Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson, best known as Ser Gregor “The Mountain” Clegane on Game of Thrones, is now officially stronger than your wildest gym bro exaggeration. The Icelandic strongman just deadlifted 510 kilograms—1,124 pounds—at the World Deadlift Championships in September, smashing his own record and making everyone else’s personal best look like a warm-up.
The number is hard to picture until you translate it into objects: about the weight of a grand concert piano or seven kegs of beer. In 2020, Björnsson beat Eddie Hall’s 500-kilogram record by a single kilo. Then, in July, he added another four. Two months later, he added five more like he was casually stacking plates at the gym.
“This is the third time I’ve broken the record. It’s been happening so fast. It’s almost surreal,” Björnsson said on his YouTube channel after the lift. He admitted the effort leaves him wrecked, at least temporarily. “Often after a big lift like this your nervous system can be a little bit wrecked…” he explained. But minutes later, standing in front of the camera, he grinned and declared, “It was like a piece of f—ing cake, baby. I’m just getting warmed up.”
Game of Thrones’ Strongman ‘The Mountain’ Sets New Deadlift World Record
Scientists have been trying to work out how bodies like Björnsson’s and Hall’s manage to do the impossible. A 2024 study on Hall’s physique found that the muscles connecting his knees to his pelvis—the sartorius, gracilis, and semitendinosus—were up to three times larger than the average man’s. His quads and hamstrings were double.
Researchers suspect this kind of build sits at the farthest edge of natural variation, but it doesn’t fully explain why someone can hoist half a ton of iron off the ground without snapping in half.
Björnsson, at six-foot-nine and over 300 pounds, doesn’t need science to explain much. He only needs gravity to keep offering him something to defy. And while most of us measure progress in pull-ups or pounds lost, he’s now at the point where the only competition left is himself.
For a man nicknamed after a mountain, maybe it makes sense. He’s already climbed higher than anyone else, and apparently, he’s just lacing up for the next ascent.
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