Throughout history, humanity has been obsessed with physical strength. From that Legend of Hercules, the Olympic Games of ancient times, where there were wrestling matches with few rules, counted on the strongest men on the planet. As time went by, incredible men have appeared who have made heterophilia an incredible sport to watch.
Since 1977 the strongest men gather annually to determine who is number one, with similar competitions held by the International Federation of Force athletics (IFSA) and the Arnold Festival Sports. Still, with all the different ways we’ve devised to determine who’s the strongest of the strong, we show you a gallery of the best athletes with supernatural strength.
All the men listed as weightlifters have a legitimate right to be the strongest man in history. Between them appears a member of WWE, Mark Henry, who in the past surprised the world with weightlifting.
Within the Olympic motto Citius, Altius, Fortius (faster, taller, stronger), weight lifting seems to be the sport that best expresses the third meaning. And in the search for the most difficult, it has always moved by the limits of Wonder. It is possible to discuss its aesthetics, but not the even morbid admiration that it produces to see human beings lifting loads to three times higher than their bodies. Maybe that’s why the name “heterophilia” sounds almost like disease or addiction. But not everything is the force, and its practitioners must also have a purified technique, quickly in the actions to direct the weights. You should draw inspiration from the most famous weightlifters in the world. Here you have some of them that are worth being a role model for you.
- Vasili Alexeiev, who died in 2011, at the age of 69 at a clinic in Badenhausen, Germany, after a long struggle against heart problems, lifted three times the 160 kilos he weighed at his best. That can only be done by athletes of small categories. But yes lifted on his shoulders the most significant burdens of history in the decade of the seventies, he would stand today in the elite (over 260 pounds). His absolute dominion earned him to be considered one of the best pickers he has ever counted on this sport, one of the best known and, according to Sports Illustrated magazine in 1974, the strongest of them all.
- Kendrick Farris is the only male weight lifter on the U.S. team. In these games, he managed to lift 356 kilos to qualify for the eleventh mark. A few months earlier, however, he had managed to rise to 377 by combining the uprisings in starter and two-stroke, his best personal record and a new record in the dollar country. And all of it was being completely vegan. Farris became a vegan in 2014 after the birth of his second son and after he had already participated as an omnivore in Beijing 2008 and London 2012. According to the American edition of The Huffington Post, the arrival of the boy made him reflect on the example he was setting for his children. “I don’t agree with the way animals are slaughtered en masse, but that was just one of the reasons that made me interested in vegan feeding,” he says in the interview.