In a rare instance of two of the world’s greatest strongmen training together outside of competition, the reigning world’s strongest man and the world’s fourth strongest man— according to their placement’s at this year’s World’s Strongest Man, anyway — have been working out at the strongman legend Odd Haugen’s gym in California.
[By the way, our interview with Haugen is definitely worth a read if you’re looking for tips on building monstrous grip strength.]
We’re of course talking about Thor Bjornsson and Martins Licis, who trains at the gym with Haugen as his coach. We’ve gotten quite a few interesting videos out of the two this week, with our favorite perhaps being this shot of Bjornsson doing deadlifts while Licis shouted unintelligible gibberish intended that was intended to sound like motivational hype.
Good session done with my buddy @martinslicis today. We did deadlifts and stones. Does he qualify for a good hype man?? 🤔
Then there’s this shot of Licis doing 506-pound (230kg) deficit deadlifts for nine reps, all while casually chatting to the camera, “What happened was I took a scoop of Hafthor’s protein and now I can lift all day and all night, no matter what the weight, I can keep going!”
[Licis is known for his sense of humor, which is why the clip of him training strongman with Kevin Hart is so much fun to watch.]
Swipe through to the other video and you can see a considerably more serious session of lifting Atlas stones — “308lb (140kg) one-motion, chalk only, stone over bar for 6 reps at 56 inches,” and Licis delivers a heartfelt shoutout to Bjornsson in the caption.
Always a huge pleasure having you visit Thor! Your strength and laser focus is always an inspiration for me to push harder!(For those of you who don’t know, he’s the Worlds Strongest man … (for now😈))
The Latvian also posted this overhead medley that sounds like it was filmed by Icelander.
During this trip to California, Bjornsson also headed out to Gold’s Gym to train arms with Mike O’Hearn, which included a tough-looking set of reverse grip bench presses: 305 pounds for 25 reps.
Watching this guy train is almost as fun as watching him compete.
Featured image via @martinslicis on Instagram.
