Plague of Strength

When the man suggests a shitload of hack squats every day to a lazy lifter, you know he’s not on the same page as anyone reading this right now- they were in a different stratosphere for training because their daily lives required them to have a far higher level of basic fitness. Not because they were harder, but because they walked everywhere, used their muscle rather than power tools for everything from digging a hole to driving a nail, and lacked even the ability to buy all of their groceries from a single store (the modern supermarket wasn’t popular until the 1950s)- that meant that before they even touched a kettlebell they were in better shape than most of you, and usually incredibly underfed. The idea of restricting foods other than those which are spoiled or tainted (unless you were rich, of course) would have been mostly preposterous prior to 1900, and even then guys like Hack only went vegetarian after their lifting careers were over. Big lifting meant big eating to them, as it should to you.

To wit, here is an excerpt from Graeme Kent’s book, The Strongest Men on Earth, followed by a little graphic I made up to remind people that when they use the word “programming” it is fucking ridiculous, because “programmer” (n.) dates to 1890, “event planner,” agent noun from program (v.). Meaning “person who programs computers” is attested from 1948. Until 1948, “programmer” was what you called the person in the theater who wrote the program notes for the performance- i.e., they wrote the table of contents for the performance. And that is what a program is- a table of contents- and you cannot claim the greatest book in the world will result from writing the greatest table of contents in the world.

Liked it? Take a second to support Jamie Chaos on Patreon!