The world was in awe of the British strongman Eddie Hall lifted 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 Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson took it a step further lifting 1,104.5 pounds (501 kg).
Meanwhile, the record of the heaviest weight ever lifted by a human belongs to Canadian strongman Gregg Ernst, who in 1993 lifted two cars with drivers that together weighed 5,340 pounds (2,422 kg).
These mind-blowing feats of strength beg the question: What is the heaviest weight a person can lift?
Experts told Live Science that it’s likely that athletes are still operating below their muscles’ maximum capacity, and it’s unclear what the limit of human strength might be. That said, it’s 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 by EMG records the electrical activity generated in a muscle, both by nerve cells and by contraction of muscle fibers. Such tests can only be performed in a laboratory setting, and EMG only monitors a localized set of muscles, so it cannot assess a person’s overall muscular capacity.
“It’s difficult to define that limit,” he said. E. Todd Schroederprofessor 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 truly determine your muscle capacity is through ongoing training, setting new personal records and seeing if you can beat them, he told Live Science.
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“If someone says, ‘Oh, I can lift 200 kilos [441 lbs]”I think that’s great, but I know you can lift more weight,” he said anecdotally. “We just don’t know how much more weight.”
Physically, a person’s ability to support weight depends on actin and myosin, the two proteins that allow muscles to contract. These proteins are arranged in different types of muscle fibersincluding “fast twitch” and “slow twitch.” A person’s muscle mass and the ratio of these fibers depends on their training program, as well as biological factors such as genetics and genderGenerally, the more muscle mass you have, the more force you can generate.
Elite weightlifters push their limits by continually increasing their muscle mass. However, the return on strength decreases as muscle mass increasesand eventually the muscles reach their limit.
And sometimes, just building muscle isn’t enough, Schroeder told Live Science. Ironically, people with less body mass sometimes lift more weight than those with more.
One factor that weightlifters must overcome is “neuromuscular inhibition,” which limits how hard a muscle can contract, to help prevent injury. Studies show that this limitation can be increased with resistance training.
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Another aspect of the problem is that, in addition to physical training, lifters must overcome mental blocks to lift increasingly heavier weights, Schroeder said. The best lifters are those who can overturn those inhibitions and put themselves in the right mental state to recruit all of their muscle fibers, he said.
“If I tried to lift the maximum force I could, say 200 pounds [90 kg]and then I’m able to get into a state where I remove that neural inhibition, I might be able to lift 300 pounds. [136 kg]”, Schroeder said, as an example.
This effect was demonstrated in a 2020 study published in the journal ImpulseThe researchers set out to determine whether positive visualization—a technique that involves mentally rehearsing positive outcomes—impacted strength training. They recruited 133 student athletes from a university and divided them into two groups. The first group was asked to imagine lifting 110 percent of their lifting 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 lab. Those who had practiced positive visualization each increased their lifting capacity by at least 10 to 15 pounds (4.5 to 6.8 kg), while those in the control group increased by an average 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.
“You always feel like someone can be a little stronger and do a little better,” he said. In the world of weightlifting, that’s evident in athletes who regularly break their own records in competition. “I try not to be surprised,” Schroeder said of those repeated records.
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