Plague of Strength

If there is any group less well qualified to critique the lifts of others, it’s the denizens of Reddit’s r/weightroom and r/powerlifting, and Bodybuilding.com, yet that seems to be what both sites primarily dedicate themselves to. Nowhere is this more obnoxious than on the big three lifts, and the bench press in particular. Any number of imagined or perceived failures to perform the bench press exactly as insurance companies, some pastel jogger-clad fuckknuckle on Instagram, or the almighty pack of vindictive, useless fuckwits of the IPF command, and the comments on the lift are aflame with all of the limp-dicked vitriol that those pasty-faced tubs of castrated Cheetos dust and mayo can muster. Not only do they fail to credit people with the lifts they’ve obviously performed, but they fail to understand that training with loose form can lend itself to massive gains in strict lifts if done correctly.

I realize that the blasphemy I’ve just proverbially uttered is even met with disbelief even outside of the walls of the unwashed and uneducateds’ parents’ basements. Certainly, you play the way you practice, as we all were told in high school football… right? Apparently, not so much. All of the agita online about high squats and bounced deadlifts and asses off the bench in the gym is nothing more than self-righteous dickheads attempting to assert their feigned importance and superiority over people who couldn’t give a fuck less whether they lived or died. Form Nazis are to serious lifting what actual Nazis are to partying- they’re just the sullen, skinny dickheads in the corner everyone wishes would have killed themselves before inserting themselves into a public situation.

Enter a historic lift that will give the form nazis a fucking aneurysm- the bridge press. Also known as the belly toss and the pullover and press, the bridge press is the direct ancestor of the bench press, popularized by none other than George Hackenschmidt. For those of you who’ve been living under a rock, Hackenschmidt is the man who also popularized the horrendously misnamed Hack squat (which is obviously a fucking deadlift), a real life Zangiefwho won over 3,000 wrestling matches under a variety of rule sets against opponents from every corner of the world, and one of the greatest strongmen ever to walk the Earth. In the first ever written account of the lift, Hackenschmidt related the following:

“In January, 1898, I pushed up a bar weighing 275 lb. to the full height of the arms and with the right hand pushed up 243 lb., and lying on the ground, I lifted and pushed up with two hands a weight of 304 lb., following this soon after with one 335 lb.” (Hackenschmidt)

By his description, the lift couldn’t be more simple- you lay down on the floor like you’re going to have someone you’d like to fuck piss in your mouth, roll the barbell over your face, and floor press it to arms length. In a remarkable prescient fashion, however, that simple lift quickly devolved into a bunch of bullshit the same way the bench press now favors Japanese contortionists with vaginas and\ short arms and the deadlift is little more than a weighted split with a bit of a hip thrust conducted by Russians who can’t seem to satisfy themselves with the weight they can pull off the floor in a real deadlift.

I’ve no idea whether the fuckery regarding the performance of the lift began before or after Hack wrote about it, and it doesn’t really matter anyway. In all of its various permutations, the lift became popular with all of the strongmen of Hack’s day, and was a competitive lift in odd lift competitions from the 1920s through the 1950s, and the International All-Round Weightlifting fed still contests it in three separate formats. Those three formats date back at least as far as the 1920s, as Alan Calvert detailed all three in his book Super Strength.

“In some localities, there is a vogue for lifting bar-bells while lying flat on the back. The lifter lies with the bell on the floor beyond his head. He reaches backward, grasps the handle of the bar-bell with both hands, lifts it across the face, and then raises it to arms’ length…. Such a lift is more a test of arm strength than of bodily strength, but because the shoulders are supported by the floor, it is possible to push more weight to arms’ length than when the athlete is standing erect on his feet…. Arthur Saxon discovered that it was possible to push much harder with the arms if, instead of lying flat on the back, the body was arched in a shoulder bridge.”

“There is still another style of lifting, known as the “body-toss,” which is also performed while the athlete is lying on the floor. After he has pulled the bell across the face, he rolls it down the body until the handle rests right across his stomach. Then he bends his legs, places the soles of his feet on the floor, and raises his body in what we call the ‘shoulder bridge,’ that is, supported just by the shoulders and feet. To make the lift, he lowers the hips, and then quickly raises them and elevates the bell by a toss of the body and by a quick push of the arms.”

