Baddest Motherfuckers Ever- Ultimate Warrior

Looking back on past BMEs, I find it odd that I've got yet another professional wrestler in a list of badass lifters given the fact I've never been much of a fan of pro wrestling. When one considers that there's less money in lifting than there is sucking cock behind dumpsters in any American ghetto, however, it makes a little more sense.  Furthermore, lifters are by and large boring motherfuckers.  They go to the gym, train people, and go the fuck home, never once stopping to rip an entire 8 ball of a line off the dashboard of a moving car and then leap out at the nearest passerby screaming unintelligible words and throw them through a plate glass window as their best imitation of a practical joke.

THE FAMILY THAT I LIVE FOR ONLY BREATHES THE AIR THAT SMELLS OF COMBAT!

This is why I find it necessary to profile the only pro wrestler outside of Goldberg I have ever found myself compelled enough to watch on a regular basis, and my only choice when playing WWE video games in the arcade back in the day- The Ultimate Warrior.  Ultimate Warrior was sane in the same way Oprah is thin and the Kardashians are actually people- his promos were unintelligible to the point where you wondered if he was simply such a genius that you lacked the requisite intellect to comprehend him.  He was one of the most physically violent and remarkably unskilled pro wrestler of the modern era, relying on drug-fueled rage, brute strength, and so much pants-shitting insanity that the Insanity Wolf seems rather tame by comparison to win his matches.  Like his eventual coke and dbol-fortified tag team partners, the Mad Max-inspired, freakishly coiffed, angriest tag team on Earth the Legion of Doom, Warrior's go to move was the gorilla press slam, which requires less athleticism than one would get out of Stephen Hawking but more brute strength than you'd get out of ten meatheads at your local rusty-iron bar garage gym to complete.  It is for these reasons, then, that the Ultimate Warrior is joining the esteemed pantheon of Valhalla-bound hardasses that comprises my Baddest Motherfuckers Ever list.

Ultimate Warrior Vital Stats
Height: 6'3"
Weight: 280 lbs.
Gorilla Press:  303 lbs (Hulk Hogan)
Bench Press: 550 lbs (reportedly)
Sanity:  Nonexistent
Awesomeness: Incalculable

Perhaps you're thinking that the above list of strength accolades doesn't warrant a place among guys like Arthur Saxon, because he's never been a competitive lifter.  You're thinking wrong.  The Warrior hails from a bygone era in which bodybuilders actually lifted heavy.  When Warrior hit the mat for the first time, he was part of a generation of bodybuilders like Eddie Robinson (610 bench press in competition at under 200 lbs.), Tim Belknap (renown for being a flaming asshole and ruining every barbell in the gyms where he trained for using insane poundages on partials), and Benny Podda (a nutjob I've detailed at length).  Bodybuilders in that era were so strong that they either had competed in and dominated powerlifting, or were simply content to compete with one another and heave around enough weight to smash a heard of mastodons flat.  Not only that, but the Warrior eventually became tag team partners and ostensibly trained with the Legion of Doom, which would mean that he was both psychotic and incredibly strong.  LOD were well known for moving massive weights, hitting bench presses of over 600 lbs (even with broken ribs) and shrugging over a thousand just because it was Tuesday and no more weight would fit on the bar.  Not only that, but the LOD were also famous for being shitty wrestlers, and pretty much relied solely on massive physical trauma and press slams to stop their opponents, both of which were the mainstays of the Warrior's wrestling repertoire.  

