Strongmen Vs. Bodybuilders

One of the deceiving myths about Bodybuilding today is that they are functionally strong. Back in the day when you had guys like John Grimek, Bill Pearl, Reg Park and Steve Stanko these guys weren’t just awesome in the physique department they were also incredibly strong in quite a few areas such as heavy weight lifting, can do strength stunts and were some of the greatest hybrids of the strongman bodybuilder. Unlike today where you have guys who isolate every single muscle in the body and spend a long period of time in the gym and very few make it to the top and even fewer are in good health.

The mental aspects of these different athletes are just that they are very different but yet they have a common goal and that is to be the best at what they do. For strongmen, they’re goal is to lift the heaviest weight possible, show different bends, tearing thick phonebooks, rip license plates, hell some even lever heavy sledgehammers but yet the mental training to get to those stunts relies on what they need to break through past the governor that resides within us to stop if there is going to pain. Bodybuilders’ mental game is picturing the perfect physique, hitting those last few torturing reps and blasting their bodies to the point where their veins look to pop out.

For the most part lets face it unless you’re superhuman there isn’t a way to put on 30-40 pounds of muscle in a month without the need of some “help.” Bodybuilders today do use steroids like a lot of other athletes but for entirely different reason. I’m not saying all of them do but there are a high number of them. Unlike sports athletes, bodybuilders relied on getting bigger and more muscular other then performing on stage better. Strongmen in certain areas of strength do use steroids and again not saying all but some do. Back in the day before the 50’s and 60’s most bodybuilders relied on strength and power and a few ended up developing great musculature. Take for example John Grimek the muscle god from New Jersey who won every single bodybuilding competition he entered in but yet to him it wasn’t as important as being strong. He was one of the very few bodybuilders at the time who competed in Olympic Weightlifting and was apart of one of the greatest clubs in weightlifting and that was the York Barbell Company. Now lets take a guy like Ronnie Colman who won Mr. Olympia titles as many as Arnold Schwarzenegger and Lee Haney. He is without question one of the greats but for him it came with a price. His body was so overdeveloped you can clearly see as bright as day he can’t move his upper boy very well and his legs look like they’re set up to be injured.

This brings to my point about injuries. Injuries happen often in both areas of the strongman and the bodybuilder but who gets the most injuries? For obvious reasons, bodybuilders today rely on building as much muscle as possible but they’re neglecting the tendons which help hold the muscles together and if you build too much muscle tissue the tendons can rupture and tear. Strongmen do get injured as well but probably not as much as bodybuilders but it does happen. Unlike bodybuilders, some strongmen rely on tendon training to do some of the craziest stunts there are. Any other reason to debate these athletes is that no matter what people say about them, these guys go all out for the thing they drive on to become the best.

Bending Steel: A Documentary

Films come and go, some take your breath away, some make you cry, even some make you think. A documentary however is different. It shows real life as we know it or may not know it. Look at Pumping Iron. Yes it was considered a documentary but under certain scopes it really was a docudrama. Really a great film in of itself and showed the power and strain and drama of bodybuilding. Now how many documentaries are there for strongmen? Not too many but one film seems to want to take that obstacle and take it to another level.

This film is about the journey of one such strongman. Small in body structure but big in will power and the will to succeed. His name is Chris Shoeck and he's learning the craft of the old-time strongmen from the vaudeville era of the early 20th century at the historic American boardwalk Coney Island, NY. Along this journey you will see what this man at 5'7 155 pounds does when he bends incredibly tough steel bars and such other great feats of strength, you will find very rare Photos of one of Coney Island's Strongest men Joseph Greenstein AKA The Mighty Atom who wasn't that much smaller or bigger then Shoeck is today. You will also see very rare footage of the strongman's protege' Slim The Hammerman Farman who was recently inducted into the York Barbell Hall Of Fame.

While you will see a heartfelt and surprising journey unfold it wouldn't be possible without the help of Chris' mentor. Professional Performing Strongman Chris Rider is also in the film as well. He's a protege' of World's Strongest Man Dennis Rogers. Rider has become famous in his own right being one of the top guys in his field at a relatively short span of only a few years. He's one of the fastest rising strongmen in the world and for good reason. The man is a monster at 6'4 290 pounds of pure solid rock. He's known to bend tough horseshoes, rip decks of cards in halves, rip license plates in quarters and bend wrenches unbraced (not using the lower body as leverage).

