The Secret Behind This Toddler's Superhuman Strength

Liam Hoekstra is the only toddler in the world who has been identified as having an extraordinary muscle enlarging condition. Because it's such a rare condition nobody really knows what this abnormality is. At the moment he's a medical mystery. A similar condition has also been identified in a breed of cattle dubbed super cows because of Liam too has remarkable muscle definition but has never had his strength evaluated. Now he's three, experts are finally able to put his muscles to the test. I know what he can do but I mean that's crazy. And in an astonishing twist Liam's unique body could also hold the key to unlocking the cure to lethal muscle wasting diseases. That'd be awesome if they could learn from him. But discovering the secret to Liam's super strength could have dark repercussions. My sense is that if Liam's condition is better understood it will immediately be misused by athletes there's no question about it. Will the world's strongest toddler's unique gift be a blessing or a curse? On the shores of Lake Michigan in midwestern America is the city of Muskegon. Tucked away in an ordinary neighborhood is the home of a most extraordinary toddler. Three-year-old Liam Hoekstra lived with his 16-year-old sister Morgan and his parents Dana and Neil. We're blessed I mean to have two great kids. I jokingly look at my wife say I have one that has you know awesome brains and I have one that has awesome brawn. Liam has virtually no body fat and larger than normal well-defined muscles. There you go you can see all the muscles in his back when he pulls up. You know he doesn't look all that much different he does have well-defined muscles but they're not huge he's not doesn't look like some bodybuilder whereas most kids can barely hang he will hang and pull himself up he does everything but just a little bit more than you know the average three or four-year-old. He may have a treat now. All the time we come here there's always something different that he'll do it just because you know he can do it. Doctors believe Liam has a rare condition which means his muscles grow much larger than normal. Like a bodybuilder the normally unpronounced trapezius muscles on his back are clearly defined. He doesn't have a protruding belly as is common with children his age. Instead his abdominal muscles already have the appearance of a six-pack. Liam's biceps and triceps bulge yet his muscle definition is totally natural and not the result of hours of weight training. Who wouldn't want to have no body fat and you know larger than normal muscles and a high metabolism so he can eat and eat and eat and you know doesn't doesn't gain any weight. But doctors have yet to find out whether Liam's big muscles have also given him super strength. Just because you have big muscles doesn't mean you're particularly strong and likewise you can have very strong people that don't necessarily have very large muscles. I would like to see Liam's strength tested. I would like to see him compared to like another three-year-old so that we could see the difference in in strength. In a week from now Liam will take part in a series of tests to discover just how strong he is in comparison with other toddlers. But whilst the family wait for answers they have to live with a very special but very active little boy. He's got the energy of 10 children. He's running around he's either on or off but I've never seen him off. Liam's daily routine begins at 7am. He's like a lot of kids he's very hyper he's active but his muscles his body is constantly go go go go. The three-year-old's parents fill his day full of physically demanding activities in a desperate attempt to try and burn off some of his excess energy. The tickle monster is coming in. It's gonna make me older in a hurry. Today even before nursery Liam heads to Castle's gymnasium. Good boy feet together and stand up. Since his first lesson coach Phil has recognized a difference between Liam and the other three-year-olds in his class. The one thing that I've noticed with Liam is that he's proportionate. Most kids that are his age may have an upper body strength but they're weak in other areas. All right climb dude climb up there muscle man. He is able to muscle himself up much quicker than others because he has the strength whereas a lot of the other kids don't because the fact that that's the way most kids are born. Come on you're almost up there go spider-man go. I mean Liam can climb the rope and ring the bell whereas the other kids you know need um coach Phil to help them all the way up the rope. These kids you're going to see me have to walk them up so because they're they're not strong enough to hold themselves yet whereas Liam has to use his lower body to compensate because he's not using my hands. All right. He's very unique I mean speaking as a gymnastics coach I would love to have a whole bunch of little Liam's in my class because they would be very easy to get into that olympic level. All right Liam I want you to show me hot dog all