I’m standing inside Thor’s Power Gym in Kópavogur, Iceland – one of the best-equipped strongman facilities on earth, a warehouse where every implement a modern lifter could want sits beneath racks laden with Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson‘s competition trophies. Three of the strongest men I’ve ever shared a chalk bucket with are telling me that the thing I really need to see has nothing to do with any of their lifts. Hilmar Örn Jónsson, Tómas Darri Þorsteinsson and Rolf Olav Pettersen want to fetch Björn, Hafþór’s father, from the gym office.
Björn oversees the day-to-day running of the place. He’s 6ft 7in, lean and, by his own admission, doesn’t train much. The lads want him to pick up the gym’s 81kg Thomas Inch replica dumbbell, a solid lump of iron with a handle nearly two and a half inches thick. You can’t wrap your fingers around a handle like that.
The original bedevilled strongmen – at least those who weren’t the doughty Inch – for a century, and grip specialists who train specifically for it still sometimes fail on replicas. Björn ambles over, chalks up, reaches down and picks the thing up, then all but curls it to his chest, straining no more than Dante does when he goes to lift the gallon of milk in Clerks. Everyone laughs.
I’d come to the right country.
You see, I’m 44, and I’m wearing down. Since I left academia for the corporate world in 2017, I hadn’t taken a holiday longer than a week – a streak that survived a torn pec in 2022 and a left wrist reconstruction in 2024, two injuries that turned my lifting regimen into a series of careful negotiations with my own connective tissue.
So when my wife suggested spending two weeks in Iceland this July, the family maths worked for everyone. My wife and daughter got waterfalls, whale watching, endless sunshine, surprisingly good lamb hot dogs, and plates of puffin and smoked salmon.
My battered body got a country where geothermal pools and saunas are as ubiquitous as petrol stations – and considerably cheaper than the heavily taxed substance they replaced. Better still, I got to investigate, up close, what is surely the strongest country on earth per capita.
Nine World’s Strongest Man titles have gone to residents of this island of roughly 400,000 people: four for the charismatic Jón Páll Sigmarsson (1984, 1986, 1988, 1990), four for the calculating strategist Magnús Ver Magnússon (1991, 1994, 1995, 1996), and one for the aforementioned Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson (2018, alongside three Arnold Strongman Classic titles), the 6ft 9in colossus who played The Mountain in Game of Thrones and became the first person to deadlift more than 500kg. Only the United States, with roughly a thousand times the population, has more.
Before flying out, I exchanged emails with Magnús Ver himself, who now runs the Jakaból strength gym, to get the lay of the land. Why here? Why this tiny, treeless rock in the North Atlantic?
‘A lot of this goes back to the Vikings settling in Iceland,’ he wrote. ‘You had to be strong and tough to survive. We were brought up with hard work – on the farms, fishing and so on. This translated well into strength sports. Hard work and working with our hands all day was just normal. Sure, nowadays that may not be the case. Now they have the equipment and such to train on, but the work ethic and mindset is still there, still the same.’
Then he added: ‘Iceland still has the second most World’s Strongest Man wins, which I think is pretty great for the size of the country we are.’
Not long after arriving, we headed to the pools. Reykjavík’s municipal leisure centres put most others to shame: spotless, orderly, inexpensive and packed. What struck me most wasn’t the facilities themselves, but who was using them, come rain or shine and at almost every hour of the day: everyone. Thin, not thin, old, young – all of them swimming proper laps and rotating through the saunas as though it were a civic duty.
The Húsafell Stone
A few days in, we drove north of the city to a goat farm that had supplied goats for Game of Thrones. The farm sits in Borgarfjörður, the same district as Húsafell, which meant I could no longer avoid the reason I’d really come: the Húsafell Stone, a 409lb slab that has sat beside a goat pen at Húsafell farm since the 18th century. Carry it around the full perimeter of the pen – about 50 metres – and you earn the title fullsterkur: full strength. I got the stone off the ground, which puts me ahead of most visitors, and then I flailed.
Alas, I did not earn the title fullsterkur.
At Metroflex, I learned how to handle heavy, commercially produced Atlas stones. I still do Zercher squats – barbell cradled in the crooks of my elbows – with more than 405lb from a dead stop low in the rack. Those weights are manageable because the objects are designed to be lifted. You roll a professionally finished, well-proportioned stone into your lap; you balance a barbell across heavily padded forearms that prevent chafing.
The Húsafell Stone is neither round nor a bar. It’s wide, flat and awkward, and picking it up is akin to trying to hug a coffee table made of basalt. I was using the technique-driven method I’d picked up from Liefia Ingalls, the now-retired American strongwoman who carried the stone herself and fed me a host of pro tips: work it up the thighs in stages, find the balance point and settle it against the torso.
Sound theory – and precisely how the handful of previous lifters, including one famous 18th-century woman, had managed to do it. But somewhere between my not-so-flexible knees and hips, the plan fell apart. A cloud of gnats – a recent and, locals told me, seemingly permanent addition to Iceland’s warming landscape – swarmed my ears. Frustrated and irritated, I kept dropping the stone after moving it just a few inches off the ground, each failed attempt further burning out my fingers and forearms.
Weeks later, Jónsson, who wished I’d come with him, told me what had gone wrong. As a bigger lifter, I should have simply forced it up, yanking it with my lats while driving through my legs – no different to a regular deadlift.
Gaining Strength Secrets
I learnt plenty more at Thor’s Power Gym, where I fell in with the three men from the top of this story. Hilmar Jónsson (@hilmaroj), who is 6ft 6in and around 285lb, is built like an NFL tight end – and trains like one, too. Strongman conditioning is changing, he explained.
