For those of you unfamiliar with this pamphlet-sized book, I can hardly recommend it enough:

Of Stones and Strength, By Steve Jeck and Peter Martin.  It’s not really a training manual, and it’s barely long enough to be considered a proper book.  What it is, however, is a reminder that all of the gym lifting in the world isn’t going to provide enough awesome to counter-balance the pathetic waste that most of us call our modern lives.  Why?  Because we’re not busy with picking up any random heavy shit we might see in the course of a day of plowing a field, because there’s no right of passage into manhood in Western civilization, and because we’re decidedly, sadly, in and incontrovertibly not Basques.

It gets no more metal than this.  Someone’s definitely wailing on a fucking guitar in the background.

Stay with me, fuckers,  I shall elucidate my points.  First, a bit about the book.  It is essentially a display of the world’s manhood stones, in particular those of Scotland.  Steve Jeck, the co-author of the book, discovered these stones while competing as a pro Highland Games athlete in Scotland, and went on a quest to lift them all.  He brought along with him a guy named Peter Martin, a historian of Scottish manhood stones and one of the main reasons I found the book so inspiring.  Why, might you ask, was this historian the catalyst for my inspiration?  Because the book is chock-full of pics of a 61 year old back in slacks and dress shoes picking up 300+ lb stones in a muddy field with a back so rounded it looks like he’s trying to form the perfect arch with his back.  Frankly, when you see a bunch of pictures of an old man picking up rocks the size of your torso, it makes you rethink every decision you’ve made in your life, and you realize that you’ve been fucking up if you cannot be out there outlifting that fucker like it’s your job.  Back to that bit in a second.

The book outlines a number of stones throughout the world that men lifted to show other men that they were indeed big swinging dicks.  Stones like the Dinnie Stones, so named because a strongman named Donald Dinnie picked up them both (one weighs 435 and the other 340) and walked across a bridge and back with one in each hand.  Back in the day, if you wanted to be a part of a crew of warriors, no matter where you lived in the world, there would have been a stone lifting test involved- these are the kinds of stones Jeck and Martin lift throughout that book, and the kind of stones you’d probably like to lift as a matter of course.

Which, oddly, brings me to my third point- we’re not Basques.  This sucks for a wide variety of reasons ranging from their awesome, alien-inspired and possibly only related to that of the Ainu halfway around the world language, the fact that they’re all nobility in Spain because their land was just about the only place in Spain not conquered by the Moors, and the fact that they have constant festivals wherein they compete against one another in wrestling, wood chopping, stone lifting, and a variety of other awesome shit.  Their stone-lifting competitions, however, are in my opinion the coolest bit in the book.  Jeck describes a legendary competition between a stone mason and an accountant, both weighing between 200 and 220 lbs, in which they competed to shoulder a rectangular stone for reps, taking turns in 7 minute rounds.  The stones, by the way, weighed over 300 lbs apiece, and the mason won with 22 reps in 21 minutes… which is fucking insane.  This is what the Basques do on the weekend, though, which makes them far more awesome than we are.

So, having contemplated what I’d just read early on a Saturday morning, it occurred to me that not only do I lack access to stones for lifting, I lack the ability to store a stone if I had one made or simply found one and took it home.  I have the misfortune to currently live in a filing cabinet for the not-poor, and thus lack the necessary personal storage space in which I’d have to store such an object, and my gym is currently unfriendly to the idea of storing a big rock for me.  Thus, I was faced with a bit of a quandary.

There is no reason for this pic, other than all of the awesome contained therein.

Then, however, I recalled an exercise that would offer a not-horrible substitute for stone lifting, get me out of my comfort zone in the gym, and possibly offer me an opportunity to discover a new favorite exercise…

and this is how I learned to stop worrying about how much it sucks and just love the fuck out of Zercher lifts.  Amusingly, Zerchers aren’t mentioned in Of Stones and Strength.  In fact, few exercises are mentioned, the workout program’s ridiculously basic, and that page and a half of the book is pretty much the least interesting portion of it.  Nevertheless, it occurred to me that that “cradle” one uses for the bar is not too unlike that you use in stone lifting.  Given that I’ve no access to stone for the time being, the Zercher lift would be a good way to approximate stone lifting in the gym, so maybe when I find myself hanging out with a badass Scottish sextogenarian I don’t find myself embarrassed by my inability to emulate his random overdressed feats of strength.

For those of you with little to no background in what a Zercher is, it can take many disparate forms.  The original Zercher lift was invented by a strongman named Ed Zercher, who while well-known in the strength community is tremendously hard to research online.  In any event, the guy was an old-school Steve Justa, except strong, and lifted in what has been described more than once as a junkyard in his basement.  He was a big fan of doing barbell leg presses, and due to his lack of a squat rack (though why he couldn’t fashion one out of junk I’ll never know) would deadlift the barbell, place it on top of his thighs, and then scoop his arms underneath the bar and continue the lift until he was at full lockout.  Horrible as that sounds, it’s pretty analogous to stone lifting, especially when one uses Bob Peoples’ deadlifting technique.

Peoples pulled 728 at 178 with a double overheand grip and a completely rounded back in 1946.

With the next blog in this series, I’ll throw up a couple of vids showing you some Zercher permutations, explain Bob Peoples’ deadlifting technique, and hook you guys up with more titties.  The chick, by the way, is ultra hot Pole Eva Wywal.

Go pick up something heavy.  She’ll be lifting her tits.

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