In 1998 a grip guy from Bean Station, Tennessee named Joe Kinney picked up a Captains of Crush No. 4. That’s the gripper rated at around 365 pounds, the top of the whole line back then. Nobody had ever officially closed it. Kinney shut it. And it didn’t look like a war. Strongman historian John […]
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During World War I, a Russian soldier named Alexander Zass got captured by the Austrians. Then he escaped. Then he got captured again. Four times total, and he got out every single time. At least one of those escapes involved snapping his chains and bending the bars of his cell. Later accounts say he kept […]
In 1895, in Boston, a French-Canadian named Louis Cyr got under a platform with 18 men standing on it. Then he lifted the whole thing on his back. The total was reported at 4,337 pounds, and that lift still gets talked about over a hundred years later. A doctor measured him that same year at […]
Early in the 1900s, an English strongman named Thomas Inch had a dumbbell cast that weighed 172 pounds. Heavy, sure. But plenty of men in that era could pick up 172 pounds. The trick was the handle. Almost two and a half inches thick, and it didn’t spin. Inch offered cash to anybody who could […]
Chris Rider says he grew up in a small town outside York, Pennsylvania, about 45 minutes from the old York Barbell Company. He lifted. Then, by his own account, doctors found multiple severely herniated and degenerative discs in his spine and told him he’d never lift again. He didn’t take that well. He worked his […]
In 1992, a magazine feature on the world’s top grip men profiled a guy named John Brookfield. He’d gotten into hand strength because his grip lagged behind everything else he built lifting weights, and he went after it relentlessly for years. By then he had bent forty 60-penny nails in less than a minute. Then […]
In the early 1950s, an Australian named John Landy ran the mile in 4:02. Then he did it again. And again. Six times between late 1952 and early 1954, he ran the mile in 4:02 and change, and every time the clock stopped on the wrong side of four minutes. On May 6, 1954, a […]
Steve Justa spent almost his whole life in Harvard, Nebraska, a farm town most people drive past without noticing. He trained with rocks, barrels and whatever junk was lying around. One day he strapped on a 100 pound chain vest and wore it to work. Every day for a month. Eight to ten hours a […]
Around 1900, a German circus strongman named Arthur Saxon was one of the strongest men alive. In one of his acts he sat his two brothers on a barbell and lifted the whole thing with one arm. His bent press of 370 pounds is still the official world record. More than a hundred years, and […]