Everyday Systems

Hi there, I've been doing SG exercises for a little while now but am new to the forums.

anyway, I was wondering if anyone had ever heard of Lawrence "Slim" Farman, one of the last of the old-time strong-men, and a spiritual godfather of hammer-based exercise.

His story basically goes as follows: the famous early 20th c. strongman The Mighty Atom was giving a strength demonstration at a farmer's market in eastern Pennsylvania, when he challenged the crowd to bend a railroad spike by hand as he had just done. A rockbreaker at a local quarry took his challenge and accomplished it with ease, much to the crowd's and The Mighty Atom's astonishment. The Atom, greatly impressed by the young man's strength, took him under his wing as a protege, and soon Farman was a world-famous strongman on his own.

While details are scant on his workout regimen, Farman has done demonstrations where he has lifted a 24 pound(!) hammer over by it's end in each hand, and gently lowered the heads of the hammers to the tip of his nose. With two hands, he has accomplished the same feat with a 57 pound(!!) hammer.

The guy is in his 70's now and still does occasional demonstrations where he proves that his strength has diminished little with age.

If you are interested in reading more about him, the following page has some information , s well as an image of an aged Farman lifting the 24 pounders and I've seen an independent documentary advertised on the web:

http://www.offroaders.com/Destinations/ ... Farman.htm

Cheers,

Brian

http://www.functionalhandstrength.com/s ... g_DVD.html

Apparently I was wrong. According to the writeup of this DVD, he did a 56 lb hammer in EACH hand, with "1,736 inch pounds on each of his wrists!"

Boy do I feel inadequate.

Very cool. I've seen stuff about this guy floating around before. But I've never seen anything about how strong his HAIR was! I'm just grateful mine's still (mostly) intact .

One of these days, once I've maxed out my insurance policy and have done everything worth doing in life, maybe I'll see what kind of weight hammer I can do the hammer to the nose trick with .

Thanks again for the posts, and sorry for my long delay in responding (I was out on vacation last week). I never get tired of reading about this old timer sledgehammer stuff. Once of these days I'll get serious about doing my homework and collect them somewhere -- posts like this will be a great help.

Reinhard