The Record That Measured More Than Strength
Discipline, Meaning, and the Revolt Against Mechanistic Fitness
This article traces a lifelong quest to unite physical mastery and inner meaning through my 2021 Guinness World Record at the Tower of Hercules. By rejecting the mechanistic culture of the modern fitness industry, I present strength as a vehicle for self-knowledge, not spectacle. The record becomes both philosophical act and spiritual test: a demonstration that discipline is not obedience but the art of coherence between thought and action. Against a society obsessed with measurement, I reclaim the body as a mirror of the mind, proving that the exceptional arises not from efficiency but from silence, reflection, and harmony with nature.
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As a child, I was fascinated by martial arts, by the discipline, the precision, the idea that movement could express meaning. In my teens that passion merged with an obsession for power under stress, whether in engines, bikes or on the soccer field. But after turning seventeen, the fascination deepened into something more intellectual. I wanted to understand the philosophy behind combat, this is, the inner law that guides gesture and force.
I searched for answers in books, in films, even in the local dojos where karate, taekwondo, and kung fu were taught as pure competition. None of it satisfied the question burning beneath technique: what is power for?
It wasn’t until the year 2000, as an industrial engineering student in Vigo, that I began training full-contact under Simón González, thirteen-time world champion. That experience changed everything. Watching how differently people react when faced with the raw shock of impact revealed more about human nature than any theory could.
From that moment, I could never see the fitness industry the same way again. It worships the body under laboratory conditions, as if life itself came with safety rails. In conventional gyms, impact is forbidden and all moves are under strict control. Not only control and mastery are completely different dynamics, but impact phenomena initiates one into the deep correlations between body, mind, and spirit; the same balance that determines how we face emotional, professional, or creative challenges. Life has hit me hard, more than once. During those times, I had no mentor, no institution to turn to. What I found instead was that the body remembers: experiential knowledge born of pain and failure transforms into instinctive, integrated and synergic gestures under stress, a kind of physical proof that the soul learns.
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This awakening experience dismantles the paradigms of fitness, bodybuilding, and even conventional strength training. It defines real discipline: not as the stoic repetition of sets, reps, or diets; not as blind obedience to authority nor as the standardization of behavior imposed by education systems, but as devotion to intellectual synthesis and a practical structuring of chaotic life circumstances. Real discipline erects frameworks strong enough to sustain the wildness of experience, giving shape to freedom rather than suppressing it. Real discipline is not about conformity; it’s about stripping away vanity, stepping out of the spotlight, embracing quiet anonymity, and is essentially about forging coherence between thought and action in all fields; it´s the art of rising every time life knocks one down, and of rising more intelligently, lifted by the wings of an unshakeable understanding earned through experience.
My 2020 aim in setting a Guinness World Record was never vanity or fame, but to anchor truth; to prove that something measurable, repeatable, and verifiable can still hold meaning in an age intoxicated by fake videos, AI mirages, and virtual lives that mistake appearance for achievement.
Much More Than a Guinness World Record
The brand Guinness World Records was established in 1955, a venture born of an advertising man’s pub-argument. That year, Sir Hugh Beaver, then managing director of Guinness Breweries, realized that when men were quizzing which game bird was fastest, there was no reference to settle the dispute. His solution: a book that recorded all measurable extremes of the world.
The very idea feels like it springs from the heart of English empiricism -roots in the lab of Isaac Newton and the mind of John Locke- the belief that if something can be measured and repeated, it exists with clarity. Traditionalist thinkers such as René Guénon or Julius Evola might have argued that this very impulse signals the crisis of modernity; the reign of quantity over quality. But in 2020 I decided I could engage with the empiricist mandate of measurement without surrendering the higher qualitative truths I pursue.
While the annual reference book remains one of the most recognizable titles in the world, in the Internet age its traditional book-sales model has been challenged. According to its own history, Guinness World Records sold more than 100 million copies by its 50th anniversary. But as print media slipped, the business pivoted: the organization shifted from being solely a chronicler of extremes to actively courting aspiring record-holders (as I did in 2020). The tactics behind the scenes changed.
