The origins of strongman competitions is Scotland and Scandinavia, where men compete in feats of strength.

These days strongman (and strongwoman) competitions typically involve participants having to perform different lifts, including a dead lift, where the weights are lifted from the ground to the waist, and log lift, from the floor to overhead. Some can lift almost their body weight.

Growing up, Rhodes wasn’t the athletic type, but as a child his father introduced him to strongman, essentially gigantic men moving insanely heavy weights.

“The best thing for me is that I used to watch Strongman as a child. It was very popular in the UK and I watched it on TV with my dad every weekend. Seeing it as a kid and now being part of it, and seeing those guys in competitions and shaking their hands … it’s amazing.”

Thirteen years ago, the scrawny-looking Rhodes was 20 years old, stood 1.77m [five feet 10 inches] and weighed 58kg [128lb]. He decided to start working out. Today, his off-season weight is 94kg, and during competition, he whittles that down to 79.8kg.

“A chef I was working with in a restaurant in Northamptonshire [in the English midlands] was really big and I wanted to be like him. I had already worked in Michelin-starred restaurants for four years, and when I met him I was thinking, I could do something else other than working 15, 16 hours in the kitchen my entire life,” Rhodes explains.

The chef trained Rhodes for about a year, not just in weight-training techniques, but also in the importance of diet. “Before I ate about one meal a day because I did not have much time for food, but he said to gain weight, I needed to eat larger amounts of food and work out on a regular basis,” he explains.

“We would go to his house every other day, buy food and then cook it, mostly chicken and beef that were roasted, and boiled potatoes and vegetables. We ate seven to eight meals a day, eating every two to three hours. It’s a small plateful so you don’t feel full, but it’s just enough energy to keep going for another two to three hours.”

Within three months, Rhodes started to see changes in his body, which impressed him, but at the expense of physical pain. “My body had never done it before. One morning I woke up and I could barely walk. My girlfriend at the time had to help me shower and put my clothes on.”

This was not the experience Rhodes was looking for and he quit working out – for all of two weeks. He realised his body needed time to adjust, and this was normal.

Working out also meant keeping a regimented schedule: Rhodes worked at the restaurant until lunch service was over, hit the gym for about two hours, then was back at work again for dinner service, five to six days a week. He also quit smoking and sharply reduced his alcohol consumption. He admits this lifestyle is not for everyone. But for him the benefits outweigh these sacrifices.

“I have done it for so long, it’s part of my routine, my enjoyment. I like the feeling of going to the gym to lift weights,” he says. “Some people do yoga or meditation. I lift weights, relieve some stress or change my mind set and carry on with the rest of the day.”

He inadvertently started competitive weightlifting three years ago when the Arnold Classic Asia was held at Hong Kong’s AsiaWorld-Expo. The gym he was training at was the event organiser and signed him up for the amateur class. He was reluctant to join at first, having trained for less than five months, but after completing five different lifts, he unexpectedly won gold.

That win automatically qualified him for the world championships in the US in Columbus, Ohio the following year. He placed 15th out of 24 competitors from the US, Australia, Eastern Europe and the UK.

He has since entered other competitions; last September he was first in the under-90kg category in the Philippines Strong Man 2018, and second in Strongman India. Last October he competed in Static Monsters, an event in which certified gyms worldwide with standardised equipment submit videos and photos of competitors to Australia, and score participants without them having to travel to compete.

In Static Monsters, Rhodes qualified as world number one by lifting more weights than anyone else in his weight class. He will learn whether he really is world number at the world championships this June.

He has fine-tuned his eating habits, in keeping with his first mentor’s advice: breakfast at 7am, a snack at 10am, lunch at 1pm, pre-dinner at 4pm, dinner at 6.30pm, a late dinner at 8pm or 9pm. When he is in competition, he eats only breakfast, lunch and dinner.

What fuels him? “I eat a lot of chicken, beef and fish, with lots of vegetables, no particular diet, just high protein. Off season I eat six or seven times a day, roughly 4,000 calories. Pre-competition season, I have three meals a day, 2,000 calories. I cut sugary and highly processed foods out of my diet, but have them once in a while as treats.”

He also stresses that sleep “is super important, I need at least six hours of deep sleep to recover the body”.

There are some people in Hong Kong doing strongman training, but when it comes to competition, only a few do it seriously. Nevertheless, Rhodes gets a lot of support from his father, who has also been bitten by the strongman bug and trains and also competes.

“I think I will be doing this for quite a few more years,” Rhodes says. “At an extremely competitive level on the world stage, I can come out in the top five. If I can get to No. 1 in the world, win a few competitions at the world level, then after that I might consider taking a break to let my body recover a bit.”