On Feb 15, George Hood, a 62-year-old former US Marine broke the world planking record with a time of 8hr 15min 15sec in Chicago, Illinois. Adding an extra 14 minutes on to the earlier record, Hood says he’s still in “unbearable” pain after breaking the Guinness World Record for planking over eight hours. Originally the world planking record was claimed by Hood himself in 2011 with 1hr 20min, before losing it in 2016 to Mao Weidong, a police officer from China, who busts the record with a time of 8hr 1min.

According to CNN, he told that “I do 700 pushups a day, 2,000 situps a day in sets of 100 and 500 leg squats a day.” For the upper body and the arms, he does approximately 300 arm curls a day. He also told, that he uses loud rock music and listen to his favorite Rammstein, to help push through the pain. To regain his world record back, he spent the last one and a half years of training seven hours a day.

Hood, an ex Drug Enforcement Administration agent, says he is at present in the best shape of his life at age 62 and has been exercising since finishing the Marine Corps officer training program in his 20s. He says “When I first tried to do it, I went five minutes.” In order to appropriately prepare and train for this event, the athlete undergoes several training camps and fitness regiments, doing 674,000 sit-ups and 270,000 pushups. In a practice attempt in 2018, he lasted 10 hours and 10 minutes. Overall, he did around 2,200 hours of planking in preparation for this challenge.

Heading up to the event, Hood worked with mindset coach Renae Cobley for six months. Despite the physical throbbing pain of planking for eight hours, Hood says the hardest part of conquering the feat is the mental challenge. Hood says “there are times you get self-doubt. You get bored. You wonder if it’s worth anything, Cobley taught me to believe in myself no matter what.” The technique Cobley used with Hood both in training and during the competition was having him imagine that he was a tree and that his roots run deep through the earth.

Cover Image source- www.guinnessworldrecords.com