iStockphoto / brizmaker
A 58-year-old grandmother of 12 has just set a new Guinness World Record for ‘longest plank’ after holding a plank for over 4.5 hours.
I did five 60-second planks this morning and felt like my lower abs were about to pulsate out of my body and that was with 20-second breaks in between. The thought of holding one consecutive plank for over 4.5 hours is something my mind simply cannot process.
Guinness World Records shared her achievement on their YouTube channel recently but the story has gained renewed attention this week after it was picked up by mainstream media, an it certainly deserved attention because she is a superhuman to be able to hold a plank for so long, but it’s interesting to see the story have a second wave two weeks after it hit the GWR YouTube channel.
The record she needed to beat was 4 hours, 19 minutes, and 55 seconds. DonnaJean Wilde crushed the previous record and set a new time of 4 hours, 30 minutes, and 11 seconds.
On average, a plank burns between 2-5 calories per minute. Taking the low end of that spectrum because she’s incredibly fit, that’s around 570 calories just from planking. Never in my life have I considered planking as a ‘calorie burning exercise’ but here we are, it just needs to be done at scale.
In order to set the new world record for longest plank, she had to keep her forearms and toes on the ground and body raised. DonnaJean Wilde told CBS News that her elbows were in serious pain and she thinks that led to her quads hurting and she was afraid of losing her form during the challenge.
She added that the last hour of the challenge was the “most challenging” but she kept her form by “breathing, staying calm and not shaking.” Shaking is a death knell in planking (and in wall sits which I also did this morning and thought I was going to pass out after two minutes).
This new Guinness World Record is for women. The ‘longest plank’ has a separate category for men. That record was previously set back in 2021 by a man in Australia who held a plank for over 8 hours!