Every sport has it’s own fan boys/girls without these characters then a lot of sports wouldn’t be able to support professional athletes and equipment manufacturers would have no one to sell their wares to.  Anyone who follow’s rugby or american football and has ever posted on an internet forum or populated the comments section of a highlight reel knows all to well the intellectual black hole that is rugby vs american football athletes.  If you love strength sports then it is easy to compare across disciplines because there are objective measures of performance i.e. how many kilos can they lift or how many reps that can they do with an implement.

People like to debate who the strongest people are on earth and the reasons why they hold this title.  It’s a fun and engaging topic of conversation however it is a topic that to many people use to rationalise their own choice of a strength sport as if the accomplishments of a lifter you have never met before makes your choice of hobby any more legitimate.  As a powerlifter I hear or seem to hear this line of rationale coming from weightlifters on a regular basis it’s probably my own personal bias but it’s genuinely annoying.

This debate is the strength sports version of Playstation 4 vs Xbox one vs Wii U vs PC debate people who have decided to invest their time, money and effort into a certain console who feel the need to argue about which one is the best way to whittle away their spare time.  These arguments almost invariably turn into adhomen dick measuring contests because people are trying to demonstrate in an objective manner their own emotional feelings about a hobby.  It’s a spiral of dumbing down that inevitably ends in stupidity.

Strength Sport Fanboys.

Weightlifters are the PC Gaming master race equivalent of strength sports they choose perform an obtusely difficult skill and try to learn it by watching Jon North videos on youtube.  This ends in a 70 kg guy who swings the bar through 2 meters of frontal space bruising his hip bone in the process.   He thinks he is better than everyone else because he does the one truly pure strength sport.  Eventually they pool into a group of spandex clad elitests who take up good lifting space doing yoga and talking about how much a lifter from an eastern country lifts that they have never met and using it as positive feedback to feed their own strength sports ninja illusion.  Without a weightlifting club to join the weightlifter can turn into a turbo douche and probably shouldn’t be allowed out into the lifting wild.

Powerlifters are the playstation fanboys.  They decided to take up the most user friendly strength sport because they read once on T-nation that powerlifters are the strongest athletes on the planet because some fat lad from Alabama who does a curtsy with 500 kg in a 300 quid custom made space suit told them so.  Powerlifters get a bad wrap because of a small group of lifters who use hacks to lift weights they have no right to touch.  The multiply federations are the strength sport equivalent of hackers, they come onto a legit server and use wall hacks and aimbots to inflate their otherwise unimpressive kill/death ratio.  The depth nazis and anti drug zealots of the IPF try to ban these cheaters from their own holy servers but don’t have good enough anti-cheat software to keep them out of their competitions.  Powerlifters are usually too busy tearing strips out of each other at any given opportunity to enter into the debate with other strength sports.

Strongmen make up the Xbone numbers.  They like to think that going to an industrial unit in butt-fuck nowhere and trying to move around awkward heavy equipment makes them in any way analogous to Brian Shaw.  Like the Xbox 360’s red ring of death most strongmen competitors spend far too much time broken to make any progress or to hold any real air of superiority.  They like to think that picking up a huge man made stone and putting it over a metal platform specifically designed for putting man made stones over equates in any way shape or form into real world or more functional strength.  World strongest man is the strength worlds version of call of duty it attracts the most casual fans who like to enter into conversations with hardcore strength enthusiasts about who the strongest athletes in the world are.  Like call of duty players the competitors of world strongest man also by far talk the most amount of shit about their competitors.  They hold the bizarre belief that trying to cut a WWE style promo interview somehow makes a fat lad carrying heavy stuff in a straight line in anyway more interesting.

Finally there are the cross fitters, the Wii U users of strength sports.  Crossfiters are the casual fans of the strength sports world they are new to lifting things and have decided to take up weightlifting movements whilst being taught by a guy who has been on a weekend course and thinks Pyrros Dimas is a make of feta cheese.  Like the Wii cross fitters love to add as many attachments as they can get their hands on, only through the vehicle of cross fit can a guy over complicate the fuck out of stretching and become a millionaire selling ebooks.  Knee sleeves, shoes, wraps, belts, seminars if you can dream it up there is a crossfiter somewhere who hasn’t got the sense or experience not to pay 200 dollars for the privilege.  Like the wii crossfit is by far the most popular of the strength sport niches if you can find an industrial unit, have got a free weekend and 1000 dollars you too can open up a box and injure people for time.  Eventually some crossfiters given enough time realise they have gone full retard and decide to upgrade to one of the three less popular strength sports.  Much as the wii is viewed as a portal for casuals to get into more “hardcore” gaming by anti-social nerds who haven’t got anything else better going for them aka powerlifters.

Can we not just admire without arguing like idiots. 

Ideally we would all appreciate the accomplishments of great lifters for the unbelievable feats of programming, dedication, attention to detail and balls that they are whilst trying to improve yourself without being a dick in the process.  Human nature probably dictates that this will never be the case and we are stuck with internet warriors and weightlifters who can’t squat 100 kg yet due to Lu Xiaojun could be a world record holding powerlifter if they could be arsed competing.  So if we can’t live in this idealistic world I think we can all join in unity to recognise the stupidity of multiply powerlifting binded as one under project white light.

Marc