by yourself bring your feet up. Liam physically has the potential to do anything he wants to do in sport and excel in it. It comes down to if he desires to do it. You want to go really high all right here we go. He is drawn to sports we're encouraging him to try everything so that you know he can eventually find his niche. It's not like we are forcing him into any of this is truly what he loves to do. It's 5 p.m and Liam is still bursting with energy but after a day at college his 16 year old sister Morgan isn't. I'm exhausted after that babysitting because I'm following him around all the time usually chasing after him cleaning up a mess. I try to keep up with him chase him around wear him out. After dad Neil comes home from work he gives the rest of the family a break by taking his son to the sports center. Even though it's 7 p.m and most toddlers are getting ready for bed Liam still isn't remotely tired. Doctors have predicted that when he's an adult Liam will be about five foot six so he's unlikely to be a basketball star but that doesn't stop him from enjoying a game with his dad. Liam and I were doing our thing with a normal basketball this other kid was there and well this kid is playing with a rubber ball and I'm thinking to myself how old is this kid? How old is he? Oh okay cool. So here's my three-year-old with a normal basketball almost getting the basketball up to the hoop. This kid's with a little rubber ball you know and he is getting up there. Even after a day packed full of physical activities Neil and Dana still struggle to get Liam to go to sleep. Our goal is to get him bed at nine that never happens so he's usually in bed 10 o'clock at the latest. But he really takes a long time to unwind. Oh yeah. To go to sleep. Cover yourself up. As Liam tries to fall asleep he's too young to realize his unique condition has already caused not only a media frenzy but a medical one too. Three-year-old Liam Hoekstra is a unique child because he was born with a rare condition which has allowed his muscle mass to grow much larger than average. But that's not the only thing that makes him unique to his parents. After years of trying to conceive a second child they adopted Liam. We're blessed to have two great kids one biological and one not biological. I mean it's amazing. I mean I don't even once in a while somebody will say well your son's adopted isn't he? And believe it or not sometimes I have to sit there and think you know because I mean we've had him basically since day one. On September the 1st 2005 Liam was born almost five weeks early. Who is that? Who is that? Liam baby. But despite being premature baby Liam quickly revealed his remarkable strength. Look at that no body fat huh. When he was a day old I did notice that you know he already put his feet down and were like bearing quite a bit of weight on his legs. Certainly he had no balance and you know um not not coordinated at all but I still thought it's somewhat unusual that he could you know. He always lift his head up. Yeah had great you know head strength and neck strength. Look at you here. You're standing up all by yourself. Wow. He was very easily standing um just as someone held his hands because he didn't have any balance but he could easily you know stand and take some steps even just by holding his hands. You're kind of special Liam because you know why? Most kids that age aren't standing like that. No. Five months old I started taking some pictures of his legs and you know I kept sending these pictures to my dad and I was taking pictures of him saying you gotta look at his deltoids and his you know his his thigh muscles and he's like you know that is really just not normal. Yeah what are you guys feeding them or what are you giving them? Can you see your muscles? Look at all your muscles. Whoa. Is that your little booty right there? Yeah. You had lots of muscles when you were a baby weren't you? Didn't you? This is the amazing right here. Four months old and he's sitting there pushing himself up. Look how strong you are. Goodness sakes. It was really unusual because most kids that I'd babysat that were his age could not do that. I just thought that was really unusual that my brother could do that. He crawled at about four months old but he could walk at five months old. The average age for a child to begin walking is 15 months old. By six months old he was going up the stairs and by the next month he was coming down the stairs which made a lot of people nervous when they would come over to our house. They'd be like you know you don't have gates around your your stairs. What about your baby? And I'm like he goes up and down the stairs just fine and they'd be like oh my god. Normally a child would not be able to walk up and down the stairs upright until the age of two. He couldn't keep the gate up either because it'd wear holes in the wall because he constantly hung on the gate. Plus he was moving my furniture around in the living room so he would push the chairs around he would push the couch out so I'd come in here you know