For most people, lifting more than 1,000 pounds on a barbell is something out of a Sunday morning cartoon, not a real-life gym session.
It’s all in a day’s work for Mitchell Hooper, the reigning World’s Strongest Man.
Hooper first won the title in 2023 and again this year. It’s the top honor in strongman competition, a sport that’s all about moving massive, often oddly-shaped objects, including stones, logs, and trucks.
He’ll face the current deadlift world-record holder, Hafþór Björnsson, on May 24 at the controversial Enhanced Games, a competition that allows certain performance-enhancing drugs.
Hooper, who holds a master’s in exercise physiology, said the average person doesn’t need to train like a strongman, but mastering similar exercises can boost strength and muscle gains with less time in the gym.
“If you want to set a deadlift record, there’s some nuance. It’s a science project,” Hooper told Business Insider in an interview coordinated by Airwaav, a brand of mouthguards that he uses during training. “Very few people are trying to do that. Most people just want to go in, do as little as possible, get as much as possible, and move on with their lives.”
How to build strength and muscle in short workouts
Whether you’re carrying your groceries to the car or a car for sport, the fundamentals of movement are the same. Strongman relies on basic patterns of human movement: push, pull, carry, squat, hinge, and overhead press.
“Fundamental movement patterns are what everyone should base their training around, whether it’s an 80-year-old woman or a 15-year-old athlete,” Hooper said. “Those movement patterns are mandatory to live a complete life.”
As long as you’re challenging your muscles in each type of movement, it doesn’t matter whether you use an exercise machine or a barbell, according to Hooper.
“If you’re more comfortable on a machine, plug away. If you want pride in your best bench press, go for that,” he said.
For an efficient workout, Hooper said to pick an exercise from each category that works multiple muscle groups at once. Then do one hard set of the exercise for up to 25 reps until you’re at or near muscle failure (the point at which you can’t complete another rep with good form).
Repeat with another 2-3 exercises from different categories, and you can work your whole body in about 15 minutes (including a 5-minute warm-up).
Building strength is all about challenging your muscles to adapt, so one difficult set can be more effective than a longer, less focused workout, according to Hooper.
“If you do that, you’re going to progress faster than 95% of people that I see in the gym on a day-to-day basis who sort of go through the motions,” Hooper said. “Removing the complication, going on machines that move more than one joint and going toward failure, you’re going to be in a really good spot.”
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