“Stanless Steel” Stanley Pleskun

Stanless Steel

I’m not sure if you have heard of Stanless Steel before, but there is a movie out called “Strongman” which covers his life. This Strongman Performer, although having received limited recognition over the years, has done some pretty amazing feats of strength.

In 2004, a friend of mine showed me some VHS treasures of some old school performing strongmen who had appeared on television during the 80’s and 90’s and Stanless Steel appeared in many of the clips.

I didn’t figure I’d get to see those clips again anytime soon. After all, how many people do you know who tapes talk shows like Ricki Lake and Maury Povich?

To my surprise, I found out that Stanless Steel actually has his own YouTube channel with many of his appearances uploaded, so I embedded them all here for you to check them out.

Holding Back Air Planes

Lifting Several People with Just 1 Finger

Ricki Lake Appearance

Out of This World – Various Feats of Strength

Maury Povich – Cray One Finger Lift

Japanese Television Show – Various Feats of Strength

Rooftop Films – Getting Run Over by a Pick-up Truck

Brazilian Television Show

Bending a Penny Obviously Stanless Steel does some pretty impressive things in the clips above. I think the feat that really sets him apart from so many other performing strongmen is his bending the U.S. penny. I can’t imagine the pressure it takes on the fingers in order to do that – maybe Dennis Rogers??? Right now, I am not even sure I have heard of anyone else doing that with their finger/hand strength, although some do bend coins in their teeth. If anyone knows of any other strongmen that bend pennies like this, please leave a comment.

One Finger Lift I’ll will be completely honest – this feat of strength completely scares me and dominates me mentally. I truly have no desire to try this feat out and was even reluctant about doing it in the Medley at the Michigan competition I competed in back in like 2008.

Driving a Nail with the Hand I have seen a few strongmen do this. Dennis Rogers has a great DVD out about how to do this feat called “How to Drive a Nail without a Hammer.” I have never tried this one either. Not that this one scares me like the One Finger Lift or anything, I just don’t venture into new feats like that anymore with so many Grip Contests popping up all the time these days, and since I always have to have my hands in such good condition.

Breaking Chains I think this feat is awesome. I’ve never broken any chains either, mainly because I am too cheap to buy chains to break. The most impressive Chain Breaking feat I ever saw was my buddy, Steve Weiner busting a chain stretched from a platform on the floor to a head harness. Chain exploded and flew all over. Freakin’ awesome!!!

Getting Run over That must take some serious cajones. I don’t ever want to be under the tire of a truck, whether by accident or under my own accord!

Bending Nails In a couple of clips, you can see Stanless bending something in rag wraps with a technique that resembles Heslep Style, also pictured at the top of this post. This is one of the TOUGHEST ways to bend. In fact it creates so much stress at the elbows, I didn’t even include it in the Nail Bending DVD. There so many other ways to bend without having to risk the injury.

All in all, Stanless Steel has performed some outstanding feats of strength. Like I said, they are too ELITE for me to try them these days. Five years ago, it would have been a different story.

I only met Stanless one time, at the 2005 AOBS Dinner, and he was just too engulfed in the events at the dinner for me to engage a conversation with him, but I can surely say that he was still beefy then and definitely outweighed me and that is when I was in the 260’s, still competing my ass off in Strongman. I also remember his hands and wrists looked EXTREMELY MEATY. It was like his bone structure was thicker than most, plus the musculature seemed to be developed in a way I’ve only seen in Farmers who have worked hard from an early age and into their 50’s and 60’s. Pretty impressive.

I hope you enjoyed the clips. There’s some awesome stuff there, for sure.

All the best in your training.

Jedd

More Posts on Bending:

Beginner Bending Information

Improving Bending Technique

Using Hammers to Prepare for Bending

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Tags: stanless steel, strongman performer, strongman story

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 8th, 2011 at 1:24 am and is filed under feats, feats of strength, feats of strength bending, grip strength, how to improve grip strength, old strongman feats of strength, strongman feats, tearing cards. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.