HALL OF FAME

Eddie ‘The Beast’ Hall, you might be aware, is quite a big man. Staring back at me from across the Zoom call, his shoulders are too wide to fit in the screen – his traps almost big enough for their first day at school. It’s quite something, then, that this is the ‘smallest’ he’s been for over a decade.

Since qualifying for his first World’s Strongest Man (WSM) – the pinnacle of professional strongman – in 2012, Hall’s life became a tunnel-visioned quest to be crowned champion. His diet became the stuff of internet legend, his training videos – including benching 100kg dumbbells for seven reps, and shoulder pressing a couple of 70kgs like they were tins of beans – racking up hundreds of thousands of views.

Salvation in strength

“I first got into lifting weights when I was expelled from school at 14,” he tells me, before a typically frank point: “Rather than sit at home wanking all day,