BREAKING: ATHLETES ARE STRONG

Good morning, athletes are not like you. They can do things like this, which you should not do. Maybe not even try, really, unless explaining how you broke your nose and tore both hamstrings in your living room trying to do something you saw a twenty year-old do with ease.

Same for squatting six hundred pounds. Double that emphasis for trying to do it for a triple.

Let’s keep adding to the list. Follow this picture: At the gym, there is usually a rack of dumbbells. If there are a few missing or in the wrong place then we are all most likely looking at the section of the rack where dumbbells weighing between ten and fifty pounds go. Those are human, manageable weights used by normal humans in weightlifting, bodybuilding, and in 70% of all gym dumbbell use, bicep curls.

(No shame there. Crossfit disrespected the bicep curl, but fortunately the noble movement has survived the shame of functional fitness stupidity. Why are you going to pick up bricks and build a house IF YOU’RE NOT GOING TO GIVE IT PIPES?)

The most orderly and dusty portion of the dumbbell rack starts at around seventy pounds, and extends up to whatever the gym manager ordered long ago, when they were optimistic and believed someone, someday, would knock the dust off those hundreds.

College weight rooms go up a bit higher. Georgia’s, for instance, goes up to at least 130 pounds in their dumbbells. We know this for the same reasons you now know this: Bulldog defensive tackle DaQuan Hawkins-Muckle can single-arm press one of them for six reps.

It’s hard to really convey unless you try it, but lifting something that heavy with one arm, stabilizing it, not tearing your shoulder out of joint, and then doing it for reps forces us to the grab-bag of country-ass terms for strong to cover it.

This is:

• Stump-tossing strength
• Pulling a car engine out with nothing but a rope and a sturdy tree branch kind of strength
• Strength that when he gets older will be by rule called “strenf”
• Turning old-school taps so hard in his house that only he can start a shower for you strength
• Every beer is a twist-off cap whether it wants to be or not strength
• Holding the deer up with one arm while you can clean it strength
• Immortal Augusta Nightclub Bouncer strength
• Cajun Catfish Puncher strength
• Plumber Who Doesn’t Carry A Single Wrench Cause He Doesn’t Need One strength

He’s strong. Athletes are strong, and please do not try any of this at home.

P.S. DaQuan Hawkins-Muckle has a name that is as strong as he is, and there is actually a cool reason behind it: He changed it to honor his adopted father who introduced him to football, Rico Muckle.

P.P.S. RICO MUCKLE