The World's Strongest Man and the Weight No One Could See Eddie Hall in conversation with Frank Sepe for Muscle & Fitness

There is a version of Eddie Hall that most people feel they already know. The World's Strongest Man. The 500-kilogram deadlift. The record that stood alone, not because no one tried, but because no one else could. It is a tidy image, and it has been repeated often enough to feel settled.
In a recent conversation with Muscle and Fitness, Frank Sepe (Director of Communications), something else surfaces. Not through dramatic confession, but through the particular way Eddie reflects on what the image cost him, and what he had to do to carry it.

He describes it plainly: "People look at the World's Strongest Man and they just think, hard case, big gnarly man lifts weights, drinks beer, eats steak. But there's a lot more."
That phrase, said without self-pity or performance, contains the whole of it. There is a lot more. The question the conversation quietly circles is whether anyone has looked.

In the months leading up to the 500-kilogram lift, Eddie Hall was not simply training his body. He was working with a hypnotherapist. Not to address injury or anxiety in a clinical sense, but to build a particular kind of interior architecture. The sessions were less about the lift itself and more about what comes after it. What does pulling that weight actually do for you? How does your life look when it is done?

"What's it going to do for you, firstly," he says, "is what you've got to get in your head."

It is not the language of sport. It sounds more like a person trying to locate their own reasons for doing something extraordinary, because without those reasons, no amount of physical preparation will hold.

He also describes what he used as a mental trigger in competition. He would draw blood before a lift, put it on his mouthpiece, and then let the taste of it flick a switch. "It would just do something," he says. "It would just trigger everything." He had never spoken about it publicly before. He offers it simply, without drama, as a piece of private information that had stayed private until now.

That combination sits oddly together: a man careful enough to work with a therapist on future visualisation, who also used something closer to ritual, something almost animal, to cross the threshold between who he is every day and who he needed to be on that platform.
Both things are true. That is not a contradiction. It is a portrait of someone who understood himself with enough precision to need both.

The 2015 Netflix documentary followed him to the title. It ended there. And then, as he describes it, something quieter and harder began.
"I almost felt like I tarnished my life by winning the World's Strongest Man, because I had nothing to chase. I had nothing to sort of keep me on the straight and narrow, keep my mind focused on something."
He fell into depression. He says it matter-of-factly, as he says most things. There was no next mountain visible from where he stood, and the absence of one turned out to be its own weight.

This is not an unusual story in sport, though it is rarely told with this degree of plainness. He describes men he knows personally, former athletes who privately admit to the same struggle but do not speak it aloud. "Man to man, they admit they suffer," he says. "But they don't talk about it to anyone. And they should."

What he is describing is a particular kind of silence that surrounds strength. The assumption that the capacity to endure physical extremity means you do not break internally. That if you are the sort of person who can pull a 57-tonne aircraft across a tarmac, the ordinary weight of loss and purposelessness will not reach you.
It reaches everyone. The question is only whether you say so.

When asked what he hopes his son Max takes from the documentary, Eddie pauses in a way that feels unscripted.
Max is 13. He has seen his father as the man who picks him up, takes him to the gym, and does the fun things. He has not seen the other version. Eddie says he is glad of that; a parent's instinct is to protect. But the film will show Max something about his father that the ordinary days have not.
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He also notes, gently, that Max is the same age as the boy he imagines when he talks about why he speaks openly at all. "If Eddie Hall, the World's Strongest Man, can suffer with it, it's okay," he imagines that boy thinking. "And there's a way to find help."

The film, then, is partly a letter. Not one that announces itself as such, but one that carries something outward that might land somewhere specific.
He is 38 now, and his relationship to his body has changed entirely. He trains for longevity, not performance. Live cultured foods, sleep, stress reduction, hyperbaric sessions, and red light. He says the pursuit of the title likely cost him twenty years of his life, and he believes he can earn some of them back.
"I want to see my kids grow up. I want to enjoy my grandchildren."

The man who once pulled what everyone said was unpullable is now, with the same methodical care, trying to stay alive long enough to watch the people he loves move through their lives. These are not separate projects. They are the same attention, turned in a different direction.

Taming the Beast does not attempt to revisit what is already documented. The deadlift is there, the records, the title. But the film stays with what came after and what was always underneath: the interior life of someone who built a public identity so enormous that it could swallow the person inside it whole, and who has spent years since finding out how to remain himself anyway.

It is a rare film. Not because of the feats it shows, but because of what it is willing to sit with. The gap between the image and the man who carries it. The silence athletes are expected to maintain. The particular loneliness of having achieved everything you set out to achieve and then standing in the quiet that follows, looking for what comes next.
If you think you know who Eddie Hall is, this film is worth an evening of your time.

You may find that what you knew was the part he was willing to show.

We would like to thank Muscle and Fitness and Frank Sepe, for an amazing interview. Let us know in the comments what you took away from the interview between Frank Sepe and Eddie Hall. 

About – Frank Sepe 
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