The long-awaited boxing match between 2017 World’s Strongest Man (WSM) champion Eddie Hall and 2018 WSM champion Hafthor Björnsson is fast approaching. While an official date has not yet been announced, Hall took to his YouTube channel on Jan. 30, 2022, to share his full boxing session in the gym as well as suggest the fight is less than two months away.
The fight is going to be announced very soon…we’re roughly seven weeks until the fight.
Hall’s timing suggests that the fight will occur sometime in late March 2022. Initially, the fight was scheduled to take place in Las Vegas, NV, but it isn’t clear if that will remain the case with the ongoing Coronavirus pandemic and the postponement of the fight due to Hall’s biceps injury suffered during a sparring session. Check out Hall’s boxing session in the video below, the comment regarding the potential date of the fight occurs in the first minute:
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Hall has not and does not intend to step into the ring for his professional boxing debut prior to squaring off against Björnsson. “The Mountain” took the opposite approach, earning his first professional boxing victory against Devon Larratt, who replaced Hall following his injury. Hall reviewed the fight and was not impressed with Björnsson’s performance, calling it “sloppy.”
The Björnsson versus Larratt fight occurred in Dubai, which may be where Hall and Björnsson ultimately throw hands. Björnsson has also endeavored on several exhibition bouts against professional fighters Steven Ward and Simon Vallily.
Hall’s Boxing Session
Hall’s training session opened with kneeling medicine ball slams while wearing a weight belt to warm up his upper body. He followed that up with planks that involved moving a 28-kilogram kettlebell from side to side underneath him. Working his way down to the lower body, Hall moved on to Bulgarian split squats with a safety squat bar. His mobility was on display as the height of the box he placed his foot on was of a height in line with his mid-thigh. His top set was loaded with 110 kilograms (242.5 pounds).
Moving back to the upper body, Hall executed standing resistance banded landmine presses to build explosiveness for his punching power. The move involves a slow negative and a fast concentric that includes swift rotation of his hip to extend the arm out — it’s like throwing a weighted punch and it incidentally matches the angle that Hall will likely have the throw at to target Björnsson’s face.
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For strength work, Hall performed an incline bench press. During his sets, he only wore a wrist wrap on his right hand and his form had his elbows flared to 90 degrees from his body with the barbell lowering just under his chin each rep. He maxed out at a 205-kilogram (452-pound) triple.
Once off the bench, Hall hopped into trap bar deadlifts that opened with what appeared to be 270 pounds (not including the weight of the trap bar). It escalated quickly to 190 kilograms (418.9 pounds) before moving to rotational work with a resistance band. Holding a resistance band as though it were the lockout of a Pallof press, Hall rotates his upper body to one side with the band extended while forcefully exhaling — the idea is to improve the power when throwing a hook punch. Those were tripleset with more medicine ball slams and burpees.
The workout closed with the use of the Iron Neck — a device used to strengthen muscles in the neck. From Hall’s perspective, training with an Iron Neck is a defensive measure to protect from having a “glass chin,” meaning easily knocked out when hit in the face or head during a fight.
The stronger your neck is, the less likely you are to get knocked out.
Hall reiterates that the fight is “seven weeks” away before signing off to grab lunch before his six rounds of sparring. Hall expressed a lot of confidence that he will emerge triumphant against “The Mountain.” If he is accurate that the fight is less than two months away, we’ll see if he can back up that confidence with action. If their additional wager still stands, the loser of the fight will have to get the other man’s name tattooed on their body.
Featured image: @eddiehallwsm on Instagram