Plague of Strength

One of my main problems with Harry Potter is that it is completely beyond belief that anyone would regard a 130 lb male adult holding a twig while wearing his high school graduation uniform with anything resembling fear, and even less believable is the idea that such a person might be capable of inflicting harm beyond a hangnail upon a hated opponent.  Call it a function of my rapidly advancing age, my will to power, or simply the belief that a heavily muscled man bearing a broad axe is a far more formidable opponent than a slightly built man with a rapier, all other things equal.  Men ought to wield manly weapons, not twigs.  Perhaps that last installment should have done more to disabuse me of that notion, but it hasn’t seemed to- I still stand in utter disbelief that some spindly, albino, elfin poofter with an overgrown steak knife stands a fucking chance against a dwarf with a two handed axe designed to cleave man from limb.

In any event, people back in the day were apparently unconcerned with looking manly, because when they weren’t fiddling about with Weaver sticks, they were busy with Indian club bells, perhaps the only training implement ever invented that could make the Weaver stick look like the training method of choice for a paragon of manly virtue.

Indian Club Training, or How the British Took a Marginally Cool Thing and Fucked It in the Ear

I suppose it should come as no surprise that the myth of being “musclebound” began being propagated in the 19th Century.  Guys like Louis Cyr, Richard Pennell, and others, were held aloft as examples of men who were too musclebound to be athletes.  Instead, smaller, leaner, less capable men were held aloft as the physical ideal, as they were the racehorses to the strongmen’s draft horses (Kraemer).  Oddly, it was at this time that inner city dwellers in Britain were being identified as “soft as shite”, as the Brits are wont to say, and resistance exercise began to be heavily encouraged, particularly for the sedentary.

The thinking at the time was that the British must be prepared for the inevitability of another European war, and anemic and weak city dwellers would probably put up all of the resistance of a 20th century Parisian when accosted by a twelve-year-old German girl holding a marginally sharp stick and bearing a somewhat menacing glare.  Who am I kidding?  They’d surrender to a four-year-old Belgian holding a lollipop while shitting her pants.  Nevertheless, light resistance exercise began to be touted as the best method of achieving “fitness”, as the implements used would be portable, and therefore convenient, and would allow the user to avoid the horrible specter of “muscle boundedness” or somesuch other nonsense.  Frankly, everyone was distracted by their teeth and had a hard time understanding what the Brits at the time were carrying on about.  Nevertheless, it was likely for this reason (war) that Englishmen put aside their pride and picked up clubbells on the regular to get “jacked”.

The truly interesting thing about the adoption of the Indian club by the British was the execution- the British primarily utilized the clubbell as a part of a group fitness class.  If the idea of a bunch of drunken Britishers swinging light weapons hither and yon in a tight space seems like a skit out of Monty Python, you’re not the only one.  British soldiers in India, however, adopted the implement as an alternative to calisthenics, however, so when they returned to the British Isles, club swinging morphed from its original, solitary nature into what can only be described as a proto-Body Pump class, complete with songs sung in cadence and occasionally set to music.  No, I am not making that up:

“In order to awaken a lively and abiding interest in calisthenic and gymnastic exercises, and to secure an enthusiasm and a fascination that shall convert indolence and sluggishness into cheerful and vigorous activity, it will be found absolutely necessary to employ instrumental music.  the best music for this purpose is furnished by a brass band” (Watson 124-125).

Thus, Victoria-era Britian was filled with drunken, anemic limeys violently swinging 2 lb. bowling pins in circles while listening to oompapa music and screeching lyrics to military cadences at the top of their lungs… and this was considered to be a good thing.

According to esteemed physical culturist and author J. Madison Watson,

“Indian clubs, or scepters, as they are sometimes called, are deservedly held in the highest esteem by all gymnasts, affording, as they do, one of the very best and most extended series of exercises for developing the muscular power of the whole body.  Nothing can be better calculated to invigorate the respiratory system, expand the chest, call into action the muscles of locomotion and the principal structures around the joints, and enlarge and strengthen the muscles of the forearm, the upper arm, and the shoulder, as well as the abdominal and spinal muscles”(Watson 257).

