---
title: 'Exercise Scientist Critiques Magnus Midtbø: How Is He This Strong?'
source: 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=xwcUBYJzTkk'
video_id: 'xwcUBYJzTkk'
date: 2026-10-19
duration_sec: 1253
channel: 'Renaissance Periodization'
---

# Exercise Scientist Critiques Magnus Midtbø: How Is He This Strong?

> Source: [Exercise Scientist Critiques Magnus Midtbø: How Is He This Strong?](https://youtube.com/watch?v=xwcUBYJzTkk)

## Summary

In this video, Dr. Mike of RP Strength breaks down the phenomenal strength of Norwegian climber Magnus Mitbo. He dissects the physiological and anatomical reasons behind Magnus's world-record performances, emphasizing that his abilities are not magic but the result of nervous system optimization, unique tendon insertions, and cardiovascular advantages.

### Key Points

- **One-Arm Muscle-Up** [06:30] — Magnus Mitbo, a former professional rock climber, performs a one-arm muscle-upaine, which Dr. Mike calls 'truly insane' and notes requires a pull-up and dip with one arm.
- **Clapping Pull-Ups** [07:32] — Exploding from a dead hang, Magnus performs clapping pull-ups, each requiring maximum effort to create enough hang time to clap, with a goal of 15 reps.
- **Strength as a Skill** [02:43] — Dr. Mike emphasizes that strength is a skill; a person's ability to express it depends on their nervous system and experience, leading to 'farm strength' or 'climber strength'.
- **Impressive Lat Pulldown** [03:59] — Even without a large muscle mass, Magnus matched Larry Wheels on the lat pulldown machine, showcasing raw grip and pulling strength from his climbing background.
- **Tendon Insertion Advantages** [04:38] — Anatomical differences, like tendons inserting further from the joint (as in chimpanzees), can make a person unbelievably strong but potentially less quick.
- **Large Arterial Diameter** [14:32] — Tests revealed Magnus has very large arteries for his size, allowing better blood flow and waste removal, which improves muscular endurance.
- **Training Recommendation** [08:19] — For optimal strength and hypertrophy, explosive pull-ups are not superior to heavy weighted pull-ups.
- **Specific Skill Training** [09:24] — To excel at a specific skill, you must practice the skill itself and its subcomponents, like heavy weighted pull-ups and dips for muscle-ups.
- **Strict Weighted Pull-Ups Record** [12:46] — Magnus broke the Norwegian military strict pull-up record of 23 reps with 25 lbs added, achieving 23 with perfect form.
- **Demystifying Superhuman Abilities** [15:18] — Magnus's exceptional performance is not magic; physiological and anatomical explanations exist for his abilities, demystifying superhuman reps.

