed it. Then you went after the No. 2.5. That was a year ago. Maybe longer. You’re still missing the close by a quarter inch. […]
Walk into any serious lifter’s gym bag and you’ll find one of two things in there. Sometimes both. Fat Gripz — those black silicone sleeves you slap on a barbell to make the handle thicker. $40 a pair, lasts forever, takes three seconds to install. Multiplies the grip demand on whatever lift you’re already doing. […]
Captains of Crush is the OG. Randy Strossen launched the line in 1990 and the certification system in 1991 and for thirty-plus years it’s been the gold standard of spring-gripper training. Closing the No. 3 puts you on a roster of about 3,000 people in human history. Closing the No. 4 puts you in a club of […]
Twelve bars. From accessible to unhinged. The bottom rung is a 190-LBS bar that 95% of beginners bend in their first session. The top rung is the 1,110-LBS “Impossible Bar” that nobody on Earth has bent and probably nobody will for a long time. In between is the entire range of human grip-bending capacity. Twelve […]
Forget the gym for grip work. Most commercial gyms have terrible grip equipment. A few cable attachments, maybe a wrist roller in the corner, the same dusty hand grippers nobody uses. Trying to do serious grip work at a commercial gym is awkward — you’re tying up a deadlift platform for sets that take 10 […]