The Harness Lift

c. 1880 – 1920s · Supported partial lift

In the harness lift the lifter stands on a platform or frame above the weight, wearing a harness joined to it by chains, and raises it a short distance — often an inch or two — by straightening the legs and back. Because the range of movement is tiny, it produced some of the largest totals of the strongman era. Warren Lincoln Travis was credited with 3,985 lb.

Description

The lifter wore a leather harness over the shoulders and hips. Chains or a hook ran down from it to the load beneath — iron weights, or a platform carrying people. Standing on supports with knees and hips slightly bent and the hands usually braced on the thighs, the lifter straightened and the load came clear of the floor. A close variant, the hip-and-harness lift, took more of the load through a belt at the hips.

Like the back lift, it is a lift over a very short range; the headline numbers are real loads but not comparable with full-range lifts.

Rules in competition

The harness lift was a stage feat first. Whether the load was weighed, how far it had to rise and how long it had to be held were matters for the promoter or the challenge terms, and disputes over the weight of the platform and the people on it were common. It survives today as a recognised lift in all-round weightlifting organisations, which set out rules for the harness, the clearance and the hold.

Notable figures

• Warren Lincoln Travis — 3,985 lb in the harness lift, before witnesses (he was also credited with 4,140 lb in the back lift).
• Minerva (Josephine Blatt) — a hip-and-harness lift of 3,564 lb (about 1,617 kg), said to have been 23 men and a platform. The claim was printed in Strength & Health in 1937, and the Guinness Book of World Records long listed it as made at the Bijou Theatre, Hoboken, on 15 April 1895 — the greatest weight lifted by a woman.

These are exhibition figures. The loads were usually estimated rather than weighed.

Disputed and unresolved

Because the loads were often people on a platform, the announced totals depend on guesses at their weight. Minerva's figure was published some forty years after the event and rests on that later account.