Plague of Strength

I know I said the second part of the Isometrics series was up next, but I’ve got a fucking PSA for the world regarding the absolute necessity of understanding context after six weeks of endless, allegedly unintentional shitposting by the entire fucking world. Forewarned is forearmed- this is one of the nerdier things I’ve ever written, and it’s occurred over a couple of weeks, so it has a sort of Tarentino feel (I hope). It’s also not just heady as shit, but it’s also longer than a motherfucker, clocking in at just over 4000 words. My hope is that it will have a degree of profoundness beyond lifting, but irrespective of that, you’ll learn about everything from the historical evolution of Batman to the history of human flight, why Hermann Goerner’s not quite as cool as you thought, and see a WWI-era one-legged strongman who was more peeled than you’ve ever been and likely bigger as well. Whether or not my lofty efforts to help illuminate the masses actually see fruition, you’ll at least learn some cool shit that mostly has nothing to do with lifting.

Perhaps one of the more willfully ignorant types of comments seen online in recent years has been a dismissal of the achievements and methods of past lifters due to the fact that their lifts have been eclipsed by lifters in the modern era. In addition to the fact that it is wildly disrespectful, and the fact that the superstars of today rarely if ever echo those sentiments, it’s almost invariably the nothings and nobodies of the world making these asinine claims, and those people need to keep their fucking teeth together, because they have no idea what they’re talking about.

I will concede that I should not be surprised by their willful ignorance given the fact that half of Facebook seems to think 5G is a global conspiracy to give us cancer, or that over a quarter of Americans think the sun revolves around the Earth, that 40% of Americans still think the baby Jesus created the universe ten thousand years ago, and 80% of Americans can name twelve or fewer presidents, but I find myself nevertheless greatly nettled at the sight of people shitting on old-school lifters as “weak.” You might guess this has to do with the fact that I held a record at one point, but my one-off foray into strength sports was to prove how easy powerlifting is, not to establish myself among the greatest of all time, as I have no interest in even attempting to establish myself as such. Instead, I would just like to help people become less offensively uneducated, which is tragically a goal shared by few other people.

Bear with me then, as I explain why both the historical context of the lifts themselves in addition to the impact of the lifts on the lifting community as a whole. History may not interest you worth a shit, but if you’re on this site, strength is likely your number one avocation or your vocation itself. As such, the history of lifting should be part of your varied interests, because not knowing the history of your hobby or profession is just as stupid as loudly proclaiming yourself to be a serious fan of road trips, when you can name neither the places you’ve been, nor the destination for which you’re headed. If that’s your thing, fine, but don’t expect anyone to respect your opinion on that subject, or any other for that matter- you’ll already have established yourself as deliberately ignorant.

With that in mind, consider the examples we can easily see of the importance of one’s forebears in the television and film industries. You might not see the parallel at first, but it will become apparent as we go. If you look at the original The Batman serial from 1943, it’s objectively crap by modern standards, but it gave us the thin, mustachioed Alfred to which we’re used, in addition to the Batcave. The serials that followed in 1949 were equally ridiculous- Batman and Robin are always getting their asses kicked by petty thieves, they drive a Studebaker, and Batman’s costume is hot trash replete with ears set at angles like alien antennae… but this was 1949, Batman was in his infancy, and the show was likely done on the same kind of budget most people now use for shitty indie college-thesis films.

That serial was insanely popular for a decade or more, however, and led to the creation of the Adam West Batman tv show, which lampooned the 1949 serial with impressive accuracy (I had no idea well done it was until I watched an episode of the 1949 serial this afternoon). Without the context of the original show, it’s hard to understand how in the fuck the 60s Batman ever came to be, as the original Batman was a murderous detective Frankenstein sourced from a variety of contemporary films and comics. Sure, the comics got ridiculous as the fearful Republifucks of the government insisted on the institution of the Comic Code Authority fucking gutted every comic for decades and comic book companies turned to kid sidekicks to bring in candy-eating babies in lieu of anyone with a working brain, but the show was still designed as a spoof.

Later, parents screamed bloody murder as Batman went grimdark in an “unprecedented fashion” and started killing folks in 1989, but that view was again due to a complete lack of historical context for the character. And looking back on the 1989 Batman flick, it’s a campy, ridiculous mess that looks insanely low budget and unintentionally schlocky by comparison with modern shit like Batman v Superman, but viewed in the context of the late 1980s and the superhero movies that had preceded it, Tim Burton’s Batman smacked people in their cowardly conservative feels harder than Marilyn Manson did half a decade later.

