When Is the Strongest Man in the World Not the World’s Strongest Man?

In 2017 Eddie Hall won the World’s Strongest Man contest.

Thor ‘The Mountain’ Björnsson came second, and a good chunk of the online and offline strength community debated about whether or not Thor had been robbed. The question, which a decade after the fact seemed unfair, was whether or not the organisers had picked events to suit Hall’s strengths. For those in the know, it was a nasty debate, which included very personal insults between Hall and Thor. The two of them eventually settled it by taking up boxing and hitting each other, which oddly seemed to help them patch it up. As a drama lover, the visual of two of the strongest men alive throwing punches on a dodgy stream was wonderful.

Now I’ve written and talked about the 2017 debate for years, partly because I lift stones. Not metaphorically, I literally go out and pick up awkward lumps of rock, and every time I do it I’m making some quiet claim about being strong, or wanting to be. So when two philosophers and an exercise scientist asked whether I’d help write a paper called “What Is Strength?”, I said yes before I’d thought about how hard the question is.

The result is just out now, in a journal called Metaphysics and here’s the simple version without any footnotes.

Who is Strong?

The thing that got me first was how little anyone has said on this topic. You’d think philosophy would have a simple answer and at this point I will admit philosophers scare the hell out of me. They ask so many questions. Centuries of very clever people have, and continue to, argue about knowledge and free will and whether the table is really there, but almost nobody has stopped to ask what we mean when we call a person strong.

Our friends in exercise science can tell us how objects are lifted, muscle fibres recruited and something else scientific (I’m over my skis here folks) but the actual question, what is strength? That is more or less open ground, which rarely happens in academia.

My job was the history, because people have been proving their strength in the same small handful of ways for a very long time. In Ancient China there is evidence of people lifting heavy cauldrons, there was (and still is) heavy club swinging in India and Persia, sandbags were swung in Egypt, rocks were lifted in Japan and so on. So we know people have lifted, pushed and pulled a variety of things for hundreds, if not thousands of years. We even have evidence of early strongmen like Thomas Topham pressing weights overhead and rolling pewter dishes up with his bare hands in the 1700s.

So the question to ask was not, have strength feats existed? The answer is clearly yes, but rather what constitutes strength? This was a much more interesting question because it forced the research team to think about strength movements and then strength competitions (more on this later).

How Have People Shown Strength?

Surveying recorded feats of human strength, and even a few mythical stories sprinkled in, it is clear that regardless of the weight lifted, human strength has typically been celebrated through one of several movements

1. Lifting a heavy object overhead
2. Swinging an object
3. Lifting an object to waist or chest height
4. Carrying a heavy object

Two things to say about the above list. First, it deals with the general movements people recorded prior to the 1900s and second, it is actually a pretty good template for anyone’s exercise regime. It is also, incidentally, not far from Dan John’s encouragements about structuring strength training around push, pull, hinge, squat and carries. Anyway, looking at the broad history of strength, from Bybon lifting a stone in Ancient Greece to 19th century travelling strongmen lifting cannons across stage, it is possible to generalise into the above list. The implements changed (a rock, a cannon, a chain etc)., but the movements largely stood.

Now keen readers, and how dare you for not being keen, will ask what about strength competitions? And that was where our article led next.

Sportifying Strength

The difference between ancient and modern strength, or pre-modern and modern strength largely comes down to competitive sport. Prior to the advent of weightlifting as a recognised sport, strength displays were often random, varied across time and space, and could be unrecognisable in how they were performed.

As per Gherardo Bonini’s research, the first international weightlifting contest was hosted in London in 1891. It was a hot mess but athletes were tested on a series of simple movements. They needed to push something overhead (either with one hand or two) and something described as a deadlift, although the weights used were so laughably small that I have to assume it wasn’t like the modern pulling movement. Nevertheless, it did set a precedent.

In time, weightlifting competitions, with some real teething problems, eventually coalesced around three set movements: the clean and jerk, the snatch and the clean and press, all with two hands. This became Olympic weightlifting which was tested every four years at the grandest sporting contest of them all. Thus from 1928 when this trifecta was standardised around the world, the only way people truly understood, and compared, strength was through overhead lifts.

