TOhm Stoltmann was a skinny kid: 90 kg, 6 feet 8 inches tall, with glasses and protruding teeth. After being diagnosed with autism as a young child, he felt like he didn’t fit in. “I was really shy,” he says. “I was bullied at school for being different.” At the time, the boy from Invergordon didn’t like what he saw in the mirror. He lived in baggy hoodies. “The headdress. That was my comfort.” He loved football but “I would look at people on the field and think: He’s smaller than me, but he’s pushing me off the ball.”
By the age of sixteen he had reached his “breaking point.” He went from being obsessed with football to playing Xbox all day. He would skip meals in favor of sweets. “Sometimes there were four, five or six bags.”
It was Stoltman’s older brother, Luke, who got him out of trouble. He was a bodybuilder at the time, and he dragged Tom into the gym and taught him how to lift free weights. He says: “At first I was only practicing lifting 20 kilograms, and the next day I felt severe pain.” But after a week he started to enjoy it.
Luke wasn’t just interested in bodybuilding. By the age of 21 he had become a strong competitor. Tom remembers watching Luke, Scotland’s Strongest Man, first compete, where he lifted and towed huge, heavy objects such as cars, logs and atlas stones. “When you watch your brother do that, you feel like the Hulk.” Tom wanted in.
Join a strongman gym, train non-stop and focus on eating to get strong enough to compete, ditching snacks and replacing them with protein-rich meals. “Autism became my cheat code.” He can stick to a routine. Block out distractions.
He is now 31 years old and weighs 180 kilograms, the same as a large lion. It took 10 years to double his weight. He eats five times a day to fuel training: eight boiled eggs with cheese and mayonnaise on sourdough for breakfast, then two meals of spicy mince and rice before training at 12:30 p.m. These days, he’s a full-time strongman – running a gym with his brother near his home, where he lives with his wife. He spends his free time like a biohacker — using an oxygen chamber, red light therapy, a sauna and a cold tub — and works with a nutritionist and sports doctor who monitors his health, including his cholesterol (which is low). “When I go to the doctor, I’m classified as obese,” he says, but his BMI does not reflect his health.
“A lot of people think that strongmen are fat guys who lift multiple times. But you can be fit at any shape or size.” He can run while holding a 200kg Atlas stone, and can lift 350kg in 12 repetitions. “I towed two monster trucks.”
How does he feel about his body now? “I’m proud of that.” Not because of the inches in his biceps — that’s artificial, he says — but because of the mental toughness his body represents and the superhuman strength it gives him. Last week, he helped a man push his broken-down car off the road.
In 2021, Stoltmann, 27, became the world’s strongest man for the first time, defeating industry veterans to take the title. He’s won it two more times. When he was 16, when he looked in the mirror he saw a lost child asking, “Why am I different?” Now he sees someone who has turned that difference into a superpower. “I can look in the mirror and smile.”