If you want to be big, you have to eat big and train big.
But they don’t come much bigger than Hafthor Bjornsson who plays the Mountain in Game of Thrones.
The two-time Europe’s Strongest Man winner is an absolute monster – and you better believe he eats big.
You don’t get to be that kind of size by eating salads and skipping breakfast.
In an interview with the New York Times, the former basketballer-turned-strongman and TV star revealed the nutrition plan that helped build his monstrous 180kg frame.
Knowing that other World’s Strongest Man contenders like Eddie Hall eat up to 10,000 calories a day, you have to presume that Bjornsson eats something similar.
Just trying to imagine how to pack all those calories in during a 24-hour period, you’d imagine just wolfing down doughnuts, fast food and anything else ‘calorie dense’ in a classic ‘dirty bulk’.
But you’d be wrong. The 27-year-old (yes he’s only 27) actually has a pretty healthy diet. He just eats ludicrous amounts of clean foods to fuel his workouts which last between two and four hours.
The Game of Thrones star, whose character Gregor Clegane is back in the new series, eats eight meals a day.
Breakfast consists of eight eggs (that’s 560 calories right there) with oatmeal and fruit.
His other seven meals consist of meats, grains, vegetables and foods containing good, calorie-packed fats like avocado and organic peanut butter.
“I eat quite healthy for a big guy like me, but you get sick of eating all the time,” he told the New York Times.
“Today, I was supposed to have chicken with sweet potatoes and greens. Because I didn’t want that, I had salmon. We have very good fish in Iceland. Everything is expensive in Iceland, especially food, and especially healthy food.”
The Mountain wasn’t always massive. He was a lean, 6ft 7 basketballer back in Iceland before he started training Strongman.
He revealed that, since then, he’s packed on 166lbs (75kg) in the past seven years. A big part of putting his immense size on was cutting down on the amount of cardio he did and adding heavy weights sessions (as well as eating a truck load of food).
At Europe’s Strongest Man, he’s the reigning ‘King of the Stones’ and he is dominant in many of the strongman events, so his training now revolves around getting stronger with old school powerlifting protocols.
He does a series of deadlifts, bench presses and squats in sets of three to five reps, using seriously heavy weights.
He recently clocked up a 450kg deadlift – which is just 12kg off the all-time world record set by Eddie Hall.
