Exercise Scientist Critiques The Real Anatoly
In a Nutshell
Quint Stott performs extreme strength feats including 635-lb helicopter squats, 500-lb platform jumps, 800-lb shirt bench presses, and nail handstand push-ups, demonstrating exceptional raw strength, coordination, and athleticism. These lifts require massive force production, stability, and coordination beyond standard training, though core movements like weighted squats, deadlifts, and presses build the foundational strength needed. Strength is a key limiter of athleticism, and while exotic lifts showcase ability, consistent basic strength training with maximal intent drives most gains.
These notes were generated by AI and may contain inaccuracies.
With 500 lbs on his back, Quint Stott leaves the ground and jumps up onto a platform.
Quint Stott is a gentleman that has a YouTube channel and an Instagram channel and probably a TikTok and he does lifts that boggle the mind. There's strong, there's really strong, there's 10 categories above that and then there's Quint Stott. As far as we know, we have every reason to believe these are real weights. This isn't staged, this is not AI, this is a real human being doing this.
This is a 200 kg 440 lb bench press that this young man is doing by placing the bar on top of his fists. What is to prevent the bar from rolling forward and backward? I guess just the grooves between his fingers. This doesn't just take strength, it takes massive balls. Assuming this is a raw press, I think this was raw, so no shirt, is that he's way stronger than having a 440-lb max bench because the instability generated by pressing off of your knuckles and the concomitant stability bandwidth that you have to put in to make sure that you stabilize the weight means you can't push as hard as you want anytime cuz the barbell will just slip off. So, this is a testament to his unbelievable strength, unbelievable athleticism, and just sheer giant bull testicles.
The Steinborn squat. This is where before power hacks people would take a barbell, lift it up off the ground on one side, get underneath it in a squat posture, and then put it on their back. He used his hands.
635-lb helicopter squat. Full depth. This is insane. The requisite strength that you have to have in order to do a squat with 635 lbs on the way down is insane. Pausing there to wait for the thing to do the helicopter thing is insane. The helicopter thing is really just a technique. It doesn't require any strength by itself, but the supporting strength required to make it actually happen is nuts. And then he squats it all the way back up. Unfortunately, it ends up helicoptering off angle and falls off of him, but he was for sure strong enough to squat it back up. So, we're talking about, you know, his raw squat to depth is, I would say, at least comfortably in excess of high sixes, 700 plus pounds, which is an unreal amount to be able to squat for any human being. He weighs 210 to 215, according to him.
With 500 lbs on his back, he leaves the ground and jumps up onto a platform. Leaving the ground with 500 lbs, it requires an amount of force and power that makes most people look like they're immobile. The probability of things going wrong and an ankle twisting, or a knee twisting, or a hip twisting, or a spine twisting, or a bar falling over the top of your head and your head cracking into that wood in front with trying to land a 500-lb excess of body weight jump is high. Balls. Sheer balls and an unbelievable amount of strength and power. And athleticism and balance.
800-lb bench press with a bench press shirt. In any kind of shirt, this is really good. He can't bench this raw. If he could, he'd be the greatest bench presser of all time by miles and miles and miles.
He's standing on top of a dumbbell with his heels completely close together. I have squatted almost this narrow with 405, 425 for sets of eight, sets of 10. But, if someone laid out a dumbbell vertically in front of me and I had 405 on my back and they were like, "Step up onto this." I'd be like, "No, are you nuts?" And then if I managed to step up onto it and they were like, "Now do a squat." I'd be like, "Are you out of your mind?" Just to be able to get back on the horse, in this case dumbbell-shaped horse, and do the thing again is just insane. Again, the strength, the coordination, the athleticism, the patience, the balls to do this is out of this world.
There's a world record for the plank. 408-lb plank. He's breaking it. This is actually even harder because you have to sit there while they put the plates on.
I have an as-measured grip strength that's pretty good. For those of you very deep into the strength world, I have closed the Iron Mind 2.5 Gripper, which is a pretty good one in a thousand grip strength or something like that for men. I can do negative of these. None of this is staged as far as we know, and we have no reason to believe it is. He just poked his finger through an apple. That's not even strength. It's a connective tissue integrity.