“The third lift in this class is known as the “wrestler’s bridge” lift. Before the lifter pulls the bell from the floor to chest, he arches his body into a “wrestler’s bridge,” bearing all his weight on the soles of his feet and the crown of his head. Then he pulls the bell over the face, and slowly presses it to arms’ length…. Hackenschmidt holds this record with 320 lbs. This lift requires great strength in the back and the neck, as well as tremendous lifting and pushing power in the arm muscles. This lift can be converted into an attractive supporting feat. The hard work is pushing the bell to arms’ length. After the arms are straightened, a great weight can be supported, either by the arms or on the body.

The bridge press was typically performed with the belly toss, which is really where the issues arose. Whereas you had Hack just floor pressing it like a monster and Nordquest doing shit like setting a pad on the ground, grabbing the bar, putting his head on the pad, and then doing a sort of handspring into position before pulling the bar over his chest and strict pressing it, you had lifters like Bill Lilly making a fucking mockery of it by turning it into a contortionist act. Lilly was a 5’6″ 165lber who drove Bob Hoffman nearly insane with his belly toss, because his “double bridge” style was basically an arch like the Japanese chicks do with the bench today, and he’d manage to get the bar almost to full extension by just inching it up with his belly.

“While the shoulder bridge or belly toss exercise may seem rather arcane nowadays, during its heyday it was a respected lift. Impelling a barbell off of one’s belly to the degree that such a maneuver required could not have been very easy or comfortable. Nevertheless, that was the only way lifters of that era were able to exceed double, or in the case of Lilly, nearly triple bodyweight while lying on their back” (Katterle).

As you can imagine, for a guy who already hated anything that wasn’t Olympic weightlifting, that shit was just beyond his ability to take. Hoffman acted like a Christian fundamentalist in mosque on Christmas when he saw Lilly bust out a belly toss 484lbs, and he railed against the lift until his death, calling it “more a contortionist’s trick than a genuine display of strength” (Heffernan). Frankly, it would not surprise me if it was Bill Lilly’s nearly 500lb belly toss that fueled Hoffman’s idiotic vitriol against the nascent sport of powerlifting.

In a move so rational it seems out of place in the lifting world, the AAU moved in and standardized the pullover and press in 1939, making it essentially what a good floor press is today (completely flat back, legs straight, heels together). They also instituted the use of spotters to hand the weight to the lifter to start at the top of the lift, rather than the bottom. Additionally, it was around this time that lifters started doing the lift on boxes or low benches- the modern bench press.

“All three variations of the press on back – prone floor press, belly toss and bench press – persisted relatively unchanged through the 1940s, but a hierarchy among them quickly developed. For bodybuilders the bench version gained dominance, and by the 1950s it was the king of upper-body movements, with noted advocates like Marvin Eder and George Eiferman. A major reason was that, as chest-conscious athletes, they liked its effect on the pectorals. John Sanchez further explains: “Interestingly, the bench press was to remain a somewhat controversial lift during the 1950s as lifters sought to maximize their advantage with outside help during its performance. What many would object to during these times would eventually become the status quo for the sport of powerlifting, however. Bench-pressing during the 1950s was an exercise in the throes of evolutionary ferment. The popularity of the lift as an aid to bodybuilders was responsible for the innovative development of rack stanchions, which some ‘traditionalists’ considered ‘cheating.’ Moreover, hand-offs as a means to get the barbell in place were similarly disdained by those who thought the best way to bench was by oneself, or unassisted” (Katterle)

The bench press might have superseded the pullover and press, or whatever the fuck you want to call it, but that hardly means the old school methods are valueless. Just like the place missionary position has in everyone’s sexual repertoire even after discovering the cervix-destroying goodness of the pile driver or the g-spot tickling wonder of the crab, every now and again it behooves everyone to go back to the beginning and see where it all started.

Though you won’t find it in Louie’s gym, the original Westside guys (who were almost to a man huge raw benchers), swore by the belly toss. According to Joe DiMarco, rack training wasn’t quite the mainstay we think it was for the bench.,  They’d beat the fuck out of it for a couple of weeks, then phase it out as everyone developed shoulder problems.  In its place, they’d throw the belly toss, which had only just fallen out of fashion as a competitive lift.

