5,000 Years of Sweat： Lost Workout Wisdom From the History of Physical Culture
Episode Stats
Summary
In an age that doesn t think much about history, you might be forgiven for thinking that a culture of exercise only emerged in the 20th century. But the idea of purposely exercising to change one s body, what folks used to call physical culture, likely goes back to the very beginnings of time. Here to unpack the origins, evolution, and future of fitness is Dr. Conor Heffernan, a lecturer in the Sociology of Sport at Ulster University and the author of The History of Physical Culture.
Transcript
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Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.
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In an age that doesn't think too much about history, you might be forgiven for thinking
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that a culture of exercise only emerged in the 20th century. But the idea of purposely
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exercising to change one's body, what folks used to call physical culture, likely goes
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back to the very beginnings of time. Here to unpack the origins, evolution, and future
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of fitness is Dr. Conor Heffernan, a lecturer in the sociology of sport at Ulster University
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and the author of The History of Physical Culture. Today on the show, Conor takes us on a fascinating
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and wide-ranging tour of physical culture, from the ancient Egyptians who made their pharaohs
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run around a pyramid to test their fitness to rule, to the ancient Greeks who used their
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gymnasiums for both bodily training and intellectual philosophizing, to modern strongmen who became
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proto-fitness influencers in many periods and societies in between. We discuss how training
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practices changed over time, where they may be going next, and the evergreen principles
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from past eras that we can still learn from today. After the show's over, check out our
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All right, Conor Heffernan, welcome to the show.
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So you are a historian of physical culture and physical fitness. What led you to researching
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So when I talk to students, I tell them that I study the desire to look better naked, which
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is kind of what I do in a certain sense. It's funny, I was a history undergrad, history and
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politics actually, and I was a terrible history student.
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Really bad. I had to learn about, you know, 11th century French kings. It was not for me.
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But at the time that I was doing my undergrad, I was training in a gym in Dublin called Hercules Gym.
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So Herx was founded in 1935. And I would train in the mornings before university with a lot of
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lifters who are in their 60s and 70s. So they were telling me about Charles Atlas and Eugene Sandow and
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Vasily Alexiev and Gerd Bonk and basically anyone and everyone from the past 60 to 80 years of
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strength. So eventually, you know, I'm a struggling history undergrad. A professor sits me down,
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Patrick Bernhardt. I'm forever in his debt. He says, what do you like? And I was like, well,
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I like lifting. He goes, OK, do history on that. Can I? And it turns out you can. No one has stopped
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me since. I'm a very weak-willed man. So if someone had stopped me, I would have stopped a long,
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long time ago. But yes, I managed to marry my love of lifting and fitness and health with a desire to
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study all of these things. And part of it was I have an insatiable love of learning. So when I was
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trying to learn how to get bigger and stronger, I was reading powerlifting books from the 1970s
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in my free time. I was looking at what Vince Garanda was doing for his bodybuilding diets in
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the 60s and 70s. So I'm very blessed that I've managed to specialize in the area that I love.
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So it sounds like you've been exercising for a large part of your life. What's your personal
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It was funny because I was thinking about this preparing for the podcast. And I had the privilege
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a number of years ago to train with Frank Zane. Frank is a three-time Mr. Olympia. A lot of people
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would see in his image online as a sort of, you know, ideal male body. And I asked the same question to
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Frank, you know, what's his history of fitness and what role does fitness play in his life?
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And he said that fitness has sort of two phases in his life. The first phase was fitness as armor.
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You know, you use fitness to build yourself up and protect yourself from the world, certainly
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muscle building. And then fitness becomes a bridge, you know, so you use the confidence
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that you have from the gym or fitness or sport to become a better person. So in my own relationship
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with health and fitness, it was an armor first. I was an overweight kid, hovered around
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obesity at one point, which a PE teacher very kindly told me about in front of the rest of the
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class. Bullies, you know, traditional 98 pound weakling, albeit in a heavier body. Use fitness
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to trim down, slim down, get stronger. And it stuck with me because it's, I suppose it's helped me
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recast my life. The discipline of the gym I used in my work, you know, the healthy eating, the idea of
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putting in hard work, having a pain threshold, et cetera, is things that really helped to shape my
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outlook later on. So I've gotten over fitness as armor and more into fitness as bridge.
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So you wrote a short history of physical culture that spans thousands of years and cuts across
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cultures, both East and West. And what I love about this book is it explores why humans, just as
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humans today exercise for different reasons, humans in the past exercised for different reasons.
