The first thing we said when we saw this video was, “Wait, what?”
This is one of the heaviest beltless front squats we’ve ever seen and certainly the heaviest we’ve seen lately. Ukrainian weightlifter Oleg Slobodyanyuk’s lift below is so smooth it practically looks like he’s doing a bodyweight squat. Take a look at the front squat that’s tearing up the internet.
[Is your front squat lagging a little? Here are two tools that can take it to new heights.]
He posted this with a pretty simple comment:
Front squatting. 300 kg, weighing 155kg, 29 years old
So the guy weighs over 340 pounds. But that’s a front squat of 300 kilograms (661.4 pounds). And he’s not wearing a belt. Front squats are seriously taxing on the core and to take this much weight for such a smooth ride without a belt… let’s just say there’s an argument to be made that in some ways, it’s more impressive than a heavier back squat.
Speaking of back squats, the superheavyweight also posted a pretty rough five-rep set of 280 kilograms (617.3 pounds) earlier this year, but we wanted to highlight some of Slobodyanyuk’s Olympic weightlifting. He’s posted some nice clips that include a 215-kilogram clean & jerk…
Plus this 170-kilogram snatch.
But those clips are good two years old. The guy doesn’t post much and frankly, we know next to nothing about him.
What this clip did do was make a lot of people ask: is that one of the greatest front squats of all time? Well, it is beltless, but there have been a lot of other squats that are more likely to go down in the history books. Thus far the absolute heaviest that we’ve seen came from Nauru’s Jezza Uepa, who is responsible for the only front squats over 400 kilograms caught on film. Here’s 405kg (893 pounds), which he made in Brisbane last year.
[Check out Uepa’s 455kg back squat that was, at the time, a new world record.]
Relative to bodyweight, though, we might have to give the best front squat award to Bulgara’s Ivan Ivanov, who made a 210-kilogram (463-pound) lift somewhere around 56 kilograms bodyweight. This is probably the closest to a quadruple bodyweight front squat that we’ve seen.
Anyway, front squats are awesome and we hope to see more from Oleg Slobodyanyuk in the future. The kid’s got heart. And quads. Lots of quads.
Featured image via @olejuk_telejuk on Instagram.