Meanwhile, in America, clubbell training caught on with a bit more of the original intent in mind.  The seminal American work on the subject was published in 1866 by Sim Kehoe, which decried the British use of the short, light Indian club as suited only for “invalids or children”(29).  Apparently the populace of the British Isles were considered to be about as physically imposing as six-year-olds with cerebal palsy in mid-19th Century America, so Kehoe recommended the more robust colonialists utilize the long club, which ranged from 24 to 28′ in length and weighed between four and twenty pounds apiece.  Kehoe described the most effective utilization of the club to consist of eight main strength training movements, based on those popular in India:

1. Inner Front Circle
2. Outer Front Circle
3. Inner Back Circle
4. Outer Back Circle
5. Inner Side Circle
6. Outer Site Circle
7. Inner Moulinet
8. Outer Moulinet

For detailed descriptions of the moments, check out Kehoe’s book here, but sufficed to say it involves a lot of spinning bowling pins in circles for extended periods of time.  Clubbells remained in vogue throughout the 19th to the early 20th century, peaking with the inclusion of two nebulous and insofar as I can tell undefined Indian club competitions as part of gymnastics in the 1904 and 1932 Olympic Summer Games.  Thereafter, the smaller, lighter, more agile implements were abandoned in favor of far heavier objects.  They briefly enjoyed a resurgence through Dragon Door Publications, who dragged them out of obscurity, but they at best remain a curiosity best left alone for most- without a bit of instruction, best case scenario you wrench a wrist and worst case you smack yourself in the face with them.  I have managed to do both on more than one occasion.

Kettlebells… One More Thing the Russians Didn’t Invent
Just as most people think the sandwich is a British nobleman’s invention in spite of the fact that it was invented in 11th Century China, most people think the Russians invented the kettlebell in the 19th Century because they were too weak to lift real weights, but in fact the kettlebell is far, far older.  the kettlebell, known in Russia as the girya, is a adaptation of a weight typically used in Russian markets to check the weight of a purchase of bulk goods.  The giri used by the Russians take their name for the Persian adjective “gerani”, which means “difficult” and was originally invented by the Greeks as an implement for strength competitions at the Olympic Games.  The stones were then adapted for strength training by the Slavs to build strength for war, and have been a part of Russian strength training techniques since the Eastern Slavs**  conquered Western Russia.  Additionally, implements similar to the kettlebell are ubiquitous in Asia, having been used for thousands of years in China and likely nearly as long in Japan and Korea in the form of the stone padlock.

In the 19th Century, kettlebell training and competitions became immensely popular. While I can find no evidence to support this, it would seem likely to me that Tsar Alexander had his army utilize them to ensure they were physically fit and strong, and may have played a part in Napoleon’s defeat.  Thereafter, they continued to grow in popularity as the soldiers took the implements back to their hometown for local strength training and competitions.  Whether or not that’s accurate, I have no idea- given the vast volumes available on vodka and the sparse information on giri, one can assume that Russians felt drinking was a far better use of their time that writing about something as simple and ultimately unimportant as a strength training implement.  Nevertheless, the strongest of the of the Russians ended up touring Europe with circuses as strongman acts, and disseminated information on the use of the kettlebell as they went, like drunken, mustachioed versions of David Carradine in Kung Fu, though with less cross dressing and autoerotic asphyxiation.

With the rise of the Soviet nightmare came an emphasis on physical strength in the populace and public displays of strength on an international scale, ostensibly to show the West that only the people in the Ukraine were starving to death, and that was because Uncle Stalin liked the smell of dead people.  Collective farms held strength competitions and then sent their best lifters to holiday festivals in Moscow, where papa Stalin presided over the events and likely had the shitty lifters liquidated.  According to one source, having Stalin’s soulless gaze upon you scared you into winning- “one girya-lifter is believed to have said: ‘I was in no mood to continue the competition, but when I saw Comrade Stalin looking at me I immediately snatched the record’” (Dmitriev).

Competitions in girya lifting seem not to focus so much on pure strength as they do strength endurance:

• The First Nationwide Festival of Strongmen, held in 1948, boasted 20,000 competitors, though there is no record of how many were compelled to participate through threats of liquidation or internment.  The winner of the event was a sailor named Alexei Protopopov, who snatched a 32-kilo girya 1,002 times with short breaks, ostensibly in the hopes he would be fed and allowed to sleep indoors.
• A contemporary of Protopopov, Aleksandr Bolshakov, clean and jerked two 32-kilo kettlebells for 19 repetitions, which seems light until you consider the fact he likely did so without having eaten for a couple of days.
• A decade later, some lunatic named Ivan Nemtsev crushed the competition for eleven straight years, capping his utter domination of an entire country by snatching a 32 kg girya 370 times in a row.

Although kettlebells typically come in 4 kg, 8 kg, 16 kg, 32kg, 36 kg , 40 kg, 48 kg and 56 kg sizes and are used for a variety of exercises ranging from the utterly useless Turkish Get up to the marginally useful high rep Olympic clean and jerk and snatch, kettlebell competitions only utilize the 16, 24 and 32 kg giri and simply consist of the snatch and the clean and jerk.  After the formation of the International Federation of Girya Sports in 1993, international competitions began being held in those two events, though they really only featured Eastern Europeans and a smattering of German, Greek, and American oddballs who had likely only just recently stopped dressing in traditional Chinese garb and yammering on about the what everyone else knew to be the extremely questionable utility of traditional martial arts in streetfighting.

