Plague of Strength

Height: 5’4″
Weight: 147
Neck: 17″
Chest Expanded: 45 1/2″
Upper Arm: 16″
Forearm: 13″
Thigh: 23 1/4″
Calf: 15″ Born Max Sick in Wurtemburg on 28th June 1882, this motherfucker was born a pussy, plagued by lung trouble, rickets and dropsy. Not satisfied with all of the sucking he was doing, Maxick made a concrete dumbbell at age 10, which his dad promptly destroyed. Thereafter, he started flexing his ass off every night before going to bed, inadvertently creating the basis for his proprietary system of isometric and muscle control exercises that later comprised the Maxalding Technique. Part of this system was, and I am not bullshitting you (you can read his book here), is FLEXING ONE SIDE OF YOUR ABS AT A TIME. Not your obliques, but your fucking abdominals. Likewise, flexing individual ROWS of abs. Bizarre. Additionally, Maxick was a bit of a philosopher, making him the badass that Mike Mentzer might have been if he wasn’t too busy ripping lines of speed of Ayn Rand booksinstead of reading the books and actually going to the gym.Like me, he was a fucking midget, though I’m like fucking D-Bo compared to his 5 feet 3 3/4 inches and 145 to 147 pounds. Despite his diminutive size, however, that fucker set records in weightlifting that few heavyweights of his day could equal, and chump most of my lifts.

What did he lift?

According to David Willoughby’s “Super Athletes” ( which you should buy if you’ve got any interest in not sucking at life), the following were done at a body weight that never exceeded 147 pounds:

Right Hand Military Press, 112 pounds (“performed with considerable ease”).
Right Hand Snatch, 165 pounds. Right Hand Swing with Dumbbell, 150 pounds.
Right Hand jerk (shouldering the barbell with two hands), 239 pounds in Munich and 240 pounds in Johannesburg.
Two Hands Military Press, 230 pounds (made at a body weight of 145 pounds).
Two Hands Clean and jerk with Barbell, 272 pounds.
Two Hands Continental jerk with Barbell, 322 1/2 pounds in London and 340 pounds in Johannesburg. (In the Two Hands Snatch, he should have been capable of about 215 pounds.)Of the foregoing lifts the most extraordinary were the one and two hand military presses and the one and two hand jerks. Maxick’s Two Hands Military Press of 230 pounds, which he performed in 1909, would be equivalent today to a lift in the same strict style of about 267 pounds, or to a Two Hands Olympic Press of about 312 pounds That is to say, in pressing power Maxick was the equal, in his day, of any of the light-weight Olympic champion pressers of the present time. In the One Hand Continental jerk, no such comparison can be made, since this style of one-arm lifting is no longer practised. In bringing a barbell “clean” to the shoulders with both hands, Maxick’s record of 272 pounds would be equivalent to about 320 pounds today. This, while a good lift, is a long way below the 360 pounds or more that the best lightweights clean and jerk today. It is rather in the jerk from the shoulders overhead that Maxick is seen to best ad-vantage, and his record of 340 pounds in this movement would be equal to no less than 400 pounds today. This is truly phenomenal lifting. It would appear to surpass by at least 20 pounds the best jerking ability of any present-day lightweight lifter.

On top of all that craziness, in 1913 Maxick:

1. Competing in something called finger pulling, which I assume had nothing to do with ripping ass, Maxick was “unbeatable,” and could pull a 200-pound motherfucker clear across the table that separated them.
2. He pressed his manager, Tromp van Diggelen (185 pounds), overhead 16 times with his right arm, while HOLDING A FUCKING BEER IN HIS LEFT HAND, AND NEVER SPILLED A GODDAMNED DROP. Why Budweiser hasn’t snatched that up and run a commercial using that scenario is retarded and embarrassing to them and marketers as a whole.
3. Holding van Diggelen aloft on one arm, Maxick ran his crazy ass up two flights of stairs with him and then ran down the two flights. Then, STANDING ON HIS FUCKING HANDS, ran the same stairs again.
4. At the Carlton Hotel one night, six empty champagne bottles were put before him. Each of these he filled three-quarters full with water (after he faced them, I’m sure) and then, taking bottle after bottle by the neck with his left hand, bitch-slapped the neck with his right like he was Snoop Dogg’s uncle whooping the shit out of whore with his shoe, causing the bottom of each bottle to smash out!

If you’re reading this, your eyes work, and you can see the dude was fucking ripped. That rippitudinosity stemmed from his “muscle control” system, which essentially consisted of flexing the fuck out of every muscle in his body in a specific order. He got good enough at that silly horseshit that he could make any desired group “dance” in time to music, and even impressed Eugen Sandow with his skill at getting crunk while flexing.He wasn’t a fan of the US, apparently, and peaced out to Argentina to open a couple of gyms. When not teaching people how to be at least a quarter of the awesome that he was, he wandered around in the Amazon, killing shit and generally being a German Teddy Roosevelt. Maxick dropped dead in Buenos Aires at the age of 80, after a full day of beating the shit out of 200 lb dudes 50 years his junior at arm wrestling and riding his bike all over hell and gone. He was found with a note at his feet that read- “My heart is beating rather slow, I feel extremely cold, I think it will be over soon. Remember the infinite is our inner freedom manifested through the consciousness.” Evidently, his heart was beating so slowly that he forgot how to use adverbs. 😉

“There was for me only one thought and one desire- to become strong- and everything else had to bow before this unconditional goal.”

“Indeed, the essence of strength does not lie in the muscles, but in thought, just as the strength of a locomotive is found in the steam, rather than the wheels”

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