As you will see in the film which is set to be out as of summer 2012, Rider helps Shoeck learn the ropes of the audience, bend certain things within periods of time and also see Rider at his best as he bend and tears whats infront of him. This film is one that needs exposure because the Old-time Strongman are starting to fade if it hasn't already and this film is helping bring back what was the glory days of the Strongmen of that era. With Shoeck on his way to performing, does he have a bit of the Atom in him? Will he perform unlike other times he has before? We shall see and if you take a look at the trailer http://www.bendingsteelmovie.com/ you will get a peice of the journey but will you find the destination once you see it?

I'm proud to get to help get this film going. While the crew is finishing up, me and Chris Rider will be helping spread the word of this film and I hope YOU will as well. Nothing in the Iron Game is more sacred then being apart of some of the strongest people on the planet and nothing is more sacred in this business then to help restore what is now a memory in the eyes of those came before us. Join me and Chris to bring this film to life nationwide and around the world.

Pre WWE vs. WWE Now

Before you had pyrotechnics and the big spectacle of drama and soap opera that is WWE today, there was a time when wrestling was meaningful. At the time once wrestlers like Frank Gotch, George Hackenshmidt were long gone (once the 30’s rolled around) you still had some great wrestlers who drew in crowds but then it started rooting in the ground of what was to become a heavy national spotlight and the start of sports-entertainment.

Back in the days of wrestling where they were guys like Bruno Sammartino, “Superstar” Billy Graham, Buddy Rogers, Crusher & The Bruiser and even wrestling greats Lou Thesz and Verne Gagne there wasn’t a big boss of the biggest corporation to go to until Vince McMahon sr. came into the spotlight in the late 60’s and 70’s. You had territories where promoters held their ground in certain states across the country, in Canada & abroad. There were champions in every territory but the biggest Company at the time next to what used to be the World Wide Wrestling Federation (WWWF) was the NWA ( National Wrestling Alliance.

Wrestling camps back then were scarce and since there was no internet, cell phones hell a wrestling camp wasn’t even in the god damn phonebooks. They were through word of mouth. Back then up-coming wrestlers got the shit kicked out of them and some of those camps made Tough Enough look like a cake-walk. Ask guys like Hulk Hogan, Ric Flair, Paul Orndorff, and Randy Savage even the greatest good guy of them all, Ricky Steamboat. If you got into a camp it wasn’t easy and being in a camp wasn’t the hard part, it was being on the road and practically having wrestlers as your family. A wrestling camp in those days meant that if you didn’t come back for more and make just a tad more then 100% effort you didn’t belong there. Wrestling Legend Vern Gagne had a camp in Minnesota where he took up to 12-16 guys to see how tough they were and put through training that just didn’t seem to be human. I mean you have guys do 500 squats, 100’s of push-ups, ran stairs up and down then carrying a guy on your back and then you’d get in the ring to learn a few moves and that was just a daily routine for these guys. I don’t know the real details about this camp but I can assure you I have put myself through some workouts but I would not want to mess with guys who made it through that camp.

Other trainers like Eddy Sharkey, Killer Kowalski, Hiro Matsuda and even the late Karl Gotch would train some of the biggest names that went to NWA, Japan, WWF/E and Vern’s near 30yr stint Organization the AWA in Minnesota. The big time names that came out of these camps went on to have some of the most famous matches in the history of wrestling. Once the 80’s rolled around you had Mega Stars making huge bank and some of the matches these guys did lasted close to or even over a whole hour. Win/Lose/Draw those matches pitted wrestlers at the peak of sport to entertainment before those 2 words were put together by WWE owner Vince McMahon jr.

Wrestling Camps today are very open to business and the training of wrestlers. Some camps are rip offs, very few give an up-coming wrestler what he needs to have Charisma, Ring Work, Conditioning, Mic Work, Working The Crowd and Ring Psychology. For the most part camps today are expensive as hell and usually from what I read far more wrestlers quit after a couple months then wrestlers who train their asses off and actually make it to the WWE. In my opinion, if most of these gyms had a synch of a Vern Gagne or a Hiro Matsuda Attitude I wouldn’t doubt some of the wrestlers would be far tougher then some guys today. Wrestlers in WWE are tough in their own right, they did a lot to get where they’re at but the training today is nothing like yesteryear.

For my opinion on WWE’s future, I would say it’ll make more money in 10 years then it did 30 years ago its really that huge and most likely already made that much bank as a company. A lot of people have their opinions about pro wrestlers and how much its more drama then physicality but the truth of the matter is these guys are some of the greatest athletes around and ya outside the ring some do drugs, drink and take certain things but in that ring when they wrestle they really are some of the best storytellers and some of the physicality they bring is just incredible. So the next time you give a wrestler shit try training like one and you’ll see how brutal some of these guys can really be. Even though it’s a spectacle and has characters that are just not that normal you have to give them props from where they came from and how they got there.