I took on the World’s Strongest Man – and crumbled under the weight

“You want to go down and do a bit of training in the gym, then?”

Who knew a 15-word sentence could impart such terror. But here I was, in the Scottish Highlands, among the whisky distilleries and rutting deer, in the company of Europe’s and the World’s Strongest Men, two Scottish brothers, about to be exposed as a weakling.

Since the Covid pandemic, the names of Tom and Luke Stoltman have grown, fittingly, in stature. Tom, the current World’s Strongest Man, is 6ft 8in and weighs just shy of 180 kilograms; Luke is Europe’s Strongest Man, a WSM finalist and stands just south of 6ft 4in, weighing a shade less than 160kg. Details of the food bill will come later.

The brothers have qualified for WSM finals in 2019, 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024 – and Tom lifted the trophy in three of those, including this year. At the age of 30, Tom needs just two more titles to tie the all-time record of the most famous strongman of all, Mariusz Pudzianowski.

I have come to Invergordon, a sleepy town half an hour north from the United Kingdom’s most northerly city, Inverness, to see just what it takes to get to their level: the obscene commitment, the absurd training, the mammoth weights. Just 30 miles away from Loch Ness, they know a thing or two about monsters.

Stoltman HQ is a discreet building in keeping with the town’s tranquillity. The scenery beyond, across the Highlands, is breathtaking in its colour; all auburn and orange, pierced by autumnal sun. Back towards Inverness, in Muir of Ord, the brothers own a warehouse where they train for specific strongman events – gigantic Atlas Stones and kegs for tossing among others – but their hometown is their hub.

“We come from a small town and we were told, growing up, that nothing really should happen,” Luke, a former oil-rig worker nicknamed the Highland Oak, says. “You’ll be a farmer, work in a fish factory, or off-shore in the oil rigs. There’s not really much that happens up here. We had a different mindset to that. We tried to do something different. I remember when we said we were going to open a shop and take this place on, people were saying: ‘Well, just calm down and hold your horses.’ Well, we’re making x amount of money on this, this and this; we can afford the rent; how do we scale up?”

The end goal is to have everything under one roof but, in the meantime, the Stoltmans have opened a shop at their HQ selling merchandise. Fans from as far as New Zealand have visited the brothers, with the popularity increasing to a degree of employing four other members of staff to lead their social media and online content, and a third brother, Harry, to run the shop. But if you drive further down the high street, towards the oft-bellowing port and the town’s edges, towards the Cromarty Firth, you will find their third site, a gym which is open to the public but where, out of convenience, the brothers often train. It is there where I am headed in a Stoltman pick-up truck.

We arrive at the gym, a disused warehouse on the outskirts of Invergordon, alongside a junkyard, tyres strewn everywhere, giving it every bit the strongman vibe. This afternoon, walking past the sauna and ice bath on the way in, we have the place to ourselves – which is just as well, as I would prefer none of the 100 members witnessing my failures.

Tom is on a rest day during my visit, which means he does a weights session which most mere mortals would still fail to accomplish. Tom’s achievements – three WSM titles in four years – are made all the more impressive by an autism diagnosis as a child. He tries to use the condition to his advantage, he tells me, but he struggles if things are not fully planned out or if there is a deviation in the schedule. “For instance, if I hadn’t known in advance that you were coming today, I would not have been able to see you,” Tom says. “I would have lost it.” It would not have been the first time, nor surely the last, where someone reacted in that manner towards my presence.

So I shadow Luke through a training session; manoeuvres which mirror the competition in which he will compete the following week. The set-up, and the moving of nearly 300kg of weights, takes half an hour. The lifting of them in competition format – ie the training – takes less than a minute. But that is the training. It is short, sharp, and intense.

After a few minutes on a Wattbike to get the blood pumping, Luke completes a warm-up with weights heavier than most would normally lift in the gym.

I am 6ft 5in and weigh around 105kg and, although not a fanatical gym-goer, I thought a bit of natural strength would be enough to carry me home and lift me out of the realms of embarrassment. I was wrong.

Luke went first. The routine was simple enough to explain: a 92kg kettlebell lifted one-handed above a shoulder; a 105kg circus dumbbell swung around like a rag doll, onto the shoulder, and then projected one-handed into the sky; and, finally, a 170kg axle press, picked up off the ground to the waist, and then hoisted over the head with both hands. All done as quickly as possible. It takes Luke less than 40 seconds. I fear I could have been there for 40 years without succeeding.

After failing miserably at their weights, the brothers take pity on me and lower the numbers, but even then I struggle. For the axle lift, I am convinced that after one especially determined surge a playing card might have been able to slip underneath the bar. There was daylight – but that was about it.

Tom’s forte is the Atlas Stones and, although he is on a rest day, he walks me through the technique before challenging me. He lifted 210kg to clinch the WSM title this year but he started me at 65kg. To everyone’s surprise – none more so than me – I nail it.

Up to my chest in one. But such bravado has poked the bear and Tom insists the weight for my next attempt must increase to 95kg. I could not even get it off the ground. To rub it in, Tom picks it up without so much as breaking a sweat. He could probably have done it one-armed; and, in fact, at the end of the session, the brothers hoisted me towards their gym’s ceiling on one shoulder each.

The brothers have to shift this amount of mass almost daily, so recovery is crucial. Sports scientists and strength-and-conditioning gurus have made their way into WSM, with Tom recently changing coaches to bring in more analysis of what other sports might term “marginal gains”. The brothers plunge into zero-degree water every morning and have recently learnt of the benefits of increased cardiovascular exercise to their training. Remarkably, both have actually lost weight in the past month, and have seen no decrease in the amount of heavy objects they can shift.

Luke tells me how key quality of sleep is to their approach, and how a company called Duxiana has made them custom beds which are reinforced at hip level, where the brothers are the heaviest, with specialist springs which allow the air to circulate more freely during the night. “Mine is eight-feet long,” Tom adds.

As I drove home, I thought how much I could have used one of those. A cheat meal, after my efforts, would not go amiss, either.