## Transcript

Honestly, that's absolutely insane, man. There's not too many pounds to pound here. Holy shit. That's really intense. You don't just step in with the world's strongest man and I mean, dude, I don't do rows of fat much weight.
I know that machine. The longstanding record was 22 repetitions and that was my goal to do. Completely full range of motion pull-ups. Unbelievable technique. That was a world record.
So you can say Goza breaks world records for fun. Yeah. Unreal. Unreal. Hey folks, Dr. Mike here for RP Strength.
I've been a long time professor of exercise and sports science. And I do jiu-jitsu. And I do lifting weights to make me look more vain. But I've never climbed a damn thing. Which makes me the exact opposite of today's profile.
Magnus Mipa. Which is apparently how you say it in its original Norwegian. Because you see, the youth people in America have no idea how to pronounce these words. But we draw our swords and conquer all the Norwegian peoples.
Magnus, who talks exactly like that, used to be a professional rock climber. And at some point he said, fuck that, and started making YouTube content. And boy, has he made some amazing content.
This is a man whose strength defies his physicality. He looks like a regular muscle guy. I think you do completely insane shit. How insane, you ask? Let us take a look, and let's see how we can make sense of this in a way that both of us can understand.
I've been in a similar position before, but... So this is, I think, the challenge where you're supposed to crawl all the way around back to the chair without touching the ground? Yes. Something I consider physically impossible.
But I've been wrong a few times. Holy shit. Oh! Man, he's really trying to work it out.
Alright, now he's got to peel his legs out. Yeah. Wow. That's really cool. I don't know what it quite illustrates other than the same back strength and same grip strength,
massively insane strength of the abdominals and the hip flexors. The anterior team is what that's testing. And obviously some trickery in the how to get around the chair situation.
Commonly impressed. Well, let's see if it's all trickery or actual strength. Yes. One interesting claim that you'll get from people is that there are many different kinds of strength.
There's farm strength, wrestling strength, judo strength, mountain climber strength. There is some truth to that because a lot of the way that folks express their strength, the strength is a skill,
and how you express it is a big part of what it is. If you, for example, someone has a ton of skyscrapers but no physical dollars, you say, well, they're wealthy in real estate. And that's really true.
Wealth is category specific. Now, wealth can also be kind of watered down to like, well, how many dollar bills do you have? Strength can be to some extent, but a lot of the situations specifically, a lot, but not all,
people who can do really, really impressive feats in a bunch of different sports and tasks typically also have a lot of strength in the gym. Some of them have not as much as you would think. That means their ability for their nervous system to direct the forces
specifically as needed in their activities is very high. Some of them have a crapload of gym strength, which is just amazing, and that means they can transfer their strength to a bunch of different stuff. So I think Magnus here went to go train with Mr. Ray Ray Wheels,
who's just kind of one of the strongest people around, and we'll find out how his strength compares. As you can see, Larry is repping the stack for his working set, which is no surprise. But what is a surprise is the rock climber also doing the same.
What the hell? I don't know where I'm going, actually. Holy shit. So he weighs 165. 165 pounds, repping the stack with a very good technique,
crazy full range of motion, no swinging. Dude, I don't think I can do that. And so, like, you know, my back is, like, way bigger than Magnus' neck. But how the hell does that work? Well, the big differentiating factor is two things.
The nervous system, right? So his nervous system is optimized for vertical pulling. It's an incredibly high-skill thing he's done for a really long time. That's a huge part of it. I guess three parts. The second part is potentially architecture.
His tendons could insert a little bit further up the bone, away from the joint, than the rest of ours, which means he is unbelievably strong, potentially not as quick as he could be,
but way, way stronger. That's the thing you see in some of the primate species, like chimpanzees, have tendons that insert further away from the bones, and they're, like, way irrationally strong for how not that jacked they are. And they don't weigh a ton either, which I've been basically calling Magnus the chimp.
But in performance, shit, man, I wouldn't get in a cage with that motherfucker. and the last thing is pure madness something I have nothing of and something madness seems to have extra of because he Norwegian and descended from the Viking peoples Which makes tons of sense Yeah but before he pointing it down 165 you never 160 never done this in your
entire life, a single rep. Oh my god. Is Eddie laughing? He's like, what the f*** is going on? That's really
intense. You don't just step in with the world's strongest man, and I mean, dude, I don't do rows with that much weight. I know that machine. I'm good at three plates, maybe four. That's why I play for the fight. And
just raw grip. Climber's grip strength is a completely different situation. Absolutely unbelievable. That's absolutely insane, right?
It might just make pounds of poundage. I like how he's like, yeah, this is what it is. And then he switches to the English accent. Oh, sorry, British. You're a fucking cunt.
This is my hardest claspenic challenge. The one-arm muscle-up. Okay, can't do that. Any part of that, as a matter of fact. That's wild. Guys, remember, a muscle-up with two hands is very impressive.
One hand is just truly insane. That means, by the way, he's doing a pull-up and a dip with just one arm. One after the other.