Likely due to its popularity in Soviet Russia, it wasn’t until they were popularized by Russian strength coach Pavel Tsatsouline that anyone in the West gave two shits about kettlebells.  Tsatsouline, a marketing genius, managed to build an entire industry out of nothing, convincing people that lifting a relatively light but ungainly implement hundreds of times was the secret to true strength, in spite of the fact that he himself, while fit, was not terrifically strong.  In spite of his best efforts and masterful propaganda, kettlebell training has basically remained on the fringes of actual strength training, but is generally considered great for insanely hot chicks with too much money, the infirm, children, and people who have difficulty lifting real weights.

The Partial Deadlift and Partial Squat Rear Their Beautifully Ugly Twin Heads
Clearly, picking up extraordinarily heavy things wasn’t an overwhelming concern in the Nineteenth Century.  Strongmen hadn’t really become tremendously popular, though by the early 1800s a few European strongman troupes had made it to American shores.  Heavy lifting, however, was not a popular activity- it was basically little more than the basis for the occasional freak show performance put on by giant men dressed like Roman gladiators for the entertainment of a paying crowd.  All of that changed, however, when I couple of 19th Century Americans stumbled upon a treatise penned by early 18th Century philosopher John Theophilus Desaguliers.  Desaguliers, in the midst of a lengthy work on mechanical action called A Course in Experimental Philosophy, analyzed the muscular action in strength performances by 18th Century strongman Thomas Topham.  Topham, a carpenter by trade built almost identically to Arthur Saxon at 5’10” and 200 lbs, was one of the first recorded professional strongman and served as a bodyguard to the aforementioned philosopher.  Desaguliers, then, has a front row seat to Topham’s many performances, which included:

• bending a large iron poker to almost ninety degrees by smashing it across his bare left arm.
• carrying a sleeping watchman in his box a considerable distance and then dumping the occupant and his box over a waist-high wall.
• holding horse and cart back for fun while the driver whipped his horse in an effort to get the animal to pull away.
• lying extended between two chairs with a glass of wine in his right hand and five dudes standing on his stomach.
• rolling up a seven pound pewter dish “as a man rolls up a sheet of paper”.
• twisting a kitchen spit around the neck of shit-talking hostler.
• lifting a fat man off the ground with one hand while lying extended between two chairs with four blokes on his stomach (Wikipedia).
• lifting a six foot long table off the ground and holding it horizontally, with a 50 lb weight hanging off the opposite end… holding it with his teeth.
• bending an iron poker in half around his neck and straightening it again.

The feats that really blew Desagulier’s socks off, however, were partial lifts.  One, in fact, was a lift so ridiculous in the effort it took to display that it is difficult to understand how it was actually conceived- a lift of 1,838 pounds a couple of inches off the ground.  As you can see from the illustration above, this lift required that a large platform be erected at least fifteen feet high, upon which Topham stood with a rope and tackle draped over his shoulders.  Using this, Topham lifted three hogsheads of water a few inches off the ground.  This feat of strength may seem about as puzzling to you as the need for a sequel to Adam Sandler’s shitfest of an ensemble comedy Grown Ups, as it should- there is absolutely no reason whatsoever so much effort should have been expended for so little reward.  The next, and the one that perhaps can be solely credited with being the impetus behind the entire American heavy weight lifting movement, was Topham’s partial deadlift of a stone roller weighing 800 lbs by wrapping it with a chain and holding either end (Desaguliers 290).

“I have seen him lift a rolling stone of about 800 lb with his hands only, standing in a frame above it, and taking hold of  a chain that was fastened to it.  By this, I reckon he may be almost as stron again as those who are generally reckon’d the strongest men, they generally lifting no more than 400 lb in that manner.  The weakest men, who are in health and not too fat, lift about 125 lb having about half the strength of the strongest.  N.B. This sort of comparison is chiefly in relation to the muscles of the loins; because in doing this one must stoop forwards a little.  We must also add the weight of the body to the weight lifted.  So that if the weakest man’s body weighs 150 lb that added to 125 lb makes the whole weight lifted by him to be 275 lb.  Then if the stronger man’s body weighs also 150 lb the whole weight lifted by him will be 500 lb that is 400 lb and the 150 lb which his body weighs.  Topham weighs about 200 lb which added to the 800 lb that he lifts, makes 1000 lb.  But he ought to lift 900 lb besides the weight of his body, to be strong again as the man of 150 lb who can lift 400 lb”(Ibid).

