More than anything, this video highlights just how blessed we were to witness that golden era of Strongman.

If I remember correctly, he was having a lot of trouble with chronic hamstring injuries right before he retired.  I think injury accumulation is what led to his decline, not uncommon, happens to everyone eventually.

Step 1: Be Brian Shaw.
Step 2: Train like a madman.
Step 3: Eat everything.
Step 4: ?????
Step 5: Profit.

Pudz had it figured out. Coke and ice cream > Coca Cola and ice cream. Get your shit together America.

“By the power of greyskull!” - B. Shaw

The biggest problem with the "seefood" diet is the inflammation. Eat enough crap and your inflammation will be sky high without even lifting. Add in lifting and the achiness will hold you back from training as hard. This matters more when you're older but in a game of inches everything matters.

as a huge Brian Shaw fan, the definitive end of his career was the hamstring tear at the Arnold. Changing training modalities was probably a way to try work around the injury. you can see a sharp decline in performance from then onward, and you can see in his videos he never really healed it. he is still getting stem cell therapy in that leg.

Having watched Brian throughout his career, I strongly believe that a major part of why he stopped dominating was because he became too focused on being meticulous, controlling everything, and getting bigger and stronger when he was already bigger than everyone and more than strong enough. In the later years of his competitive career he was loosing placings on events typically because he was too slow. He would run out of time on a squat for reps, or loading race, but when you watched his training videos he was not focused on speed or athleticism but rather hypertrophy and technique, and just kept trying to get bigger and more muscular.He also became more focused on growing his business, his family,and his youtube and seemed less focused on training and less hungry.

Part of why he was loosing events was that he was overly meticulous, concerned with never making a mistake, where others were just throwing all caution to the wind and getting faster times. Even if his strength on static events wasn't quite the peak of where he had been in the past he was still pulling off top 3 of 4 in those events, but on timed events he was lower in the results.

I feel like a lot of guys go through a similar arc, they come in more athletic than the rest, and win events because they are so fast and athletic, but maybe lack some static strength. So they begin putting on weight, focusing on getting bigger. they get stuck in that mode, and eventually end up in a place of diminishing returns where they are no longer faster, start to loose their athleticism which was their ace card, and the extra strength they gained has seemingly topped out but they still just keep trying to put on more size even though they are already bigger than almost everyone. Take a look at Thor for example, he did that, but if you look at his best years and best moments if was when he shed some of that extra weight and became leaner. Thor or Brian lean is still bigger than 90%of the other top guys when they are fat. So they don't need more size.

The last thing I think worked against him was his obsession with unproven recovery modalities and similar stuff that at best might improve 1%. He seemed to become more focused on ice baths and hyperbolic chambers than on his training.

textbook example of great training mixed with great genetics

IIRC, Shaw came on about the same time as WSM was making events heavier and harder every year(at the time I thought it was to "even the playing field" against Pudz, who was small for a WSM athlete. Because of that, I thought the rookie Shaw, because of his height and athleticism, could excel as events got heavier IF he could gain substantial weight. It was awesome to see him turn his weak events into strong ones as he filled out his frame to true strongman proportions. Getting to see Shaw, Hall, Thor, and Big Z all compete at the same time was historic.

I think Brian thought his way out of at least two more WSM titles. Compare how much Brian focused on eating and hitting certain calorie numbers to what, say, Hooper does. I think Mitch might eat half as much as Brian did. It just wasn't necessary to spend like 5 h a day on food. On training, the crazier he got with event specifics and getting super neurotic about planning the worse his performance. Then throw in the pressure he placed on himself rather than just going out and being a gorilla.

Great video!  Brian is the strongman who has always intrigued me the most.  But you forgot to mention that when he was just a basketball player, he astonished people by just casually picking up a Thomas Inch dumbbell, a feat that only a few people in the world can do.

2:13 man rip Mike Jenkins was so excited to see what he could do unfortunately passed away too soon looked like he would be a name to podium for years to come

The reverse hipthrust/ leg curl( ? ) at 10:40 looks so damn cool lol

I think his injuries caught up to him.  Plus, he got kids.  The risk/reward ratio changes when you got a family to take care of

The donkey comparison was way to funny hahaha

Congrats on the big 300k!!

Yo big Brom, good video! I like this type of video; could def watch more like this on other strong folks.

The man was a beast. That hamstring tear at the ASC killed the momentum and it never really came back. Even winning the SMOE a couple times later on, he wasn’t peak Brian Shaw…which is wild, because it was still good enough to beat the best in the world at the time at a gosh-awful heavy show.

I honestly believe, as others have said, that he got too in his head and psyched himself out or focused too hard and agonized over minutiae. I may be wrong. Obviously, he knows more about winning than I do. 😂

Either way, he was my favorite as a teen. Those battles with Big Z were legendary. I’d spend all year looking forward to the next WSM.

Now he's lost 120 lbs and is ripped but still looks like a badass.  That's even more interesting than any of this because he did it in his 40s and improved his health.  He would have died before he was 50 had he continued training like a strongman.