Scientists recently studied the body of one of the world’s strongest men. This is what they found

Justin Keogh, Tom Balshaw For The Conversation

Gold Coast: The development of “superhuman” strength and power has long been admired in many cultures across the world.

This may reflect the importance of these physical fitness characteristics in many facets of our lives from pre-history to today: hunting and gathering, the construction of large buildings and monuments, war, and more recently, sport.

Potentially, the current peak of human strength and power is demonstrated in the sport of strongman.

What is strongman?

Strongman is becoming more common, with competitions now available at regional, national and international levels for men and women of different ages and sizes.

Strongman training and competitions typically involve a host of traditional barbell-based exercises including squats, deadlifts and presses but also specific strongman events.

The specific strongman events – such as the vehicle pull, farmer’s walk, sandbag/keg toss or stones lift – often require competitors to move a range of awkward, heavy implements either higher, faster or with more repetitions in a given time period than their competitors.

Researching one of the greats

Strongman has enjoyed substantial growth and development since the introduction of the World’s Strongest Man competition in the late 1970s.

However, from a scientific perspective, there are few published studies focusing on athletes at the elite level.

In particular, very little is currently known about the overall amount of muscle mass these athletes possess, how their mass is distributed across individual muscles and to what extent their tendon characteristics differ to people who are not training.

However a recent study sought to shed some light on these extreme athletes. It examined the muscle and tendon morphology (structure) of one of the world’s strongest ever men – England’s Eddie Hall.

Measuring an exceptionally strong person such as Hall – who produced a 500kg world record deadlift and won the “World’s Strongest Man” competition in 2017 – provided the opportunity to understand what specific muscle and tendon characteristics may have contributed to his incredible strength.

What can we learn from a single case study?

A limited number of athletes reach the truly elite level of strongman and even fewer set world records or win premier events.

Because it’s so difficult to recruit even a small group of such rare athletes, conducting a case study with one elite strongman provided a unique opportunity to understand more about his muscle and tendon characteristics.

Case studies have many limitations, including an inability to determine cause and effect or generalise findings to other individuals from the same group.

However, the study of Hall was insightful, as his muscle and tendon results could be compared directly with various groups from the authors’ earlier published research.

These groups included untrained people, people who have regularly resistance trained for several years, and competitive track sprinters.

The inclusion of these comparative populations allowed meaningful interpretation of what makes Hall’s muscle and tendon characteristics so special.

What they found

Hall’s lower body muscle size was almost twice that of an untrained group of healthy active young men.

And the manner in which his muscle mass was distributed across his lower body exhibited a very specific pattern.

Three long thin muscles, referred to as “guy ropes”, were particularly large (some 2.5 to three times bigger) compared to untrained people.

The guy rope muscles connect to the shin bone via a shared tendon and provide stability to the thigh and hips by fanning out and attaching to the pelvis at diverse locations.

Highly developed guy rope muscles would be expected to offer enhanced stability with heavy lifting, carrying and pulling.

Hall’s thigh (quadriceps) muscle structure was more than twice that of untrained people, yet the tendon at the knee that is connected to this muscle group was only 30 per cent larger than an untrained population.

This finding indicates muscle and tendon growth, within this case of extreme quadriceps muscle development, do not occur to the same extent.

What do the results mean?

The obvious implication is, the larger the relevant muscles, the greater the potential for strength and power.

However, sports like strongman and even everyday activities like climbing stairs, carrying groceries and lifting objects off the ground require the coordinated activity of many stabilising muscles as well as major propulsive muscles such as the quadriceps.

While Hall’s quadriceps were substantially bigger than untrained people, the largest relative differences occurred in the calves and the long thin “guy rope” muscles that help stabilise the hip and knee.

These results pose a question about whether additional or more specific training for these smaller muscles may further enhance strength and power.

This could benefit strongman athletes as well as everyday people.

Also, the relatively small differences in tendon size between Hall and untrained populations suggests tendons do not grow to the same extent as muscles do.

As muscular forces are transmitted through tendons to the bones, the substantially greater growth of muscle than tendon may mean athletes such as Hall have a greater relative risk of tendon than muscle injury.

This view is somewhat consistent with the high proportion of tendinitis and strains reported in strength sport athletes, including strongman and weightlifters.

(Justin Keogh is Associate Dean of Research, Faculty of Health Sciences and Medicine, Bond University and Tom Balshaw is Lecturer in Kinesiology, Strength and Conditioning, Loughborough University.)