Eddie Hall has stated he’s retired from the World’s Strongest Man competition, but he’s still maintaining some seriously elite pressing strength. In a YouTube video casually dropped on the International Strong Man YouTube channel this weekend, the strongman benched 225 kilograms, or 496 pounds — a weight that would make an impressive 1-rep max deadlift — for 10 reps.
Not only are these insanely smooth reps, they’re performed without wraps and they even have a slight pause at the bottom of each rep.
[Bench presses aren’t just good for building your chest. Check out these 11 undeniable benefits of the humble bench press!]
The first thing we thought of when we saw this was to compare it to another insane high-rep bench press set that Hall pulled off almost exactly a year ago: 265 kilograms (584 pounds) for 6 reps. That time he didn’t even have a spotter.
Sure, that bar was almost a hundred pounds heavier than the 10-rep set above, but it’s worth considering the total weight moved in each set: the 6-rep set resulted in a total of 3,504 pounds (1,590kg) moved, while this weekend’s 10-rep set was 4,960 pounds (2,250kg).
Of course, that brought to mind our other favorite high-rep bench sets.
A lot of people like to play around with the hypothetical “who would win in a bench press showdown between Eddie Hall and Kirill Sarychev” — we’ve legit written an article with that exact title, after all — but it’s hard to ignore the fact that Sarychev has the world record in the raw bench press. In high rep sets too, he may have the advantage. Take a look at this set of 10-reps of 240 kilograms, or 529 pounds.
And of course, there’s the time he benched 200kg (440 pounds) for an astonishing eighteen reps earlier this year.
But as far as crazy high rep bench pressing goes, we couldn’t avoid posting IPF World Champion Freddi Smulter’s unreal forty-eight reps of 130 kilograms (286 pounds) from this past April.
There’s one similarity these lifters have, though: it almost looks like they’re just warming up with the bar.
Featured image via International Strong Man on YouTube.
