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" Brian Shaw is a three-time winner of the World&amp;#039;s Strongest Man competition, taking home the first place title in 2011, 2013, and 2015. He&amp;#039;s also one of the largest athletes on the planet. The 33-year-old Colorado native clocks in at a hulking 415 pounds and is\u00A06&amp;#039;8&amp;quot; tall, which makes sense when your job involves pulling trucks and lifting 300-pound stones. Fresh off his most recent win and newly married\u2014he joked with his 5&amp;#039;7&amp;quot; wife, before she was his wife, about minimum height requirements for potential partners\u2014he took the time to tell us what it&amp;#039;s like to be the strongest man in the world. Here it is, in his own words. I&amp;#039;ve always been a big guy. I played basketball in college on a scholarship, and I got into weight training as I was studying to be a strength and conditioning coach. It was just something that I had a passion for. I&amp;#039;ve always been very, very competitive, so once I got done with basketball, I needed an outlet. My love for weight training and competing just seemed like\u00A0a\u00A0perfect\u00A0fit for strongman. So I decided to give it a try, for fun, really. It&amp;#039;s definitely not for everybody, but if you love working out and being competitive and pushing yourself to the limit, it&amp;#039;s great. It&amp;#039;s fun, for sure. My very first competition was at the end of 2005. Honestly, I just looked it up online and tried to find something local, because I had no idea how to do it or where to start. I did Denver&amp;#039;s Strongest Man here in Colorado, and I won. And then I just started going to bigger and bigger contests from there. The level of competition goes up as you go higher, and once you&amp;#039;re pro, it goes from lower-level contests, all the way up to international contests, and then qualifying for World&amp;#039;s Strongest Man. That&amp;#039;s the top, making it there.  I think the first contest I did, I was somewhere just over 300 pounds. With my frame, I needed to add more weight and put more muscle on to get better leverage and be more successful. Just to get stronger, really. I had to work really hard. In those first few years, I tried to gain about 20 pounds a year. I was trying to transform my body into what I needed for strongman.  A pretty typical meal is somewhere between 12 and 16 ounces, so almost a pound\u00A0of meat. And then rice or pasta or something like that along with it. I eat a lot of grass-fed beef. That&amp;#039;s my main protein source. But I&amp;#039;ll substitute in chicken and turkey, and sometimes fish, to have a little bit of variety. Normally it&amp;#039;s seven meals. I&amp;#039;m trying to eat every two, two-and-a-half hours, all day. It&amp;#039;s just constant eating. That&amp;#039;s probably the hardest part, is the discipline of preparing the food, and then sitting down and eating. During hard training, I&amp;#039;m probably somewhere in the 8,000 to 10,000 calorie range. Normally, leading up to a contest, I would train four or five days per week with bigger sessions, probably two to four hours each of heavy, intense training. Outside of that, I would probably do roughly four others, more conditioning training. Rest is really important too, though. Because if you get to a point where you&amp;#039;re over-training and you&amp;#039;re not recovering, that can open you up to getting hurt. It&amp;#039;s very much a balancing act.  Dead lifting. Squatting. I do a lot of overheard press, some bench press. Those are the major, multi-joint movements. And then a lot of accessory work to support that. That&amp;#039;s the weight training side of it in a nutshell. And then I throw in the actual event training. If we have to pull a truck, then I&amp;#039;ll schedule a training session to pull a truck. Or if we&amp;#039;re going to lift stones, or flip tires, or whatever the events are going to be, I try to throw those into my training as well, just to\u00A0be sure that I&amp;#039;m prepared. If we have a hard truck pull, that&amp;#039;s probably head-to-toe one of the most physically exhausting things we can do. Your whole body starts burning, and it becomes almost more mental at the end of it to finish it. But everything is difficult in its own way. Whether it&amp;#039;s for a maximum weight or for reps, everything challenges us in a different way. In 2012, I detached my bicep. That was on the first event of the contest. There were four more events we had to do after that, and I did the rest of the contest with my bicep torn off. There have been other guys that have torn biceps, and they normally just stop immediately. But I went and got it checked out, and I asked the doctor, &amp;quot;Can I still compete?&amp;quot; And he looked at me\u00A0like I was a little bit crazy, but he said, &amp;quot;Well, it&amp;#039;s already torn off. You&amp;#039;re probably not going to do much more damage. So if you can deal with it, you can do it.&amp;quot;  It was one of those things where it was almost more mental to overcome that and push through. But you train so hard to win that contest, and I wanted to win. You just do everything you can to go for it. And that&amp;#039;s what I did. It was not fun, particularly. But at the same time, even though I ended up getting fourth place, that&amp;#039;s still one of my top performances, everything considered. Finishing in fourth with that going on is pretty crazy. I haven&amp;#039;t set a time that I want to stop competing. Obviously if I lose the fire or drive to want to compete, that&amp;#039;s a good time to hang it up. But I&amp;#039;ve always set big goals for myself. The most titles that have ever been won is five. And I would be lying to you if I didn&amp;#039;t tell you that I have my sights set on winning five, at least, if not six. I feel like I&amp;#039;m getting into the prime of my career. I&amp;#039;m healthy, I feel good, my body&amp;#039;s in good shape overall. I feel like now, especially with winning three, I&amp;#039;m in that select group of guys who have been able to win it that many times. I don&amp;#039;t think that I necessarily have a lot more to prove, but me being who I am, I definitely would like to go down as winning the most ever. That would be amazing. * This article is part of The Code, an editorial partnership between Esquire and Ford F-150.    "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/lifestyle/health/a37058/what-its-like-to-be-worlds-strongest-man-day-in-life/>