I like what the other arm is doing. If you look at it, it's like, guys! While I was happy with my first attempt, I felt like I needed another one to perfect my technique.
Regrip. That's nuts. That's nuts. I would have just like folded over the bar by them. Just kidding. I would have never gotten up that high. Let me know which one had better form in the comments.
They were both great. 1, 6, 15. Okay, so he has to touch his hands back down to his legs every time, I guess. I mean, yeah,
wild. You have to produce enough power to get enough hang time to clap your hands on your legs. So each one of these is like maximum max effort. Phenomenal. Full range of motion. It's hard enough
to do pull-ups, but explosive pull-ups, that's a whole different category. 17. Come on, go. Just keep going. 18. Keep going. Keep going. 19.
It didn't give him the record there, did it, Scott? Yeah, I can't figure out what the deal with that counter was, if they were not counting those or what. Not high enough. It's not sharp and impressive. Very, very impressive. Should you be doing these lifts in your own training?
We can come at this from two perspectives. One is if you want to get really strong and really jacked, should you be doing explosive pull-ups like that? You could. They're probably not going to offer you any really crazy advantage
over just putting a lot of weight on your weight belt and doing the damn thing. So probably you can incorporate them, but there's nothing magical about them here. If you want to get good at the skill of doing these explosive clapping pull-ups,
absolutely you have to practice them and often. A lot of times these guys with amazing genetics will show up to a random event and kind of try it for the first time. If you want to get good at anything, practicing that event or kind
of subcomponents of it are a real swell idea. So for example, if you want to do really really amazing muscle ups, you've got to do lots of pull-ups with weight with a high velocity at the top and you've got to do lots of dips with weight with a
a very massive explosion from the bottom. You combine those two strengths, and you have to train the entire muscle-up as well, that pull-up-to-dip combo. If you do all three kinds of training,
heavy-weighted pull-ups explosively, heavy-weighted dips pretty explosively, and muscle-ups themselves, it kind of forms a trifecta of getting you amazing at muscle-ups. So you could just have ball or dip abilities,
ball or pull-up abilities, or big back, mass, and triceps, and be able to knock off a few muscle-ups It's just gone pure athleticism because you're the man. But if you want to get really, really good at something, you have to train its subcomponents, in this case,
massive pulling and pushing strength from those angles and the thing itself. Practicing the thing itself is also ultra important. If you want to become a good rock climber, you've got to climb a lot. If you want to become really, really good at muscle-ups,
you've got to do a whole bunch of muscle-ups, man, multiple times a week is the key. All right. Let's go tell the tech. grip events
suck. It looks like it's not impressive, you guys, but it's damn near impossible. You got the coke handle looking thing and you have to just kind of grab it and slink it off with like a hundred and some odd pounds It is super super difficult to do And failure on it it kind of like your fingers just unravel and there not shit to do about it
There's only so much motivation and focus you can have until you either can or can't do the thing. This is real tough stuff. Come on. Aha. Why not? Why the f*** not?
Climbers are undefeated. Okay, so that was crushing rip, right? This one looks like to be pinch grip, maybe. Let's find out. It's always a harder grip when there's not as much weight on the implement.
Ah! Ah! Scott, my fingers. It's so brutal. Yeah, this is pinch grip. So you basically have to do one of these little alligator things. I mean, like, the way in which your body is probably the weakest at gripping stuff,
so if you're strong here, holy shit. The RP Hypertrophy app comes with a number of premium programs from two days of training per week all the way up to six days of training with specialized programs included for shoulders, arms, chops, back, legs, abs, and glutes, each one with male and female options.
You get them all and can use them as often as you like, even building off of them to make your own customized version for only about a dollar a day. Click on the link in the description of this video to get started. and also you know his grip has to be strong for it to just fly out without much velocity like
yeah it flew out of my hand it would just slowly leak out yeah this was like wow yeah there's a lot of force there oh no i did my thumb i hate watching injuries happen i'm gonna probably zoom in on it
They didn't. Yeah. Yeah. Magnus just did 75. Of course he bled on it. I don't care if I bleed. I'm a Viking. The other guy's bleeding more. That's if he could take the day.
Scott, if we drank that blood, do you think we could do more pull-ups? I hope so. Mm-hmm. Magnus just did 75.5 pounds. Put them above the entire record of 73.
That was a world record. See, he just goes and breaks world records for fun reasons. Yeah. Unreal. Unreal. This test has been around for years in the Norwegian military. Strict pull-ups with 11.25 kilos added weight.
Damn, the Norwegian military is totally shit. 25-pound pull-ups. This is gonna get wacky, I think. The long-standing record was 23 repetitions. And that was my goal to do.
Completely full range of motion pull-ups. Unbelievable technique. all the way up and down, head clear over the bar. Holy fuck. And remember, the record is 23. Scott, remember back in the old days we did some videos
about various folks playing various pull-up numbers? Yeah. And it's like, am I dead? No, you couldn't. Because as soon as you put some good technique standards to it, as soon as you put some weight on these markers, you ain't doing no 80 pull-ups anymore.