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Let's start off definitions. I'm sure people have heard the phrase physical culture before,
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but what exactly does that mean? And it's a term that I really wish would come back and we'll
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probably touch on this later in the podcast, but physical culture is, and I'll borrow from a friend,
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Jan Todd, she likens it to purposive exercise. And what that is, is it's exercise done sort of for a
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reason. So the difference between physical culture and a sport is that when you play a sport, you're
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primarily trying to, you know, win a game, win medals, score points, score goals, whatever the
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case may be. Physical culture are those activities that we use to strengthen the body, to increase
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flexibility, to engage in anti-aging, you know, and things that would fall under the umbrella of
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physical culture would be going to the gym, going for a jog, doing yoga, calisthenics, Pilates,
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whatever we want to do. When I describe it again to students, I say, you know, physical culture is about
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the building of the biceps and sport is about the winning of medals. Sometimes they intersect
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weightlifting as a sport being an obvious example, but for the average man or woman or child, it's
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about building the body up, making it stronger, more robust, anti-fragile. And there's a number of
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different ways you can do that, which the history of it shows as well. So I really do like that term
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physical culture. It was very popular. We're going to get to this period in history, like the 19th
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century. That's what they called exercise or fitness was physical culture, but then it just kind of went
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out of style. Why do you think the term went out of fashion in the early 20th century?
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It's funny. And you're right. You know, if you and I, and some of the listeners, at least I hope,
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were exercises in 1900, you'd say, I'm a physical culturist, but just sounds objectively awesome.
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One of the reasons it went away is because the physical culture activity splintered. So bodybuilding
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arises really as a sport in the interwar period, the 1920s and 30s. Olympic weightlifting becomes really
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an official sport in 1920 and a formalized sport in 1928. Eventually then powerlifting comes along
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and CrossFit, et cetera. And when these splinters of physical culture came about, people began to
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specialize in them more. So they didn't want to be a sort of jack of all trades, you know, a physical
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culturist. They wanted to be a weightlifter or a bodybuilder or a powerlifter or a CrossFitter.
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So one end is just fitness got specialized and splintered. The other end, and we will talk
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about this, I have no doubt, Brett, is a lot of physical culture entrepreneurs in the late 1800s,
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early 1900s were kind of wacky, kind of weird. Bernard McFadden, one of the greatest American
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physical culturists, he so angered the American medical profession that there are several books
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written just about Bernard McFadden being an awful person by American doctors. So physical culture kind
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of got a tarnished name, especially in the US because of some wacky entrepreneurs. And then
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also there were physical educationalists who wanted to kind of attack that term because they
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saw it as lesser than the subject, the learned area of PE. So there's a couple of different things
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going on in why it dropped away. Yeah, I want to talk about Bernard McFadden. We talked about him on
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the podcast before with Mark Adams in his book, Mr. America. Yeah, the guy was crazy. A lot of crazy
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people during that time. So let's take a look at a history of physical culture. And the archaeological
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records suggest that humans were doing purposive exercise nearly 5,000 years ago in ancient Egypt.
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So what did ancient Egyptian exercise look like? Yeah, and I think the only caveat to say before I
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start that is the record shows 5,000 years ago. I have no doubt that, you know, there are people lifting
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heavy things before 5,000 years ago. We just don't have the records to prove it. But ancient Egyptian
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physical culture is just so fascinating. You know, we have stories and images and especially in some of
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the tombs of the pharaohs and sort of the wealthy elite of people doing gymnastics, wrestling activities,
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swinging heavy bags of sand, which to me is a really cool indication about club swinging, which is one of
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my sort of pet loves in many respects. But they also built fitness into their very culture, even in
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performative ways at times. So there was a point in Egyptian history when a pharaoh would have to run
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around one of the pyramids for a set number of laps to prove that they were fit for office. You know,
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so this idea of being a fit political leader had a physical component to it. So there's really
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interesting calisthenic routines, you know, in ancient Egypt. And then you do have weight-based
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routines. You have sand swinging, for want of a better phrase. And there's some evidence of like
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early stone lifting practices as well going on. So there is a rich culture in ancient Egypt.
