Eddie Hall has revealed one of the most extraordinary secrets behind his historic 500kg deadlift, admitting he deliberately rubbed blood onto his gum shield to trigger an adrenaline surge before stepping onto the platform.
The former World’s Strongest Man made the revelation during an appearance on The Good, The Bad & The Rugby, where he explained the extreme mental techniques he used before becoming the first person in history to deadlift half a tonne.
Hall said his pre-lift routine was built around psychological “trigger points” designed to switch him into competition mode.
“I learned over the years that you have to have a flick switch,” he said. “When you’re putting your gum shield in, everything’s got a trigger. The mouth guard was the trigger for me. It was like, ‘Right.’
“The mouth guard would come out afterwards, and I’d relax again. It seems so trivial, but the mouth guard was my trigger to be like, ‘Right… turn the beast on,'” he said.
He then revealed a ritual he says he has never spoken about publicly before.
“I was doing some studies from universities, and it was actually a scientist that said to me, ‘If you want to pull this half a ton, you’ve got to have a massive surge of adrenaline,'” he said.
“I would do some weird sh*t. I would cut my arm or something and rub my gum shield in the blood. So, when I put the gum shield in, I would taste blood. And I haven’t said this before.
“I’d taste blood. That is a massive activator for the human mind to release adrenaline… so that’s stuff I used to do,” he said.
The blood ritual formed part of a much bigger psychological routine. Hall explained he worked with a hypnotherapist and visualised his children trapped beneath a car to generate an emotional response before attempting the lift.
“I worked with a hypnotherapist to put myself in a scenario where I would get a massive release of adrenaline,” he said.
“I’d visualise my kids trapped under a car on a motorway and me lifting the car for my kids. As I’m lifting that car, that’s me deadlifting the bar.”
Before the world-record attempt, Hall said he isolated himself backstage to complete the routine.
“I locked myself in a disabled toilet behind the stage and just stared at myself in the mirror. I was putting myself into that scenario,” he said.
“I’d grab a load of flesh on the back of my hand and twist it as hard as I could to create a huge amount of pain. That was the last spike of adrenaline before I walked out.”
Although Hall successfully completed the 500kg deadlift, he admitted the aftermath was brutal because his body was not prepared for such a huge jump.
“The most I’d ever pulled was 463kg, so to do a 37kg jump was insanity,” he said. “My mind was ready, but my body wasn’t.
“The blood pressure was unreadable. I had blood coming out of my tear ducts, my ear ducts, and I was coughing up blood backstage. It was basically a huge bleed into my head.”
Despite the horrific physical toll, Hall described the lift as three seconds that justified years of sacrifice.
“It felt like I turned Super Saiyan for a three-second period,” he said. “It was just three seconds of madness — years and years of dedication and sacrifice released into three seconds of chaos.”
Featured image credit: Eddie Hall / Instagram / The Good, The Bad & The Rugby / YouTube
