What’s Your Greatest Feat of Non-Gym Strength?

Training
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Pianos! Agh! They’re too shiny and delicate and generational. They all have a story.

Me and my one lifting buddy became known amongst our circle of friends as the guys who could move anything, and all of the sudden its like everybody needed their pianos moved. For like a whole summer that was our saturday thing.

One good one was a friend who was moving. His two hobbies were wood working and gun collecting. So one afternoon we moved two large full gun safes out of one house and into another, down one flight of stairs, yard, etc, and up another, then an entire wood shop of bandsaw, table saw, lathe, planer, air filtration system, other odd ends.

Doing residential tree work I cant even count the number of 3’ to 4’, fully grown oak and maple trees I’ve taken out of back yards, piece by piece, but it adds up year over year. We would typically fill 3 or 4 10 ton trucks with chips & logs per day.

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22

Clean and pressed a storm drain lid when I was 20 working construction. We were pouring the concrete floors of the boxes that house the water and let it drain via the slope to the pipes and I’m like “I…think I can press this if I get it to my chest” and my middle aged boomer foremen just cheered me on as I went for it.

I would also clean and press skid steer wheels laying around the shop and flip 600-1000lb tires laying around. Great times!

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Industrial Strength!

Sometimes when I didnt want to make a bunch of little chunks I’d bang sidewalk sections at the break joint and just throw those in the truck pretty much whole.

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Not quite a lift, but one of my personal favorite non-gym uses of strength was rolling with a BJJ blue belt as a white belt and basically “posting up” to make my arm immoveable when he tried an Americana lock. It “only” took another minute or two for him to get the tap.

Beyond that, the freshest on my mind is me and the kiddo moving 3,000+ pounds of stone and sand from the front yard to the backyard for a project last year. 30 minutes of loaded carries, as functional as functional training gets.

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25

Glad to see you’re back around. Please update your world record charity thread from last year. A bunch of us have been looking forward to hear what happened.

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I wish I had a nickname with a story like this behind it! Good stuff.

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Carrying mom to the ambulance gurney. Died in her bedroom from cancer, hospice. Glad I was able to do that for her.

Call your mom fellas.

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I got quite a few from being in construction since I was 16. I guess one that comes to mind was back in the summer…I was doing a bit of roofing and the last three rows had poly under it. Managed to roll it up like a sushi roll if you know what I mean for the length of the house, picked it up and carried it back so I could drop it in the dump trailer. Boss said “yeah I ain’t doing that. I’m not 29 anymore”.
A few times my brother and me helped people move and we carried fully loaded deep freezes in and out. Done lots of stuff like that over the years and probably will continue for a long time to come.

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At the risk of sounding like a liar… my team and I once carried a hurt dude and his kit (and all ours obviously) a mile out to the truck at night under sporadic contact after a ~19 mile movement and multiple contacts that day. Easily the hardest physical thing I can ever remember doing. They were studs.

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Great thread idea.

Carrying dad when he had cancer is up at the top for me too brother. I had to drive him from Massachusetts to Florida to get him home to mom when he was starting to shut down and couldn’t fly. I had to get him from the car to the bathroom, motel, and eventually back in his house. An hour later he was in the ambulance to the hospital. A day later he was in hospice for his last two days. My siblings flew down just in time and we all got to hold his hand as he passed.

I was proud to be the sibling who was there for dad in that moment, and being a strong dude meant that dad got everywhere he needed to go safely in my arms.

A few other instances come to mind.

I cleaned, shouldered and fireman’s carried a roughly 240 pound woman who was completely limp and passed out from the floor of a bar to a stool outside where we had an ambulance coming for her. I maneuvered her out the door without a bump on her body.

Doing stuff like this is also helpful for one’s reputation when working bar security, because everyone in the packed bar just saw you do something that none of them can. No fights that night.

This one was at the gym, but still qualifies as non-gym strength.

My old lifting partner and I stepped up to push an elderly gym member’s stuck Volkswagen Jetta out of the mud, which was actually pretty hard. I’ve pushed a lot of people out from the snow, some that were even more work, but there’s something gratifying about having your strength number called at the gym and being the guys to get it done.

On a related note, I always stop and help people stuck in the snow. This is part of my civic duty as a Toyota Tundra 4x4 driver, which I don’t use nearly as often as I do brute strength to get people un-stuck. It’s usually quicker to just push them out in most situations.

On the subject of regrets…

A former boss of mine once pointed at a very dense ingot of exotic metal and said “nobody can pick that up”. It was only 100 kilos and had adequate grip points. I wanted to prove him wrong, but I decided against showing off my strength on the day 1 tour at my new job with an ingot that’s worth half of my salary.

In hindsight, I should have answered his challenge and picked the heavy thing up.

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31

I worked in welding and industrial supplies for a while. The shop had a little store area for walk ins, and a bunch of odd ends to be purchased on the spot. I guess theft was a problem because just a few small items can add up to hundreds of dollars very quickly.

So some genius came up with putting these three very small but extremely strong supermagnets together, and when you have to leave the counter you just hand these magnets to who ever is there and say “Here! See if you can get these things apart.”.

That kept their hands busy while we were in the back room, and nobody could ever get those things separated.

The ingot story reminded me of that.

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50m hill sprint from seated start in full kit to catch a suspect with a 20m lead. Pretty cool dashcam footage.

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Kings

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Okay, you win

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35

I’m quite a wuss now though

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I pushed my own car out a center median ditch one winter after sliding on icy roads.

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Not sure I can compare to many here, but I have a few

Moving 36 cast iron boiler sections on an appliance dolly, solo. 5 feet tell and 3 feet wide. They weigh 500 lbs for per intermediate section and 700 lbs per each of the 4 end sections.

Actually pretty much any boiler job. The shit is just so heavy. Hanging 8" black steel piping, shimming and leveling boilers, pouring pads… Nothing about it is light or easy haha.

This one isn’t necessarily strength, but a co worker and I retubed a water tube boiler, which involved driving nozzles into a manifold. I swung a 12lb sledge roughly 2000 times driving over 300 nozzles back in.

Moving a natural stone for my mom from her garden to the backyard. No idea how much it weighed but it was heavy and awkward.

Running 3 bundles of shingles up a ladder at work (this is when I was a 165lb twerp). The three combined weighed more than I did. I regularly did two bundles at a time but wanted to show off to a new guy.

Running 2 sheets of 3/4 ply up a ladder at work, again, showing off.

Shouldering a 5hp blower motor and bringing it up 4 stories of scaffolding, then another ladder.

I’d like to say I “work smarter not harder”, but it feels good displaying strength at work. Co workers sit around and think about how they’re going to get something to the roof and I’m halfway up the ladder with it.

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Back when I was young and naive, carried a washing machine to a customer’s car from the shop floor without a truck as there wasn’t one available. Once I had started, was sure as hell not going to stop / admit defeat.

At the same place of work, pushed a delivery van down the driveway to help the driver bump start.

Still felt, at that age, I had something to prove. If I was to try that now I would probably tear / snap or hemorrhage something!

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39

Back when my husband was still in the 260lb range…he was having a rough night. Got blackout drunk and passed out in the backyard.

Took me maybe 45 mins, but I finally managed to hoist him over my back and wobble him to the bed. This was during my SHW days, but I’m fond of the memory. Told him about it the next day and he was like:

“You’re the cutest, scariest wife ever.” Lol

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He sounds about the size of my ex. (ex-wife)