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Now, I really love that idea of making your political leaders do an obstacle course to see if
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they're fit to lead. I would enjoy like an NFL combine. Every time the UN meets, I think we should
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do like 40-yard dash, you know, bench 220 for reps, stuff like that. But it made sense in the context
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of ancient Egypt, because there were wars going on, there were warring states. And the parallel would
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be, say, somewhere like Sparta, where being a leader also meant you were a general. You know, so there
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wasn't as fine a distinction at times in Egyptian society between pharaoh and general or pharaoh and
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soldier. So it did eventually take on a more performative element. This is just something you
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go through the motions with. But I think even the intent of that shows how seriously and centrally
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they did take physical fitness. And you also talk about with the Egyptians, one of the reasons
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they exercised was connected to death, like the rituals of death. What was going on there?
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Yeah. So, you know, at funeral rites and then even in the tombs themselves, there was
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events going on. And it's interesting. It's not just ancient Egyptian culture. Like a lot of early
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strength activities were connected to religious festivals, were connected to funerals and funeral
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rites and funeral games. And this is a big thing in the ancient world was a sort of celebration of life
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with a recognition of death combined into it. The celebration of physicality with the acknowledgement
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that all physical things are unfortunately ephemeral. So for them, fitness is also a way to
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mediate that barrier between life and death and a time to celebrate. And that's not unique to the
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Egyptians. You know, in China, there were ancient and very heavy cauldrons called dings that were
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often lifted in funeral rites and funeral processions as well. So again, I think it does show that
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interesting relationship and even centrality of fitness within these societies.
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Okay. So they exercised for, there's a functional purpose for it, you know, maybe training for
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warfare, but it was also a religious rite as well. You mentioned Indian clubs. You're a big fan of
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Indian clubs. Let's talk about Indian, ancient Indian physical culture. What did that look like?
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Yes. Thank you so much for indulging me. I have literally written the book on Indian clubs,
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which means I have read it and maybe no one else has. Ancient Indian physical culture is fascinating
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and it has parallels with the Persian physical culture as well. But we know, and Joseph Alter's
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work is really central in this as well, that in India, fitness held a deep functional practice. You
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know, soldiers would train to strengthen their bodies and I'll run through the activities in a
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moment. It had a religious practice. We know that wrestlers in particular would train their bodies in
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certain ways and do certain exercise almost to get into a meditative stance, trance, pardon me, or
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meditative state. And then it had a health purpose as well. We know of Indian physicians from the
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ancient world recommending exercise. Now, in terms of what that exercise looked like, and this is a
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really fascinating thing, we had club swinging, heavy club swinging and heavy Indian clubs or jories or
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mugdars or mugas, whatever term you want to apply to it is, it's intense. I have some traditional
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Indian clubs in my home gym and they weigh, you know, 30 kilos each. And there are even photos and
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videos you can see online of people swinging heavy Indian clubs that have nails dotted all around
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them to make sure that you're swinging with proper form. But they would swing clubs, they would engage
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in calisthenics. So things that we would call in the West Hindu squats or Hindu push-ups, you know,
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these would be part of the regimen. But there was also resistance training. There were gnaws, which is
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kind of like a stone donut, if people will indulge me. And you would put your head through the donut and
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you'd do squats and you would lift heavy stones, you know, as I don't know, you've had David Keown on
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the podcast before, a good friend of mine, the Irish stone lifter. And he's all about the
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universality of stone lifting, but there was stone lifting in ancient India as well. So you had
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soldiers and wrestlers and wrestlers held such a high value in Indian society. Oftentimes princes would
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keep wrestlers in their court just as a sort of status symbol and their training would have been
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subsidized by the princes. So you would have had wrestlers and soldiers, but then also, you know,
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a doctor's patients engaging in some of these activities. And a lot of the, I suppose, scientific
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and religious underpinning of the practice was all to do with your vital force and your energy flow and
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centering your breathing and connecting in with the universal force. So it's a very fascinating style
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of physical culture, which still exists today. You know, the traditional Indian Akara, the gymnasium for
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the wrestlers holds a lot of the trappings of exercise patterns and movements that were born
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and popularized centuries ago, which is an incredible preservation of historical practice.
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Yeah. I'm a big fan of Indian clubs and the gata. I did a few videos when I did YouTube about this. So
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if you guys want to see a video from me of me 12 years ago, swinging Indian clubs, we'll link to that.
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And also the gata. So that's like, like the Indian clubs, that was a very kind of British version of
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sort of the clubs that Hindus use, ancient Hindus use. And the gata, it's like, basically it looks
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Yeah. Rosalind O'Hanlon wrote a really interesting article many years ago, looking at how a lot of the
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training implements for wrestlers in particular, like the gatas, were initially used in warfare.