First time deadlifting, am I doing this right? Oh, he's grabbing the loops on the plates. Brilliant. From a 3-in deficit. 555 lbs. Off of a 3-in or 4-in deficit. Holding the weights in a place you're not supposed to hold them. This is actually a really good exercise. So, this is a snatch grip deficit deadlift. Very, very snatch grip. If you can get your grip to not be a limiting factor to build the crap out of your spinal erectors and your glutes and your core strength. If you can do this with a lot of weight for a lot of reps, man, you're probably not going to get a hurt back from almost anything.
He's holding a bunch of quarters, right? And he's got the quarters off on like a cinder block situation. And he's doing a close grip push-up, but the close grip push-up is the super, super easy part. Because the only thing connecting the quarters together is his hands pushing them together. So, he has to generate enough friction between all of the quarters that that frictional force is higher than the force of his body weight coming down, which is insane. To put it another way, he's basically isometrically flying at the top end of the fly kind of his whole body weight in some sense.
455 split squats. Nuts.
Lifting heavy doesn't make you athletic. Athleticism can be very roughly defined as putting into action in a sporting context the idea for movement that you had in your head. A person is more athletic when they think they're going to like step around, duke this way, go up that way, and then dunk the ball. The degree to which they succeed at that task is the degree by which on zero to 100% their athleticism can be measured for that task. There are multiple requirements for athleticism. There is speed, there is strength, and there is coordination. If you're really strong, but you're not quick, you won't be able to do cool stuff. If you are quick, but you're very weak, your own body weight will preclude you from doing super athletic stuff. And then the really, really, really, really big one is coordination. Coordination is what allows Michael Jordan to do that crazy stuff that you're like, "How does a human being arrange his body in such a particular sequence of movements to actually do this really crazy thing?" That like slide up under the rim, come up over back of it, and do all that crazy stuff. Because you have to have as many of these speed, strength, and coordination as possible to net result in athleticism.
If strength is your limiting factor, you are going to massively increase your athleticism as your strength comes up. Because if you're not strong enough to generate the ground reaction forces to get up to the rim, it doesn't matter how athletic, how fast, and how coordinated you are, strength is a limiting factor. And so this is why we weight train athletes. This is like 90% of why we do weight training for athletes because then their strength no longer becomes a limiting factor. There's another thing to say. If your strength gets really exotic, and you have a good amount of speed and coordination ability, your athleticism will come up still higher. Though, at some point, it will be limited by your speed and by your coordination. So, when people see folks that are very big and strong, but have very poor athleticism, they're probably seeing folks with really poor speed genetically and or really poor coordination also mostly genetically or the fact that you just don't train that thing at all and it's not proof that becoming stronger doesn't make you athletic because if you take that person who's very strong but very unathletic and make them weaker and watch them become substantially less athletic still just to reiterate if you max out your strength and you don't train your coordination or your speed you're only going to get so far but you would have gotten a lot less far without strength.
435 40 yard dash so this makes total sense the fact that Quint has trained himself to be super strong absolutely helps but the fact that he is unbelievably genetically gifted to begin with and ultra fast twitch in his musculature which allows him to do all those crazy lifts and get that strong to begin with is the dominant reason why he's so fast because you don't have to be as strong as Quint to be as fast as Quint but if your body weight stays the same then you still practice speed the stronger you get by a small margin but meaningful one the faster you will get big big deal.
Only one person can do this okay so they're both legs are on a bench behind them yes one is on a bench one is in the air one is in the air one is not in the air he's holding out a dumbbell with one hand and one hand is on the ground as a fist.
He's putting on extra weight. Putting his hand on a nail. And what's that in his other hand? Why not?
Will doing any of these lifts make you better at sports? Yes, but really the core basics, squatting, deadlifting, overhead pressing, rowing, doing pull-ups with added weight over time and sets of three to six reps with a maximum intent to move that is moving the weight in the concentric as fast as possible, will do most of the getting you strong. Learning technically how to pull all this stuff off and then doing it is more of like expressing your abilities. So, should you be doing the stuff Quint Stott is doing for vibes? Totally. Just sign the waiver at your gym and do it with massive assumption of risk on your part. But the training that probably got Quinn there is the basics that you can do by yourself. Now, if you want to just look strong and awesome and cool and have veins, your RP Hypertrophy app can do that for you. But if you want to be ultra super duper strong, man, train for strength and get you some genetics and willpower and giant testicles like Quint Stott. I rate Quint Stott as not human, actually a machine, an immortal god with massive balls out of 10. Don't put your hands on any nails, you guys.
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