How do you prepare to smash a Guinness World Record? If you’re Strongwoman athletes Sam Taylor and Izzy Tait, half an hour in the back of the Motorpoint Arena Nottingham will apparently suffice.
At this year’s Ultimate Strongwoman competition over the bank holiday weekend, the duo executed a beastly 454-kg (1,000-lb) tandem deadlift. The crowd was roused, the lift was deceivingly casual. To indulge a game that makes most within the Strongman milieu chuckle bashfully and deflect attention anywhere else, the poundage is roughly the weight of an adult male moose, four full size refrigerators or two Andre the Giants.
The move not only broke the previous Guinness world record of 245-kg (roughly the size of an adult male grizzly bear) lifted by two females, but comprehensively obliterated it.
The synchronised lift was the latest record in the Strongwoman books to be toppled as the sport continues to explode in popularity and quality. Yet, more remarkably, it was the direct product of just four practice lifts half an hour before the event.
With Taylor, 44, living in south Wales and Tait, 42, based in Dundee, and both with full-time jobs, finding time to train in person in the six weeks leading up to the event was a non-starter.
It is meagre preparation by any sporting standard, but rather than cow to geographical woes, the pair studied each other’s individual training videos and used their acumen as veterans to gauge the precise timing required to execute the lift together.
Teasing out a fragile, harmonious balance was key, with any slight incongruity from either woman in the lift’s initial stages enough to throw the entire endeavour off-key. Such minutiae, however, hardly rattled the pair, who made the lift look effortless against a backdrop of celebratory red fireworks.
“When we first got on the bar together I knew it was going to go well, we are very similar lifters technique wise so that helped a lot,” Tait reflected afterwards. “I know how determined both myself and Sam are and there was no way we weren’t lifting that bar, I knew the instant we lifted together it was going.”
“As soon as I put the bar down on Sunday, I thought, yeah, we could’ve gone heavier,” echoed Taylor.
Taylor, the current third strongest woman in the world, was not being cheeky in her candour. Taylor knows a thing or two about Guinness world records and, more precisely, smashing them.
The long-time Strongwoman has helped to rewrite the boundaries for women in the sport, and in 2021, Taylor and her partner Sue Taylor-Franklin pulled a 48-tonne aircraft more than 20 metres in 37 seconds, making silly of the previous record of three minutes.
The tandem deadlift marks Tait’s first time etching her name into the Guinness World Record book, though she holds the Masters’ world record deadlift of 272.5-kg and has a laundry list of records she intends to break in the near future.
“It means a lot to me, to get the opportunity the Ultimate Strongman gave us was phenomenal and when you achieve something like this it makes me proud and seeing my kids faces when I showed them what I’d done was just the best feeling ever,” said Tait.
Both Taylor and Tait are eying this year’s Strongwoman competitions hungrily, with the Welsh and Scottish competitions arriving in July before the European championships in August.
Traction around Strongwoman competitions – a contest that combines movement and strength exercise to produce a more physically taxing, all-encompassing hybrid strength trial – has grown exponentially over the last few years, with more visibility afforded the women’s vein, though investment and prize money continue to pale dramatically in comparison to that of the men’s.
Nevertheless, the greater visibility has afforded the likes of Taylor and Tait larger platforms to dispel archaic notions of women competing within the sport while encouraging more to participate and raise standards.
Taylor in particular has been vocal in her mission to showcase Strongwoman as not only an acceptable space for women to compete but a desirable one.
And the most recent contest held in Nottingham represented a tangible step forward in Taylor’s mission.
“After the competition on Sunday, I had to go up to the VIP area and meet some fans and there were young girls there who wanted to be Strongwomen and go to the gym and lift weights and that’s exactly why we do it,” Taylor recalled. “Seeing those young children and inspiring them to be the next generation is exactly why we do what we do.”
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