The world was delighted when the British strongman Eddie Hall deadlifted 1,102 pounds (500 kilograms) at the 2016 World Deadlift Championships. Hall was the first person to break the half-ton barrier — and then, in 2020, Icelandic strongman Hafor Július Björnsson took it up another notch via deadlift 1104.5 lbs (501 kg).
Meanwhile, the record for the heaviest weight ever lifted by man belongs to Canadian strongman Greg Ernst, who in 1993 lifted two cars with drivers that weighed a total of 5,340 pounds (2,422 kg).
These mind-boggling displays of strength beg the question: What is the greatest possible weight a human can lift?
Experts told Live Science that it’s likely that athletes are still working below the maximum capacity of their muscles, and it’s unclear what the limit of human strength might be. However, it is difficult to measure a person’s maximum muscular capacity.
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Bradley Schoenfeldprofessor of exercise science at Lehman College, said muscle strength can be measured using an electromyography (EMG) machine. EMG works on recording the electrical activity generated in the muscle, both by the nerve cells and by the contraction of the muscle fibers. Such tests can only be performed in the laboratory, and EMG only monitors a localized set of muscles, so it cannot assess the muscle capacity of a person’s entire body.
“It’s hard to define that limit,” he said E. Todd Schroeder, a professor of clinical physical therapy at the University of Southern California, who studies how strength and muscle mass can be increased in older adults. The only way to really determine your muscle capacity is through continuous training — by setting new personal records and then seeing if you can break them, he told Live Science.
“If someone says, ‘Oh, I can lift 200kg [441 lbs]”I’m like, this is great, but I know you can lift more,” he said anecdotally. “We just don’t know how much longer.”
Physically, a person’s ability to bear weight depends on actin and myosin, the two proteins that allow muscles to contract. These proteins are arranged in different types of muscle fibers, including “fast” and “slow”. A person’s muscle mass and the ratio of these fibers depends on both the training regime and biological factors such as genetics and gender. In general, the greater your muscle mass, the more force you can generate.
Elite powerlifters push themselves to the limits of their ability by constantly increasing their muscle mass – but regaining strength decreases as muscle mass increases more and moreand eventually the muscles reach their limit.
And sometimes simply gaining muscle mass isn’t enough, Schroeder told Live Science. Paradoxically, sometimes people with less body weight lift more weights than people with more.
One factor that powerlifters must overcome is “neuromuscular inhibition,” which limits the force with which a muscle can contract to prevent injury. Studies have found that cap can be increased with resistance training.
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Another piece of the puzzle is that in addition to physical conditioning, powerlifters must overcome mental blocks to lift heavier and heavier weights, Schroeder said. The best weightlifters are those who can remove those inhibitions and get themselves into the right mental state to recruit all of their muscle fibers, he said.
“If I try to deadlift as much as I can, say 200 pounds [90 kg]and then I can go into a state where I remove that neural inhibition, I might be able to deadlift 300 pounds [136 kg]Schroeder said as an example.
This effect was demonstrated in a 2020 study published in the journal Impulse. The researchers sought to determine whether positive visualization — a technique that involves mentally rehearsing positive outcomes — affected strength training. They recruited 133 student athletes at a university and divided them into two groups. The first was asked to imagine lifting 110% of their capacity for at least five minutes a day while listening to motivational music. The second group did not do this.
After three weeks, the athletes returned to the laboratory. Those who practiced positive visualization increased their lifting capacity by at least 10 to 15 pounds (4.5 to 6.8 kg), while those in the comparison group had an average increase of only 5 pounds (2.2 kg ).
“To some extent, you can lift a lot more than you think if you have the right mindset,” Schoenfeld said.
“It always seems like someone could be a little bit stronger and perform a little bit better,” he said. In the world of weightlifting, this manifests itself in athletes who repeatedly break their own records in competition. “I try not to be surprised,” Schroeder said of those back-to-back record accomplishments.
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