Their main lift was obviously the bench press, though they usually did pad presses, working their way down from 4 to 1 or none as the meet drew near.  This, combined with the belly toss, served as overloads that would reset the golgi tendon apparatus to a higher level. Doing so would prevent tendon injuries, and the belly toss in particular made heavy weights on the bench feel lighter than Trump’s micropenis.  Additionally, the soft start that the pads and belly toss gave the lifts would eliminate the pain the dead stop start gave their shoulders.

For the belly press, they used a short, narrow bench that was 9 inches high and 12 inches wide- basically just a board mounted on some low blocks.  This lift was a regularly contested one among Westside lifters.  Joe worked up to 600 for six and 660 for a single with this lift (he was benching 505 touch-and-go at 230), “bringing the bar from a handoff to the belly, and then using body English, legs, super arch with butt high off the bench to rocket the weight back to arm’s length, having been pretty well “tossed off the belly region in a touch and go fashion.  Also, the crew benched off a pad (or 3-4) placed on the torso, something akin to what we now call “board presses.”  Bill West initially brought the pads in to bench press with, and then DiMarco said he married the pads to the belly toss and they used the combo a lot after that. 

For the skeptics among you, and I’m sure you are about as legion as dollars in that talentless limpdickasaur PewDiePie’s bank account, DiMarco felt the belly toss was “a full body exercise, in which most of the major muscles are engaged, and is probably responsible for raising testosterone levels naturally, as squats and deadlifts have been claimed to do” (Yarnell 59).  Additionally, he and the Westside crew thought it drastically improved their competition bench by strengthening their ligaments and tendons, and my making their lockout unstoppable. And if you’re one of those douchebags who thinks that your form has to be perfect at all times to avoid the dreaded “Snap City,” get the fuck over yourself-

The OG Westside Crew believed there was no such thing as cheating in training.

At this point, I couldn’t give a fuck less whether or not anyone does the belly toss or not. I’ll be including it in my workouts, because I’m not a fucking idiot and I know a good thing when I see it. I’ve also developed a deep and abiding hatred for having an average bench press, so I’ve been hammering the fuck out of my triceps and the incline in an effort to make my bench a bit closer to Mountain’s than that mustachioed bitch boy Gavin McInnis. Whatever you do, don’t take to the interwebs and discuss the relative merits of the belly toss with a bunch of people who almost certainly know less about training than my cat. Discussion about lifting never put a single goddamned pound onto anyone’s total, so I either do the damn thing or don’t.

“There’s two kinds of people in this world when you boil it all down. You got your talkers and you got your doers. Most people are just talkers, all they do is talk. But when it is all said and done, it’s the doers that change this world. And when they do that, they change us, and that’s why we never forget them. So which one are you? Do you just talk about it, or do you stand up and do something about it? Because believe you me, all the rest of it is just coffee house bullshit.”

Sources:

Calvert, Alan. Super Strength. Preston: Milo Publishing Company, 1924.

Calvert, Alan. Joe Nordquest and His World Record Lift – Strength Magazine – March, 1915.  https://www.roguefitness.com/theindex/article/joe-nordquest-and-his-world-record-lift-strength-magazine-march-1915

Hackenschmidt, George. The Way to Live. 1935.

Heffernan, Conor.  Pumping iron- the history of the bench press.  Physical Culture Study.  9 Apr 2015.  Web.  30 Apr 2019.  https://physicalculturestudy.com/2015/04/09/pumping-iron-the-history-of-the-bench-press/

Katterle, Sean.  Bench press history, records and raw lifts.  The Tight Tan Slacks of Dezso Ban.  31 Jan 2009.  Web.  1 May 2019.  http://ditillo2.blogspot.com/2009/01/bench-press-history-sean-katterle.html

Tanny, Armand.  Joe DiMarco.  Reprinted from a 1967 article in Muscle Builder.  The Tight Tan Slacks of Dezso Ban.  8 Oct 2011.  Web.  6 May 2019.  http://ditillo2.blogspot.com/2011/10/joe-dimarco-armand-tanny-dave-yarnell.html

Yarnell, Dave. Forgotten Secrets of the Culver City Westside Barbell Club. Self Published, 2011.

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