after I would just leave him for two minutes to you know do something and come back in and he's you know pushing a piece of piece of furniture in the living room. He would climb up on our countertops just by putting his hands up and he would pull himself up. He could climb the refrigerator and he'd just kind of shimmy up it. I didn't know that there was any kind of condition that this could be so so we had an active yeah we just figured okay we had a yeah a strong kid. Liam's mother Dana is a medically trained physician's assistant but for her and for the rest of the family Liam's advanced development wasn't a cause for concern. If we think about disease as a spectrum of abnormality we usually think of it in the negative. Well in this case this is somebody who has abnormality in the positive direction and how many parents go around taking their kids to the doctor because they're they're stronger than the other kids in the neighborhood. It just doesn't happen. As Liam grew he continued to display signs of exceptional strength. Dana's dad Daryl couldn't contain his pride. He began telling friends about his grandson's super strength. One of them was local doctor Ellen Larson. He was just as all grandfathers do doing a bit of bragging about his grandson about how strong he was and a lot of things about how you could see the muscles on his body and so forth and I asked him how young as young the child was and he said he was only 18 or 17 months and it all sounded a little bit strange. Dr. Larson's like no no way so we had him come over and it's like wow you know and he's scratching his head and he's feeling Liam's you know the skin on him he's like there's no fat on him. His grandfather told me that he could you know lift himself up with his arms which is completely unheard of at that age and so I tried lifting him up and rather than leaving his arms fly up like a normal child would he held on to them and that very few well-trained athletes can do. And then Dr. Larson's like I think I read about this. Back in 2004 Dr. Larson had seen an article in a medical journal about an eight-year-old German boy who had super strength. This child was the first human to date that had been diagnosed with a pure myostatin knockout deficiency. Myostatin is a gene which regulates the size of a person's muscle. Regulation of muscle growth begins in the womb and continues throughout life. Another example of when myostatin works differently has been observed in the Belgian blue breed of cow. Known as super cows these bovines have a heavily sculpted muscular appearance due to a naturally occurring mutation. But myostatin was first discovered in the lab when genetic engineer Dr. C. Jin Lee created a new breed of rodent known as the mighty mouse. We engineered a strain of mice in which we've deleted this gene and these mice are quite unusual in that they have two to three times the muscle mass of regular mice. Dr. Larson believed that Liam too could have a myostatin genetic defect. A couple days later you know he called us back and said I think your son has something to do with this myostatin deficiency and we're like what? News that their young son may have a genetic defect relating to his muscle growth made Neil and Dana extremely worried because the heart is also a muscle. My first thoughts were now what? Is he going to have a short life? Do we have to worry about parts of him growing faster than other parts or too much muscle here not enough you know you know what does the future hold? It was much to my relief that it doesn't affect smooth muscle and it doesn't affect cardiac muscle. Myostatin only affects skeletal muscle. Dr. Larson's diagnosis was reinforced by the fact that like the German child Liam too had experienced uncontrollable muscle spasms in infancy. They now think that it was you know the muscle fibers are larger and growing so much faster that it pretty much was the tension being put on the muscles giving him that that tremor-like sensation. And when Liam was 18 months old a geneticist discovered his condition was different to the German child whose body doesn't create myostatin. Liam's body produces normal levels of myostatin but for some reason it doesn't properly restrict his muscle growth. Tests were then carried out to see just how large his leg muscles were. They did the ultrasound of his thighs and I was told that it was about 40% more than the average one year old at the time. As he appeared to be the only child in America to have this rare condition local journalist Jeff Alexander wanted to let the city of Muskegon know about the extraordinary child living in their midst. When I first met Liam he was 18 months old and 18 month old children you expect to be sort of wobbling around on their feet and Liam was sprinting around the room and then he grabbed the coffee table and was moving the coffee table and it was just astonishing how strong and agile this kid was and our photographer had the same reaction and we just sort of looked at each other like holy cow this kid is really an amazing specimen. Liam's