Derek Anthony Poundstone was born into a military family at Mountain Home Air Force Base in Idaho in 1981 and lived the first ten years of his life in Spain and Italy before the family settled in Rapid City, South Dakota. It was there that he joined the local YMCA and began his lifelong passion for lifting weights. After moving to Waterbury in 1999, he caught the attention of a local power lifting champion, who encouraged him to enter his first Powerlifting contest, which he won. In 2004, while training to enter his first Strongman competition, he became a Naugatuck police officer. He entered his first professional Strongman competition later that year and has become the most decorated American Strongman in the last four decades, winning five major Strongman titles, while serving with the Naugatuck police department.
Poundstone was named America’s Strongest Man three times. He won the Strong Man Super Series three times and the Giants Live and the Arnold Strongman Classic titles twice. In 2007 he ranked 4th in the IFSA Stongman World Championship and third in the IFSA 2-Man Team World Championship. He won the Fortissimus title in 2008 and has ranked in the World’s Strongest Man competition four times. Of the twenty-six competitions he has entered, he has finished in the top three an amazing twenty-one times.
He currently holds the title of America’s strongest cop and was named one of the twenty-five fittest men in the world by Men’s Fitness magazine. Despite serious injuries, he remains, arguably, one of the ten strongest men in the world.
He recently opened his own gym, The Poundstone Performance Training Center in Waterbury where he works out an average of 15 hours a week. He hosts Poundstone Power Radio on Sirius Xm satellite radio and travels the world as both a motivational speaker and as a spokesman for Solae, LLC, the world’s largest provider of soy. In 2011 he was named the first-ever Global Ambassador for the Law Enforcement Torch Run for Special Olympics.
An induction ceremony will take place Saturday, October 20 at the Howland-Hughes Center, 120 Bank St. at 2:00 p.m. The public is invited. Admission is free.
Read the entire article: http://www.waterburyobserver.org/node/1187
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