A Manx gym owner has broken the world record for most deadlifts performed in 24 hours.

Sam Murphy, founder of the Braddan-based Fusion Barbell gym, broke American athlete Kengee Ehrlich’s record of 500,500kg by almost 20,000, having lifted 520,072kg in one day.

This involved lifting 60kg an average of 10 times each minute, for a total of 22 hours.

Sam said: ’I think it was about as hard as I expected it be, only a different type of difficulty - but physically, it was as hard as I expected it.’

’Everything hurt, but it was just a case of gritting it out and dealing with it’

As for how he felt after it, he said it was ’the worst muscle pain across my entire body that I have felt in my entire life.’

training

But he said that fact it was only muscle pain, and no joint pain whatsoever - showed that the training he had done for the challenge had worked, and allowed him to avoid injury.

During this training, undertaken over the last six months - he estimates he lifted between 1.5 to 2 million kilograms.

He said the reason he didn’t make it to his target of 600,000kg was down to issues of nutrition.

He got his energy throughout with a combination of jam and honey sandwiches on white bread, a high-carbohydrate energy drink and the ’occasional Haribo and jelly baby’.

However, this mixture left him feeling sick around four hours into the challenge, which he felt was the main limiting factor to not meeting his personal goal.

But following a short nap at midnight his ’sole focus’ became to beat the world record, finishing at 9.30am the next morning.

He said that he has ’no intention of ever doing it again’ as he doesn’t feel the need to, adding that ’if someone goes on and breaks my record, I will be proud of them - and it would be nice to see if they did it for charity as well.’

There is now a 12 week process to get the record certified by Guinness World Records, with the entire challenge having been filmed and observed by two certified personal trainers who acted as adjudicators, counting and ensuring the deadlifts were correct repetitions.

In total so far Sam has raised over £4,000 for Movember UK, with his Justgiving page remaining open into December at: justgiving.com/fundraising/ sammurphy24hour