This upcoming Sunday, World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) will hold the biggest event on its calendar– Wrestlemania. The 34th iteration of the wrestling company’s version of the Super Bowl promises to be bigger and better than ever (as they tend to claim each year). With MMA and mainstream star Ronda Rousey making her in-ring debut, nostalgia acts like Triple H and the Undertaker set to perform, and the stars of today looking to take center stage, the event has much to anticipate.

As is tradition in this blog, I wanted to find a way to connect this upcoming event with the world of energy technology and science, no matter how silly and trivial, as it nonetheless presents an opportunity for education and thought experiments! So with that in mind, let us consider the following tongue-in-cheek but ultimately very important questions connecting Wrestlemania and the WWE to some energy analyses (i.e., connecting the passion of my 11-year-old self with my professional passion as an adult):

During his heyday as a professional wrestler, The Rock (who you might now know better as Dwayne Johnson, star of blockbuster movies like The Fate of the Furious and Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle) often called himself ‘The Most Electrifying Man in Entertainment.’ If we are to take him at his word as being so electrifying, exactly how much electricity was The Rock producing?
One of the most famous moments in Wrestlemania history, oft referenced and boasted by the man behind the act, was at Wrestlemania III when Hulk Hogan did the seemingly impossible and body slammed Andre the Giant. How much energy and how much power were required by Hogan during this legendary feat?
In the past year, WWE upset many fans when they opted to completely remove pyrotechnics from the entrances of its performers. While this act was largely recognized as a cost-cutting measure, could the always PR-conscious company reasonably tout the elimination of fireworks as some sort of green act to reduce carbon emissions?

Can we measure just how electrifying Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson is?

Among The Rock’s seemingly endless array of catchphrases was his self-bestowed moniker as ‘The Most Electrifying Man in Entertainment.’ Perhaps, all these years later, this one claim has been backed up by the data after Dwayne Johnson made the full-time leap to Hollywood and became one of the most bankable and reliable leading men. But what if The Rock was talking about the actual electricity he inherently produced compared with other ‘lesser’ men?

After some research, the first number I came across was this calculation from Gizmodo that determined that, on average, the human brain outputs about 0.085 Watts (W) of power. Two initial impressions from that: 1) that’s surprisingly not much power being output by evolution’s most advanced supercomputer, and 2) The Rock definitely produces more electricity than that, as he’s not just brains but also brawn.

When considering the average person, their full body at rest produces about 100 W of power. After 24 hours, that produces 2.4 kilowatt-hours (kWh) which converts to just over 2,065 kilocalories (otherwise known as food Calories)– in a comparison that may sound odd, but is apt given that your food intake is literally energy/fuel to power your activity. The final number should be unsurprising, as that math is what leads to the daily recommended intake of 2,000 Calories.

But what do we know about The Rock? We know that he is the most electrifying man, so we have to adjust these numbers to the appropriate level for the People’s Champion. Given that we live in an age where the answer to any question is just a Google search away, we know that on an average day Dwayne Johnson consumes 5,165 Calories. Working backwards, that equates to about 6 kWh of energy for the entire day or an average power output of 250 W— two and a half times greater than the average person. That figure alone is quite impressive, but through savvy social media management The Rock has also made public his habit of epic cheat days where he binges on all the fatty and sweet foods that he abstains from during his periods of training. One such feast documented on Instagram, which included 21 brownies, 12 pancakes, and 4 double dough pizzas, was calculated at 15,000 Calories. Even if he ate and drank nothing else the rest of the day, The Rock would total 17.4 kWh of energy or an average power output of 726 W on cheat meal days– over seven times greater than the average person.

Given an average power output of 250 W, and upping that to 726 W on special occasions, it’s no wonder The Rock considered himself so electrifying. While there might be men out there with greater electrical output than The Rock, particularly in his given fields of wrestling or action movies where amassing and maintaining large muscles through high caloric intake is the norm, these figures are insane enough to leave me sufficiently impressed. And lest you chide me for this ridiculous measure of electrical output of humans, I’ll skip comparisons to The Matrix. I will, however, point out findings that the average adult has as much energy stored in fat as a one ton battery and reference the many ways scientists and engineers are already looking to use humans to generate electricity, from the expected like harvesting the motion in exercise equipment like stationary bikes to the bizarre like microturbines implanted in human arteries to harness the power of blood flow (not unlike hydropower plants creating electricity from the rushing of a river).

How much power output and total energy was required by Hulk Hogan to body slam Andre the Giant?

No retelling of the 1980s wrestling scene would be complete without the story of Hulk Hogan and Andre the Giant’s epic and immortal battle at Wrestlemania III that ended when Hulk did the seemingly impossible and body slammed the larger than life Andre. Hulk Hogan was already a super hero in the eyes of children across the country, but this incredible moment only confirmed that the Hulkster was not even human– his feats of strength were now the thing of legends. But can we approximate how much power and energy was required for this body slam? We can certainly try…

First off, Andre the Giant was billed at 520 pounds by the WWE, which was not much of an exaggeration as biographers have confirmed Andre was at least 500 pounds (though his height was fluffed from about 6’11” in real life to 7’4″ in billing, because someone thought that number needed to be fudged for his immense stature to sound impressive). For the purposes of these calculations, we’ll use 500 pounds as the official weight for the man who was often called the Eighth Wonder of the World.

The other data we need for this calculation are how high Hulk Hogan lifted Andre the Giant and how long it took for him to do so. For this, I simply consulted a video of the body slam itself, which can be found on YouTube if you want to check my math or witness the legend for yourself.

