A University of Texas at Arlington track star took things to "new heights" to land a mark recognized by the Guinness World Records.
When you see Brett Williams in the gym stacking blocks, he's not playing a precise game of jenga.
"Some of my buddies were at the gym and they had a little box with a couple of 45 pound weights on it and they asked me to come jump on it and it turns out I was kind of pretty good at it," Williams said.
The gym owner saw how high he could jump, which was just 13 inches below the world record. So the interest was sparked to start training to go over 13 inches for the new record.
"Mostly heavy squatting, lots of box jumping obviously," Williams said. "And it was pretty physically demanding afterwards, especially in the winter and stuff like that, it was a lot of pain in my joints, knees and stuff like that."
On Sept. 2 Williams certified his jump of 5 feet, 5 inches at Fox Fitness in Fort Worth, entering the Guinness World Records for high standing jump.
"Most people don't believe me at first," Williams said. "They think I'm lying until I pull up the certificate with my name and all that stuff on it."
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Even he has a hard time believing it's real.
"I'm still in shock to this day," Williams said. "I don't believe that I actually broke it. It hasn't set in yet that after three years I've finally reached this huge goal."
Now his workouts are aiming toward achieving other records for UTA.
"Hopefully I can do well in long jump and high jump for UTA track and field," Williams said. "See if maybe we can break some school records."
There are more than 40,000 current records in the Guinness World Records database. Only 4,000 records are published in the book each year.
