Damien Rooney, a gym owner from Burren, just outside Newry in Northern Ireland, now holds the Guinness World Records title “most chin ups carrying a 20 lb pack in one hour (male).” Guinness lists his total as 499, set in Newry on June 1, 2026. That is four more than the previous mark of 495.
The pack weighs about 9 kg and stays on for the full 60 minutes. Rooney, a former professional mixed martial artist who fought as “The Rage,” said in an interview published on Sunday, October 18, that the confirmation took months to come through. “I did this on June 1 and they told me in September,” he said. “It can be up to 20 weeks because they have to go through the tapes and watch it from different angles.”
How 499 reps fit into an hour
Rooney did not go flat out from the first second. He split the hour into two-minute bursts of work with 30 seconds of rest after each, because starting at full speed backfires: “If you do that the body will fatigue and it will fatigue quickly making recovery hard,” he said.
The arithmetic shows how tight that pacing is. Assuming the hour ran as 24 working blocks, those blocks add up to 48 minutes, and 23 rests of 30 seconds add 11.5 minutes more, for 59.5 minutes in all. Over 48 working minutes, 499 chin-ups comes to about 10.4 a minute, or roughly 21 in every block. Averaged across the whole hour, the rate is 8.3 a minute. His winning margin of four reps is under 1% of the total, about 23 seconds of work at that pace.
A chin-up is not the same movement as a pull-up, and Guinness keeps separate titles for each. Rooney described the chin-up as the version done with the palms facing you, so the biceps take most of the strain; with the palms turned away, the lats, the broad muscles of the back, carry more of the load. Standard reference descriptions of the pull-up likewise call the underhand, or supinated, grip a chin-up.
Six years and four failed 24-hour attempts
The weighted hour was not his first target. Rooney started chasing chin-up records in 2018 with the 24-hour category. In a 2024 interview he said he had tried for that title four times and each attempt ended in injury: a torn bicep after 14 hours and 3,505 reps, then a torn pectoral muscle, then heat exhaustion during a July heatwave, and finally forearms so inflamed he could not close his hands. By then, he said, he had done more than 400,000 chin-ups in training.
That spring he was preparing for the 12-hour record, which stood at 4,649. The figure moved first. Guinness lists Charles Solano of Battle Creek, Michigan, as the holder with 5,107 chin-ups in 12 hours, set on May 3, 2024, ending a mark that had lasted since 2016. Rooney said that after his last unsuccessful attempt he rebuilt his training around the shorter, weighted hour instead.
Next up: the unweighted hour, then 24 hours
Without the pack, the one-hour target is far higher. Guinness lists Frank Sagona of Pueblo, Colorado, with 1,010 chin-ups in an hour on May 13, 2023, or about 16.8 a minute. Rooney’s weighted total is 49.4% of that figure. “Without the weighted jacket the record is something like 1,010 so it is night and day without it,” he said. That unweighted hour is his next challenge.
After that he plans to return to the 24-hour record, which he estimates could take as many as 10,000 reps. The Guinness page for most chin-ups in 24 hours still shows 7,479, by Graham Morgan of the UK at Quinta do Lago in Portugal on November 19, 2022, though the organization notes that records change daily and are not immediately published online. For scale, 10,000 chin-ups in a day means one every 8.6 seconds for 24 hours straight, with no time left over for rest.
Rooney, who trains clients at his own gym, has penciled in April 2027 for that next record attempt.
Further reading
Image: Sgt. Justin J. Shemanski, Public domain via Wikimedia Commons
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