So today we are gonna read about a sport or a game (whatever one may like to call) which , though not as famous as cricket and football, is played all over the globe, a game which involves the skill of strength, technique, endurance and resistance.
Arm Wrestling is a recognized sport with a plethora of candidates pursuing the art with the hope of basking in its glory. There have been numerous personalities who have earned recognition through the sport of arm wrestling.
Arm wrestling( or armwrestling), also known as “armfighting “ is a sport involving two participants .Each one places one arm on a surface with their elbows bent and touching the surface and they grip each other’s hand. The only goal is to pin the other’s arm onto the surface, the winner’s arm over the loser’s.
When we peep into the factors essential for one to win in a match we can find a wide spectrum which contribute to make a great arm wrestler although technique and overall arm strength are the only two factors which matter the most. Other factors such as arm length, muscle and arm mass/density, hand grip size, wrist endurance and flexibility, reaction time, as well as countless other traits, can add to the advantages of one arm wrestler over another. It’s sometimes used to prove who the stronger person between two or more people is.
If we turn over the pages of history we can see that in addition to being a semi-popular sport among high school and college students, arm wrestling was a tavern sport and the first organized competition was staged by a journalist, Bill Soberanes, in 1952 at Gilardi’s Saloon in Petaluma, California. Over the next ten years, it became bigger and bigger.
Lets add a bit of biology in our topic. Arm wrestling involves the primary use of four main muscles: biceps brachii, pronator teres, pectoralis major and flexor carpi ulnaris. Other muscles such as the deltoid, Latissimus dorsi( commonly called as Lats) and triceps brachii are also used. So when we hit the gym even if we train the other upper body muscles, other than the four main ones that I mentioned, there will be no harm, in fact one can get more advantage out of it.
Sometimes we have a common instinct to google up who’s the best (in a certain platform/field). In this case we have John Breznk, it’s not that he has never lost a match but if we analyze his matches we can say that he is the greatest overall arm wrestler. He competes in the Ultimate Armwrestling League (UAL) and is the current UAL Right-Handed champion (heavy-weight division). He won the 2015 World Armwrestling League right handed Heavyweight championship. Among experts Brzenk is widely regarded, and was also officially named by the Guinness Book of World Records, as the "Greatest Armwrestler of All Time".
When he was 16 years old he participated in his first tournament. He gained the name "Giant Crusher" for his ability to pin opponents twice his size. Brzenk started his career in 1982, and he won his first world title on ABC's 1983 Wide World of Sports when he was 18 years old. His right forearm is 16 inches in circumference, and his left is 13.5 inches. The heaviest opponent he faced weighed 660 lbs, whom he defeated. In his entire career John has only lost a single supermatch once, and only a handful of people have ever beaten him, which only happened later in his career when he was of advanced age. The most noted of them are Devon Larratt and Alexey Voyevoda. Aside from arm wrestling, he works as a mechanic at Delta Air Lines. He says the job is non-physical so his arms get plenty of rest.
Brzenk won four world championships in the heavyweight division through 1994, and gained the nickname of "Superman" for defeating much larger opponents. In 1995, he won the middleweight world championship.[13] He had an uncredited cameo in the 1987 Sylvester Stallone film “Over the Top”. The feature documentary "Pulling John", directed by Vassiliki Khonsari and Sevan Matossian, produced by Navid Khonsari, chronicles Brzenk's legendary armwrestling career and follows him intimately for 4 years during which he competes all over the world, while considering retiring.
Apart from John Breznk there are many other very famous , strong and well identified arm wrestlers
Few of them are:-
- Devon “No limit” Larratt.
- Andre pushkar( August 6, 1985- November 14, 2018)
- Denis Cyplenkov
- Michael “The Monster” Todd
- Travis “The Beast” Bagent
- Alexey Voyevoda
- Oleg Zhokh
- Levan Saginashvili and many more
We can conclude by saying that armwrestling is a sport played and practiced worldwide and just like other sports this too involves regular training and dedication for one to become a successful armwrestler.