Have you ever felt like just digging a hole in your backyard, then building a squat stand over it and loading a thousand pounds on it, then standing in the hole and doing partials with it?  Me neither. Paul Anderson, however, thought about a lot of crazy shit like that. Paul Anderson, if you don’t know already, was an American Olympic weightlifter, proto-powerlifter, and strongman who was well known for his weird-ass training style and his penchant for shattering world records.

Gold- 1956 Melbourne +90 kg

World Championships

Gold- 1955 Munich +90 kg

1st- 1955 +90kg

1st- 1956 +90kg

As loudmouth internet warriors are wont to be incredulous about the poundages with which Anderson is credited, I posted both the lifts that have been confirmed in documentation or competition and the ones he’s alleged to have lifted.  Though many of his lifts have been verified by some of the greatest lifters in history, including Bruce Wilhelm, Bob Peoples, and Pat Casey, and all of them would slap you out of your shoes if they witnessed you shit talking Anderson’s epic lifts, Anderson’s biography was apparently pretty well full of shit and people are prone to making outrageous claims about Anderson’s strength (Neece).  Tommy Kono, however, one of the greatest American Olympic weightlifters, said of people’s doubts about Anderson’s lifts (before the claims started to get really outrageous):

Additionally, Paul was reported by Tommy Kono to have done a set of ten full squats, with no warmup, with 700 lbs., “so rapidly that it was as if free squats were performed” (PP 16), and shattered the world record in the strict press lifting IN THE RAIN, pressing 402 lbs in strict competition fashion over his head- 72 lbs more than the previous record. Ten years later, he broke the record again with 420. You can see why people felt comfortable making outrageous claims about Anderson’s lifts, then, because the real weights were so phenomenal they were easy to embellish.

Before we get into his training methods, it would only seem appropriate to outline the man himself, as although he’s certainly every bit the strength sports badass who generally receives treatment on this site, he is hardly the psychotic, misanthropic, purveyor of destruction of the other Baddest Motherfuckers are.  Paul Anderson was none of those things- instead, he was a deeply religious Southern Baptist big softie who some might say squandered all of his talent performing exhibitions rather than actually competing to raise a youth home for disadvantaged kids. Nowhere will you find stories of Paul Anderson, hard drinking, coke snorting, bulldozer of a man who once threw a boulder through the window of a McDonalds, or smashed his face open by headbutting a pay phone off a wall, or holding people hostage for a ham sandwich.  Instead, Paul Anderson was what can only be described as a really nice guy.

Born to a standard, intact, Southern American family, Anderson was huge even as a youth.  According to Earl Liederman, “when he was 12 years of age he weighed 160; at 15 he tipped the scales at 200; at 16 he was around 210; at 17 his weight went to about 230; at 18 he weighed 250; and at 19, 270 pounds,” and by the time he was 20 he was 295 (Liederman).  According to Clarence Bass, Anderson’s noob gains were beyond fucking retarded, but as everything about Anderson seems larger than life, it should come as no surprise.  “In less than a year of training, Paul transformed himself from “just another small town Southern boy” into a 275-pounder with a 21 l/2″ neck, 20″ arm, 33″ thigh and 19″ calf.  In later years, his arms and neck grew to 25″ and his thighs to 36″” (Bass).

No real record exists of the sizes of his parents, but with dimensions like those you’d expect to hear a story that Gojira was a female and King Kong knocked her up, only to produce Anderson.  Well, save for his height, but what he lacked in height, he made up for in girth.  Paul Anderson was a mere 5’9″ and weighed around 350 pounds at the peak of his strength career, though he at one point ballooned to 400 and snagged his Olympic gold weighing 303. Though he was famous for his fast sprint starts and concomitant explosive strength, he was apparently hideously out of shape and usually wheezing in an effort to catch his breath.

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o matter his failings as an endurance athlete and the fact that Anderson was fatter than Chris Farley after a weekend locked inside an all you can eat buffet- his resultant strength has made him a legend in strength sports, a successful pro boxer, an Olympic gold medalist, an epic powerlifter, and the king of the odd lifts in the 20th Century.  Anderson’s career was as all over the place as his bona fides would indicate.  He had a show for some time in Las Vegas, in which he squatted a barbell weighing over 1,000 lbs loaded with $10,000 in silver dollars.  Later, he appeared on the Ed Sullivan show, and other late night shows, in an effort to raise money for his youth home.  Given what is still continuing indifference to awesome feats of strength in the fat-ensconced brains of the American public, Anderson soon turned to professional wrestling and boxing to earn money.  Additionally, he continued to tour the country performing exhibitions wherein he would backlift while playing some kind of wind instrument to raise money for his youth home.  He did this so often, in fact, that “[Bob] Hoffman would later claim, with a straight face, at a USOC eligibility hearing that [Anderson] was a musician, not a professional weightlifter” (Archibald).

Anderson could have cited his unique training methods as the key to his success, but being an evangelical Christian, he gave all the credit to someone else. It’s all well and good if you’re religious, but if you’re squatting upwards of 900 lbs, chances are it was a combination of long, brutal workouts, a little genetic luck, and a lot of eating, since the Catholic Church doesn’t seem to be fielding the majority of the gold medalists in the Olympic Weightlifting and Jesus wasn’t well known for being a strongman.  Weirdly, however, Anderson rarely chose to compete, even though he was nearly criminally strong and was occasionally even at competitions performing exhibitions.  This is probably why so many people are apt to call bullshit on his lifts.  For instance:

In spite of the fact that he preferred exhibitions to competitions and some of his lifts are somewhat disputed, his methods for getting crazy strong still bear investigation.  I’ve already alluded to, and shown a picture of, one of his favorite training methods- squatting in a hole. As time progressed, he would add dirt to the hole, increasing his range of motion, and he eventually got to the point were he could allegedly squat 1,200 (though bear in mind he allegedly squatted 315 for ten reps the first time he got under a bar or 400 for a double, depending on the source [Wilhelm, Liederman]).  As you can see above, he had a multitude of ways to do partial squats and gradually add weight, and it seems he included the use of proto-crazybells in his partials as well (this rig apparently weighed about 1800 lbs).  The key to these partials was to start at the bottom, rather than the top, so eliminate the bounce out of the hole and increase the loads your body is capable of handling.

Another wacky training method Anderson used was to set up two golf holes on his farm about 300 yards apart. He’d whack the ball down to the one hole, where he’d set up an outdoor rack with a bar loaded to 400. He’d do 3-5 reps in the overhead press with it, then whack the ball back to the other hole, where he’d set up a squat rack loaded to 800. He’d bang out 3-5 reps with that weight, then repeat, all afternoon. Yeah, that sounds pretty fucking awesome to me as well, save for the golfing. I’d rather do a set and get a bleach enema, then repeat. I truly despise golf. Anderson’s typical workouts (according to Marty Gallagher in Purposeful Primitive) were 6 days a week and took 3-4 hours to complete.

Press Off Rack– 1x6x300, 1x2x400, 1x2x390, 1x2x370

Press Outs (from sticking point to lockout)- 1x4x500

Press From Shoulders To Top Of Head– 1x4x500

Push-Press Off Rack– 1x3x450

Bench Press– 1×6-8×400-450

Paul Anderson’s Olympic Weightlifting Routine

Wilhelm, Bruce.  Paul Anderson: Force of Nature.  Milo.  1193 Apr;1(1):10-14.