In 2019 I discovered that I could perform 20 reps of what is called the “prison push up”, the “King of All Push-Ups” or what elite fitness expert Al Kavadlo –collaborator with Dragon Door- refers to as the “Ultimate One-Arm Push-Up”, a performance roughly 7 times greater than what the strongest athletes had achieved to date. My aim was not just to establish a record, but to give my region -Galicia- an event of global resonance. This would be the first world record in an athletic modality attempted in Galicia. The project would highlight Galicia’s land and sea, its high-quality food –which was extremely important for attaining my peak health condition- and the traditional training methods which still existed in the early 2000s but were fading under techno-industrial change. I chose a location that embodied those values: the Tower of Hercules (UNESCO World Heritage site since 27 June 2009) and the compass-rose beneath it. The following video shows the spirit of the project that my team shared in 2020:
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With the total agreement and enthusiasm of sponsors such as Estrella Galicia and journalists from A3 and TVG, I committed in 2020 to this ambitious project, not simply to perform the feat, but to serve a higher purpose: thinking globally, acting locally. In early 2020 I navigated the application guidelines on the Guinness site, preparing to submit a world-record attempt. At that time, Guinness World Records indicated on their website that if a candidate followed all guidelines, a three-month waiting period would apply before organizing the record attempt. On paper the process looked straightforward: the attempt must be focused on irrefutable evidence (per their “Guide to Evidence”), and the category must be measurable, breakable, repeatable and standardisable.
However, here’s where things get interesting… (and extremely frustrating…). The technical administration by Guinness World Records mismanaged my application starting January 2020. I had to appeal to senior members, and only after 16 months did I get official approval. Given the delay -and my awareness that I could have expedited the process by paying the €12,000 fee for “assistance”- one could reasonably suspect that the issue was not necessarily lack of technical competence but rather a business model shift: revenue had moved from book sales toward charging aspirant record-setters. I refused to pay the fee because my local sponsors and media had already committed enough to limit my event budget to about €1,200. My only reason to engage Guinness was for the rigorous global validation of my exercise. Considering the plan I lay ahead, I did not need certificate-generating services aimed at celebrities or corporations who treat Guinness simply as a marketing platform.
Spending only demanded from Guinness technical competence, yet in 2020 my local environment greeted my initiative with a cocktail of skepticism, confusion and even mockery. That reaction was hardly surprising. Guinness World Records has become widely popular by publishing some of the bizarre, controversial -even ethically debatable- records of our age, for example: the record-for-most-hot-dogs-eaten-in-three-minutes, or the largest collection of stuffed crocodiles, or the longest time balancing a cucumber on one’s knee, all of which underline how the brand has moved toward spectacle.
The Record That Measured More Than Strength
Despite the bizarre, almost circus-like turns the Guinness World Records brand has taken in recent years, one statement from Craig Glenday, its Editor-in-Chief, still resonated with me. In the 2018 edition of the book, he described record-holders as “living, breathing superheroes, with their heightened powers—strength, stamina, intelligence, persistence, determination, or a combination of all five”.
These virtues aren’t gifts we’re born with. They emerge from discipline; the kind forged through hardship, patience, and the acceptance of circumstances we don’t choose. When we live that process fully, fatality itself becomes meaningful. The body begins to “rewire”: gestures under stress change, tendons tighten differently, the nervous system learns new rhythms. This embodied knowledge reveals a startling truth: today’s supposed mind-body divide is a cultural illusion.
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The deeper purpose of my record attempt was precisely to expose that illusion. Physical activity need not exist only for competition, spectacle, or vanity. It can be a mirror for personal evolution, a measure of coherence between thought and action. We don’t all have to be footballers or cyclists. The exercise that best symbolizes us is the one that springs from the core of our own being.
Modern urban culture tells us the opposite. From childhood, we’re trained to separate who we are from what we do. The fitness industry insists that improvement is a matter of obedience to pre-designed routines that are mechanistic, standardized, efficient. But my 6X world record was meant to challenge that orthodoxy. It demonstrated that the purely “scientific” approach to training, with its obsession for measurable efficiency, blinds us to the multidimensional nature of strength. What cannot be quantified is dismissed as nonexistent. Yet the most transformative experiences often arise from apparent inefficiency, this is, from detours, pauses, and the kind of endurance that refuses to be timed by a stopwatch.
