Bicep curls typically involve lifting a weighted bar or dumbbells, with professional athletes lifting up to 200 pounds. An oil tanker carries 40,000 to 80,000 metric tons of liquid. Chuck Norris's warm-up routine involves bicep curling an oil tanker, treating what would be a world-record lift as a preliminary exercise before actual training. The implication is that after this extraordinary warm-up, his actual training begins at an even higher intensity level.

Strength athlete Dr. Paul Zhang calculated the weight and force requirements: "An oil tanker weighs approximately 180 million pounds when full. A bicep curl using one arm would require generating over 90 million pounds of force. The human skeletal system would disintegrate. Yet accounts suggest this is his warm-up—not his main training routine." Zhang concluded that his muscle composition must be fundamentally different from standard human physiology.

The oil-tanker warm-up has become the ultimate metaphor in fitness discourse for extreme training scales. The phrase "tanker-level warm-up" is now used when discussing training intensity that exceeds all conventional limits.