The above pictures show the moment Hogan began picking up Andre on the left and the peak height he lifted him on the right. Measuring the time between these frames comes out to almost exactly one second. In terms of how high he was lifted, this really just has to be eyeballed. The best approximation of the height Andre the Giant is lifted is that, while watching the video, his center of gravity appears to go up about as high as the top rope of the ring. WWE does not officially list how high this is, but if it is comparable to a boxing ringthen we can assume the top rope is 54 inches (4.5 feet) high– a height that seems pretty reasonable watching this clip with the knowledge of Hogan and Andre’s relative heights. Even if we’re off by a little bit, this estimate should get us in the ballpark of the right answer.

First, the energy (or work) needed to lift anything is simply calculated by multiplying the weight of the object by the height to which it was lifted. Plugging in 500 pounds and 54 inches gives us an approximation that it took 2,250 foot-pounds of energy to pick up Andre the Giant, easily converted to about 0.847 Watt-hours (Wh) of energy. To find the average power output of Hogan during this body slam, we simply divide the total work done (0.847 Wh) by the time it took (1 second) to get a power output of about 3,051 W.

How much is that in context? Science tells use that in very short bursts of energy, some elite humans can output up to 2,000 W (such as Olympic sprinters or Tour de France cyclists during a sprint). As such, we’re left with two possibilities– either Andre the Giant was actively pushing off and shifting his weight to make it easier for Hogan to body slam him, or Hulk Hogan really was a super hero. I’ll let the reader decide which narrative they prefer here.

In terms of the energy used, less than a single Watt-hour is not much on its own and is fueled by less than 1 Calorie. Humans use less than that amount of energy during a minute while asleep. But that is why it is more impressive to look at the power output of 3,051 W. That amount of power is about 4 horsepower, literally the amount of power of four horses combined! Even though he only sustains this output for a second, it is still awe-inspiring to equal the force of four horses (and more impressive sounding than saying it exceeds the power output of a commercial blender or a portable generator). The moral of the story, though, is that energy number comparisons can be weird and sometimes counter-intuitive, but can also be fun for their inherent silliness (especially because Hulk was not the only person to have body slammed Andre the Giant!).

Can the WWE reasonably champion their elimination of pyrotechnics as a green initiative?

In 2017, WWE made waves when it was announced they would no longer be using pyrotechnics for the entrances of their wrestlers— not even at big pay-per-view events or for big stars who were synonymous with their entrances filled with pyrotechnic sparks (e.g., Goldberg) or fire (e.g., Kane). Reports came out that this decision was a cost-cutting measure, and fans were upset and felt shortchanged. Would WWE have been able to garner some positive press and ease the pain if they claimed that the carbon dioxide (CO2) released by pyrotechnics was the real reason and they were simply trying to be good stewards of the climate? In a company notorious for being heavy-handed in advertising its charitable and occasionally progressive initiatives, saying this was simply a ‘green’ measure might have saved them from some backlash! But are there appreciable amounts of CO2 emission reductions from eliminating the pyrotechnics?

This question was the hardest to answer, as WWE is rather secretive when it comes to parts of its behind-the-scenes production. I was unable to find any estimates for the amount of pyrotechnics that went into a typical show, the types or suppliers of pyrotechnics used, or really anything useful. So I had to get creative and really really bust out the back-of-the-envelope estimates.

The one bit of information I was able to find regarding WWE pyrotechnics was that at Wrestlemania 24 in Orlando, the event well known to have used more fireworks and pyrotechnics than any other in WWE history (watch this video of the pyrotechnics used just for the opening moments of the show, and realize that it continued like this through the night), a reported $300,000 worth of fireworks were used. To get an idea of how many fireworks that money would buy, the American Pyrotechnics Association reports that in 2008, the year of this event, 26.8 million pounds of display fireworks (i.e., used by licensed professionals and not consumers) were purchased for a total of $313 million. While obviously there is great variation on the cost per pound of firework based on type of firework, where it was purchased, bulk purchase rates, etc., we can still use this as a very rough guide to find that in 2008 the cost per pound of fireworks was about $11.68. Given that WWE spent $300,000, that means the fireworks used were in the ballpark of 25,700 pounds.

Again, we have to make some rough estimates here, but if we assume that the flash and/or black powder make up 25% of the weight of fireworks, and for every 270 grams of powder used they create 132 grams of CO2, then we can approximate Wrestlemania 24 pyrotechnics to have created 1,424 kilograms of CO2.

This amount of CO2 sounds like a lot, but the Environmental Protection Agency calculatesthat this would only equate to taking 0.3 cars off the road for one year. Given that this event was known as WWE’s most pyrotechnic-heavy event ever, and any other show during the year would only account for a small fraction of that total, it was probably a wise conclusion for WWE not to use this decision in an attempt to appear more climate-friendly. For a company that travels city to city and puts on 200 shows per year, taking with it 12 tractor trailers and 14 buses, the emissions saved from eliminating pyrotechnics is beyond minuscule compared with their overall footprint. In fact, put that way, WWE seems like a pretty harmful company to the climate. Perhaps they should be adding some green and/or climate-related initiatives to their community outreach (currently there are none), or at least start commissioning some electric vehicles for their constant travels!

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For some more analysis of the intersection of sports and energy, see how the 2017-18 NFL season would play out if it was decided by sustainability, the 2018 Green March Madness Tournament, the amount of power really garnered from a power play, and a look at what happens to electricity demand on Super Bowl Sunday.