I also wanted to confront another false divide: contemplation versus action, intellect versus the body. This split has long impoverished both worlds. Too often, intellectuals treat physical practice as trivial, while athletes dismiss reflection and culture as indulgent luxuries. Since I began self-publishing The Solar Warrior trilogy in 2013, I’ve seen how wrong that split is. My most engaged readers have been those who embody the very spirit Glenday described -strength, stamina, intelligence, persistence, determination- yet infuse it with meaning drawn from philosophy, tradition, and art. They remind me of modern Samurai, Spartans, or Knights Templar: quiet, devoted, and invisible to the machinery of mass spectacle. Their light doesn’t come from the stage but from within.
A Record That Aims Towards Enlightenment
Why build a Tower of Hercules if its light does not guide? Architecture without spirit is only stone; a monument to forgetfulness. The true purpose of such a tower is to serve as a beacon for strong wills adrift in the chaos of modern life.
My 2021 world record was conceived in that same spirit. It sought to prove that the physical realm is never an end in itself, but a bridge to higher meaning. Even Guinness World Records original logo once embraced this idea: a star rising above monumental architecture, symbolizing the ascent from material achievement to illumination.
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Yet today the fitness industry thrives on dismantling that meaning. It seduces people of every age into action for action’s sake, into a kind of restless activism that leaves no room for reflection, contemplation, or art. Life becomes a blur of movement without direction, an endless parade of means that eclipse the ends they were meant to serve. The result is a culture of anxiety and self-absorption, where even the youngest generations grow up detached from genuine self-awareness.
This malaise is inseparable from the mechanistic training methods still imposed across sport and fitness. If there is any true “secret” for those who may one day attempt to surpass my 6X record, it is this: learn to breathe. Not just in the physiological sense, but in the existential one, allowing your life and human relations to resonate with the larger rhythm of nature, to find coherence between your own cycles and those of the cosmos. That resonance is precisely what the Compass Rose beneath the Tower of Hercules represents, and it is what guided every repetition of my exercise.
Whether my Guinness World Record ever receives wider mainstream attention beyond the more than two million spectators who witnessed the event in 2021 is ultimately irrelevant. Its meaning will still find those few who are ready for it, just like a message in a bottle cast into the Atlantic, carried by invisible currents to the right shore.
It’s no coincidence that the reactions of those who watched my performance mirror those of readers encountering my books. The same bridge between contemplation and action connects both realms. As Living Traditions (Australia) once wrote of my literary work, that it is: “so extensive, so exhaustive that it is truly astounding. It exalts us with a vision of nobility while offering an astounding critique of the modern world”. To me, it is an honor to create works -whether physical, engineered or written- that evoke the same silent contemplation once inspired by traditional art.
Such art bears what the wise traditionalist author, Frithjof Schuon refers to as the perfume of infinitude where “genius is as if hidden; what predominates is an impersonal, vast, and mysterious intelligence. The sacred work of art has a scent of infinity, the imprint of the absolute. Individual talent is disciplined within it; it merges with the creative function of the entire tradition, a function that cannot be replaced, much less surpassed, by human resources” (1). In this sense, my world record could never have existed apart from a set of life principles running counter to the dominant forces of our age; an age that measures everything yet understands so little.
That is precisely why practices rooted in harmony and awareness -those that resemble the spirit of purely traditional Tai Chi- can still distill the exceptional, even within the commercial wasteland of the modern fitness industry. The exceptional is not born from noise, but from silence disciplined into synthesis.
Records are meant to be broken, yet an elite coach told me recently that given today’s training methods, he doubts mine can be. He argued that he never saw anyone accomplish one rep of an exercise in which I accomplished 17 under rigorous measurement. Yet I disagree with him because the true method isn’t about training, it’s about self-transformation. Physical exercise should never be an end in itself, but one of the ways we verify that our destiny, our richness, and that our potentials are being affirmed through the very challenges our time demands we face.
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(1) Frithjof Schuon. Perspectives Spirituelles et Faits humains, Les Cahiers du Sud, Paris, 1953.