At BarBend, we love heavy sled pushes.
In our eyes, they’re a movement similar to the squat and deadlift, a pure performance of strength that test an athlete’s grit and tenacity. The best part about them is that any athlete can do them, no matter their sport. A sled can be used for conditioning, strengthening, and even to improve sprint mechanics.
Back in August 2017, we wrote about CrossFit athlete Josh Bridges pushing a 1,000 lb sled, and that was impressive, but we may have a video that tops this strength feat.
The video below features 16 year old Jake Wolfe who’s a football player in high school. Wolfe is coached by Top Speed Training’s Joseph Potts, and is pushing a sled well over 1,000 lbs in the below clip. For context, his push is only 32 lbs shy of retired NFL linebacker James Harrison’s 1,400 lb sled push.
In TopSpeedsLLC’s video’s description Potts writes, Meet Olathe NW’s Jake Wolfe, “The first 16-year old who might be able to go toe-to-toe with NFL linebacker and #weightroomfreak James Harrison when it comes to sled pushing. Having the sound on improves the video too. The 1368 pounds represents a new TopSpeed gym record and far surpasses what he needed to join the exclusive #TeamTopSpeed 1000 Pound Club.”
To add to Wolfe’s impressive sled push, Potts told us that the other athlete who pushed over 1,300 lbs during the same day passed out right after doing so, although, not Wolfe. After his push when they asked how he felt Wolfe replied with, “That wasn’t bad”.
[Sled pushes offer a ton of benefits for strength training, do you know them all?]
Obviously, it’s tough to compare sled pushes directly due to differences in flooring and friction, but this is an impressive feat nonetheless. Wolfe is a naturally strong athlete, but we wanted to know a little background on him and his training. Potts told us,
“He’s very mesomorphic. Adds muscle mass very quickly. As for our program with him, it’s an even blend of unilateral strength and plyometric movements. His workouts typically involves sled pushing followed by a frontal plane movement such as Bulgarian squats supersets with a single-leg jump of some type. Then we finish the whole this off with a posterior chain superset and trunk/core exercise.”
This sled push is one of the heaviest sled strength feats (if not the heaviest) we’ve seen for 16 year old athletes, we’re pumped to see what the future holds for Wolfe.
Feature image from @topspeedllc Instagram page.
