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.
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.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BQ5vTYKDsCb/
And of course, there’s the time he benched 200kg (440 pounds) for an astonishing eighteen reps earlier this year.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BSf54-TDNDU/
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.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BSyDc_QBlzT/
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.
