Like the rise of NASCAR over Formula One, professional wrestling over boxing, and “Jersey Shore” over “The Sopranos,” the return of men like Shaw seems to signal a shift in our appetites—a hunger for rougher, more outlandish thrills and ruder challenges. A modern strongman has to have explosive strength as well as raw power, Shaw told me, but most of all he has to be willing to lift almost anything, anywhere. “I’m a fan of functional strength,” he said. “If you’re the strongest man on the planet, you ought to be able to pick up a stone or flip a tire. Those Olympic lifters—how can you call someone the strongest man if he can’t walk over to a car and pick it up?”
The writer of the article, Burkhard Bilger, tags along with Shaw as he competes in the Arnold Classic, and along the way, offers a fascinating look at the history of strength and conditioning in the United States. If you've ever watched the World's Strongest Man competitions on ESPN and wondered about the crazy-huge competitors, I think you'll find this article to be a fascinating read.
Back in the 1930s, you couldn't exactly roll into your local Dick's Sporting Goods and pick up a squat rack for your home gym. Even big-name competitive powerlifters and professional strongmen like Missouri's Ed Zercher didn't have one.
So Zercher did the next best thing: He loaded a barbell on the floor, deadlifted it up to mid-thigh, squatted down and balanced the bar on his quads. From there, he reached his arms under the bar and grasped it in the crook of his elbows -- and stood up.
This combo came to be known as the Zercher Squat. For decades, it's been used across the globe by lifters looking to improve their squatting; more than almost anything else, it boosts strength in the deep squat position, where folks are generally weakest and least stable. An added bonus: Zercher squats are fun. In the ten months since I joined CrossFit Palo Alto, we've done a few Zercher cycles, and they've been among my favorites.
We don't do 'em from the floor, though. (Why? Probably because Tim doesn't want to put everyone in traction. Go figure.) Instead, our Zercher squats are done from racks. They look something like this:
As you can see, they are awesomely awesome. And we got to do them again this morning.
Despite his Cruise-like stature of 5-foot-4 and 140 pounds, “The Mighty Atom” began wrestling professionally in Texas under the name Kid Greenstein. That’s until a man obsessed with Greenstein's wife shot him between the eyebrows from 30 feet away. Astonishingly, the bullet did not enter his skull, but flattened on impact. This inspired more odd feats of strength: driving 20 penny nails through a 2.5-inch board with his bare hands, changing a car tire without tools and lying on a bed of nails with a 14-man Dixieland band on his chest. On September 29, 1928, the Buffalo Evening Times reported Greenstein resisted the pull of an airplane with his hair at the Buffalo Airport.
On Monday morning, Joe Rollino was struck and killed by a minivan while crossing a street in Brooklyn. He was 104 years old, and best remembered as one of the country's most prominent carnival strongmen.
In his younger days, Rollino once lifted 3,200 pounds at Coney Island and called himself the "Strongest Man in the World." Well after turning 100, he could still bend quarters with his fingers. A nonsmoking, teetotaler vegetarian, Rollino was still the model of health at 104.
More details about his extraordinary life are here.
