Strength sports promoter Odd Haugen is coming off a red hot series of contests—strongman, grip strength and strongman combat—at last weekend’s Los Angeles FitExpo, but wasting no time, he’s already at the drawing board for the competitions he will stage at the San Jose FitExpo this summer.


Strongman combat is what Odd Haugen called the mano a mano events he introduced at last weekend’s Los Angeles FitExpo, all of which were crowd favorites.  Here’s James Rude (left) goes at it with Robert “OB” Oberst (right) in the Pole Push.  OB won the Strongman Combat competition (James Rude was the runner-up), as well as the Overall title (best combined score across Strongman, Grip Strength and Strongman Combat).  IronMind® | Randall J. Strossen photo.


On the strongman side, Haugen will have a top level amateur contest, with the possibility that there will be two body weight classes and also that the winner will earn his ASC pro card.  Regardless of the details, though, the contest format will be unique as far as event selection goes.

Haugen said there will be five categories of events (such as overhead, stones, deadlift/squat, etc.) and that each category will have five events in it.

Each competitor will choose one event from each category when he enters.  Each of those votes goes into a hat, for each event, and then one is drawn from each hat, to determine which event will be used in each category.

For the grip strength contest, Haugen said that he is leaning toward running an IronMind Record Breakers again, as he did last year, which could also include the Crushed To Dust Challenge! again as well.

Stay tuned for more details.
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