story was front page news and suddenly everyone knew about the toddler's super strength but while some parents envied his muscle powers others feared it. Now age three Liam attends a nursery program five days a week but when he was first enrolled it created quite a stir. Obviously all the parents in the program have seen this article that's been published throughout our community and they are going to have some concerns with their children being in this program and is there going to be physical harm to the other children in the program. Some of the parents had expressed concern that he was going to be a brute and aggressive and and that that he might you know torment the other children so you know we had to kind of reassure the daycare and those parents that that that's not him yes he has he is stronger but he's not particularly aggressive. And we've never really had to say Liam you need to be gentle Liam you need to settle down or remember that you're stronger and you may hurt someone we've we've not had to do that. Yeah I think so he's just the sweetest most loving little boy that is not aggressive in any form. He's the same to us as any other child and he comes here he has friends he's wonderfully adapted to our environment and so for us it seems quite typical quite normal he's just Liam. Here we go okay big boy today. Bye bye love you bye bye. He's a very loving child who is very conscientious of of the other children around him. He's a caregiver he typically takes care of the younger kids he makes sure that their needs are met if there's a new child that comes into the program he befriends them immediately and shows them the ropes. He's a teacher by by nature. Liam is much the same as his classmates in many aspects of school life except when it comes to doing physical activities. Due to the increased muscle in his legs Liam has more power and can run faster than his classmate Trent. One of the activities Liam and his classmates like doing is playing on the chin-up bar where they try to pull themselves up without touching the wall. From a developmental standpoint this simple exercise is way beyond the abilities of an average three-year-old as they have not yet developed the upper body strength to do it. Because Liam has overdeveloped biceps he performs the task with ease. But it's not just compared to his classmates that Liam's strength is extraordinary. We have five and six-year-olds upstairs and I know they can't do it either. What makes this toddler even more remarkable is that he's been able to do a chin-up since he was little more than a one-year-old. His ability to perform activities that require upper body strength is accelerated probably to twice his age. Whilst Liam's large muscles appear to give him more power experts have never been able to measure his strength but now age three he's old enough to be put to the test. Three-year-old Liam Hoekstra has 40 percent more muscle than a normal child. It seems the only negative side effect to having an overdeveloped physique is that Liam is always hungry. For every additional pound of muscle he has he needs to eat around 50 extra calories. Liam definitely eats a lot. He needs to eat a lot because he's more active than most kids his age and he's more active more intensely active. He just expends a lot more calories. Are you hungry Liam? Yeah well then there try that. The nursery has set times for the children to eat but they've had to make special allowances for Liam. He has snacks in his locker so that if he gets hungry before you know a meal or a snack that he that he can get something out of his locker and eat it. Even though Liam eats constantly his condition means he is not able to store body fat. This is a potential health risk as toddlers need a certain amount of fat in their bodies to help the brain and nervous system develop correctly. When we start going into like a starvation mode we can kind of live off the land for for lack of a you know better phrase because we have excess body fat on us whereas he does not so when he goes into that starvation mode and he's not eating right and eating enough fat it'll take the nutrients away from the brain and the spinal cord so he'll actually suffer damage. Are you all done bud? Okay. Liam's remarkable body seems to give him exceptional strength but in the world of sport some believe his genetic gift will give him an unfair edge over others. We all have unfair advantages in one way or another. Some of us recognize them and make it some of us make it through life never even realizing them and never really allowing them to come to fruition. Aware that his large muscles appear to have given their son super strength parents Neil and Dana have introduced Liam to different sports to find out where he may excel. He loves the water. He's been a fish since you know he was born. It's been wonderful for him. The water drives him crazy. The three-year-old's love of swimming combined with his genetic differences have led to comparisons with American Olympic gold medalist Michael Phelps. Michael Phelps