A short YouTube interview (Rob Moore with Eddie Hall) in which Eddie names Ed Cohen as his pick for pound‑for‑pound strongest lifter, cites Ed Cohen as ~70 kg deadlifting ~420 kg, and recounts his own deadlift progression (420 kg at age 21, later reaching ~460 kg then 500 kg). The conversation emphasizes training structure (alternating heavy and speed weeks), recovery needs that increase with age (Eddie states ~10 days to recover from a maximal deadlift), and practical guidance for recreational trainees about listening to the body and using deloads.
Questions this video answers
Ed Cohen.
He said Ed Cohen weighed about 70 kilograms and deadlifted 420 kg.
420 kilograms.
He mentions getting up to 460 kg within a year of changing programming and later pulling 500 kg.
About 10 days to recover from a maximum deadlift effort.
Chapters
Who is, pound for pound, the strongest person you've ever seen? Pound for pound.
I'm gonna go with a gentleman called Ed Cohen.
Ah, that surprises me. Yeah, I thought you might say Magnus. He's a bit of a beast, isn't he?
No, no, no. So, Ed Cohen. Yeah, give him a Google. Ed Cohen, phenomenal power lifter from back in the day. So I'm sure he weighed. He weighed something like 70 kilo. And he was deadlifting. 420.
Wow.
Like, just the most ridiculous, like, pound to, like, body weight ratio you've ever seen. So I'm gonna say a pound for pound, strongest moon that's ever been. Ed Cohen.
And how do you think he got that strong then that lighter weight?
Dedication, firstly, having that mindset of pushing the boundaries, but a little bit of genetics, you know, good bone structures, good cartilage strength and everything else. We're long arms, you know, to help you lift longer off the floor. But mainly I would just say mindset, you know, just a bloke that's like, right, I'm gonna do something so drastically different to everybody else and push the boundaries harder than everybody else. Putting those extra hours in the gym, eating those extra bits of, you know, meat and proteins and whatever else. So that's what sets apart a champion from a loser, his mindset.
Right, how do you push yourself to the absolute limits, but not over train, get injured and go back?
That's a real tough one. So pushing yourself to the absolute limits when you are young is great. It's no downside. Oh, man, it's great.
Yeah.
I remember being 21 years of age, 22 years of age. I would train all week. I would then go out the weekend, get blasted up on cocaine, whatever else. I would compete on the weekend as well and on strongman competitions, and then I'd be back in the gym Monday. And I do that quite religiously.
Yeah.
And then I think you got to like age 26, stop the drugs about that age. But I'd say by age 26, like you do, you do a week of training, you do your competition and you need a week off. And then when you hit 36, it's two weeks off, you know, and you just feel age and growth hormones and like that. That ability to recover diminishes so fast. So you've got to listen to your body.
Right?
And I would say, when I was a teenager, I don't honestly do think there's any such thing as over training, because I would train for 3, 4 hours every single night after a 10 hour shift at work and then I'd go work the doors till, you know, eight at night, till two in the morning, I'd go to bed for four hours, I'd get up and do it all again. And I'd do that for years, up until I was like 25, 26, and I felt invincible. And then as I say, you just, you know, like they say, the, the human body ages at certain brackets. And I think that's the same with, with sport. You sort of have brackets like 16 to say 24. You know, you're in this bracket of like, you can recover from anything within three days. And then once you get past 24 to say 32, you're in another bracket where it takes you maybe five, six days to recover. So you've just got to listen to your body, you know, you've got to, you've got to.
What does that mean?
So if you're feeling sore and you're going into the gym to train that body part again, maybe you shouldn't be doing it right. If you've got a niggle, you got a little injury in your arm or, you know, your back sore or whatever, sometimes you just got to be like, right, I'm going to take today off and that will do me more good having a day off than going and training hard. I mean, for me now, at my size, at my age, I'm 37, I mean, there'd be days, I've worked with coaches in the past where, you know, we'll do weights in the morning, we'll do swimming in the afternoon, and they'll do fight training in the evening. And you know, you do that for a few weeks and you destroyed and you realize you, you can have the weekend. I know you want you in Saturday morning and you go in Saturday morning and then you've absolutely fried and you've burnt out. Yeah. And you just, you know, you, you, you, you're going backward. So you've got to, you've got to, you got to listen to yourself and sometimes you got to tell coaches off sometimes and be like, no, like, I'm tired, my back hurts, I've got a bad foot, I need this session off or I need a week off. You just got to listen to your body. That's, that's the number one thing is listen to your body. If you're, if you're training through injuries and you're turning up to sessions already fucked, then you're probably doing something wrong.
And should you, if you're just an ordinary person, Training, but you want to progress. Should you be progressing every session or is that unrealistic? And, you know, obviously I'm, you know, I'm not a Greek statue, but I do try and work out a bit. And sometimes I can bang out 12 good chin ups and sometimes I can only get eight out. And I'm thinking there's no point doing my workout today because I'm not progressing. Or is it just because I'm maybe not hydrated? It's maybe just I'm not feeling good and I should carry on training. See what I mean? Should you always be progressing?
Yeah. So I'll tell you a story that'll proper resonate with that. So I would say, age 21, I hit a 420 kilo deadlift. Wow. At 21 years of age. I then came back every single week, every single Thursday, I'd come in the week and I'd try and beat 420 kilo. So what, what would happen? Every single week I'd come back and pull 420. Sometimes it'd be done easy, sometimes it that you've done hard.
Yeah.
But anytime I put any more weight on like 4:30, I'd fail.
Right.
And I did this for four years.
Oh, wow.
Right. And it wasn't until somebody actually just like spoke to me, is all right, slow down a minute, take a step back. The human, and this is what broke it down for me is like the human body cannot recover from a maximal deadlift within seven days. It takes 10 days to recover from a maximum deadlift effort. So with that in mind, that's all he said to me. And then with that in mind, I went away and was like, right, how the can I get around this then? So what I worked out is, is I do a week of heavy and a week of speed. So I do a week of heavy lifting where I do, I don't know, and then implemented reps. I do like a week of like say 5 reps at 400 kilo. And the next week I'd do 8 sets of 2 at like 50, like 210 kilo or whatever and just do it as fast as I could. And that way I'm still training the fast twitch fibers, but I'm allowing the body to actually recover.
Right.
And once I implemented that, that was, I'm gonna say when I was 26, something like that, within, within a year I got up to 460 kilos. And then I use that method to go on and on and eventually pull 500. And it was just that that one person said to me, it's like your body just cannot recover from the maximum left every, every week. So you've gotta, you gotta go back to the drawing board and think. And that'll be the same with your pull ups.
Right.
So you've gotta, you've gotta treat your body like if you think your body can come back every week and give maximum effort, it just can't takes more than seven days because you're ripping all that muscle, all that fiber.
Yeah.
It's gonna take you 10 days to recover from that. So you've got to do something in the. To carry you over whilst it's still repairing.
Right. So one week heavy, one week fast.
I would say that works a lot for this is why like we have heavy weeks and deload weeks, you know, it doesn't work for everything. I say with bench you're better off just staying heavy, heavy, heavy, heavy. Then have a deload week, you know, because it's such a smaller muscle group.
Right.
So you can perhaps get away with it. Lack pull ups lats. It's quite a big muscle group. So you know it's got to, you got to factor it in. Legs is a big muscle group. So again I'd do like a week of heavy, a weaker speed, those kind of things.