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So they sort of transitioned away from the battlefield and stayed in the gyms. And you're
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right. These large, heavy maces, they look like weapons because they were weapons at a certain
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point. And then they became just for building up strength and vitality.
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Yeah. I like the gata because it's nice on my, it feels good on my shoulders. I just like
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swinging it around. It just feels good. Sometimes I'll do that before I bench press even.
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Yeah. It saved my relationship with the bench press. I, like you, I swing clubs and gatas before
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I do chest or any sort of chest movements. And, you know, if you think about it, we're quite
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boring in terms of a lot of our fitness patterns. You don't really swing a lot of weights and you
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don't really move your shoulder in full rotations the entire time when you're working out in a gym
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setting. So I think sometimes you have to let the body move the way the body was meant to move.
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And that's where things like gatas and Indian clubs still have a value.
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Yeah. So, yeah, you talked about there's a Chinese ancient physical culture. They were
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lifting big, heavy bells as well as part of funeral rites and things like that. Let's move to the
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West. I think, you know, if you live in the United Kingdom or the United States, I think we're all
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very familiar with the Greek and Roman influence of physical culture. What did ancient Greeks physical
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Yeah. And you are right to cite the importance of that for the modern trainee, because really our
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modern gym environment traces its philosophical and religious and social underpinnings to
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Greco-Roman physical culture. And, you know, when we talk about ancient Greece, we're using an
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umbrella term for, you know, dozens and dozens and dozens of ancient Greek city states. And the two
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most important ones are, of course, probably Sparta and Athens when it comes to gym cultures. So
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Sparta, I'm not going to go into a 300 rant, although the first movie did hold up. Second movie,
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I have my qualms about, you know, in ancient Sparta, physical culture was to train soldiers.
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Hard calisthenics combined with boxing and combat. There's a ancient Spartan quote that, you know,
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if you're a Spartan soldier, you bring your heavy shield into battle, which weighed maybe eight to
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10 kilos. And you had two choices. You either returned with your shield or on your shield.
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So it was a lot more, you know, intense militaristic style of physical culture.
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The one that has retained and the one that captured people's hearts and minds and imagination
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in the 19th century was ancient Greece. You know, the word gymnasium or now gym has its origins in
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ancient Athenian culture where gymnasium came from two words that effectively meant naked exercise.
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So you can guess what the dress code was in the ancient Athenian gyms. But the gym in ancient
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Athens was just a remarkable place. The gymnasium in that era was a multifunctional center of Athenian
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society. The gymnasium was the university of its time. Plato and Aristotle and Socrates taught at the
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gymnasium. You would go to the gymnasium where you would train your body, predominantly using
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calisthenics. There were also stone, what would say, stone dumbbell predecessors called haltares,
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mainly calisthenics, mind you, mixed with some wrestling and sports, depending on the gymnasium.
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You would also have a mentor within the gymnasium setting, an older man from Athenian society
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who had mentored the younger boys through Athenian society. And it was this idea, and, you know,
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we still use the phrase today, albeit it was juvenile, the Roman poet who coined it, you know,
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mens sana, incorpore sano, a healthy mind and a healthy body. And that's what you had in Athenian
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culture in particular, that, you know, the gym, the gymnasium was a central part in a man's
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upbringing. It's where he learned to educate his mind. It's where he learned polite society. It's where
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he learned to make his business connections. And it's where he learned to, you know, build his biceps
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and get stronger and look better naked and all of these vain things that are also important in our
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world. Yeah. That was interesting about the Greeks. So, you know, they actually, there's a functional
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purpose to their exercise. Like they, they train so they can fight more, but they also had an
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appreciation for just the physical beauty that bodily exercise can bring to a person. It's like
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they train for aesthetics too. Absolutely. And you know, there were male beauty contests in ancient Greece
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and the scholar's name escapes, you know, um, Crawford, I think maybe a surname who's written
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about that almost as a precursor to modern physique or bodybuilding, uh, competition. So you, you had
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a real aesthetic appreciation of the male body and, you know, a lot of the statues that still exist from
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the classical world that then inspired the sculptors of the Renaissance period in Italy, which then
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inspired a lot of the 18th, 19th, and even modern day ideas around beauty of the male body stem from
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that ancient Greek appreciation. And that was a muscular athletic build. Now, sadly, a lot of
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those sculptures were enhanced, not in the way that enhanced means nowadays, but you know, the sculptor
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would pack on a little bit more muscle mass than the subject actually had. We had old school Photoshop
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in the ancient world, but you know, they had that appreciation of the body and it, it was woven
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through Greek culture. The soldiers trained, you know, you could train for beauty and that was
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acceptable. Doctors had a really strong view that people should exercise and exercise could help
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alleviate illness and stave off illness, you know, let exercise be thy medicine to a certain extent.
