Hafthor Bjornsson of Iceland competes at the Truck Pull event during the World's Strongest Man competition. Photo / Getty Images.
Hafthor Bjornsson of Iceland competes at the Truck Pull event during the World's Strongest Man competition. Photo / Getty Images.
Two blokes. Three Days. $1123 of meat, rice and health.
That's the crazy situation American fitness guru Matt Wenning finds himself in alongside World's Strongest Man stars Brian Shaw and Game of Thrones' Hafthor "The Mountain" Bjornsson.
Two of the most popular World's Strongest Man competitors are training with Wenning, a private strength, coach at a gym in Columbus, Ohio, as part of their final preparations for this weekend's Arnold Classic — an international strong-man competition named after body-building legend Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Wenning announced his training camp with Bjornsson and Shaw on Instagram, posting an image of the groceries that were needed to fuel the pair's workouts.
He claims the bill for three days of groceries came to $1123 (US$880).
Shaw, a four-time winner of the World's Strongest Man competition, won last year's Arnold Classic — and has posted a series of workouts recently where he claims to be in peak physical shape for the contest.
He even claims one of the video previews shows him producing a new world record for the heaviest deadlift session ever recorded alongside training partner Jean-Francois Caron from Canada.
Shaw, who finished third in last year's World's Strongest Man competition behind England's Eddie Hall and Bjornsson, recently revealed his freakish 12,000 calories-per-day diet that has helped him become one of the biggest physical freaks on the planet.
Shaw revealed last year he eats more than three-times the number of calories Hollywood star Dwane "The Rock" Johnson consumes per day.
The 203cm, 192kg behemoth takes in more than 12,000 calories per day worth of peanut butter, protein shakes, beef and more peanut butter to achieve the status of the strongest man on Earth.
"I'm just eating to be the strongest human being on the planet," Shaw said in a YouTube video as he highlighted his first meal consisting of cereal, eggs and peanut butter.
"This meal, even though it's got eight eggs, it doesn't really fill me up. I get through it pretty quickly and then I'm hungry again."
Shaw said the eating side of his career is by far the hardest, shrugging off backbreaking dead lift training as "fun".
"Eating is the hard part. It's constant — you don't ever stop from the time you wake up you eat until you go to bed. Then I wake up in the morning and the first thing I do is eat and do it all day again.
"People think the training is the hard part, it's not really. That's fun, I can get loose and do what I want to do. I only get to train for a few hours, maybe during the day."
The man-giant explained his sixth meal — a huge feed of pizza takeaway and soft drink — was suggested by his dietitian to eat before big training days. On other days, the 35-year-old eats a giant plate of beef, potatoes and asparagus instead.