Desaguliers, in an effort to scientifically compare the strength of dudes who apparently had a trampling fetish, developed several strength testing machines.  One of them mimicked hip and harness lifting of the type that 17th and 18th Century strongmen William Joy, John von Eckenberg, and Thomas Topham made famous.   Realizing that a harness lift only tested the strength of a man’s hips, back, and thighs, however, Desaguliers also invented machines to measure arm strength and overall lifting power.  Using these, Desaguliers went on to calculate the force placed upon the body with lifts conducted at a variety of angles, rep ranges, and movements, and concluded that extremely heavy partials placed a greater systemic load on the body than lighter full range movements.

If you’re having trouble believing that a philosopher’s physics textbook inspired a group of people who later went on to decide that the Earth was 6,000 years old, subsist on a diet of Ho-Ho’s and Ring Dings, and consider a 10 minute walk to be “exercise”, you’re not alone- this would seem far fetched to anyone with a spinal column that ended in something resembling a human brain.  If modern Americans can be trusted to do anything, it’s to be as intellectually lazy as they are physically.  Americans of the 19th Century, apparently, were an entirely different breed.  Perhaps because they acknowledged the fact that the Bible was a work of historical fiction, 19th Century American not only read Desaguliers’ book, but they built strength testing machines modeled on Desaguliers’ designs and littered the country with them, placing them on street corners, circus sideshows, and local fairs. There, Americans pitted themselves against each other in tests of “‘main strength’—the strength of his back, hips,legs and hands—by moving a large weight a very short distance and thus see how he stood in comparison to his neighbors” (Todd 5).

After becoming “the strongest man at Harvard”, medical student and aspiring actor George Barker Windship tested his strength on one of these machines, pulling 420 but utterly failing in his attempt to get laid in the effort, as no one on Earth would likely be impressed by a 420 lb partial deadlift, unless it was performed by a sub 100 lb woman, invalid, or small child.  Thereafter, Windship gave up on the body weight exercises and gymnastics that had earned him his reputation for strength at Harvard and adopted a program of heavy weightlifting centered around extremely heavy partials in 1854.  Dragging his wounded psyche (and likely insanely sore carcass) home to Boston, Windship built a lifting machine based on Desaguliers’ designs in his backyard “by sinking a hogshead in the ground and placing inside it a barrel, filled with rocks and sand, to which he attached a rope and handle. Then, standing on a platform he constructed above the barrel, he mimicked the partial movements of the lifting machine he had tried in Rochester” (Todd 6).

Hammering himself like he was some random jacked dude trying to pound Isabel Ice into a coma, Windship built his strength up quickly.  From his 420 pull in 1854, he managed a 700 pull in 1856, 840 in 1857, and a massive 1208 lbs in 1860, all performed without straps.  Having topped out on what his tiny little rat claws could handle, Windship built a wooden yoke attached to chains and continued to train squat partials.  “With this contrivance,” Windship stated “my lifting-power has advanced with mathematical certainty, slowly but surely, to two thousand and seven pounds, up to this third day of November, 1861” (Todd 6).  Clearly, what people seem to like to call “Anderson squats” would far more accurately, impressively, and Dennis Miller-style obscure reference-ly be referred to as “Windship squats.”

Though that ended up being his best lift, Windship kept pounding the iron like a 1950’s meth fueled American housewife with a husband who gets a little punchy if his shirts are slightly wrinkled.  After going nuts working with lead shot-fulled globe barbells and heavy dumb bells, Windship invented the first adjustable dumbbell, built a standing chest press machine, trained with 180 lbs dumbbell at a weight of only 150, and even built an Indian club that weighed in at an utterly insane, impossible to conceive, and difficult-to-understand-exactly-what-the-fuck-he-did-with-it 137 lbs.  Though I have no evidence to support this theory either, it may have been that Windship was a doctor at the Boston Lunatic Hospital and he had to defend himself daily against the attacks of the nutters contained within, but George Barker Windship eventually built himself into what could only be described as one of the strongest human beings at 150 lbs to ever live.

Capitalizing on his hard work, Windship hosted the first ever American professional strength competition, and although he ended up losing when his yoke snapped, Windship’s reputation grew after he explained the mechanical action behind his opponent’s lift to jounalists.  Thereafter, he began performing exhibitions of strength and delivering lectures on the myriad benefits of extremely heavy strength training. Calling the hand and thigh lifts and partial Hack lift he performed on his machine “health lifts”, Windship gained a massive fan base, disabused the American public of the notion that being “musclebound” was unhealthy, spawned an entire industry of copycat lifting machines like Mann’s Reactionary Lifter (a sort of trap bar deadlifting machine designed for women so they wouldn’t have to change clothes to use it) and the Butler Health Lift machine.  With that, heavy lifting spread to both men and women, and the American populace began, for the first time, to lift heavy, often, and enthusiastically… as everyone fucking should.