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So it was a really encompassing view of beauty and training and the body. And, you know, even
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ideas of self mastery were oftentimes explained through the gym, you know, ideas of a rat achieving
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one's excellent excellence, pardon me, or agon, which is the suffering one needs to undergo in order to
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affect change. Gym metaphors and training metaphors and sporting metaphors were used to really bring
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home those messages. So it is one of the most encompassing body cultures of the ancient world.
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And then the Romans, they would pick up where the Greeks left off in many ways. Like they copied
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the Greeks in many aspects of their physical culture. When you look at these ancient physical
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cultures, both East and West, are there any big takeaways you think that we can get in the 21st
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century from how they approached fitness? I really take so much inspiration from the sound mind sound
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body approach. I think that is something that we talk about a lot with well being, but I think the
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sound mind was and understanding that, you know, developing your body goes in tandem with developing
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your mind. It's not just that going for a run will make you feel better, but it's that embracing your
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educational learning or your learning or research about the world in a similar systematic way to
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physical fitness is a strong way of doing it. But I truthfully think, and I am a bit woo-woo by
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nature, I think the connecting of fitness and your health and your vibrancy and your body to broader
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elements of the cycle of life and death is a really important thing. And it's something that we
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attend. And I'm not saying people have to be religious or spiritual, et cetera, but I think the
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connecting of fitness to something bigger than yourself is something that was truly there within the
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ancient world, which sometimes gets lost. I think in mainstream modern fitness cultures, which is
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they're getting jacked or losing 10 pounds or, you know, getting a 500 deadlift, whatever the case may
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be. I think connecting into something more is always valuable.
00:22:00.960
Yeah. I think we approach exercise the way we put it out there in the popular culture. It's like
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just this like chore you got to do. It's like, you got to do this thing. So I, my heart's healthy and I
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don't get sarcopenia, but I really like that idea of, yeah, this is a chance for me to remind myself
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that I'm alive and it just feels good. So yeah, I really do like that idea of connecting it to
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vitality. I guess we call it. Yeah. And you know, the body likes to move. Yesterday I was driving for
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four hours and then sitting down for a long time, which is not how I usually do things. When I got
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home, I have sandbags in my home gym. Myself and my two-year-old son spent, you know, just 10 minutes
00:22:38.160
flipping heavy sandbags and grunting, not because we're sociopaths, but because the body needed some
00:22:43.120
attention. It needed to connect in with its physicality and it needed to do something
00:22:46.760
communal with my son at the same time. So lift sandbags is the takeaway.
00:22:51.320
There you go. How did physical culture change during the medieval era?
00:22:55.920
Yeah, this is a tricky question, right? Because a lot of scholars, very good scholars, I hasten to add,
00:23:01.820
have often written about, you know, the dark ages, which is a problematic term, or the middle ages as a
00:23:07.760
time when the Athenian appreciation of the body disappeared. And, you know, you'll see a narrative
00:23:13.080
of that. Physical culture disappeared during the middle ages. It didn't disappear. It just didn't
00:23:17.720
get written about as much. Now, the predominant form of physical culture in the middle ages was
00:23:22.760
obviously soldiers training. That has always been a strong through line in the history of physical
00:23:28.720
culture, is a connection with the military. Even in modern times where, you know, outside of the
00:23:34.200
Marines or special forces, one could argue that machines have lessened the need for physicality.
00:23:38.940
And I have family members who serve, so that's not me throwing shade on any sort of soldiers. But
00:23:43.760
fitness still, even in the modern context, plays an important role in the military. And it did for,
00:23:48.320
you know, knights and people who are fighting in the Crusades and all of that stuff. But,
00:23:53.520
you know, you also, less written about, less known about, but you had people still practicing
00:23:58.300
calisthenics. There weren't the male beauty competitions of ancient Greece or ancient Athens,
00:24:02.820
but there were people lifting heavy stones. There were people doing gymnastics or calisthenics. There
00:24:08.840
were people training their bodies. Unfortunately, all we know about really from the middle ages is
00:24:13.980
how knights trained and occasionally how a doctor would tell someone to go for a walk or,
00:24:20.140
you know, strengthen their body to avoid an illness.
