This New World Record For The ‘Most Side Jump Push Ups’ Is Incredibly Stupid But I’m Still Wildly Impressed

iStockphoto / fizkes

Walid Yari is best known as ‘The Beast of the Middle East’ to his hundreds of thousands of fans on social media. He’s an Emirati power engineer who rigorously trained to set a new Guinness World Record for the ‘most side jump push ups’ in 60 seconds, a record I’d definitely never heard of nor considered until this morning.

This might be the purest example of a Guinness World Record that only exists because someone successfully petitioned GWR to materialize a new record out of thin air only in this case, he’s broken a previous record so there’s some degree of legitimacy here. He does 33 ‘flying push ups’ in just one minute. Jumping side to side over the white line.

The previous world record for the most side jump push-ups in 60 seconds was held by India’s Harpreet Singh when he was able to do 26. Walid Yari smashes that record and I’m actually quite exhausted watching this clip because an interesting side-effect of this video is how it stokes curiosity. My first thought was wondering how many I could do in 60 seconds so I got on the floor and started busting out flying push-ups until I realized it’s too damn early for this.

I’ll be shocked if at least half of you reading this right now don’t go from watching this clip below to doing flying push-ups on the ground a minute later. It’s hard to watch this and not test yourself. Here’s the clip from the Guinness World Records Twitter feed:

He’s clearly in absurd shape already but he reportedly trained hard spending two hours a day working on building muscle for this specific challenge. It’s wild to think how it must’ve changed the complete composition of his body for this world record alone. Here’s an excerpt from the GWR website:

He spent two hours training everyday as a youngster before he took it professionally. Now, he is known as ‘The Beast of the Middle East’, according to his 650k+ fanbase on social media. “I have been training almost all my life, and I was ready the minute I knew about Guinness World Records (GWR) Day. So, I set up my cameras the very next day, and filmed the entire scene to smash the previous record title,” Yari said.

Yari took on the challenge to celebrate the launch of GWR Day 2020 – the annual celebration of record breaking that takes place in November each year. This year, it’s encouraging people to take on a new challenge now lockdown measures are easing, or simply turn a newfound skill or talent into a world-record attempt.

For this challenging record, the push-ups had to be correctly performed in one minute while performing a side jump after each repetition. The arms had to be fully extended when jumping from one side to the other, making sure the body remained straight throughout, with no bending at the knees or waist.

He’s got some equally absurd workouts on his Instagram feed so ‘most side push-ups’ isn’t all that shocking, in hindsight. Here he is practicing those push-ups using a rope on fire. Totally normal behavior.

Showing off his title:

I think I could do this. Seriously. I’m going to attempt it later and report back.

I think I’ve got that challenge on lockdown.