Hysterical strength is a term sometimes used to describe “feats of strength occurring in high-stress situations that greatly exceed what we would normally imagine a person being able to produce and which would be impossible to reproduce in calmer circumstances,” says E. Paul Zehr, a professor of sensorimotor neuroscience at the University of Victoria in Canada. Most people cannot deadlift their own weight – 150-200 pounds without training.
When I was going to college Jack Tupper and I rented the second floor of a house in Old Town, Maine. I was working five days a week from 6 PM to 2:30 AM as well as going to school holding a full schedule.
Saturday was my day to catch up on sleep. One Saturday I was fast asleep in my bedroom when I woke up hearing someone call “HELP”, I went out to the front room which was over the car port of the neighbor below. I asked Jack what was going in. He said that he had heard nothing. I was sure someone called help and convinced Jack to go down outside. When we came out we saw our neighbor with his right arm pinned under the weight of the car. He had appearently jacked up the front left of the car and taken the wheel off. A jack uses two small metal lugs which operate alternately to lift the car. One of the lugs had sheared off from the weight of the 1960’s two ton car.
The neighbor’s forearm was pinned under the breakdrum. Jack tried working the jack, but it just went up and down about an inch accomplishing nothing. I went to the front of the car and started lifting it. I had to lift the engine portion of the car up high enough that the springs lifted the front axel up. I called for Jack to pull his arm out as he had passed out and did not move. Of the 4000 pound car I may have had to lift 600 pounds about a foot and hold it for Jack to get his arm out. I did not hear what happened to him, and even though I had gone way over my normal stress, I did not have any bruising.
A few days later as an experiment I tried to lift the front end of a Volkswagon and could not do it!