We’re huge fans of the barbell push press. A versatile movement that bridges the strict press and the jerk, it’s a fantastic movement for strength, power, and muscle mass. In addition to the obvious benefits to overhead pressing, it also trains the hip drive, core stability, glutes and quads.

When we saw the lift below, we thought it was one of the heaviest barbell push presses we’ve ever seen. (We’re sticking to barbells in this article; no logs.) We soon realized it’s actually the fifth heaviest. Read through for the full list and get ready for some truly inhuman overhead strength.

5) Saeid Alihosseini: 220 kilograms / 485 pounds

The 29-year-old Iraniain superheavyweight currently holds the junior world record in the snatch, clean & jerk, and total, having lifted 206kg and 245kg at the 2008 Junior Asian Championships. In 2008 and 2009 he failed two doping tests, resulting in a 12-year suspension from international competition.

4) Steven Maradona: 227 kilograms / 500 pounds

The only American on our list, Maradona is a 24-year-old athlete who, at just 21 years of age, gained notoriety for jerking 500 pounds overhead. A couple of years later he made the transition to weightlifting, and was soon seen jerking 500 pounds at Prometheus CrossFit in California. After a 9-month break due to injury, he was seen making a clean & jerk of 407 pounds earlier this month.

3) Dmitry Klokov: 225 kilograms / 496 pounds

Not long after winning silver at the 2011 World Weightlifting Championships, the Russian athlete was seen making this phenomenally fast push press of 225 kilograms. He retired in 2015 and is now President of the Russian Strength Sports Association, in addition to teaching seminars around the world and designing his own weightlifting equipment and shoes.

2) (Tie) Dimitar Savatinov: 240kg / 529 pounds

Did anyone else think he would celebrate a little more after making such an incredible PR? The Bulgarian strongman usually trains with logs, but said that he couldn’t find any for this particular training session. So he went ahead and made what might be the heaviest barbell push press of all time. We’ve also seen him pull off a one-armed overhead press of 141kg (310lb).

1) (Tie) Chingiz Mogushkov: 240 kilograms / 529 pounds

The gargantuan Russian weightlifter won gold in the snatch at the 2015 European Weightlifting Championships with a 202kg lift, but his overhead pressing really deserves the spotlight. We’ve seen him clean & jerk 230kg (and more), but the 240kg push press is almost unprecedented. The craziest part? He’s said in interviews that his PR in the lift is 250kg.

This is some serious motivation for shoulder day. Have you seen any push presses that should have made this list? Let us know!

Featured image via @persian_weightlifting on Instagram and portugaljoao7 on YouTube.

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Nick English
Nick is a content producer and journalist with over seven years’ experience reporting on four continents. His first articles about health were on a cholera outbreak in rural Kenya while he was reporting for a French humanitarian organization. His next writing job was covering the nightlife scene in Shanghai. He’s written on a lot of different kinds of things, but his passion for health ultimately led him to cover it full time.Shanghai was where he managed to publish his first health related article (it was on managing diarrhea), he then went on to produce a radio documentary about bodybuilding in Australia before he finished his Master’s degrees in Journalism and International Relations and headed to New York City. Here, he’s been writing on health full time for more than five years for outlets like Men's Health, VICE, and Popular Science.Nick’s interest in health kind of comes from an existential angle: how are we meant to live? How do we reach our potential? Does the body influence the mind? (Believe it or not, his politics Master’s focused on religion.)Questions like these took him through a lot of different areas of health and fitness like gymnastics, vegetarianism, kettlebell training, fasting, CrossFit, Paleo, and so on, until he realized (or decided) that strength training fit best with the ideas of continuous, measurable self improvement.At BarBend his writing focuses a little more on nutrition and long-form content with a heaping dose of strength training. His underlying belief is in the middle path: you don’t have to count every calorie and complete every workout in order to benefit from a healthy lifestyle and a stronger body. Plus, big traps are cool.

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