You're doing 23. So we'll find out how many Magnus gets for eight-mile-per-words. Extra credit?
The door to the grind is what's crazy. Nuts. So he's fast twitch and slow twitch at the same time, which makes no sense. He's like extra crediting the top. That's insane. He's hanging out there.
Oh, he's got it all day. He's got many more. He just like stopped.
How do you explain his fast switch load for his ability to grind? He's just better? He's just better. Sometimes he's just better. Some folks are able to summate a shitload of force and have really good endurance.
The best of all worlds is somewhat of a possibility if you're gifted. This is really incredible stuff. This is so great for me. Archery. Yeah. and you have actually the same diameter as the mesh you have on, 4.4 mm.
Really? Yeah. And that is huge. It is huge. It is huge compared to your size. You said it's like, if you like, for the thermal artery for other people. For other people having their legs, I have my arms. Yeah. Interesting. So, he can perfuse more blood around his muscles because his arteries are larger,
which makes a ton of sense. That means whatever strength his muscles have for one rep, they're likely to keep a large fraction of it, a bigger fraction of it than the rest of us can, because after every rep, waste products are removed much more rapidly from the area,
and things like oxygen and carbohydrates, etc., are delivered much more rapidly to the area. Very, very fascinating. Every time someone is bigger and or stronger and or capable of more things,
there is a physiological and anatomical explanation. So this isn't magic. He's not like some kind of total freak. He just that goddamn good for obvious reasons in retrospect of measuring his tissues and saying you just are able to clear your blood flow way better and so he probably doesn accumulate metabolites nearly as fast as the rest of us Which means interestingly enough for him it very tougher to push his muscles closer to the limit which also explains why he not super jacked but ultra capable
Scott, wouldn't it be a tragedy if all he wanted to do was be like a classic physique pro? He's like leg pressing 8,000 and benching 435 to close grip, and he still looks like, man, he looks pretty good, you know? Goddamn.
Maybe that's not the difference. Is it because of the training or I was born like this? It may be part of your talent. It may have a huge factor. Locals call this cave Hellhole. Scott, you want to go to somewhere called Hellhole?
So this is my one phobia right here, what he's doing. And what's inside is truly terrifying. After entering and crawling through numerous tight squeezes for around an hour, you arrive at the corkscrew, the tightest squeeze.
Birthing canal. Nothing I want to see named, ever. The only way I'm going to back up a burning canal is... Ah, too much for YouTube.
Not that. Absolutely not. This was so tight, I almost got stuck.
Good news. If you get stuck by a small margin, your dehydration over time will make you physically smaller, Scott. And you'll probably... What a ruse. Yeah. It's just going to take a few hours of panic.
Or you never get unstuck and you slowly shit yourself and die. Oh, come on. Never. Probably. What a way to go, though. You know what I mean? What a way to go. Honestly, this entire time, I was thinking dehydration was bad for me.
which is why during my workouts I always take a packet of Element which is a proprietary blend of electrolytes and flavors that you can put into any other liquid including water and instantly make it
the optimal rehydration beverage and it's today's sponsor. But if you're going spelunking maybe have your Element on hand but when you get stuck in one of these shifts give your Element to a friend and start screaming for dear life
so that you sweat faster making yourself actually Scott if you sweat you become more lubricated and physically smaller in all of your proportions because you're getting shrunken down.
I'm going to say something, Scott, that I might regret. Shitting yourself is probably going to help both with lubrication and making you smaller. So just consider it. Look, Scott, do you want a weird story about how you shot yourself
or do you want to die in the middle of a mountain? Yeah, true. Exactly. Next was the draw. a 50 feet vertical part where one slip would be a complete disaster. Oh, they got a rope. Whatever. I'm kidding.
Oh, wow. Oh, my. That is cool. Then, after a few more tight squeezes, we arrived at the legendary Hall of Faces. Oh, shit!
I knew there was nothing Christian about this. Oh, shit. Oh, something Christian. Folks, there is still more videos to come, but if you want a longer, more extended, harder, more uncut,
dingier and juicier version of this very video, we have it in our member section along with tons of other amazing content, a little bit of money, a ton of value. See you over there. Okay, fine. Back to video.
Oh, I can't. If someone was like, hey, Mike, for a trillion dollars, I'd be like, no, no, the answer's no. And not because I don't want to, it's because it's impossible. Ah!
Insane. Already insane. I guess the next thing he goes up is that little chode thing right above him. Which would be also insane. Yeah, sure is.
Urban bouldering. Highly impressive. Hey, you don't have to go out of your way to do it. You can just do it on every freeway over town. Folks, how do you rank someone when they are physically made of molecularly sized goats?
Magnus Petba is out there doing crazy shit. I highly encourage you to subscribe to his YouTube channel so you can be shown that they're men and they're gods. I don't know which one of those, it's a piece that's been described as a child in a man's body, but not a man's height, he's like four foot eight and a half.
Magnus Mitba, Goated Norwegian Viking King out of 12. Let's see that next time. Woo!
Scott, that was so fun. I might want to go to Norway to climb random boulders. Whoa. And when I inevitably die doing that, you guys can still catch me in one of these videos here.
See you another time.