started swimming at a young age and from my understanding is because he had so much bottled up energy that getting in the pool was a way for him to burn off some of that energy. We've also found that with Liam and his swimming you know it helps to burn up some of his energy. I definitely see him as a swimmer because he loves to swim. I would like to see him be in the Olympics like Michael Phelps. As well as going to the pool regularly with his dad Liam has swimming lessons twice a week with his teacher Laura. She has already noticed he has a natural talent for the sport. It takes every muscle of your body to swim. The fact that he does have a lot of strength and muscle and the fact that he loves to swim and that he's really interested in it I think he could go far with swimming. Like Liam Michael Phelps also has his own genetic gift. After expending energy his body has abnormally low levels of lactic acid which gives Phelps an advantage over other swimmers. People who have in their ability to remove lactic acid from their system are able to recover more quickly from exercise and experience less fatigue in their muscles. Phelps's unique genetic difference has led some to question whether his seven world records and 14 Olympic gold medals have been won because he has a physiological advantage over his competitors. It's a huge controversy in the field actually is whether or not people who are genetically gifted should be allowed to participate at the same level as everybody else. Clearly there's training involved and dedication to sport and so many other things that go into fitness and competition and elite athleticism. All right buddy let's go. Neil and Dana worry that in the future like Phelps Liam could also suffer unfair criticism or even discrimination. I have had some people come up to me on the street and say well don't you think that that would be somewhat unfair for him to play sports and I think well no. But it's not just Liam's parents who have foreseen that genetic discrimination could happen in the future. American Congress has recently passed the GINA Act to prohibit it. GINA stands for Genetic Information Non-Discrimination Act and with this goal that if you test somebody's DNA maybe you sequence all their DNA you can never discriminate based on what you've learned from that genetic information. In some countries children are already being tested to discover if they have genetic differences which will make them more likely to excel in particular sports. Dr Eric Hoffman thinks this will result in most youngsters missing out. GINA should apply to gym class but you can't discriminate on gym class by giving the ones with a good muscle genes access to the class and not those without them. Today Liam is having a sample of his DNA taken. Doctors want to carry out further research to find out why his muscles have grown 40 percent larger despite his body producing normal levels of myostatin. Okay what we're gonna do is I'm gonna put this little swab right in your mouth so I'm gonna have to have you open your mouth really big and wide and then I'm gonna rub it on the inside of your cheeks. Cool. Won't hurt at all. Open your mouth real wide. Real wide. Bigger. There you go. Did you tickle? Well that's all we need to do. We'll have this sent out for genetic analysis and maybe we can figure it out. Mr I'm full of energy all the time. At the Children's National Medical Center in Washington DC, Dr Eric Hoffman heads up a team which is carrying out clinical trials into muscle wasting diseases. It's hoped that this research will ultimately lead to a cure for muscular dystrophy. The most common form is called Duchenne muscular dystrophy. It's been known for hundreds of years. Most common worldwide of any type of genetic disease. It's mostly young boys who are normal up until about three or four years of age but then their muscle slowly loses function. They're generally in a wheelchair by 11 years and often die before they're 20. Dr Hoffman believes understanding Liam's genetic difference could really benefit his research. Patients with muscular dystrophy particularly Duchenne muscular dystrophy are at sort of one extreme where their muscle is not working well and they're losing muscle relatively quickly with age. I think Liam is at the other extreme where at a young age he's gained a lot of muscle and strength and if we can use that knowledge to bring Duchenne patients more towards normality that would be a great boon for all those patients. But not everyone will use this knowledge for good. My sense is that if Liam's condition is better understood it will immediately be misused by athletes. Myostatin hasn't been known for very long and almost immediately after its discovery you could go online and purchase myostatin inhibitors that were used by body builders all over the world. Now were they scientifically validated? No not whatsoever but were they immediately a target for misuse? Most definitely. Previously Liam was too young to have his strength evaluated but now he's three. Experts are going to find