Though true wrestling aficionados then bag on them like they're Clinique counter girls at Macy's talking shit on Amy Weinhouse's crack whore makeup motif (only likely in a far more effeminate manner, as I've yet to meet a true wrestling mark who doesn't live in his parents basement and appear to spend the bulk of his time stealing and sniffing his mother's shoes), all of the most entertaining wrestlers of the past seem to have been the least technically proficient- Goldberg, Big Poppa Pump, the Legion of Doom, Hulk Hogan, and Andre The Giant are living (and dead in the case of half of LOD and the Giant) proof.  Speaking of Andre, the Ultimate Warrior might not have displayed his lifting prowess on the platform, but he sure as shit hefted that tubby acromegalic fuck off the ground for a body slam when Andre was tipping the scales at 545 lbs.  For those of you who think that's not all that impressive, feel free to try to hoist a saddie in a scooter at your local Walmart and dump them on their ass.  Whether or not you succeed, you'll be a fucking legend for trying and will gain valuable insight into what it feels like to heft about 600 lbs of uncooked cookie dough , flip it upside down, and smash it on the ground.

His ass is his proudest accomplishment.

Though many of the baddest motherfuckers have interesting starts to their careers, Warrior's is perhaps the most ridiculous- he wanted an ass.

"On the lecture circuit, Warrior is fond of telling the story of how a skinny little kid befriended a rusty old workout machine and the machine gave that kid an ass.  Seriously, that was his proudest accomplishment.  Not the biceps, triceps, delts, or lats.  Ass.  Not even “glutes.”  Ass.  He was very clear about that.  Ass" (Simon).  

To that end, the Warrior signed on with an all-male review called “PowerTeam USA”, which included a mime and two other random, jacked and tan, ambiguously gay in a 1990's sort of pink spandex sort of way.   At the same time, Warrior got into competitive bodybuilding, placing decently at regional shows until he met up with a couple of other bodybuilders who decided to make the transition into professional wrestling.  Warrior debuted in a shitty little Texan federation I recall seeing on UHF stations on Saturday mornings as a kid, and to my recollection the ring was octagonal, prefacing the UFC's cage shape by 10 years.  I realize that has absolutely no bearing on the discussion at hand, but I recall thinking that was a stupid fucking gimmick even as a little kid.  By the time he hit the mat for the WWE, the Warrior had established himself as a bonafide maniac capable of few legitimate wrestling moves, but also as the single greatest promo cutter in the history of wrestling.  Not event the Rock could touch the Warrior's stilted, guttural, incoherent rants, so rife with insanity that you couldn't help but pay attention.  I'm honestly not even sure his rants were a work, given that everything he's done since is equally nonsensical and insane.  Bear witness as he exercises his exorcism:

Having witnessed his insanity,it will likely come as a shock to you that his workouts were not all that exciting.  He's admitted a great many times that he has no idea how many years steroid abuse took off his life, so those of you chomping at the bit to scream "STEROIDS" can look smug and pat yourselves on your back.  Then, punch yourselves in the fucking face, because steroid use is so fucking common in commercial gyms that even in BELGIUM, a country that has literally never produced a lifter of note, 25% of of recreational lifters use gear.  Thus, steroids were not the magical panacea for muscle building and strength you might have thought they were.  Instead, insanity seems to be the primary factor in the Warrior's lifting and career success, just as it was for Tookie Williams.  

Were you to watch the Warrior's training, you would look directly into the face of a man who's managed to channel enough insanity to fill 100 horror movie loony bins with gibbering maniacs, self mutilators, and compulsively masturbating cannibalistic evangelic Christians.  I've been around multiple Special Olympians in my day, and I have never before seen a human being perform exercises with that much grimacing and slobbering.  That moaning chick at every commercial gym who sounds like she's working her way through a 50 man gangbang while lifting makes less of a scene than the Warrior does while warming up.  Nick Manning makes less of a spectacle of himself dropping loads on bitches' faces.  A roomful of naked, shit-covered midgets with Tourette's would draw less attention than the Warrior in your local Gold's Gym.  It's like the Warrior is trying to get his face as jacked as his body by making the most dramatic rictuses he possibly can in the least amount of time possible.  It's almost as if he's using time under tension for his face, and somehow it radiates out to the rest of his body.  Whether it's intensity or insanity, however, the shit is clearly working- he looks better at 54 years old than most people look at 24.

