Mike Bartos is a gym owner from Youngstown, Ohio. He is a man I know personally from going to his gym for the past 4 years. Over many years he was trying to figure out how to make an atlas stone that can have variable weight settings. An atlas stone is generally a large sphere that is made of concrete and has one weight. It is used in strongman competitions and training. Instead of having a bunch of concrete spheres laying around, he knew something had to be done. This led to many prototypes and testing to find the perfect stone. He created the Stone of Steel: the worlds first plate loaded atlas stone. This black stone is capable of weighing either 130 pounds up to 450+ pounds. This was a major innovation in the strongman community. He has since added many other products that are very useful. He prides all his products on being American made with American steel. He has been entrepreneurial in his field and has made a major innovation in stone training.
This is actually really cool! This product solves numerous problems within 1. excessive weights laying around can be a problem in safety and in use of space. I like that is product can be used with regular weights and not additions that cost extra money, plus it saves even more space.
It is great to see how people are capable of innovating and changing the way things work in their environment instead of simply accepting things the way they are. Mike’s idea with the atlas stone is a perfect example.
Recently, I have become interested in strongman and was very interested to see if anyone had thought of this idea yet purely because it seemed that a lot of stones would be difficult to keep track of. It’s awesome that this idea is being put into action.
I have never seen this on the market. I think this could be huge for strongmen. This is a really cool example of someones passion forming into a problem, then boom problem fixed. the website also looks great i hope he does well.