out for the first time if his larger muscles do make him stronger. Dana's meeting her friend for lunch to share the exciting news. So anyways we have a busy week coming up we're going to do some special testing on Liam. They take him to the gym and have him do like various like grip testing and you know pulling up and sit ups. Are they taking another child that age like in there and they're gonna like side by side kind of comparison. So when you go to the gym and they're testing Liam against this other kid what do you think the results are gonna be? I mean I've seen the things that he can do. I know well when we first had him tested when he was one they told us that he had 40% more muscle mass so I guess if I had to guess I'd say he'd probably be 40% stronger but you know I don't truly know I guess we'll find out. Being a huge American football fan Neil hopes that his son's muscular body will help him to be a future football star. As Liam is now old enough to follow instruction Neil is keen to see if his son is showing any early signs of talent. Today they are meeting Ken Bayard a football coach who trains 16 and 17 year olds. As a father I would love to see him be a great you know football player. I'd love to see him play for the University of Michigan. For him someday to play for them would be awesome. How you doing Ken? Hi. I'm Neil Hoekstra. Ken Bayard nice to meet you. This is my son Liam. Hi Liam. Can you say hi? Football energy huh? And he's what three? He's three years old and he likes football. He likes all kinds of sports. Yeah. So what he's gonna be good at we're not sure. Yeah. I'm thinking maybe football. Yeah. Because he's got that core muscle. Core strength. Yeah. I can just see the difference in the stability and how he can move and. Oh his balance is unique. It's weird. It's yeah. That's cool. My only concern is his height. Sure. Five foot six. Five foot eight. Yeah that does I mean that limits obviously some of your opportunities. Obviously at five eight you're not going to be a lineman. You know. Right. You probably won't be a quarterback. Exactly. But you know anything's possible. It seems that Liam is showing early signs of having good technique. You know his feet are even right when he throws the ball. Is it? That's amazing. He throws across the body with proper form. He grabbed it like you're supposed to and a lot of that's just attributed to having a strong foundation you know physically. Perfect. Nice and high. Now you gotta look where you're throwing. Look where you're throwing. Remember? You see you see him stepping that foot. I saw it. You did it perfect. Give me five. Good job. All right. I'm gonna throw it high. Nice catch. Good job. Liam has clearly impressed Ken with his abilities but with years of experience the coach has seen the pitfalls of doing too much too young. I'll throw to you spin and then run. So often nowadays parents limit opportunities because they want to specialize. They got to focus on one thing and and they forget to let kids play and that goes from three till kids are in high school and they don't get a chance to be kids and that's sad. I agree with you. I mean you need to let these kids find themselves. Yeah. Tomorrow Liam and his family will finally discover how much stronger his extra muscles make him as he undergoes strength testing for the first time. Three-year-old Liam Hoekstra has already been diagnosed with having 40 percent more muscle than an average toddler but doctors don't know if this makes him stronger. Ted Quick and Michelle Ward are strength and conditioning specialists in sports medicine. Today they will be conducting standardized strength tests on Liam. These tests aren't normally carried out on children under six. Unfortunately we don't have a lot of data on young children and their strength. It's difficult to get a young child to cooperate with good strength tests. Okay Owen, Liam. To motivate Liam to carry out the tests and to serve as a direct comparison Owen is also going to take part. Although they are the same age Owen is 14 centimeters taller and 12 pounds heavier. Hey Liam, I've heard that you can do a sit-up and I haven't seen you do one yet so do you think that you can, well look at that. The first strength test requires Owen and Liam to do as many sit-ups as they can in one minute. Owen is struggling to whilst Liam finds it easy. Was that tough to do those sit-ups? Yeah. Ted is impressed that Liam has the core strength and skill to perform sit-ups when he is still only a toddler. The coordination is really difficult to not to mention obviously the abdominal strength just to do a sit-up against your body weight where obviously he was able to do probably more than what I could do. He would probably be the norm with the sit-up not being able to complete it and very uncoordinated with it. This is the percentile chart for the President's Challenge that we use in the schools here in the states and Liam did 17 repetitions. He would actually fall in the 30th percentile rank for a six-year-old which is double his age. I mean