The key to understanding this phenomenon, beyond a basic grasp of the world at large in viewing the disparate Batman incarnations, is the fact that humans are not innovators, we are imitators. This is why Batman and the Joker were both pastiches of extant characters in pop culture at the time, and why lifters today should outlift the lifters of yore without even accounting for the changes in lifting equipment, diet and nutrition, and drugs.

When we copy what came before us, what we produce should necessarily be as good or better than what we are copying.

“Other animals, such as apes, learn by doing. Episodic learning, as it’s called, means figuring things out oneself through trial and error. Fire is hot. If you can remember what happened last time you touched it, you don’t touch it again. Even simpler creatures store the equivalent of learning as instincts or natural behaviors, but they are procedural and automatic. Humans, on the other hand, can learn by imitating one another or, better, representing their experiences to one another through language. This is big and may give us the clearest way of understanding what it means to be human.” (Rushkoff)

Building upon existing designs and improving them over the time is how every technological improvement in history has occurred, so it should come as little shock that it’s how human nature in general works.

“In one study I reviewed, the researchers looked at 48 innovations and discovered that 34 of them—almost three-quarters—were copied. The research also shows that the rate of imitation is accelerating. For example, Chrysler invented the modern minivan, with front-wheel drive and a carlike unibody, in 1984. It took almost a decade for another carmaker to copy it. But after GM introduced its Spark minicar, a Chinese imitation, the QQ, came out within a year and outsold the original by six to one in China. In fact, nearly 98% of the value generated by innovations is captured not by the innovators but by the often overlooked, despised copycats.” (Shenkar)

As I mentioned in my article on the dubious value of eccentricity, going one’s own way in anything is typically fraught with difficulties, endless frustrations, and constant shit-talking from the peanut gallery, who claim to love innovation but secretly despise outliers because they expose the mediocrity of the mainstream. When I write about the individuals about whom I choose to write, I do so because they’re interesting as hell, not necessarily people to emulate, but even in saying that my aim is to suggest that emulating their refusal to adhere to social norms is a positive goal. That’s right- even in being an innovator and a contrarian, you’re still a lemming- just a lemming with better music, art, and movie tastes and fewer mindless dipshits leading the way.

This is why every broken record in the history of strength sports is significant, because every one of them move the baseline and the “ceiling” higher. And the bar might have been higher in the past than you realize, because there was a great wide world before hte internet in which people didn’t meticulously detail every last fucking thing they ever did in an effort to get hollow congratulations from an audience of virtual people. Thus, the mere fact people don’t know that something was achieved, or the exact details surrounding the achievement, does not mean it never happened.

For instance, the fastest you can get across the Atlantic Ocean these days is eight hours, no matter what airline or jet you fly. You’d think that this would be the fastest commercial flights have ever made that trip, but you’d be wrong- the Concorde used to make that flight in three and a half hours, and flew so fucking fast that it forced Air France to completely redesign the plane, from the tray tables to the goddamned silverware. Mention that to a halfwit on the internet and they’ll screech some bullshit about fake news and claim some conspiracy must be involved either in the scuttling of the Concorde program or in the creation of its “myth” rather than researching it, then return to flogging their limp dick to interracial porn while posting about their hatred of non-whites on Reddit.

Frankly, a simple belief in the possibility of a thing makes that thing a more realizable goal, which is why all of the records and purported records of the past are beneficial to the world at large. Each is a stair tread in a staircase to a goal that seems inconceivable on the first step, but entirely possible on the thousandth step- just as climbing a redwood might seem impoosible to a person on the ground, reaching the top seems like a seriously easy goal to a person who’s already three quarters of the way up- the problem is, there is no way of knowing where the top might lay.

People often incorrectly attribute this phenomenon to Roger Bannister, the skinny dude who broke the four minute mile “barrier.” According to legend, a sub-four-minute mile was an impossibility, whether due to the mind-fuck of that number (like 315 is often for kids on the bench) or the limitations of the human body. Bannister shattered that barrier, blazing the trail for ten skinny dudes to pull off the same feat in the following two-and-a-half years. Having accomplished something similar, I’d suggest that the 1700 total barrier was going to fall within that year irrespective of my efforts, because hard-training, serious athletes aren’t busy with what their opposition is doing- they’re busy with what they’re doing.

Whether or not that’s true, when I pulled off my total I had no doubt it had been done before somewhere, because I’d seen far more impressive lifts in the gym than I’ve seen in meets, and not everyone records every fucking thing, meets included. Furthermore, there had been no real raw powerlifting between 1980 and 2000, so the records that would have been set in those years went to geared lifting- a random change in the interests of powerlifters resulted in the omission of a bunch of records that would have been set under different circumstances.

