Devon Larratt

The conversation opens with greetings and with the observation that this is the show's first arm wrestler. Almost immediately it turns to a physical cost of the sport: an elbow that will not fully extend. The speaker affected says he started club arm wrestling at around 18. At about 20, he admired an older, much-decorated champion called Crazy George, who could not straighten his elbows. He calls his own wish to have elbows like that "a silly wish". His own range of motion began to shrink, by his estimate, in his late 20s.

The cause he gives is mainly constant pressure on the elbow joint, which can "potentially" produce osteophytes. He stresses that this does not happen to every arm wrestler. It becomes a problem when the bone growth gets bad enough to constrict nerves or blood flow. That happened to him. He dates his first surgery to 2013, which he describes as roughly 13 years ago, and says he has since had two operations on the right arm and one on the left. He calls this "a small price to pay" and part of the "cost of admission for some of us".

He does not give a single cause for why some arm wrestlers develop the condition and others do not. He lists style, genetic predisposition and one bad match, and adds that bone pressure builds over time. He admits to one more factor: continuing to train when rest is needed "probably" makes it worse, and he says he is guilty of that.

I actually, I call it weaponized arthritis.

He argues that losing range can sometimes help on the table. Because the elbow stops short, the body's resistance from ligaments, tendons and protective muscular strength at the end of the range starts earlier. He firmly rejects the idea that this protects against a jiu-jitsu arm bar. A good grappler would still finish it, and the bones would just "snap in bad places." Asked whether hanging from a bar might help, he says he has "tried a lot of things". The discussion recalls a video in which attempts to roll out his arm with large metal bars caused visible agony. He says he has largely accepted the condition. Because bone has already been removed in surgery, he believes what now limits him is a capsule or sheath around the joint, which he tentatively describes as fascia or connective structure.

The anatomy discussion leads to David Goggins's knees. As told here, both knees were bone on bone, and a doctor said he did not know how Goggins could walk on them, let alone run thousands of miles. The bone had reportedly spread out so much that the knees moved at odd angles. Surgeons sawed the tibia, "like a wedge off a piece of wood", leveled it and screwed it in place. Goggins then rode a stationary bike for about five months before running again, still bone on bone but now on a flat surface.

A search during the show turns up "Wolf's Law". The description read aloud is a biological principle that bones adapt to physical stress and grow thicker and denser. The speakers tentatively accept it as the explanation, with "I think that's it." They also note that one image on screen is an illustration of what such a knee looks like, not Goggins's own knee. Edema pictures on screen are described as being from after the surgery.

The arm wrestler then says he has something similar and has been bone on bone "for probably two decades", with all the cartilage gone. The transcript does not make clear which joint he means. About 15 years ago, he says, a doctor told him surgery might extend his career "another couple years". He is now 51. He believes he "probably" gave his best performance ever about six weeks before this conversation, and says he is still ranked number one in his divisions with another shot at a world title. From this he concludes that what doctors predict "is just not true. You can do anything." The other side of the conversation puts it differently: the idea that something is impossible is based on when most people quit. Both views rest on individual stories, Goggins and the speaker himself, not on any wider evidence.

Pain is an interesting thing to try and master, you know. It's information, and you have to be able to live with it and work with it.

Pain is presented as a guide to where improvement is needed. Arm wrestling heavily loads the tendons of the elbow, and rehabilitating and building those structures under "great duress and trauma" takes time and monotony. According to the speaker, many people will not put that time in.

The discussion turns to grip strength. The host gives a personal example: his best on a grip-strength device is 164, he wants to reach 200, and he cannot get past 164. He trains with wrist curls, a forearm finisher from Golden Grip and thick cable handles for rotating the wrists. His hands are bigger and he is definitely stronger, but they are always sore and he does not know when to back off. Asked to guess how often the arm wrestler trains grip, he guesses every day, which is confirmed. He then asks whether that is the smart way to do it, noting that rock climbers have extraordinary grip strength.

The answer reframes the question. Grip is of "massive importance" in arm wrestling, but the speaker describes it as "more like defense and added offense". The technical core of the sport lies elsewhere.

the real technical nuance of the sport is to try and make the other person hold on to you.