I know what he can do but where he falls and where he lies I mean with a six-year-old I mean that's crazy. Strength naturally increases with age because of body growth and development of the neuromuscular system but Liam's performance suggests he's developmentally and physically ahead of his peers. The idea that Liam was able to to do this test and perform at a level that put him in the range of six-year-old performance I think is really remarkable. The next test is to do push-ups but Liam and Owen are too young to be able to understand what they need to do. In all the confusion Liam still manages to show his amazing strength. He was doing the push-ups and all of a sudden he just went one arm put his arm behind his back and looked at us like hmm you know trying to listen to us not knowing what he was doing a normal three-year-old can't do you know I mean we're all looked at you're like you just yeah yeah I mean it was like nonchalant he just did this. So the next test we're going to have them perform is a hand dynamometer test and basically it's just going to measure the amount of force that they are able to exert on the machine and we can measure that in either kilograms of force or pounds of force. I want you to go ahead and squeeze it as hard as you can go ahead squeeze and relax okay so Owen even had a little trouble holding on to the weight of the hand dynamometer so on that one he had two kilograms. Now it's Liam's turn and he has no problem holding the heavy equipment. Now I want you to give me a big squeeze spray spray spray oh that was a good one all the way across the room good job and relax good job and that one is six so six kilograms. The children have to perform the test three times. Owen's grip test average was two kilograms and Liam's average was three times more at six kilograms. This is a test that I didn't predict that he would be able to do and he performed in the range of a seven-year-old now it's at the low range of a seven-year-old but he's three and I was I'm really amazed by that. The purpose of this test is to measure grip or forearm muscle strength. People with strong hands also tend to be strong elsewhere. Okay hang up here put your hands up there okay ready pull yourself up and touch your nose. The final test is to see how long the three-year-olds can hold their own weight by hanging from the bar. The children are also asked to pull themselves up. Liam was able to hold for 13 seconds and Owen was able to hold for 7.19 seconds which is pretty so again almost twice as much almost twice as much again the ability to do a pull-up is a real good gauge of upper extremity strength and you know Owen kind of struggled even to pull himself up where Liam was able to do a couple he just wasn't that interested in doing many more. This is a remarkably challenging test for many people and his score put him in the 85th percentile of six-year-olds meaning that he was stronger than 85 percent of six-year-olds out there and you know it'd be nice even in a couple of years when he gets a little older to test him when he kind of fits into some of the parameters and probably improve you know strength-wise even more when because he likes to work out obviously. Maybe we'll use him for some motivation for our older students in the high school and show them that this three-year-old can do a chin-up so can it's pretty impressive. Back home Neil shares Liam's remarkable results with mum Dana. It shows that you know not only does he have larger muscles than you know other three-year-olds but that truly the he has more strength than other three-year-olds. The head-to-head data here is a little bit more concrete than just saying you know oh look at his muscle mass and plus right now you don't even really know him differently from any other kids unless you take your shirt off and yeah it's really hard to tell that he has this condition. Yeah it's something very interesting as far as how these muscles react and how strong they are when they don't even look strong. Neil and Dana finally have proof that their son's larger than normal muscles do give him super strength but until they get the results of his full DNA profile which will take several months to prepare Liam's rare genetic condition remains a medical mystery. At some point in time we may understand what's different about Liam and hopefully that will lead at some point to better understanding of the different diseases where people have muscle wasting and loss of muscle and be able to reverse that process. No one yet knows whether Liam's unique body will help find a cure for lethal muscle wasting diseases or whether thanks to his extraordinary strength he is predestined to be a future Olympian. Honestly at three years old I haven't really looked that far down into the future you know I just want Liam to be happy and if it's not in sports then so be it. I just think he's a really great story and he's going to be fun to watch for many years. But no matter what the future holds for this remarkably strong toddler for now Liam is just happy being Liam.