Nick Guardione is a story straight out of “Ripley’s Believe It Or Not!” In high school, he was a tall, sleek runner on the cross country team. Thirteen years later, he is 6 feet, 4 inches tall, weighs 350 pounds and performs mind-boggling feats of strength. One is pulling a 50,000-pound fire truck with a harness and rope across a 50-foot course.
Austin Andrade has his own crazy tale. A former college athlete who is 6-foot-2, he turned listless after his football and wrestling career ended and ballooned to 340 pounds. He walked into a local gym, bulked up to 400 pounds and became a Hispanic Hercules. Beast? He once gripped and lifted two 700-pound metal safes, each on the end of a single bar, and walked them 20 feet.
The muscled men are friends who train at Heavy Metal Fitness. On Thursday, they’ll be rivals at the 49th World’s Strongest Man competition in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. The four-day event features 25 men from 11 countries competing in such challenges as the deadlift, truck pulll and Atlas Stones.
“I’m hoping to win,” Andrade said.
“I’m hoping to win, too,” Guardione said.
Winning won’t be easy. The field includes Tom Stoltman, a 6-foot-8-inch, 408-pound Briton, who has won the event three times. Also competing will be South African Rayno Nel, the 2025 World’s Strongest Man, Canadian Mitchell Hooper, the 2023 winner, and Texan Trey Mitchell, a two-time winner of the Shaw Classic strongman championship.
Qualifying rounds of the World’s Strongest Man competition will be held Thursday and Friday. Those who advance will compete in the finals on Saturday and Sunday. CBS will broadcast a delay of the competition, beginning in July. The finals will air on Aug. 3 at 3 p.m.
Andrade and Guardione are rising stars on the strong man circuit. Guardione won the Arnold Amateur World Championship and the Official Strongman Games World Championship in 2024. Last year, he finished as runner-up at the Shaw Classic.
Andrade, meanwhile, claimed the title of World’s Strongest Latino in 2023. He won the Shaw Classic Open the same year, finished seventh at the 2024 World’s Strongest Man competition and deadlifted 1,036 pounds to tie for second at the 2025 World Deadlift Championships.
Heavy Metal Fitness, a North Side gym, brought the two strongmen together. Andrade arrived first in 2018. Fresh from Adams State with a business degree, Andrade grew restless as a young husband working at the Bexar Appraisal District. With no physical outlet, he gained weight.
“After work I’d come home and didn’t know what to do with my life,” he said. “I was like, ‘I need to get back in the weight room because I’ve been in the weight room since I was 12.’”
Andrade discovered Heavy Metal Fitness on Instagram. Inside the gym, he found powerlifters and bodybuilders. He noticed strongmen, who reminded him of pros he’d seen competing on television. Andrade thought, “I can do this,” and began training.
“I fell in love with it,” he said.
Guardione’s journey to Heavy Metal Fitness was marked by tragedy. His father died in 2015 when he was a sophomore at UT San Antonio. Around the same time, Guardione and his girlfriend with whom he lived broke up. Without his father, who was paying for his tuition, and his girlfriend, Guardione became effectively homeless.
He slept on the couch at the home of a friend, who led him to the gym. Guardione bulked up from 160 to 250 pounds. With income from a small business he started, Guardione moved into an apartment. When the UT San Antonio gym closed during Christmas in 2019, he walked into Heavy Metal Fitness and met Andrade.
The men became training partners. Guardione added muscle and weight and joined Andrade at strongman competitions. Podium finishes followed. Reputations grew.
Now here they are in Myrtle Beach, mingling with fellow competitors and posing for photos on the sport’s biggest stage.
To get an idea of their strength, check out their Instagram pages. On Guardione’s feed, one video shows him pulling a firetruck. Another shows him squatting 675 pounds. On Andrade’s feed, one video shows him deadlifting a 1,025-pound wagon wheel axel. Another shows him walking a bar on his neck with two metal safes that weigh more than 1,400 pounds.
If Andrade and Guardione advance past the qualifying round, which includes a truck pull, they’ll face grueling challenges in the finals.
Consider the titan toss. It requires competitors to throw 10 30-pound sandbags over a 12-foot bar in the fastest time possible.
Consider the Atlas Stones. The final event, which usually determines the winner, requires competitors to lift five spherical stones, increasing in weight from 220 pounds to 352 pounds, onto five high platforms across a course.
Could either Andrade or Guardione win?
In their college days, neither imagined competing in such an event. Yet here they are, writing another chapter in a story almost impossible to believe.