50 years old and still looking thick, tight, and solid.

In case you're curious, the Warrior does a "bodybuilding type of workout", and is preternaturally  excited about the fact that he trains calves.  For the vast majority of his training, Warrior does 10-15 reps for each set with warmups in the 30 rep range.  Ture to his completely nonsensical form, the Warrior believes this works the muscles from "the inside out".  We could spend the next hundred years with linguists, scientists, and psychologists trying to parse exactly what the fuck working a muscle from the inside out means and would likely be no closer to the answer than we are now.  Nevertheless, it seems to work for the Warrior, who is jacked to fucking bits at 50 and angrier than ever.  Just ask the band Asking Alexandria if his methods work- in a pilot for a television show that sadly never saw air, the Warrior spent the better part of an hour berating the skinny jean clad metallers from that band for disrespecting him and interrupting himself with a great deal of psychotic pseudo-intellectualism without ever really putting them through a workout. In spite of the fact that they learned nothing more than what psychotics smell like up close, I bet each one of those skinny fucks put on 5 lbs just from being in the same room as the living embodiment of every fear feminists have of machismo that is the Ultimate Warrior. 

I am not exaggerating when I say that the Warrior appears to make up for terrible programming with full-blown lunacy, skull splitting intensity, and what appears to be a dogmatic adherence to a lifelong strict diet and training routine.  If nothing else, this should prove to one and all that your program doesn't matter nearly as much as the effort and persistence you put into them.  The Warrior's routine literally could not be objectively less interesting or less likely to make someone strong enough to help a neighbor move a couch, much less lift a 600 lb man off the ground and slam him, or strict press a wiggling 300 lb man overhead.  Who needs good programming when you have maniacal training intensity?  One of the Warrior's workout videos literally shows him spending 20 seconds grabbing random benches and throwing them around the gym in a manner I previously only believed befit eternally spandex-clad and Otomix shod douchebag bodybuilder Branch Warren.

251 lbs locked out overhead and taking it for a stroll.

Warrior's workouts typically take 45 minutes to an hour and consist, hilariously stereotypical of 1990s bodybuilders, of one to two sets of three to four exercises to hit each muscle group from a variety of angles.  From what I could glean from the videos I saw online, here's what he does:

Chest: Flat Dumbbell Bench Press, Incline DB Bench Press, Flat Bench Flies

Back: Pulldowns (behind the neck with so much crunching it looks like he's trying to suck his own dick), Pulldowns to the front, Pulldowns alternating back to front

Shoulders:  Stiff Legged Clean to Behind the Neck Strict Press, Dumbbell Laterals, Dumbbell Shrugs

Arms:  Preacher Curls, Straight Bar Curls, Dumbbell Curls, Tricep Pushdowns (variety of angles), Dumbbell French Press

Legs: Leg Extensions, Leg Curls, Close Stance Squat, Calf Raise

Dem quads.

And now, to flog the same cold, dead horse I beat every time I do a baddest motherfuckers entry- there is no one ideal program, and no program is useless if you apply enough pants shitting insanity to it.  Just look at this motherfucker- is there anything at all in his program that would indicate that he's capable of moving prodigious weights?  Nope.  Will a pack of useless shitbirds content themselves with simply screaming "STEROIDS!!!!!!!" in spite of the fact that nearly everyone in your gym is on shit and none of them can do what the Warrior can do at age 54?  Yup.  In spite of the fact that everyone knows that excuses are like assholes, people just don't want to admit that's just what they are, because the only thing the lot of us should really be injecting is a truly terrifying dose of insanity- that's where the fucking gains come from.

GO HARD OR GO FUCKING KILL YOURSELF.

Get this insane and you will succeed on the platform.  Or be committed.

Sources:

Simon, Harry.  Clustershmazz.  The Wrestling Fan.  Web.  22 Sep 2013.

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