If you were a kid in the nineties there’s a damn good chance your Saturday evenings involved kicking back in front of the TV to watch Gladiators.
If I remember rightly, the epic show was the highlight of the evening – sandwiched between the casually offensive Big Break and the repetitive dullness of Blind Date.
But Gladiators, with its combination of awesome events, larger than life characters and an audience baying for blood was pure entertainment.
My personal favourite was Shadow – who can forget when he literally broke a pugil stick over a contestant’s head – but unfortunately his stint on the show ended in a drugs scandal.
But there was one who reigned supreme above them all – Hunter, proving as much when he won The Ultimate Gladiator title in The Battle Of The Giants show.
Well it turns out, more than 20 years on from when he first appeared on the show aged 19, James Crossley is still absolutely ripped.
The former Junior Mr England is now 42-years-old and works as a personal trainer, running Chelsea Fitness. He has trained everyone from pop stars to rugby players – but specialises in fat loss and body transformations.
And his own training has changed pretty drastically too – he recently took part in an amateur strongman competition, telling Muscle & Fitness: “I eat like a bodybuilder but train like a strongman.”
As a result he now incorporates a lot of strongman exercises like yoke walk, single arm dumbell clean and press and Atlas stones into his workouts as well as metabolically demanding exercises like the farmer’s walk and sled pushes.
However, he does still include more traditional bodybuilding exercises with squats, leg presses and deadlifts, which he can pull close to 300kg on.
Wow.
