Do Strongman Die Early?

Many scientists were worried about strongman athletes. In another article, we discussed about whether strongman athletes are too “fat”. Scientists often use measures like BMI to determine whether a person is overweight and quickly judge a person’s health with it. However, is it true that strongman die early because of their health? In this article, we try to answer a few questions about strongman life expectancy.

Do Strongman Athletes Die Early?

The answer is yes and no. Yes because many amateur strongman athletes may actually be obese as they do not have professional training or enough knowledge on how to bulk correctly. As we mentioned that BMI may not be the best indicator to whether one is healthy. We recommend checking body-fat percentages and making sure the visceral fat levels are not too high.

Amateur strongman may live a longer life than professional ones as they have less incentive to do steroids. In the later part of the article, we are going to talk about how professional strongman are suspected to abuse steroids and unfortunately, shorten their lives.

According to academic literature, the answer is yes. Scientists quoted that the use of androgenic anabolic steroids (AAS) caused most of the high profile deaths in strongman community. The use of steroids may leave to different kinds of heart problems. When a large athletes uses steroids, it increases the risk of heart dysfunction and occurrences of strokes.

Scientists also commented that the strongman athletes observed do not consume “healthy food”. The authors of the paper listed that the athletes ate too much saturated fats and need to swap to healthier alternatives such as peanut butter, salmon and avocado to get more unsaturated fats. Scientists commented that the strongman diet will not help their life expectancy.

Strongman Early Graves

A notable case we can discuss here is the early death of Jon Pall Sigmarsson. He died in 1993 at the age of 33. According to witnesses, he was deadlifting and suddenly collapsed to the ground. Upon autopsy, the coroners determined that it was his use of steroids that led to a heart attack and untimely death. He has won the World’s Strongest Man four times and did powerlifting on top of bodybuilding.

Mike Jenkins, a winner of the 2012 Arnold classic, passes away in his sleep was also accused of using steroids. His coroner mentioned that Jenkins had a heart that was twice the size of an average man’s. In the report, they found DMAA which is a substance similar to meth. It does not mean Jenkins was necessarily doing drugs as some pre-workouts contain DMAA. The presence of stimulants and a large heart was enough to kill Jenkin who died at the age of 31.

Other strongman such as Thor also admitted to using steroids in his strongman career. He openly talked about how his family worried for his health which ultimately helped him make the decision to retire from strongman. Steroids use in strongman competitions are very commonplace as a lot of strongman federations do not follow the “World Anti-Doping Code” by WADA.

What Causes Strongman’s Early Death?

The truth is, there are many reasons to why a person would have an early death. For example, Jesse Marunde, who placed second in World’s Strongest man died at the age of 27. He was not using steroids and he was generally healthy. However, during autopsy, they discovered that he had an unusually large heart which caused his death.

Final Thoughts

Professional strongman often have to make big sacrifices to hit those numbers and do the impossible. However, for people that are starting up, it is important to keep ourselves healthy and accidently become obese while following a strongman diet. Doing steroids should not be the first option if you are just starting out as we see many strongman dug an early grave due to their use of the drugs. However, this should not deter you from lifting! As long as you eat and train right, you will be able to get those numbers up!