As it happens, Roger Bannister’s sub-four-minute mile wasn’t the first either, and history had intervened in the progression of records in such a way that his feat seemed incredibly special, but in reality was simply cool but otherwise unremarkable. World War Two resulted in the stagnation of the records in every sport, and Bannister’s main competition was barred from competing after the war after being labelled professionals. Not only that, but the mile is commonly run as the 1500m, as only in the land of “Cowboys and First People” do we adhere to the Imperial system, which makes no sense given that we fought a war to divest ourselves of all things “Imperial.” Various conversions have been done to account for the additional 109 meters in a mile and the slowing that would occur over them, but the generally accepted conversion shows that when the mile record was 4:03, the predicted mile by the fastest 1500m is 3:43, which is a hell of a lot faster than a 4 minute mile. Interestingly, the record hung up there in the same way it did at 4:00 in the mile.

“It’s much more likely that the stagnation was attributed to the war and the breakthrough was a return to sport along with the modernization of training which occurred during the 50’s and early 60’s. The sport began making its transition to modernity with modern coaches like Franz Stampfl, Lydiard, Cerutty, and others beginning their work. While the psychology of the breakthrough after the first sub 4-minute mile makes for a wonderfully inspiring story, the reality is much different. It’s strange to say, but World War 2 might have created the 4 minute barrier. Not doctors saying we couldn’t do it, or people not believing. A massive war that put a halt to every record imaginable. It just so happened that we were just on the wrong side of 4 minutes when the stagnation occurred” (Magness).

As you can see, context played a massive role in what led to what is better described as environmentally-imposed stagnation of a record instead of a barrier. The fact that we are imitators explains the myth of the four-minute-mile barrier, because one poorly-cited article turned into a “truth” within our zeitgeist. In any event, it should be apparent that the context surrounding a record should be important, not just in breaking one, but in setting one. Thus, you might want to consider the context surrounding a lifter’s training, from the available equipment to the gear to the food quality to medical care and fucking air conditioning- nothing whatsoever is done in a vacuum (which is one more reason so-called evidence based training is horseshit).

Take, for instance, you want to replicate Hermann Goerner’s world-famous, legendary 727 pound one arm deadlift. First, you have to know that deadlifts of the time were done English-style, which means heels together, and only pulled to knee height. Then you have to know that 727 pounds is exactly 660 German pfunds (a pfund is 500 grams), which is the exact weight of a stone block Goerner was reported to have lifted in a number of newspapers, though the height of the lift is unknown (Bonini). Goerner isn’t reported to have done any kind of barbell lift with that weight, and no German source for record lifts have any entries for a one-arm deadlift. With that newfound knowledge, you can do one of two things- resolve to budge a stone block with a handle of indeterminate height and shape of the same weight or greater, or to begin setting records in a relatively uncontested lift (the USAWA still has contests that feature it).

Modern scientists have trouble replicating Tesla’s experiments because they view science very differently from how he does. A different perspective can give you a very different impression of a thing. To really figure out how Tesla thought, and to fully grasp his understanding of electricity, we would have to relearn science, or have someone learn it the first time, in a manner similar in every possible way to the manner in which Tesla learned it. Doing so could lead to new insights into the uses of electricity that could cause radical advancements in the technology we have today, or create entirely new technological fields we had heretofore ignored due to our single-minded advance in the direction of the transistor. Yet no one does this, because we are wired to emulate the “now” rather than the “then” in spite of the fact there is still plenty to be learned.

Recreating old school and ancient lifts might benefit from understanding that their equipment and their training methods were markedly different from out own- their weights and bars weren’t standardized, the performance of the lifts weren’t always the same, and the reporting of those lifts might be (as in the case of Goerner) somewhat suspect. Furthermore, even if you recreate the lift, it’s hard to judge yourself equal to a lifter who did it at a likely far lighter bodyweight, because you did it heavier, on far better equipment, and in a world where steroids and refrigerated, fresh, healthy food are the norm.

For that reason, it’s hard to say that a modern Steinborn lift matches the impressiveness of a person who did it at 200 pounds, in between two massive world wars and recessions and depressions. Or to say that Hafthor’s new Viking ship’s mast walk record actually broke the record of a man who lived a thousand years ago, never lifted weights, and spent half the year either killing or rowing or recuperating from both. That said, you might make allowances for past lifts in terms of questioning their details or simply stating that the softness of the modern world means modern lifts are more impressive- it depends entirely on your perspective of the context surrounding the lifts.

