Meat the world’s strongest men

The sun was breaking through the trees outside an historic building in the grounds of a Grade II listed 17th century manor in the Hampshire countryside.

Suddenly, the Wellhouse at Lainston House hotel near Winchester transformed into Hagrid’s Hut as two giants emerged, ducking their heads to avoid removing oak beams. I borrowed a step ladder and elbow–bumped Tom Stoltman and his “wee older brother” Luke in greeting.

They are huge men. Tom, aged 26, stands 6ft 8in, while Luke, 10 years older, is 6ft 3in. They are known respectively as The Albatross and The Highland Oak. At that size you get to call yourself anything you want.

They are strong men too. Actually, make that two of the strongest men in the world. I don’t know what they put in the waters of Easter Ross other than whisky. But, to quote Luke, “we are two of the strongest men in the world from a town in the Scottish Highlands where things like this shouldn’t happen.” Invergordon take a bow.

The Stoltmans are unquestionably the strongest brothers in the world. Luke has competed in World’s Strongest Man four times and won Scotland’s Strongest Man five times. Last year, Tom, who aged 18 finished fifth in Scotland’s Strongest Man in his first-ever competition, was second in World’s Strongest Man, vowing to go one better in June. Every elite athlete loves a title, but to be able to call yourself ‘the strongest man in the world’. Move over Atlas, this globe’s mine.

What’s this all got to do with barbecue? Well a lot actually and a lot of meat – every day. The Stoltman brothers are sponsored by Campbells Prime Meat – a Scottish family-run business, dating back to 1910 when young Thomas Campbell started out as a butcher.

The basket of a butcher’s bike wasn’t quite going to cut it, so instead Campbells hired an articulated lorry to deliver the meat to feed the 10,000-calories-a-day-each brothers. Campbells have even named a steak after them, with the Stoltman Steak weighing in at 52oz or 1.5kg. I can barely bench-press that.

The brothers had flown down from Scotland in the early hours, lured by industrial quantities of food to barbecue under the expert tuition of Weber head grill master Gyles Foster, working with Luke and Tom on a Weber GS4 and a Weber Summit Kamado.

But first and foremost, the Stoltmans are elite athletes with a strict training regime, but an equally strict diet and that consists of lots of meat, especially red meat.

“We barbecue every day and love it – everything tastes so much nicer. As for the Campbells’ meat deliveries, I’ve had to buy another freezer,” says Luke.

The nutritional value of meat, as well as boosting testosterone levels, is key. The heavy lifting in the gym is the easy bit; a lot of the discipline is in the diet and the rest and recovery, “with a few cheeky doughnuts thrown in!” laughs Tom, not looking forward to his next freezing Scottish swim, unless he can have a fire pit on the beach to return to for a feed.

They will flip burgers, sausages, steaks and pork chops on their barbecues at home (they live three miles apart) but the purpose of the visit to Lainston House – with the hotel’s Wellhouse opening as a wood-fired dining experience – was to learn how to make those meats not just functional and nutritional, but fun and delicious. If you need to consume that much barbecue, you might as well reverse sear a Stoltman steak with pink peppercorn butter or chimichurri, to the Highland warrior cry of “that’s got my name on it!”