Table Talk Podcast | Episode 415

Bull, Steel, and Fang on Table Talk: What the American Gladiators Cameras Never Showed

Three elite athletes sat down at the S5 Compound and broke down the American Gladiators reboot on Prime Video, including everything that didn't make the show.

I had no idea how this episode was going to go.

I knew the show. American Gladiators is trending on Prime Video right now. Number one unscripted television in the country. Number five overall. That kind of cultural moment doesn't happen very often, and when it does, you want to understand it from the inside out.

What I didn't expect was how much I didn't know.

We spent over three hours together. Arms first, because Bull wanted a pump. The pump was gone by the time we sat down. But the conversation wasn't, and what came out of it is worth writing down.

They Did Not Walk Onto This Show

The first thing people need to understand about the 2026 American Gladiators is that the contenders are not ordinary people pulled off the street.

Neither are the Gladiators.

Bull. Steel. Fang.

Between the three of them: a YouTube powerhouse who pulled 888 pounds behind his back. A D1 wrestler who cranked 111 push-ups in a minute at the combine. An AEW professional wrestler who tore his bicep one week before filming and competed anyway.

These are not guys who answered a casual casting call.

Fang heard about the reboot through the grapevine, found the casting director's email, and sent a cold message with videos attached. He did the Zoom interview and walked away thinking it was a grand slam. Then two months went by with nothing. He started to believe it wasn't happening.

Bull went through the same wait. A full year between his Zoom call and the phone call confirming he was in.

This is the part that never airs. The uncertainty. The months of silence. The point where you've already built the thing up in your head and then you sit there wondering if you read the room wrong.

They hadn't.

After the Zoom comes a full physical, background checks, and the combine. Push-ups. Pull-ups. Tire flips. Rope climbs. Collision drills. And then a speaking portion on camera. You're being evaluated on everything, not just how you move.

Bull did 111 push-ups in one minute. He beat his combine partner in the first session, and they told him he was leading. He didn't fully believe it until he saw it listed as a fun fact on the actual show.

The call comes after that. For Steel and Fang, within a week. For Bull, in early March with filming starting in June. Enough time to prepare. Not enough to know what you were actually preparing for.

Gladiator Lockdown

Once you arrive on set, they separate you from the contenders completely.

Not just on filming days. Everywhere. If a contender walks into a hallway, you get redirected. If they're in the lobby, you wait. You do not talk to them. For a full month, your world is sixteen Gladiators, a hotel, and a filming schedule that runs from eight in the morning until ten at night, six days a week.

That is a long month.

Adrenaline is the thing nobody prepares you for. You get two, sometimes three dumps per day depending on how many events are scheduled. You go out hot, compete, come down, then have to build back up and do it again. And between events, you have to look like a Gladiator on national television, which means you have to maintain a pump.

Three times a day. Same muscles. Lateral raises, bicep work, tricep work. Whatever it takes to walk back out there looking the part.

The meals were timed, and the timing was brutal. Lunch would come and within five minutes you were up for an event. If you're pushing 280 pounds, you're not eating a full plate before running a steel cage drill. Hard-boiled eggs in a bucket became breakfast. Fast-absorbing carbohydrates became the intra-training staple. You ate what kept you going and adjusted as you went.

None of them trained the way they normally train. The athletes with in-season load management experience figured it out faster. The ones who trained with no other variable present took longer. Everyone got there eventually.

The bond between Bull, Steel, and Fang didn't happen because they were assigned to each other. It happened because when you go through something that high-stakes and that sustained together, it compresses the timeline on trust. What would normally take years happened in about a week. They were each other's boost when one was down. That part made the show. A lot of what built it didn't.

Fang's Bicep

One week before flying out, Fang was training on the rings.

He tore his bicep. Full tear.

He decided to go anyway.

For the first week on set, he wore long sleeves every day. He covered the bruising with tanner. He told nobody on the production team. On day one, he went out on the rock wall, grabbed on, and felt lightning shoot through his arm. He did not take pain medication the entire month. He said afterward that he wished he had.

In powerlifting, a bicep rupture is not the career-ending event it would be in bodybuilding. You lose ten to fifteen percent of your strength. You look a little different. You keep training because the meet is scheduled and a torn bicep doesn't change your ability to squat and pull. But powerlifting doesn't put you on a rock wall thirty feet in the air, grabbing with both hands. It doesn't ask you to perform in events you've never practiced while cameras are on you from forty-four angles.

