Who is Ronnie Coleman? Ronnie Coleman is a retired IFBB Pro that dominated from 1992-2007. Ronnie attained eight consecutive Mr. Olympia titles which is a record and 26 IFBB Pro titles, which gave him the nickname “The King.”
Ronnie now walks around with crutches, almost not being able to walk at all. Ronnie had been injury prone since his teens; he suffered a back injury at 17 squatting 500 lbs. This didn’t stop him but later while playing college football he had a neck and back injury.
Even though he had to live with the pain, he pushed through with training for the bodybuilding shows. Then in 1997 he was squatting 600 lbs and severely herniated a disc in his back. Ronnie did an interview with Joe Rogan and said “I was squatting 600 lbs. I can remember like it was yesterday. I was coming up on rep number eight, and all of sudden, BOW! It was a loud, gunshot sound.
“I’d do 600 for like 12-13 reps all the time. This time I took two weeks off, and I thought I was still as strong as before I took the time off, but I wasn’t. I lost a little strength, and that’s why that disc snapped on me like that. I heard it and I felt it, but, you know, the athlete in you is like: Let’s go on and finish this up. Every time I finished up working out, doing legs, I always had a real bad pain in my back, every single time, but it would always go away in like an hour. This day it didn’t.”
Ronnie ended up not getting surgery because it would have affected his stage performance. One thing he would do that made him more injury prone then others was lifting SUPER heavy weights without lifting suits (which should be used when going for high weight). Ronnie lifted heavy deep into his 40’s which at that age your body cannot always keep up with heavy weights.
In 2014 he had his hips replaced, then his first spinal surgery in 2015. In 2018 he had three spinal surgeries that marked his 10th spinal surgery, and then in 2020 he had his hips replaced yet again.
Now Ronnie is 60 years old and still goes to the gym to lift weights. Even though he may not be lifting as heavy as he used to, he still puts up weight he can handle after all the injuries he has gone through.
