Behind the scenes training with Luke Fullbrook; a strongman competitor and former training partner of Worlds Strongest Man – Eddie Hall.
Strongman Luke Fullbrook
As part of the How to Train Like series I’ve been creating on my YouTube channel, I got the opportunity to work with Luke Fullbrook on an episode around Strongman training. Luke is a personal trainer, that works and trains out Strength Asylum gym in Stoke on Trent. This is a gym that is legendary in the UK amongst many professional athletes, strongmen competitors, bodybuilders and much more.
Luke has been training for Strongman for over 10 years, and competed at very high level at both national level and at European masters competitions. He even qualified for World’s Strongest Man, but at the time chose to decline as he knew wasn’t quite at the level he wanted to be. He is perhaps best known for being a long time training partner with World’s Strongest Man and World record deadlift holder Eddie Hall. Luke has trained with Eddie for over 7 years and helped him prepare for competitions. You may also recognise him as one of Eddie’s coaching team on the Facebook video series called “Beasted”.
Train Like a Strongman
Luke is currently at the start of a 12 week training camp to prepare for England’s strongest man in May 2020. He is aiming to not only win the competition, but also to capture several masters world records, including the log press, deadlift and overall lift total. I joined him at Strength Asylum on “rep week” which was lighter weights, higher volume. During this training session he trained deadlifts, squat, frame carry and a shield carry. In between sets, I was able to get a lot of insights from Luke into his training, methodology/programming and so much more.
Redefining expectations
At around 130 kg in weight, a massive physique, tattoos, shaved head and a beard – Luke strikes a fairly formidable and imposing figure, especially when grimacing through some heavy lifts. I was apprehensive about working with him, as outside of a few introductory messages online my correspondence with him had been pretty lean – limited to agreeing times and places to make the video.
However upon meeting him, I was pleasantly surprised by his friendly personality and even softly spoken character. You would be forgiven for making a snap judgement on seeing Luke that he is going to be a typical “gym rat” or “meat head” that’s all muscles and little substance. But Luke is clearly very well educated on physical training, passionate about nutrition, and has a wealth of experience of training at the highest level of his sport. To top this off, his thoughts were extremely organised and he articulates himself extremely well, which makes for really interesting viewing.
You can see more from Luke at his Instagram page here: https://www.instagram.com/fullstrength001/
