The tin of Die Hard on the shelf to the right of Gerry O'Grady's head promises chemical warfare for the body builders and power-lifters of Flex Gym. The plastic container of Creatine sitting to the left of Die Hard will deliver ATP to the muscles turbo style. Why bloat yourself on steak when a few tabs of Creatine can deliver the equivalent of a quadruple helping of Chateau Briand?

Here in the muscle rich environment of Flex Gym, , in the low-ceilinged basement, eye-popping feats of strength are the name of the game.

For the nerd, the anorak, the pen pusher, the sciatica sufferer or the ordinary Joe Soap, the bin-lids of steel stacked like giant coins may just as well be welded to the floor. They sit there - enormous, inanimate, immovable.

On the wall, a picture of Joyce Gavin's back looks like a mountain range on a relief map in an old geography book. Ripped, stripped and shrink-wrapped muscles ripple from her biceps across her shoulders and down her left arm. Gerry O'Grady, Flex Gym's affable proprietor, is a man of the body, a steel junkie and Ireland's record power lifter. He looks at Gavin's physique, pinned on the board beside that of the strikingly dissimilar tennis player, Anna Kournikova.

"Unhealthy to be that ripped all the time," he answers, picking up on the incredulity that her torso might always look like the Wicklow Way. "Their body fat would be down to three or four per cent for competition. For a woman especially, that is not healthy. They'd only stay like that for a week and then they'd smooth out again."

Flex Gym is a serious gym. O'Grady makes that clear. It is not a Health Centre or a Fitness Clinic and it certainly isn't a Studio. It's a gym. Cement block walls, functional steel-cabled pulleys and little else. Gavin's photograph is pinned to the wall and women do attend, but Flex Gym has a street corner look, spare, functional - a male-dominated gym.

This year, 36-year-old O'Grady squatted 330 kilos, bench pressed 220 kilos and dead lifted 350 kilos over the course of two hours. That's what he trains for. The dead lift O'Grady performed was the heaviest amount ever lifted off the ground by an Irishman.

For that, the Dubliner bent down, grabbed the high tensile bar, capable of taking 1000lb before it bends, and straightened his legs, pulling the 771lb or 50 stone with him to knee level. That is his buzz.

"That's my favourite lift - the dead weight," he says. "I done it on my third attempt at the Irish Championships at Limerick. The day after, my body was just knackered from the amount of tonnage lifted over the course of the competition. With three squats, three bench presses and three dead lifts you'd be talking about lifting 2,500 kilos on that day within, maybe, a two hour period."

Different to Olympic weight lifting where they have two lifts, the snatch and clean jerk, power lifting involves three, with each competitor competing in his own weight division. Power lifting is not an Olympic Sport.

In the squat, the weight is taken on the shoulders in a standing position and the lifter has to bend his legs down to his hunkers before straightening back up again. The bench press involves lying horizontally on a bench facing up and taking the weight over the chest. Again the weight must be lowered to the chest and then pushed away so that the arms lock straight.

O'Grady is already a world champion from his showing in Canada in 1989. At the close of the championships he had taken the bronze medal but when the winner and runner-up were found to have tested positive for steroids, O'Grady was moved up into first place. He has also won the Irish title 12 or 13 times ("can't exactly remember") and came second in the junior World Championships.

"People look at guys who are big and strong with a lot of muscles and say he must be taking steroids. You have to be very, very stupid to use steroids now because you're going to get caught. Only the guys who have the money and a doctor backing them the full time would be in a position to do that without getting caught," he says pointing to the fact that his sport has received no Lottery money since 1989. Steroids, of course, are also lethal.

Ask American, Steve Michalik, former Mr Universe. Michalik had perfect symmetry: 19 inch biceps, 19 inch calves and a 54 inch chest. When the Anadrol and Bolasterone got backed up in his bloodstream he threw people through windows and beat up bodybuilders who had the temerity to look at him while he was training.

Michalik had constructed his remarkable body with the help of massive doses of steroids which got bigger year by year. Not only did he consume a cocktail of toxic drugs including Anadrol, Primobolan, Parabolin and Dianabol but he and his friends bought the skulls of dead monkeys on the body-building black market, cracked them open and drank the hormone rich fluid that poured out of the hypothalmus gland. Within 10 years, he was close to death: his joints had turned to jelly, his liver, the only organ engorged as much as his muscles, was close to collapse, his shockingly high blood pressure kept a constant supply of blood spurting out his nose and his testicles had shrunk to the size of peanuts.

Michalik now takes himself around gyms and competitions in the United States having survived his sport. He tries to talk reason to teenagers who clock in at 265lb and claims that the human growth hormone (HGH) has evolved a new species. By the end of this decade he believes that the standard body-builder will weigh 300lb and develop a 23-inch neck almost as big as his waist. But all over the country kids will be dropping dead.

Mr Universe is far from Dominic Street in Dublin's North inner city and Irish power-lifting is not exactly Pumping Iron. O'Grady's honest efforts could do with a little more hype as he, with three colleagues, continues Ireland's impressive tradition in strength events.

Along with Gerry McNamara, Liam Bevel and Stephen O'Malley, O'Grady will travel to this year's championships in Prague without public support or even public awareness.

Consumer-friendly events such as Ireland's strongest man, which he won two years ago in Ballymena by lifting round boulders, pulling trucks and jacking parts of trees onto his shoulder and sprinting, increase the profile but not sufficiently to draw a sponsor for the World championships.

Not only will the team pay their way but O'Grady's 5,000 calorie daily intake involves eating practically every two hours of the day.

"A big bowl of cereal . . . you know big . . . around 8.0 a.m. and a large yoghurt and a banana at 10.0. At 1.0 p.m. I'd have a tuna pasta, then at three some fruit and a sandwich. At six o'clock I've dinner, maybe a steak or chicken, potato and veg then a six-egg omelette at around eight o'clock."

Winding down from two hours training six times a week to four times a week is a sign of the gathering years but O'Grady is hooked. "I love training. It's part of life. If I missed a session, there'd be something missing," he says.

Built like a rugby prop he has, over the years, been approached by clubs to come down to training.

"I'd be a model for another injury if I got into rugby," he says. "So I said I'll stick to what I'm doing. I was asked a few times to go down to Clonsilla, then a club called Lansdowne asked me to come down. I was around 29 at the time. If I was younger . . . maybe. Terry Price, who coaches Aer Lingus, trains here and so does Emmet Byrne, who plays for Leinster. He's a strong lad."

O'Grady's solo lift of over 50 stone would equate to the weight of an entire front row in many rugby clubs. Think of it. An Irish rugby front row populated by World Championship power-lifters with solid scrummaging techniques. A promoter's gift. How Sky would handle it!