00:24:23.300
Yeah. You talk about if you were, if someone was on the track to become a knight, training began
00:24:27.820
at the age of eight. It was, that was pretty young.
00:24:30.780
Yeah. And it was like sectioned, you know, a progressive overload, uh, to use a gym term,
00:24:37.020
I suppose, you know, you'd start off with, and again, quite an Athenian understanding of, um,
00:24:41.840
education. So the knights training begin at eight. It would start with a lighter introduction to
00:24:46.980
physicality and also education and manners and decorum. And it would ramp up until they're ready for,
00:24:52.440
for battle. And the training of knights was systemized depending on the country, depending
00:24:58.800
on the era, depending on the region. It was progressive. It was always progressive. And
00:25:04.600
in a sense, it helps keep a physical culture going at a time when mainstream society, and I will agree
00:25:11.240
with those scholars who talk about a disappearance of the body, especially in Catholic countries.
00:25:16.100
You know, the Catholic church wasn't necessarily fond of the physical body. Physical body was seen as a
00:25:20.940
vehicle for sin. So mainstream society didn't openly celebrate the body, but, you know, certainly the
00:25:26.800
knights had like quite a systematized way of training and hardening themselves for battle.
00:25:33.280
Yeah. So they're doing calisthenics, gymnastics. You quote this one guy, a French historian talking
00:25:38.540
about this one knight who could do a somersault in all his armor. Um, and then he would dance around
00:25:46.080
in his male shirt. And then when he was in his lodgings, he'd always be testing himself with the
00:25:50.380
other squires to see who could throw the lance the farthest.
00:25:54.280
I love that so much as Jean Lamont, um, is the knight's name, just because it shows that
00:26:00.020
strength has always had a, a fun component to it as well. Like, uh, you know, and to go back to when
00:26:06.760
you talked to David Cohn with stone lifting, like a lot of stone lifting histories are just
00:26:10.280
men or women standing around a stone and saying, go on, see if you can lift that thing over there.
00:26:14.940
Bet you can't. So the, the knight doing a somersault on his horse, it's like, there's a playfulness
00:26:20.960
No. Yeah. I was reminded of this a couple of weeks ago. We, I had the teenage boys from church
00:26:25.900
to come over to my garage, do like a deadlifting night and did a deadlifting tutorial. And it was
00:26:30.400
just fun to watch them get really excited about lifting a heavy thing off. And they're just pumping
00:26:36.640
each other up and clapping. And I was thinking people have been doing this for thousands of years.
00:26:42.260
Like if they were transplanted to the year, you know, 2000 BC, they would fit right in
00:26:50.140
Absolutely. And it's something, you know, I'm working on a book at the moment and I'm
00:26:53.920
looking at this sort of human desire to test their strength and to be joyful with their
00:27:00.780
strength and to build their strength. So there's a very famous book in the history and sociology of
00:27:06.360
sport called Homo Ludens by John Hunziger, which talks about the human desire for play. You know,
00:27:11.660
it's just, there seems to be something ingrained in humanity that there's a desire for play.
00:27:15.700
I think in a lot of individuals, there is that sort of inbuilt, you know, spans across time desire
00:27:21.600
to test strength and especially in communal settings to do so in a joyful, playful, but
00:27:28.780
We're going to take a quick break for a word from our sponsors.
00:27:30.520
And now back to the show. So medieval era, physical culture is kind of relegated to
00:27:39.140
aristocrats who were training to be knights. How did physical culture change during the Renaissance?
00:27:45.560
The Renaissance or the Renaissance is the great rediscovery of Greco-Roman texts. And, you know,
00:27:52.780
there's a variety of reasons for that. There's, you know, palaces and palladiums built and they
00:27:57.060
discover sculptures underneath. There's the sacking of Muslim countries and the transportation of texts
00:28:03.740
that were preserved in Muslim societies and destroyed in European societies, you know, ancient
00:28:08.940
Greek and Roman texts being brought back into Western libraries and Western societies. And people
00:28:14.900
would read about ancient Greco-Roman physical culture and gymnasiums, et cetera. And they began
00:28:19.900
to bring it back. And the Renaissance, which is a European wide experiment with creativity in many
00:28:27.780
respects, sees a more visual, physical culture. You have sculptures being built. Even if you look at,
00:28:35.260
you know, like the Sistine Chapel and God is pretty jacked, you know, and he's, he's holding out his hand
00:28:40.140
and his arm to the human trying to make contact. The artists begin to really try and capture the body
00:28:48.120
beautiful, the muscular athletic body. You have physicians looking back at Greco-Roman texts and
00:28:53.760
beginning to take inspiration from it. Probably the most influential text is the Arte Gymnastica by
00:29:01.520
Mercialis. And this is a Renaissance physician who effectively compiles a great number of Greco-Roman
00:29:08.580
medical texts and tracks into one book. But the critical thing is he includes illustrations in the book
00:29:15.320
so people can see these muscular images of men wrestling and lifting weights and climbing ropes.