He competed for two weeks before anyone outside the three of them knew what had happened. By then, the bruising had faded enough to blend with the tanner. He told the production team after the fact.

You wouldn't have known from watching. He didn't let you know.

What These Events Actually Feel Like from the Inside

People watch the show and think they understand what's happening up there.

They don't.

The joust platform wobbles. Not slightly. Early in filming, it was moving under your feet while you were standing ten or more feet in the air trying to figure out your footing against someone who may outweigh you or have a significant height advantage. You can't practice this at home. The risk of falling during a practice run, before filming even starts, is not worth what a bad landing would cost you.

Bull's first time on the joust, he went low. Wrestling instinct. Stay low, control position, manage the contact. The problem is that going low makes the board wobble more, and if any part of you contacts the platform surface, you're disqualified. He learned the adjustment in real time. You stand upright. It's counterintuitive. It's not what any of his training had prepared him for. He learned it by doing it wrong first.

The edge is different. You're not ten feet up. You're thirty. The safety net below you is black and invisible from above. The audience is twenty feet below you, and you can see them clearly, which means you understand exactly how far down you are. The apparatus moves when weight shifts on it. You're being asked to run across it, chase someone, and fight them off without losing your own footing.

Steel went up against a contender on the edge who did things nobody expected. It cost him. He came back from it. The moment where he dove to stop the guy from scoring, knowing that if he missed, he was going headfirst into a support structure, is the kind of thing you either have in you or you don't.

The rings break 280-pound men. You need shoulder mobility that most powerlifters don't have, and tendon resilience that takes months to build. All three of them found this out the same way. By trying and getting a fast education. Fang found out while pulling with a fresh bicep tear.

The Periodization Lesson Nobody Planned For

Bull came back from filming and started hitting PRs.

He said it without being prompted. A month of not going heavy. Of moving his body in unfamiliar ways. Of getting pumped for television instead of loading the bar to see what it could hold. When he got back under real weight, everything moved better than it had before he left.

This is not a coincidence.

Professional football players don't attempt maximal lifts during the season. They maintain. They stay strong and mobile enough to perform every week, manage recovery, and protect themselves from the kind of accumulated fatigue that causes injury at the worst possible time. Then the offseason starts and they rebuild from a fresher baseline.

The most serious problem most lifters have with deloads is that they don't trust them. You feel like you're losing something. You feel like everyone training through it is gaining on you. What actually happens when you reduce volume and intensity for a meaningful period is that your body absorbs the work you've already done and comes out ready to do more.

Bull didn't choose to deload. The show chose it for him. He came home and hit personal records. 

Why the Kids Are the Point

Near the end of the episode, the conversation shifted.

Steel was at his daughter's dance competition recently. An eight-year-old kid couldn't believe who he was standing next to. Wanted to know his best bench. Wanted to know which Gladiators liked each other and which ones didn't. I was completely locked in on this show, the way kids in 1989 were on Nitro, Gemini, and Diamond on a Saturday afternoon.

That's the whole thing right there.

I started elitefts in 1998 because the knowledge that made me a better powerlifter was given to me for free by meatheads in the gym who didn't charge anything for it. The articles, the coaching, the equipment, all of it exists because people who wanted to get strong deserved better information than what they were being handed. And most of the people who actually used that information never said a word about it to me directly.

That's how this works. The people you're reaching are quiet. They take what they saw or read and they go do something with it. You don't hear from them. They don't leave comments. They just show up a year later, having made better choices because something they saw put them on a different track.

Fang said it this way. There's a kid watching this show who doesn't have a father at home. No male figure showing him what discipline and consistency look like in practice. If one of these guys on screen makes that kid want to pick up a weight, want to eat better, want to work toward something, that is what this is for.

The vocal minority online will tell you the show isn't what it used to be. That the '90s version was better. That these Gladiators don't compare.

They're wrong. And they're looking at the old version through the eyes of an eight-year-old, which is not a fair comparison to anything. The eight-year-old watching right now sees what we all saw then. Larger than life. Athletic. Something to aspire toward.

That's the whole point. It was always the whole point.

Where to Find Bull, Steel, and Fang

Bull: YouTube, search "thick as frick" or Eric Bugenhagen.

Steel: Instagram @mrspectacular. AEW Dynamite on Wednesdays and AEW Collision on Saturdays on TNT and TBS.

Fang: Instagram, search Fang or real Wllo. AEW Dynamite and Collision, same schedule.

American Gladiators is streaming now on Prime Video.

Live, Learn, Pass On.
Dave Tate
elitefts