There are probably sound structural reasons why the Eddie Hall deadlift world record video from July 2016 is so hard to stop watching, why it has become a sleeper internet phenomenon, a thing people go back to, theorise about, commune over in ways that seem both lighthearted and also deeply-felt in the way of all the best sport.
Part of this is its stark and simple theatre. The video is 55 seconds long. It features what seems at first to be an abandoned American-style fridge‑freezer, but turns out on closer inspection to be a single very square man, essentially a seamless slab of human muscle, quivering slightly, moaning to himself, profoundly alone even in front of a boisterous full-house crowd.
To get to that point he’d spent years transforming his body into a machine for generating power, training endlessly, consuming five times the normal adult male calorie intake (“My body runs best on pure fat”) and racking up a body mass index score, at 6ft 3in and 28 stone, that made him, according to one doctor, the single most likely person to have a heart attack in the UK. Hall thinks getting to the record took 10 years off his life.
The deadlift on this scale is of course basically nuts. It doesn’t have to happen. It’s not display or gymnastic beauty. It’s an obsession, verging on a death wish, but also increasingly an object of cultish vernation, for reasons that seem to have something to do with the strangeness of modern life, and young men in particular.
This weekend deadlifting is back in the eyeline again, with an added sense of needle, and of history to be made. On Saturday Birmingham’s Utilita Arena will host the Mutant World Deadlift Championships 2025. Eddie won’t be competing – he is long since retired from competitive strongman. As a fitness/eating influencer he is in his gentle, fun way one of the most famous people you’ve never heard of if you’re quite old, his internet reach massive, his manner moreish, a human emoji you just have to click on.
His presence will certainly be felt on stage, not least in the central event, Hafthor “Thor” Björnsson’s self-advertised attempt to lift 510kg, thereby extending his own recent record mark set in July at the Eisenhart Black Deadlift Championships.
This is where the story turns a little dark, because there is also bad blood here, beef between the beefcakes. Björnsson first claimed a record in 2020, a Covid-era 501kg, the legitimacy of which Hall disputed. In 2022 they even got in the ring, Björnsson, who is six inches taller and frankly terrifying, winning a bout billed as the Heaviest Boxing Match in History. The chippiness has continued. Thor maintains Hall’s 2017 World’s Strongest Man title was wrongly adjudicated. He likes to belittle his talent, call him lucky.
This all feels not just wrong but upsetting. First, because these are two very different strongmen. Hall is a story of making the absolute max of your resources. Expelled from school at 15, he worked for a truck company, edged into strongman, relatively short but hugely dedicated, took the biggest title once, hit the four-minute mile of lifts, then retired because the alternative was basically killing himself.
At which point, because he is a very nice man who does funny stuff, his Eddie Hall YouTube channel took off, spooling out its stream of likable and relentlessly positive videos.
Thor, on the other hand, is your classic super-athlete, a former basketball player and now serial champ, considered by those who know to be the strongest strongman ever to walk the earth. He’s box office. He was in Game of Thrones for five seasons as the Mountain. The default option is always going to be: Thor wins.
So why is he angry about Eddie Hall? The obvious answer is that while Björnsson may be the greatest, Hall has become Brand Strongman, because he’s nicer and better at it. Forcing his face into the chat is no doubt commercially smart for the Thor industrial-complex.
There is a serious point here. All of this applies to women too, of course. But specifically on man culture, gym culture, body culture, that modern version of male vanity: this can be hard to understand. Who are these people talking endlessly about protein, fetishising their honed and tattooed bodies?
It is also a rational reaction to a world that wants to assail you with hunger and toxins. Being a male human is basically a nightmare. Young men did not create or ask for this world. But by now the entire range of hard-wired desires has been commodified and relentlessly retailed. From the first tick of puberty, life is an endless gush of porn, bad food, alienation, reels of aspirational tripe and warnings about your own nature.
How to survive in this matrix? What to do with your strength and hunger and desire? If someone comes along and says: “Here is a benign and orderly way of navigating this world,” that seems pretty useful. Measure calories. Learn about muscle types. Watch videos on how to grill meat. Resist the pressure to become simply a blob of consumption. This is what Eddie Hall does, in his friendly, throwaway fashion, filling a space that might otherwise be populated only by more sinister figures.
So we head on to Birmingham and another attempt to raise the bar. Thor is confident of making it. If he does it will be inspiring, in the way all elite sport is inspiring. In the meantime it seems a fair verdict on the wider world that rewatching a human being almost exploding his own head while espousing life-shortening physicality can feel like a draught of cold, calm good sense.