Finally, it’s important to remember the trailblazers because without them, we’d not be moving the weights we are today. Just as we should be thankful for the sacrifice of the ancient monks who smashed themselves to bits jumping from great heights strapped to gliders of various degrees of flight, a failure to consider the sacrifices of the early monks who experimented with flight does modern aircraft a disservice and denies the unreal risks curious motherfuckers took in the past so that we could enjoy the safety, security, and comfort of modern air travel.

We’ve all heard of the Wright Brothers, and aside from Da Vinci’s flying machine, that’s likely all most of us know about the pioneers of aviation.  In our haste to remember the names Howard Hughes and Chuck Yeager, we’ve forgotten about people like Elmer of  Malmsbury, who in the 11th Century threw himself off the top of a tower with wings inspired by a Greek myth attacked to his hands and feet.  Somehow, that gibbering psychopath managed to glide 200 years before crashing and maiming himself.  Nor do we know the names of the Arab Wright brothers, the brothers Çelebi, one of whom completed a glider flight across the Bosporus, while his brother somehow survived a ride on a seven-winged rocket powered by motherfucking gunpowder in the early 17th Century.

And the same goes for strength sports- the modern era has taken the primordial goal of ridiculous super strength and made it mundane. People have broken lifting down into component parts, widgets, rules, and restrictions, and they’ve turned one of the most atavistic and primordial of man’s pastimes into the soulless pursuit of mediocrity in the name of pretending to be vaguely interesting. And in the process of doing that, we’ve largely ignored lifters who were no longer in the limelight, laboring under the misapprehension that all that is new is necessarily better (or worse) rather than simply necessary and different.

The theory of accelerating change suggests that the rate of change in society and technology occurs at an exponential rate, which we’re not seeing in the lifting world. Large jumps in the record should occur at shorter and shorter intervals until they reach the limits of human potential… which will be interesting to see.

In closing, I hope that you will take from this more than simply the realization that historical lifters are important for their contributions and the manners in which they made them, but that when viewing any person, issue, or material object, you should likely consider the context surrounding that person’s opinions, actions, and mentality, or the same sort of historical and cultural context for whatever issue or thing you’re examining. Out of context you can arrive at a conclusion completely contrary to the original intent or the perception of an event at the time, and that isn’t really a fair appraisal. If you spend a little time to educate yourself on a given subject’s history and sociology, you might find you develop an entirely different perspective on the subject, whether that be on Hafthor’s undeniably sick deadlift performance in the type of strength exposition that comprises almost the entirety of the “sport’s” history; whether or not you still think Goerner’s the greatest one-arm deadlifter of all time; or the fact that literally no one is attempting to control any of you and you believe otherwise because it’s comforting to believe something or someone is in control when the reality is that everyone is trying to maximize their own comfort at the least expense to themselves. That might have been the longest sentence in the world, but sufficed to say, a little context goes a long fucking way.

Seriously up next, Nothing New Under the Sun: Isometrics, Part 2- Bill March and Jim Dorn Pile on the Fucking Weights With Partials and Isometrics.

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Sources:

Magness, Steve.  The Roger Bannister Effect: The Myth of the Psychological Breakthrough.  The Science of Running.  16 May 2017.  Web.  16 Mar 2020.  https://www.scienceofrunning.com/2017/05/the-roger-bannister-effect-the-myth-of-the-psychological-breakthrough.html?v=47e5dceea252

Bonini G, Kodya M, Roark J.  Was Goerner truly mighty?  Iron Game History. May 2007;9(4):21-33.

Rushkoff, Douglas.  Human beings’ superpower is imitation.  Medium.  18 Dec 2019.  Web.  4 Mar 2020.  https://medium.com/team-human/human-beings-superpower-is-imitation-fdf69e11bea7

Shenkar, Oded.  Imitation is more valuable than innovation.  Harvard Business Review.  Apr 2010.  Web.  4 Mar 2020.  https://hbr.org/2010/04/defend-your-research-imitation-is-more-valuable-than-innovation

Wood, Connor.  A maligned human trait is the key to our survival.  Inverse. 10 Mar 2020.  Web.  16 Mar 2020.  https://www.inverse.com/science/copycats

van Prooijen JW, Douglas KM.  Belief in conspiracy theories: Basic principles of an emerging research domain.  Eur J Soc Psychol. 2018 Dec; 48(7): 897–908.

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