For the first time the Massenomics Lift Hard Live Easy Classic will be held over two days.
The fourth annual event takes place at the Ramkota in Aberdeen this weekend with activities on Friday and Saturday.
The two-part event is made up of the lifting competition and the live easy events, which is a festival made up of get-togethers over the weekend.
In the lifting competition, there will be three different events: a strongman event, a powerlifting event, and a grip competition.
The event will have participants from 31 different states and around 160 different competitors.
“This year will be the biggest,” said Tanner Baird, manager of Massenomics Gym. “2026 is the fourth year and we have more competitors this year than we ever have before, so we split it over multiple days for the first time.”
The event has exceeded expectations, according to Baird.
“It’s awesome,” Baird said. “My partner Tommy Defea and I put this together and the first year we wouldn’t have expected it to grow to be what it is now. … It’s a huge deal for us and our community. We have this online community of people from all over the world and this is sort of the annual in-person event that everyone actually gets to connect face to face.”
With the event growing so much, it takes a lot of preparation to get ready for competition.
“It actually takes the entire year to prepare for it now as this has grown,” Baird said. “We start working on basically the week after it’s over. We start working on the next one. Roughly planning some things and then it continues throughout the year. But there’s only so much that can be done and then those last three or four weeks are kind of a crazy sprint to the finish for us. Right now, we’ve made all the plans, but there’s just a lot of executing that has to go on these last few days. It’s kind of a wild whirlwind.”
With how much work that goes into the event, once it gets going there is a sense of some relief for Baird.
“It’s a good feeling once it starts, because once it starts a lot of the work has actually already been done,” Baird said. “We’ve got a lot of volunteers a lot of people in place. So once it gets going and the lead-up is over and the anticipation is over, it’s awesome when it gets started. … It’s fun once it begins and we get to be involved in everything and see all of our hundreds of friends from all over the world, and just hang out and do the stuff that we love to do.”
Baird and Defea started Massenomics as a podcast and it has grown to what it is now.
“Massenomics started about 11 years ago as a podcast about lifting culture, home gyms, strength, sports, all of that and we’ve posted a new episode every Monday for the last 537 weeks,” Baird said. “Over that time, the community has grown around it in a bigger and a different way than we ever really could have imagined.”
Aberdeen has also become very important for Baird and his brand.
“Having been from Aberdeen or at least the Aberdeen area and being around here we talked about Aberdeen so much over the years it was like all these funny quirky things about living in the Midwest and Eastern South Dakota,” Baird said. “We call it Western Northeast South Dakota. It’s like a running joke about that. So everyone jokes about Western Northeast South Dakota geographically. Involving Aberdeen on it was a big part of it for us because all these people that have listened to us talk about our Midwestern culture of years. So it’s cool for them to come here for the events.”
Baird gives out an itinerary when people arrive that has a list of locations in Aberdeen that people should go see, one of them being ‘Brock the Rock,’ which is the rock outside of Qdoba.
Events will start on Friday at 9 a.m. and go until around 3 p.m. Saturday will start at 8:30 a.m. and finish around 3-4 p.m.
There will be food vendors and a bar venue. Adults can get a weekend pass for $10.
“It’s not just picking up weights on a barbell,” Bair said. “There will be people throwing kegs around, picking up big rocks and lifting logs over their head. It’s really kind of a mixed bag of odd lifts and feats of strength that you get to see.”
For those unable to attend, there will also be a live stream on Massenomics’ YouTube channel both Friday and Saturday.
