Daniel Scali is quite the marvel of extreme fitness. Last August, the then-28-year-old Scali (from Adelaide, Australia) set a Guinness World Record for holding a plank position, with his time of nine hours, 30 minutes and one second breaking the previous record by an hour and 15 minutes. This week, Scali set a record for pushups in an hour, doing 3,182:
That beat previous record-holder Jarrad Young, who recorded 3,054 pushups in an hour in 2021. But what’s perhaps more remarkable still is that Scali accomplished this while fighting through complex regional pain syndrome, which he’s had since breaking his arm when he was 12. He spoke to Guinness about that around his plank record last year:
“When I was 12 years old, I fell off my trampoline causing a severe break in my left arm and as a result I live with a condition called CRPS (complex regional pain syndrome),” he explained.
“It’s the brain sending wrong messages to my arm, which is the affected area. So anything like soft touch, movement, wind, water, will cause me pain.”
During the attempt, he wore a compression band on his left arm to try and alleviate the worst of the pain, but as you’d expect, his condition made this attempt even tougher that it already was.
“Obviously putting constant pressure on my elbow and forearm, up to my shoulder did give me quite a bit of grief at the start.”
Scali also spoke to the CBC’s Carol Off last year on how that condition affects him, and why it’s inspired him to try and bring awareness to it:
“As I’m sitting here, I feel a heavy throb, like just a dormant throb just waiting there.”
“Moving the arm, you sort of get a little tingling that that’s not right. Even though there’s no damage … at the moment, my brain is sending warnings to my arm to say, ‘Well no, that movement is not right. Send a pain signal.”
…Scali said because of his condition, he missed out on playing contact sports, like boxing, with his brother.
“It’s only now recently that I’ve sort of grown up a little bit where I’ve been able to accept it … and say, ‘Well, this is what I’ve got. Now do something with it,” he said.
…”I want to just sort of concentrate on bringing more awareness to CRPS,” he said. “It is a confusing condition, but there is enough research out there now for people to understand it better.”
Here’s video of Scali’s plank last year:
Scali’s fitness accomplishments so far are incredible. We’ll see what he does next.
[UPI, CBC, Guinness; image from Guinness World Records on YouTube]