The age of the big-bellied, slow, strong guy – think of the all-time Lithuanian great Žydrūnas Savickas – is ending, with fitter competitors like Ukraine’s Oleksii Novikov holding their own across every event. ‘Other than Icelanders, the Ukrainians are the strongest people out there,’ Jónsson told me.
One day, Jónsson spent an hour on heavy sled pulls. The next, he worked against a running clock, hoisting the sport’s notoriously awkward circus dumbbells on a regular cadence up to 110kg, and pressing with both arms rather than the dominant-arm-only approach most strongmen take, in case one arm fails him in competition.
He’s four years into the sport and already one of the most powerful humans I’ve ever seen in action – and I’ve trained at the old Metroflex in Arlington, Texas, alongside the likes of Rendy DelaCruz, Branch Warren and Johnnie O. Jackson. For raw explosiveness, Jónsson blows those guys away, laughing and joking the whole time, completely in the zone.
Then there’s Tómas Darri Þorsteinsson, who at around six feet tall and a virtually fat-free 220lb is already the greatest powerlifter in Iceland’s history. He’s effortlessly good at everything – the kind of coach who makes one small adjustment that changes your training for months.
Watching me hold a barbell, he spotted a problem I didn’t know I had: ever since my wrist reconstruction, I’d been gripping every bar like a featherweight, tentatively, even while deadlifting more than 600lb without straps. He corrected my hand position on the spot, and the lingering pain in the four fingers supporting those weights disappeared in the weeks after my trip.
Þorsteinsson has coached both Jónsson and Pettersen, and holds Thor’s Power Gym record for the one-handed pick-up at 255kg (with Hafthor, whose hands are roughly twice the size of mine, right behind him). The obvious comparison is John Haack, the American powerlifting phenom I’ve interviewed for Men’s Health, but I’ve never seen Haack smoothly continental clean and press a 122kg axle or lock out a 102kg circus dumbbell for fun. The circus dumbbell, for the record, bedevilled me even at 52kg: Rolf-Olav Pettersen demonstrated it carefully, and I still kept bonking myself on the back of the head with a loose lockout.
Pettersen is the athlete who ought to be a model for everyone reading this. He’s 37, Norwegian, and at six feet tall is considered small for the sport. He has a day job back home, completed his postgraduate studies in England, and has a tattoo of Hafthor on his calf. Since winning the 90kg class at Iceland’s Strongest Man in 2021, he has commuted from Norway to train here, methodically building himself through the 105kg class before taking a year away from competition to reach 120kg bodyweight – all without ever looking much more than simply larger rather than genuinely heavyset, similar to long-time World’s Strongest Man contender Rob Kearney, whom I interviewed for Men’s Health in 2019.
‘I want to fulfil my dream of competing alongside Hafþór and all these other guys at Iceland’s Strongest Man, on their terms,’ he told me.
One day he wants to open a strongman gym in Norway, a sports-obsessed country that leads the world in Winter Olympic medals, but where strength sports haven’t taken off in quite the same way they have here.
He told me he was going to lift the Húsafell Stone and run with it, then hoped to deadlift at least 300kg in competition. That’s 661lb – the most I’ve ever pulled in a meet myself – except Pettersen would be doing it after seven other events, while weighing around 100lb less than the giants beside him, and at nearly my age.
I didn’t doubt him. He was locked in.
And if I needed any more evidence of how strength-mad this country is, there was Skúli Ármannsson, another massive, bearded friend of Hafthor’s, casually repping 145kg on the bench after a battle with cancer. Jónsson, spotting him, kept telling me: ‘That’s a real man.’ This is a country chock-full of them.
For my own part, I left with plenty to take home and even more to work on. I can also say I pulled some exceedingly comfortable 270kg deadlift training reps, without straps, from the same platform where, in May 2020, Hafthor set the 501kg deadlift world record with Magnús Ver on hand to judge it. He later pushed that mark to 510kg, before surviving a failed 515kg attempt at the Enhanced Games in Las Vegas this past May. The record has since been broken by Mexican strongman Raul Flores, who pulled 511kg earlier this month.
Taking Strength Home
A week after I returned home, the results of Iceland’s Strongest Man – as carefully reported by Thor’s Power Gym – showed me just how competitive the scene I’d brushed up against had become.
The competition was held outdoors, and the first day’s rain was relentless. Hafþór – by many measures still the strongest man on the planet, albeit while rehabbing nagging injuries and recovering from those gruelling Enhanced Games deadlift attempts – won the max deadlift, the weight throw (with an almost casual effort that appeared to set an unofficial world record) and the manhood stones, an event built around Iceland’s traditional lifting stones.
He still finished second.
The winner, Kristján Jón Haraldsson, edged him 88 points to 86 despite winning just one event, the arm-over-arm pull. Like Jónsson, Haraldsson – a three-time Iceland’s Strongest Man champion – is a large, well-conditioned athlete rather than a hulking one, more evidence for the new-model strongman thesis.
Jónsson himself finished fourth, consistently near the top of the field across all eight events. The dark horse, a shorter and impossibly jacked Czech named Jan Krasinský – whose presence says plenty about what a strength mecca Iceland has become – dominated the Húsafell Stone carry before having to withdraw from the final two events with an injury.
‘It was a battle, man,’ Jónsson messaged me afterwards. ‘The weather had a huge impact. The rain was pouring. It was truly a fight against the elements.’
Back in Pittsburgh, my wrist has stopped hurting and I’m far more mindful of every lift I undertake, thanks to a 30-second correction from Iceland’s greatest powerlifter. Meanwhile, I know the stone is still there, beside the goat pen at Húsafell, almost certainly still swarming with gnats. If I ever make it back, I won’t go alone.
And this time, I’m going to force it up.
Perhaps it won’t happen in this lifetime.
But that’s the stuff dreams are made of.