Tom Stoltman was a skinny kid: 90kg, 6ft 8in, with glasses and sticking‑out teeth. Diagnosed with autism as a young child, he felt he didn’t fit in. “I was really shy,” he says. “I got bullied in school for being different.” Back then, the boy from Invergordon didn’t like what he saw in the mirror. He lived in baggy hoodies. “Hood up. That was my comfort.” He loved football but “I used to look at people on the pitch and think, ‘He’s tinier than me, but he’s pushing me off the ball.’”
By 16 he’d hit a “crashing point”. He went from football-obsessed to playing Xbox all day. He’d skip meals in favour of sweets. “Sometimes it was four or five, six bags.”
It was Stoltman’s older brother Luke who got him out of the rut. A bodybuilder at the time, he dragged Tom to the gym and taught him how to lift free weights. “At the start I was just doing the 20kg bar and the next day I’d be so sore,” he says. But after a week he started to enjoy it.
Luke wasn’t just into bodybuilding; by 21 he had become a strongman competitor. Tom remembers watching Luke’s first competition, Scotland’s Strongest Man, where he lifted and towed huge, heavy objects such as cars, logs and atlas stones. “Watching your brother do that, you’re, like, oh, he’s like a Hulk.” Tom wanted in.
He joined a strongman gym, trained nonstop and focused on eating to get strong enough to compete, ditching snacks for protein-rich meals. “Autism became my cheat code.” He could lock into routine; block out distractions.
Stoltman (front left) aged 12, with his parents and brothers Luke (back, second from right) and Harry, and his two sisters. Photograph: stoltmanbrothers.com
Now 31, he weighs 180kg – the same as a large lion. It took 10 years to double his weight. He eats five times a day to fuel training: eight boiled eggs with cheese and mayonnaise on sourdough for breakfast, then two meals of spicy mince and rice before training at 12.30pm. These days he’s a strongman full-time – running a gym with his brother near his home, where he lives with his wife. He spends his downtime like a biohacker – using an oxygen chamber, red-light therapy, a sauna and cold tub – and works with a nutritionist and sports doctor who monitors his health, including his cholesterol (it’s low). “When I go to the doctor, I’m classed as obese,” he says, but his BMI doesn’t reflect his health.
“A lot of people think strongmen are fat guys lifting one rep. But you can be fit at any shape or size.” He can run holding a 200kg atlas stone, can deadlift 350kg for 12 reps. “I’ve pulled two monster trucks.”
How does he feel about his body now? “I’m proud of it.” Not because of the inches on his biceps – that’s artificial, he says – but because of the mental toughness his body represents and the superhuman strength it gives him. Last week he helped a man push his broken-down car off the road.
In 2021, at 27, Stoltman became the World’s Strongest Man for the first time, defeating industry veterans to take the title. He has won it twice more. At 16, when he looked in the mirror he saw a lost kid asking, “Why am I different?” Now he sees someone who turned that difference into a superpower. “I can look in the mirror and smile.”
Tom Stoltman is a co-founder of the Stoltman Strength Centre.
