Burkhard Bilger has a fascinating article in the
New Yorker
about modern strongman competitions. He addresses their history, their
competitors and what they physically demand from athletes. One
particularly interesting topic is why many champions in the sport don’t
look extraordinarily strong:
And I remember, as a boy, being a little puzzled by the
fact that the best weight lifter in the world—Vasily Alexeyev, a
Russian, who broke eighty world records and won gold medals at the
Munich and the Montreal Olympics—looked like the neighborhood plumber.
Shaggy shoulders, flaccid arms, pendulous gut: what made him so strong?
“Power is strength divided by time,” John Ivy, a physiologist at the
University of Texas, told me. “The person that can generate the force
the fastest will be the most powerful.” This depends in part on what you
were born with: the best weight lifters have muscles with far more
fast-twitch fibres, which provide explosive strength, than slow-twitch
fibres, which provide endurance. How and where those muscles are
attached also matters: the longer the lever, the stronger the limb. But
the biggest variable is what’s known as “recruitment”: how many fibres
can you activate at once? A muscle is like a slave galley, with
countless rowers pulling separately toward the same goal. Synchronizing
that effort requires years of training and the right “neural hookup,”
Ivy said. Those who master it can lift far above their weight. Max Sick,
a great early-nineteenth-century German strongman, had such complete
muscle control that he could make the various groups twitch in time to
music. He was only five feet four and a hundred and forty-five pounds,
yet he could take a man forty pounds heavier, press him in the air
sixteen times with one hand, and hold a mug of beer in the other without
spilling it.
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