Who do you think has the most impressive squat of all time?
My two votes are for:
Fred Hatfield - 1014 lb squat @ ~250 lb bw and ~48 years old. Also, basically raw with ace bandages for knee wraps.
Ray Williams - 1069 lb squat in sleeves in the IPF so he is at least drug tested, and strictly judged.
Let me know your candidates!
Hatfield wore a squat suit. It was obviously impressive and the best at that time, but it has since been surpassed. Nobody can squat more than Ray Williams without knee wraps, so he is the best for sure. Jezza Uepa isn’t far behind though. I’m sure both of those guys could squat more than Vlad Alhazov if they used wraps and a monolift.
Didn’t know Hatfield was wearing a suit! Still super impressive.
Joe Bradley - 650 @ 132
What’s the most he officially squatted? I heard he squatted 1200 or so in either an exhibition or training, but there is no video that I’m aware of and we don’t know to what standards the lift was performed. There was nobody else close to his level of strength at that time, it would have been interesting to see what he could do with more pressure on him.
I read some articles and interviews with Paul Anderson, he said that the reason he used those wheels was so that he wouldn’t get crushed if he failed a squat.
Is that raw or what? Either way it’s crazy, 5x bodyweight. Yesterday I did a walkout with 615, it was fucking heavy and I weight over 100lbs more than him.
Crappy single ply suit almost a singlet, old school knee wraps. They probably gave him 50 lbs.
Nothing as far as I know; powerlifting was in it’s infancy and he was a weightlifter/exhibition lifter. But at the time he broke on the scene, 500lbs in the squat was considered big numbers.
Paul was trained by Bob Peoples, who was a big fan of range of motion progression. Along with the wagon wheels, Paul squatted with 55lb drums while standing in a hole, and would fill the hole with dirt to increase ROM. Just crazy inventive stuff.
Assuming Ray weighs ~360 lbs he gets more wilks points than Joe Bradley. Since he is Raw and heavier and still gets more points, I have to give the more impressive squat to Ray.
You don’t hear many people using this training method anymore. I think Greg Nuckols just wrote an article about it working very well for his deadlift. I believe he just used different blocks (doesn’t sound nearly as cool).
It’s a big part of my training. It’s pretty much exclusively how I train the squat and deadlift, but I don’t powerlift anymore, so there’s that.
3 x bodyweight vs. 4.9 x bodyweight. Really? OK
Yep. That is what Wilks is for!
The larger you get the lower your relative strength. Is a 150 lb lifter deadlifting 450 more impressive than Eddy Hall deadlifting 1100 at 400 lbs. Eddy doesn’t even get to 3X bw, but I haven’t been to a powerlifting meet where a smaller lifter doesn’t hit 3X. Why was Hall’s lift a big deal then?
This is the kind of argument that isn’t going to go anywhere. Going by multiples of bodyweight favors lighter lifters and Wilks favors absolute weight lifted, which will obviously be more with bigger lifters. Ray Williams weighs around 400, he hasn’t even squatted 3x bodyweight but nobody is squatting more than him.
NSS, we all know what the wilks score is.
But the title of the thread was “… most impressive squat…”, not highest wilks score (which is a man made metric to be able to compare lifts among lifters of different body weights). Impressive implies an emotional reaction in the observer.
Andrezj Stanaszek 662 (300.5k) in the 114 weight class. Believe he weighed in at 110lbs so a 6x BW squat. No knee wraps. Believe no suit as well. IPF.
Most impressive per bodyweight, but not the most impressive in my opinion. Just wanted to throw his name out there for the bodyweight guys… and he was a midget, so then you can argue his proportions. Believe he also benched 391 with no shirt. Great lifter
Ok, I can go with that. I think I have seen the relative strength vs wilks argument too many times anyways.
If we are getting away from pure powerlifting; Tom Platz’s squats were pretty deep, and I think he did 23 reps at 525, and I don’t think his bodyweight was above 250.
That was in an exhibition with Fred Hatfield, Fred squatted more than Platz for a max single but Platz did more reps with the lighter weight. The question is which is better? In powerlifting it doesn’t matter what you can squat for 20+ reps, only your best single in counted. But if you aren’t into powerlifting then rep maxes are arguably more important.
Now imagine if Platz had stopped bodybuilding and came over to the dark side. Hmmmmm?