The speaker calls the opening move "rising", referring to the film Over the Top. It is an attempt to get a better grip. If one wrestler can reach the opponent's fingers and force them to activate and hold on, the opponent becomes less efficient. He calls this "the first step in technical supremacy."

His principle is to attack weakness rather than go where you are strong. A wrestler is most efficient palm to palm with everything gripped tight. The goal is to make the pressure "unfair to your advantage" by forcing it into the opponent's fingertips with a hammer-like motion that resembles a curl. He admits the real mechanics are "more complicated".

He calls it "a very short-sighted way to think about the sport" to see arm wrestling as simply pinning the other person. He prefers to think of pulling the match toward yourself. Rising is an upward, spinning, slipping motion that ends with a better grip, so that whatever the opponent tries must pass through their weakest system, the fingertips. A great grip helps, he concludes, "But that's not everything."

The speaker estimates that he typically does 21 working sets per workout, with one of them dedicated purely to grip, and that he trains "all day". He calls himself "probably one of the most dedicated armresters in the world" in terms of how much time and energy he gives the sport. His week, as he describes it, looks like this:

Club training about twice a week, which he says varies. These are his hardest days, where he goes to his "highest, highest capacity." Extra sessions with his children, one of whom is described as a professional competing that weekend. The remaining days are spent on extremely monotonous work. He says he is retired and has "nothing but time."

Video of his equipment shows an arm wrestling table with a cable and pulley system, which he calls standard gear. He says it was handed down to him from Leanne Dufrein, whom he calls the best female arm wrestler ever, and Johnny Roberts (names as transcribed), and he estimates the table is about 40 years old. He works off the table at different angles and pressures that replicate those of arm wrestling. A thick handle like a PVC tube works the fingertips and wrist rolling.

One tool is called a "multi-spinner". It has a single attachment point, which he compares to a Swiss ball for the wrist: deliberately unstable. He names top rolling, hooking and pressing as "probably" the base moves of the sport. The footage shown was his final, already-tapered workout in his basement before he faced the Russian champion, transcribed as Vitalya Letton, about six or seven weeks earlier.

Outside a taper, he normally does about 100 repetitions per movement. When asked whether that means around half his maximum, he says no and suggests almost no weight, agreeing with "Like 20 pounds". He says he has experimented with many systems and this is the one he thinks works best. Club days are where he aims for maximum performance. Off days are for blood flow through the fascia and the chains of muscle used in arm wrestling motions, with the stated aim of improving circulation, especially in connective structures.

Asked why this beats heavy, low-rep strength training, he first calls the question "super debatable". His reasoning centers on limited energy. If heavy lifting produced steady progress, he would do it. But he has found that it uses up energy and resources that would otherwise go to the table, which he calls "the best part of my training". Anything that interferes with table work is something he would consider cutting.

the the high rep training heals me it heals me

He acknowledges the obvious objection. Arm wrestling is a strength sport, and many people believe high-rep work turns an athlete into an endurance athlete and makes them weaker. His answer is total work volume: lifting light weights all day adds up to an "astronomical" total load, and he believes adapting to that over long periods is beneficial. He adds that blood cannot flow through connective structures without movement, and points to the overall metabolic conditioning. He presents this as a claim he says he keeps "proving" over the years, while admitting it is "highly debated". It rests on his own experience, not on studies.

He makes clear that he does not skip heavy loading. His heavy work at this stage of his career happens in the sport itself. Being 51 and "plagued with injuries", he says he has to be very precise. When he was younger, his approach was to lift as heavy as possible, and he says, "I have made so many mistakes."

He says he cross-trained heavily: judo, basketball, military service and a military version of the Iron Man race. That event, he explains, involves running with a backpack, portaging a canoe and paddling, with winning times of roughly five and a half to six hours. He notes that most winners are of average size or smaller, while he is larger even for that event. Arm wrestling is the sport he always came back to.

It was also his first sport. At about four years old he arm wrestled his grandmother, who used matches as a reward for doing chores. He says he never beat her. Her name was Levan, which he points out is also the name of the current super heavyweight world champion, whom he has also never beaten.