I’m trying to write a story involving a character who has a complete personality shift against their will and begins exercising to an obsessive degree. Are there some notably difficult exercises that I could describe them as doing in order to show that they are very serious and are getting incredibly fit? For example, I’ve heard that kettlebells are pretty difficult. Would using them while hanging from a bar be considered extremely hard? (And yes, you can think of this as a workout montage if you want to :).
Beast Skills( a whole buffet)
Clapping handstand pushup
L-Sit to Handstand
Free solo climbing. There are very few recreational activities that are more physically demanding or as unforgiving. Like, “your very first mistake could be fatal” unforgiving.
There was a scene in Lost where Jack is running up and down all the stairs of a stadium.
Iron Cross.
I’ve seen people do chin ups with weights hanging off them from a weight belt.
There’s also the Turkish Get-Up.
Deadlifting over, say, 700 lbs? It wasn’t done until Bob Peoples did it in 1947, but it doesn’t require someone to be a genetic freak and/or drugged up, like deadlifting 1000lbs would be. Just a long, consistent, strenuous training regimen and plenty of food.
A slow muscle-up is one of the hardest moves I can think of.
Most people can’t do standard (fast one, with ‘kipping’). Doing one over 15 seconds or so requires immense strength-to-weight ratio.
Olympic lifting Snatch, something like twice your bodyweight is pretty high up there. Could take many, many years and not reach. A blend of mobility, precise technique and explosive power.
I’m a dedicated gym rat, and with that lens I second free climbing and a slow muscle-up.
For background, I’m a big fish in a small pond when it comes to powerlifting, and top the leaderboards at my local gym, and have done bouldering at a rock climbing gym for 3-4 years.
A lot of the mentioned things are intermediate rather than difficult. Kettlebells, turkish get-ups, and handstand pushups are easy, I’m personally a hundred and change pounds from the 700lb deadlift mentioned earlier and know a few people stronger than me at it, I routinely do 5 sets of 10 rep weighted pullups with at least 50lbs added weight and know people who do more…the things here that would really get my attention and admiration are anyone doing a slow, fully controlled muscleup, or anyone doing something like this at the rock climbing gym (or its corollary, a difficult free climb out in the world, Alex Megos in the video does plenty of real world climbing).
I think for your purposes, the problem is the intersectionality of “admirably difficult” and “known to the public at large.” Most folk won’t know what a muscle-up is, or what campusing is (an extremely difficult variant of which is shown in the video link above).
The Iron Cross is probably the only broadly known admirably difficult thing mentioned here, but you could also go with standby’s like Iron Mans and Triathlons or Ultra-marathons, and people will at least have the mental association of “really hard athletic thing” even if they don’t know the specifics.
This is all great stuff! For some reason that scene in Cape Fear keeps running through my head, the part where DeNiro is doing exercises on his bed and you can just tell he’s been doing them for years?
Muscle-ups get my vote. I still can’t quite make it but keep in mind im strapped into my chair and had to climb a rope in order to reach the bar. But muscle-ups are brutal
Ditto
That’s the first thing that came to my mind and its something I have never done and have no intention of trying. Absolutely not on my bucket list.
Heh, I expected to see this.
This race seems almost impossible. A 3100-mile “marathon”. :eek:
While not the most difficult athletic feat ever, the man who runs marathons while pushing his disabled daughter in her wheelchair is pretty damn impressive.
Team Hoyt It’s his son.
257 Triathlons including
6 Ironman
7 half Ironman
72 marathons including 32 Bostons
22 duathlons.
Wow. I’m even more impressed now.