George Hood, of Naperville, Illinois, a former U.S. Marine and DEA Supervisory Special Agent, is once again the world’s top planker. He set the Guinness world record for the longest time spent holding the plank position for men.
According to Guinness, his official time was 8 hours 15 minutes and 15 seconds. (Our abs and shoulders hurt just reading that.) Hood took on the challenge in part to support 515 Fitness, a gym that provides psychological counseling alongside physical training with a mission to promote mental health services through fitness.
Hood says he’s in the greatest shape of his life—which isn’t surprising, given the training he undertook to prep for the event. He did over 2,100 hours of planking in preparation.
“It’s four to five hours a day in the plank pose,” Hood told CNN. “Then I do 700 pushups a day, 2,000 situps a day in sets of a hundred, 500 leg squats a day. For upper body and the arms, I do approximately 300 arm curls a day.”
He also says that listening to rock music helps—his favorites include Van Halen and Rammstein.
“When it gets tough, you know what I do? I turn that music up so loud, you’d think you’re at a rock concert. I always had a fantasy of being a rock star back in the ’80s,” Hood said. “And at least for those 8 hours, 15 minutes and 15 seconds, I was a rock star.”
This isn’t the first time Hood has broken the world record for planking. In 2011, he held the position for 1 hour and 20 minutes. He tried again in 2016—but wasn’t able to beat Mao Weidong from China in a head-to-head contest. Weidong held his plank for 8 hours, 1 minute and 1 second. In his training for his latest record attempt, Hood says one practice attempt in 2018 lasted for 10 hours and 10 minutes.
After his 8-plus hour plank, Hood announced his retirement from the position. That said, he pumped out 75 pushups directly after the plank hold—and declared that he’s coming for the record for the most pushups in an hour next.
The female record is currently held by Canadian Dana Glowacka, who held a plank for 4 hours, 19 minutes and 55 seconds last year.
These numbers are staggering—but you’d be better served if you keep your planks to a more manageable time and focus on form, instead.
“The plank has its greatest value to your actual core strength and functionality when you’re forced to apply maximum core tension (thus fatiguing your core incredibly quickly). Do a plank right, and you’ll only be able to hold it for 20 to 30 seconds (and ideally, you’re tapped in 10 seconds, because you’re generating that much more core tension),” says Men’s Health fitness director Ebenezer Samuel, C.S.C.S.
“Once you can hold a plank sturdily for a minute or two, there are better ways to train your abs than to chase a world-record waste of time,” Samuel continues. “You should look to add bands or to pull you off-balance, or to work from increasingly unstable plank positions that force your core to create tension against rotation (think of plank shoulder-taps) or lower back extension (think of planks with your hands extended far in front of you, arms off the ground.”
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