00:29:21.140
And this really inspires ideas around the body. But, you know, you also have Luigi Canaro, who's an
00:29:26.340
Italian aristocrat who tells people to live a long life. You know, you need to eat healthily and
00:29:30.940
eat a low calorie diet effectively. So there's this incredible explosion of interest in the body
00:29:38.000
and a recognition that, you know, even if we are still in a spiritual and religious time,
00:29:43.480
it was a very Catholic time in the Renaissance period, that there is a joy to be found in the
00:29:47.960
body. And the Renaissance period is when we see, you know, the printing press or at least more
00:29:54.400
illustrated texts coming about and changing and uplifting people's knowledge around fitness and
00:29:59.520
physical culture and artists showing people what their bodies could be or could be capable of.
00:30:05.480
And it's not gods that the sculptors are often doing, you know, images of. It's average men or
00:30:12.000
women. And I think there's something in that as well, that this is a target that could potentially
00:30:16.240
be achieved. Yeah, I thought that was interesting about the Renaissance, that with the advent of the
00:30:20.620
printing press, immediately you saw this uptick in the number of books written about health and
00:30:26.600
wellness. Like the health and wellness industry, book industry got started in the 1400s.
00:30:33.660
Effectively. And, you know, and continues to this very day. But that's the printing press is huge
00:30:38.660
during this time. There's also fewer wars, which allows for more stability, greater riches. Obviously,
00:30:44.660
we started, you know, 15th and 16th century. So certain European cities begin to enjoy a great
00:30:50.480
deal of riches, which allows them then to have the leisure to do these things. But the written word
00:31:00.700
So with the Renaissance, you see the return of exercising, not just for warfare, but just because,
00:31:07.120
you know, it feels good to exercise. It's part of humanism. You get to experience your body and you
00:31:11.380
can sculpt the body. It's very Greco-Roman. What would a typical Renaissance workout look like,
00:31:16.660
you think? It's funny because it does depend on, you know, where you are in Europe. We'll go with
00:31:23.500
Italy, which sort of, you know, drank the Kool-Aid the most on Greco-Roman physical cultures. We don't
00:31:29.400
have a lot of evidence of resistance training. You know, like what I mean by that, pardon me, is weight-based
00:31:34.020
training, lifting heavy weights. But we do have people copying and mimicking certain calisthenic
00:31:39.060
regimes. Dancing becomes very important and is actually a form of physical culture during this
00:31:44.220
era. But it's light gymnastics, calisthenics combined with dancing. And gentlemen would dance
00:31:50.660
as well as women. Gentlemen, because it's the aristocracy who gets to do these type of things.
00:31:55.380
And they would combine that then with wrestling and boxing as well to sort of create a well-rounded
00:32:00.540
physique in every sense of the word. So I think maybe a takeaway from the Renaissance period of
00:32:05.720
physical culture, bring back that idea of exercise is just part of experiencing your body and that
00:32:10.280
feels good in and of itself. But I also just like the idea, like, it sounds like the exercise they
00:32:14.460
did is like they just enjoyed it. Dancing, walking. I mean, it just, it wasn't like they're on a
00:32:18.840
treadmill trying to get, you know, into zone two. They're just like, I'm just going to move my body
00:32:23.340
because it feels good. And I enjoy this. Yeah, I am. I had this conversation with
00:32:28.700
someone recently who's an exercise scientist. He's a brilliant mind. But my argument was the
00:32:33.220
vast majority of people don't need to specialize. A lot of us would be better if we trained as
00:32:36.980
mongrels. And what I meant by that is, you know, you have a dog and you're not sure if it's
00:32:40.600
one quarter Labrador, one quarter Jack Russell, one quarter, it's just a mixture of everything.
00:32:44.960
I think in the Renaissance period that they're, they're training mongrels. As you said,
00:32:48.680
they're not trying to get into zone two. Monday isn't chest and biceps or, you know, it's not
00:32:52.960
pushball legs. It's they're doing a little bit of dancing, a little bit, a little bit of fighting,
00:32:57.080
a little bit of training. I think it's a more fun way to see what your body's capable of.
