Shaun McDaniel is on his way to becoming an international champion. Last week, the twenty four year old New Yorker famous for training in a thrift-store basement (link to original article) unofficially broke the world record that his longtime hero, Paddy Doyle, established in 2008. With a forty-pound weight strapped to his back, Shaun managed to pump out 719 back-handed pushups in an hour, topping Doyle’s previous record of 663. “I didn’t know I could do it,” said Shaun, “I thought it would just be a practice session.”

Shaun McDaniel doesn’t eat on his half-hour lunch break. Instead, he spends his time in the basement of the New York thrift store where he works, doing as many push-ups as he can before break-time is over. Unable to afford a gym, it’s also in this dingy, unfinished concrete basement that he trains after work. Shaun slides his feet under clothing racks to do sit-ups. The exposed pipes and staircase become pull-up bars. The fifty-pound boxes of secondhand clothing serve as weights. It’s all part of the training regime Shaun has created for himself with one goal in mind – to get into the Guinness Book of World’s Records.