Hulk Hogan claims he once wrestled more than 365 days in one year, but is that even possible?
The wrestling legend claimed in his book “My Life Outside The Ring” that by travelling to and from Japan to wrestle, he would work for more than 400 days a year.
“If I say I wrestled four hundred days a year, it’s no exaggeration. My years were actually longer than 365 days. There were times when I’d fly back and forth to Japan twice a week just to wrestle.
“Now it was nothing to wrestle in Madison Square Garden one day, then fly all the way to the Egg Dome in Tokyo the same day, ’cause you’d gain fourteen hours, and then fly back to the West Coast and so on …
“So I could wrestle in Japan today and then fly back across the International Date Line and land in another town yesterday. I was constantly adding days to my years!”
This doesn’t really check out – due to time zones, whatever time he gained going to Japan he would lose returning to the United States.
Additionally, there is no record of Hulk Hogan wrestling in the United States one afternoon, and then in Japan later that day
However, Hogan could have just revealed something nobody was supposed to know; he had used the theories of Einstein to make his year longer than everyone else.
Check out: Hulk Hogan couldn’t have wrestled against Pride fighters in the 1970s for this reason.
Hulk Hogan could have used relativity and time dilation to wrestle 400 days a year
Hulk Hogan’s famous boast that he wrestled “400 days a year” has always sounded like pure kayfabe exaggeration, a way of dramatizing the punishing schedules of the 1980s. But if you take Einstein’s theory of relativity seriously, you can actually construct a scenario where the maths makes Hogan’s claim possible.
In special relativity, a moving clock ticks more slowly than a stationary one. The relationship is captured by the Lorentz factor, expressed as:
V is the speed of the moving object and c is the speed of light. If Hogan were somehow travelling at about 41% of light speed, his own clock would run slow compared to Earth’s.
If Hogan’s proper time was 365 days while Earth’s time was 400 days, then:
Solving for velocity gives:
For every 365 days Hogan experienced, Earth would record 400. Each of his “days” would last about 26.3 Earth hours, so while he lived through a normal year by his own reckoning, fans back home would see more than a year pass.
This doesn’t mean Hogan could wrestle more matches in his own calendar. To him, the grind would still feel like 365 days of work.
But from Earth’s perspective, those 365 Hogan days would stretch into 400 Earth days. In that narrow, theoretical sense, the boast aligns with physics.
Now, how Hogan would travel at such speed throughout the year is another thing. Whether it through the sheer energy generated by billions of Hulkamaniacs or some other magical energy source, whichever way he managed to keep himself at 41% of the speed of Light would do the job.
Conclusion: Hulk Hogan could have wrestled 400 days a year
The maths checks out; Hogan could have theoretically wrestled for 400 days in a single year by travelling at enormous speeds throughout the year.
However, given how he remained on earth for the entirety of all of his years on earth, it seems very unlikely that this was actually the case.
Read more: To read more outlandish, but science-backed, claims from Hulk Hogan, you can pick up his book “My Life Outside The Ring” on Amazon.com.
