You take it for granted, but your body is a freak of nature.
The architecture, composition, and ability of the human body are truly mind-bending.
It takes around 100,000 miles of plumbing in the form of arteries, veins, and capillaries to distribute blood around the individual, none of them are extra or vestigial.
What can a human body produce in one second? Twenty-five million cells—25 million highly complex, high-functioning cells.
The orbicularis oculi of the eye are considered the fastest muscle in the body, responsible for the blinking reflex. A blink takes just 100-150 milliseconds.
Moreover, there are specially-skilled and talented individuals that a cut above the rest. We’ll look into some of them here.
Cristiano Ronaldo (Football Superstar)
There are excellent athletes. Then there are those that are a cut above the rest, lording over their sport with total control. These are your Michael Jordans, Tiger Woods, and Michael Phelps.
In 2011, a team of sports scientists looked into the physical specimen that was then 26-year-old, Cristiano Ronaldo. The Portuguese spiker who won multiple football accolades including “The Player of the Century” and multiple “Ballon d'Or,” was at the peak of his career and researchers wanted to get a peek “under the hood” and discover what made this football superstar tick.
Scientists put Ronaldo under the microscope and tested several aspects of his fitness and came to a startling conclusion. The man just might be superhuman—an all-around athlete.
He ran almost as fast as a professional sprinter, running 25 meters in 3.61 seconds. That’s fast!
He jumps 78 cm. That’s higher than an average NBA player can jump.
His body is just 7% body fat. (That’s 3% less than the average football player.)
His muscle mass is 50%. (That’s 4% more than the average football player.)
He kicks the ball at a speed of 80 miles per hour.
And most importantly, he can score a goal even when they turn off the lights at the exact moment of a pass.
Cristiano Ronaldo, it seems, is a perfect blend of body strength, mental ability, technique, and skill.
(The findings are presented in a documentary entitled, “Ronaldo: Tested to the Limit.”)
Ashrita Furman (Man on A Mission)
Ashrita Furman is not a household name, he doesn’t hold hundred-million-dollar contracts for any sports team. But he holds the Guinness World Record for the most number of Guinness World Records.
Furman was born in 1954, the year Guinness World Records was conceived—the same year Roger Bannister broke the four-minute mile.
Growing up, Furman was always fascinated with the feats of record-holders, knowing it required tremendous amounts of physical training and mental discipline to be the best in the world at one thing. Not being a physically gifted fellow made him think he had no chance at any of the records.
But as it happens, Furman also got into the practice of self-transcendence and realized that any limitation can be overcome. Since then, Furman made it his life’s mission to break one record after another. His first was doing the most number of consecutive jumping jacks, which he set at 6 hours and 45 minutes (and around 27,000 jumping jacks).
The feat got him a spot in the Guinness World Records 1980 edition, next to Nadia Comaneci—the perfect gymnast.
Since then, over the decades, Ashrita Furman has broken over 600 records and currently holds 200 of them.
A truly amazing human being!
The World’s Strongest Men
It would be very difficult to determine without a shadow of a doubt who the world’s strongest man is. For one, strength could be displayed in a wide number of ways—lifting the heaviest weight being just one of them. (Holding that weight the longest is another. Lifting the weight the most number of times is yet another. Or how about measuring pulling force instead?)
With the body made of distinct parts, one can have different strengths relative to others, like one’s legs can have power independent of the arms.
But if we are to look for the strongmen of our time, a good bet would be at the World’s Strongest Man competition. It’s a multi-discipline competition that features tasks like car deadlifts, bus pull, flintstone carry, etc.
From this, we get names like Tom Stoltman, Martins Licis, Oleksii Novikov, Eddie Hall, Mariusz Pudzianowski, and many more.
And let’s not forget Paul Anderson, who in 1957 lifted 6,270 lbs., the greatest weight ever lifted.
Whoever the strongest man of all time truly is, there’s only one thing for sure, you don’t want to be on his bad side.
The World’s Fittest Men and Women
Fitness is not just about strength. It’s about stamina, endurance, and the ability to execute complex movements at high intensity. That means a lot of cardio.
You’ve probably heard of stories of men as big as the hulk left in the dust by Ironman triathletes. The Ironman program involves more varied disciplines that include a 3.86-kilometer swim, 180.25-kilometer bike ride, and 42.20-kilometer run.
As an athlete of this sort, you better be comfortable with discomfort and pain—when your heart is threatening to jump out of your chest and your lungs are gasping for air, for hours. It takes serious dedication to prepare one’s body for these punishing tasks. And so we celebrate the men and women who give us a peek into the potential greatness of the human body.
As of late, we’ve got the likes of Allistair Brownlee and Javier Gomez for the men, Laura Philipp, and Sara Svensk for the women. The men finish the disciplines in 7 hours (and change), and the women do theirs for 8 hours (and change).
Then there’s also the CrossFit Games where they crown the winners to be the “Fittest Man/Woman on Earth.” The competition is composed of a wide range of grueling events that test a person’s cardio, dexterity, strength, speed, and technique. They have disciplines like running, biking, swimming, weight lifting, rowing, carries, rope climbs, weighted lunges, weighted pulls, pull-ups, handstand push-ups, etc.
So a pretty intense, all-around workout for the body.
We’ve got legends in the sport like Mat Fraser, who won “Fittest Man on Earth” a record 5 times.
For the women, we have Tia-Clair Toomey who’s won the “Fittest Woman on Earth” 6 times—a feat in and of itself.
Cirque du Soleil
For every child who’s ever been in a big tent with clowns sliding into exploding canons, trapeze artists taking your breath away, and acrobats displaying precision and strength, the circus is an experience of a lifetime.
Cirque du Soleil is not your grandmother’s circus. Gone are the tigers and elephants, but front and center are human skill and artistry. It is the world’s most prolific circus-theatre company, featuring a flourish of fantastic acrobatic performances that can only be performed by the best and most skilled dancers and contortionists.
The numbers are death-defying, breathtaking, and mind-bending—an exhibition of what the human body can do when one submits it to the rigors of training and practice.
The members of the company, though we might never know their names, are some of the most disciplined and skilled athletes in an artistic role. And they deserve the accolades for the heights that they have taken the art. For it takes total dedication to one’s craft to mount a performance on a nightly basis.
In this piece, we highlighted folks with a once-in-a-generation talent or skill. But that’s not the whole story. Humans share 99+% genetic similarities. The differences that we see—musculature, height, skin color, etc.—are but a tiny fraction of the genetic code.
If the names mentioned above reached heights of greatness, it’s because they have dedicated thousands of untold hours in practice and training. Ashrita Furman, the man with over 200 Guinness World Records looks like your average grandfather, but because he consistently trained his mind and his body, he’s able to do a whole lot with what he has.
And it all starts with good health.
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