It’s been a while since I wrote about Brad Castleberry or since he did anything newsworthy. He started posting realistic-looking gym videos, with him actually struggling with weights and seemingly turning over a new marketing leaf for all future posts….oh, almost forgot! He is now sponsored by Bang energy drink. Which is such a stupidly perfect fit that it’s not even funny. It’s just one of those “yeah…that makes perfect sense” scenarios.
Now, Brad is seemingly at it again with a new topless video in which he lifts a seemingly ridiculous amount of weight with horrible form. This time, it was the gun show, the bicep curls! I’ve written in detail about why I think Brad is either not being honest or is just the worst person to lift weights in the history of modern-day fitness. So I’ll just give you a brief summary of my Castleberry-thesis.
His best-recorded lifts all happened around the 2008-2014 time frame. After that, his videos never show him go up in weight. It’s always the same amount of reps, the same weight, the same bar movement speed, the same(usually very sloppy) technique and the same amount of effort.
Which brought my article to 2 conclusions; A) he is a liar that has at some point in time used clever social media magic to make it seem like he is lifting more than he really is or B) he’s horrible at lifting, because if he never used fake plates that would mean that he’s been stalling on nearly all of his lifts somewhere between 6 to 12 years.
Now, I will once more attempt to explain why the math just doesn’t add up when talking about Brad Casteberry’s records and Instagram videos. First, off…this isn’t the first time he’s curled 4 plates, he’s been cheat curling 4 plates since at least 2015. Which again, brings me to my thesis-he either at some point between 2015 and 2020 manipulated the weights to make it look like he can curl more than he actually can, or… for some reason hasn’t progressed in weight lifting AT ALL. This would mean the last time he made progress on a gym lift Obama was the President of United States and Donald Trump was just a reality tv star.
Now let’s compare Bradley’s cheat curl with a world strict curl champion, the Arm-wrestling monster from Ukraine, Denis Cyplenkov. Denis is a force to be reckoned with in the world of arm wrestling and is best known for having comically large hands, twice the size of a normal human being. He is so thick and powerful that he can crush walnuts with his bare hands. In 2015, Denis strict curled 113kg which, according to google is still the world record in strict bicep curling.
Now let’s get back to Brad Castleberry for a second, after all, this article is about him. Breaking down his 4 plate curl into numbers would look something like this; 4 x 20kg is 80kg, which multiplied by 2 gets you 160kg in plates alone. Now let’s assume that the bar he is curling on is 10 kg and we get 170kg of weight in Brad’s hands. So if my gym math is correct, Brad’s 4 plate bicep cheat curl would equal to about 170(ish)kg.
Here’s Denis Cyplenkov cheat curling that weight, notice that unlike Brad he is wearing a belt and is actually struggling to move the weight.
The best way to treat Castleberry’s “world record” lifts is to treat it like it’s a Big Foot sighting. Until you either see a live one running around in the woods or see a dead body of a 7 ft tall missing link between man and the apes, it’s probably not real. Thinking about it a bit more, Brad’s lifts are the Big Foot sightings of the fitness industry. They are always shrouded in mystery and hype, you can even see footage of it, but something just doesn’t add up and in the end, it’s more than likely that it’s just a guy curling fake plates.
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