Lifting 639 pounds with just your hips is no small feat, but for Lilian Zamora Alonso, the trick to achieving anything impossible is that “you gotta love it.”
Zamora Alonso is a Miami-based fitness coach who recently set the Guinness World Record for heaviest weighted hip thrust by a woman. The new record is now 639 pounds.
A hip thrust is a lower body exercise where you rest your lower back on an elevated surface like a bench, and lift your hips toward the ceiling using your glutes and hamstrings.
Zamora Alonso's fitness journey didn’t start with the dream of earning a world record. It began with a young girl who fell in love with working out.
Inspiration and preparation
At 16, she first started lifting weights and going to the gym consistently in her hometown, Santa Clara, Cuba. The athlete and her best friend would record the workouts and post on social media, and even as a beginner going to a gym with little equipment and machines, Zamora Alonso always found a way to do what she loved.
“Sometimes I even did the upper body workouts at home with some water bottles,” she said. “There's no excuse. When you wanna do it, you get it done.”
It was with that same determination that she worked toward earning her world record title. Her husband, who is also a fitness coach and gym aficionado, mentioned to her the male hip thrust record after seeing an Instagram post about it. Out of curiosity, she looked up the female record at the time and saw it was 605 pounds — just 25 pounds shy of her latest personal record.
Her preparation started with a lot of strength training. It wasn’t just about the maximum weight she could carry, but about having enough strength in the rest of her muscles to hold a straight line position — from knees, to hips, to shoulders — for the required six seconds to break the record.
Before attempting the world record, Zamora Alonso hit a personal record of 670 pounds, but when doing the official attempt she felt she couldn’t risk pushing that far.
“I was a little bit scared because you gotta record everything, you gotta send everything so they can review it. So more weight would mean more time recording, maybe a few mistakes that can happen…we didn't want that to happen, so we did 639 pounds,” she said.
A dream achieved
After sending the video, the Guinness World Records organization told her they would give a response within three months, but more time passed and Zamora Alonso started feeling she had failed. In the time she waited, she could not stop training, because if there was any mistake in her first attempt they could request a redo and she had to be able to still lift the same weight. During that period, she hurt her elbow and her knee, and still she kept going.
Finally, after five months of waiting, the weightlifter received an email with the subject “Congratulations, you are officially amazing” announcing she had beat the record. Zamora Alonso said she was so shocked and moved when she received the e-mail that she didn’t even have time to record the reaction.
“That just tells you, as a content creator, when you don't record it, it's because you were in shock. I was crying,” she said.
Support and pride in her community
Looking back on it now, she said the journey was what she enjoyed the most. Her path to personal fitness and coaching might have given her a record, a job and a community, but to Zamora Alonso, it all comes down to passion.
When she was younger, she always heard the saying “Love your job and you will not work a day in your life,” and now she understands it in a very personal way.
“I had people that inspired me when I first started working out… when I see other people start in the gym, they text me all the time, they go like, ‘Lili, I know you're not my coach but girl, I started the gym.’ They send me pictures and it is insane,” she said. “I feel so grateful because I barely get hate from my community, it's just women inspiring each other.”
Zamora Alonso is now training for aesthetics and personal goals, but she doesn’t discard the idea of breaking another record in the future, or even surpassing her own.
Coming from Cuba, she said she always saw a Guinness World Record as something huge and impossible to achieve. Today, she still struggles with self-sabotage and a voice telling her that if she got the record, maybe it wasn’t so hard to get. But as her own trainer, cheering herself on from exercise set to exercise set across the gym every day, she has learned to appreciate her efforts for what they are.
“You have to do a lot of work like talk to yourself and [say], ‘Hey, you got it. You did the hard work. You deserve it,’" she said.