Now obviously people did squat, bench and deadlift but only as an assistance movement to the Olympic movements. Things changed massively in the 1950s and 1960s when the sport of powerlifting emerged. Now strength had two masters. Powerlifting standardised around squat, bench and deadlift, after a brief flirtation with the bicep curl as a contest lift. For Olympic weightlifting zealots, like Bob Hoffman of York Barbell, powerlifting was the death knell of Olympic weightlifting’s success. And he was largely right. Between bodybuilding and powerlifting, Olympic weightlifting’s popularity waned.

By the 1970s, strength could be understood through either Olympic weightlifting or powerlifting movements. This is where our article’s importance comes in, in particular our use of ‘proxy failure,’ a concept from a recent paper by John and colleagues. It’s the grown-up version of a line strength coaches love: that when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. That’s Goodhart’s Law. Proxy failure goes further and says that if you optimise hard enough for any stand-in measure, it stops tracking the real goal.

An example of this. You have an athlete who wants to be better. He currently deadlifts 180kg. You help him to a 210kg deadlift. Has he gotten stronger? Yes… in the deadlift. Does that strength make him stronger on the pitch? Not always.

The issue we raise in the article is that Olympic weightlifting and powerlifting test athletes in a set number of very rigid movements. Athletes get better in those movements but, test them in something else, and their capability falls. Think of the powerlifter who can’t clean and jerk 40% of their deadlift or the Olympic weightlifter with a laughable bench press.

Does this matter? In theory no, as long as you stay within weightlifting or powerlifting circles. But fitness loves talking about ‘overall’ strength and the ‘strongest’ man or woman. Enter the beauty of ‘good enough.’

The ‘Best…ish Strength Measure’

So who is the strongest? We’ll never know. The powerlifter can do things the Crossfitter can’t and vice-versa. The Olympic weightlifter laughs at the hyrox athlete, while the strongman looks at both with pity. No one person can possibly excel at everything, and no strength sport tests every possible modality (despite what they market).

But… our article did find a current best case, and an argument for it based in history. In 1977 the World Strongest Man contest emerged, first as a television spectacle and, eventually, as a legitimate sport in its own right. The World Strongest Woman equivalent eventually joined this. If we return to our historical list of strength movements, overhead presses, pulls from the floor, weighted carries and rotational strength, these are the exact movements which tend to be found in a strongman or strongwoman show.

There is also, as Eddie Hall’s fans and detractors realised, variability. Competition lifts, even if the movements are similar, tend to change regularly. One show may have a tyre deadlift for reps, the next may be an all-out 1rm with an elephant bar. One show may have a viking press overhead while the other may do an overhead medley where competitors press a variety of different objects, mixing between one and two-handed presses, in a timed gauntlet.

What this means is that ‘proxy failure’ still exists, especially given athletes have advanced knowledge, but that it is somewhat lessened between shows. At this point, I want to be straight about where this stops, though, because it’s the bit we sweated over… a lot. We are not claiming Strongman hands you the one true measure of strength. It isn’t, and sport science is blunt about why, there isn’t one. Force depends on the muscle, on the joint angle, on how fast you’re moving, and on your tendons. Two lifters with an identical squat can be miles apart the moment speed enters the picture. Think of the powerlifter who shoots up with 700 lbs. on their back versus the ugly grinder. You could dream up a full-body scanner that added up every fibre’s output, and it might even be accurate, but it would no longer be measuring strength as something a person does. Besides, nobody is buying a ticket to watch a force plate.

So for us, the argument is simple. Exercise science generally defines muscular strength as the ability of a muscle or muscle group to produce force against resistance. The difficulty comes when we try to turn that neat definition into an objective measure of how strong an entire person is. Strength feats have a long history, they cluster around a relatively small set of movements and, at present, strongman and strongwoman contests seem particularly good at avoiding proxy failure. If I was a cynical organiser I would now use philosophy to argue that strongman/strongwoman are the strongest athletes around… “do you even Plato bro?”

Anyway, the article is open access, so you can go and read the real thing for nothing. Tell me whether proxy failure works for you, or whether you’re firmly in the camp that a big enough deadlift ends the argument and everything else is decoration. I lift stones. You can probably guess which way I lean.

Read it here!