00:33:01.340
So we shift into the Enlightenment after the Renaissance. They put an emphasis on
00:33:04.560
science and rationality. How did that affect physical culture?
00:33:09.820
It is, it's one of those sliding doors moments, which is a phrase one of my friends loves to use.
00:33:15.340
And what I mean by that is the Renaissance is so important in popularizing physical fitness again
00:33:20.000
in European society. The Enlightenment is what sustains it in many respects. And in the Enlightenment
00:33:27.220
period, especially in the 1700s and the 1600s and 1700s, pardon me, you get philosophers writing
00:33:33.840
about exercise. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who has the best opening to a book ever. Man is born free,
00:33:39.760
but everywhere he is in chains. I wish I'd thought of that for any of my own books or blog posts.
00:33:44.100
Jean-Jacques Rousseau writes a seven volume tract on how a boy should be brought up and a girl as
00:33:51.160
well is brought into it. It's called a meal and physical fitness is part of that. You have John
00:33:56.020
Locke, you know, the man who sort of helps to popularize the idea of the tabula rasa, the blank
00:33:59.940
slate in educational theories, this idea that we're born with a blank slate and we then learn
00:34:04.900
from our societies. He writes on physical fitness. The philosophers write about physical fitness,
00:34:09.900
which means then that the educators start to take an interest in physical fitness.
00:34:14.440
And it's in the Enlightenment period that effectively early PE teachers start to emerge.
00:34:19.080
And some of them are powerful, powerful writers. Johan Gutzmutz, who many people would see as
00:34:25.460
maybe the grandfather of modern gymnastics and modern fitness. He writes a book about the youth
00:34:31.920
and there's a chapter in it. The title is we are weak because it does not occur to us to be strong,
00:34:39.020
which I think is just one of the most powerful titles I've ever read. It's up there with Jean-Jacques
00:34:45.020
Rousseau, this chain comment, but the Enlightenment helps to give an institutional backing to physical
00:34:50.820
fitness in a way that hadn't been done before, because these educators like Gutzmuth and others and
00:34:55.560
who are based in Switzerland, Denmark in particular, in the 1700s, they start to build physical fitness
00:35:00.620
into the day-to-day routine of a school. And that is not happening on a regular basis within their
00:35:07.600
Renaissance period. And because they have books, they're writing to each other, they know about each
00:35:11.540
other, a whole network of physical educationists emerge. And really in the 1700s and early 1800s,
00:35:18.460
the doctors are looking towards the philosophers and the educators for knowledge on how to train the
00:35:24.100
body because they are thinking about it and grappling with it and doing experiments in the real world.
00:35:29.220
So the Enlightenment takes the Renaissance celebration of the body and begins to scrutinize it and say,
00:35:35.660
well, this is an important thing. We're going to think about what works best and how do we combine
00:35:39.700
this with education to make this something serious. And someone like Gutzmuth, he introduces or reintroduces
00:35:47.480
the idea that physical fitness is tied to the nation state. And one of Gutzmuth's disciples in the early
00:35:54.240
19th century, Friedrich Ludwig Jan creates the Turnverein system in Prussia. This is after
00:35:59.720
Napoleon runs through Prussia and Jan creates a gymnastic system because he wants to strengthen
00:36:04.180
Prussian men so they'll never suffer the indignity of defeat once in his lifetime. But you know,
00:36:09.260
you have people like Jan studying and learning from Gutzmuth who are studying and learning from
00:36:15.060
Jean-Jacques Rousseau. So like there are huge heavy hitters in the Enlightenment period writing about
00:36:20.600
fitness. And that helps to give a legitimacy to fitness. It really helps to spawn the discipline
00:36:26.340
of physical education. And then some of the offshoots of that are transformational, like
00:36:30.680
Jan reading Gutzmuth work and saying, well, I'm going to take some of that and apply it in a more
00:36:35.240
militaristic setting. So the Enlightenment helps to add a scientific bent to it. But this philosophical
00:36:41.020
bent and weight to it, I think is probably the more important of these things.
00:36:44.300
Yeah, it also added a nationalistic bent to it as well.
00:36:48.300
Yeah, of course. And eventually this sort of ties in, you know, in Sweden, P.H. Ling creates a
00:36:53.820
gymnastic system and that has a militaristic component to it. The British army gets involved,
00:36:58.200
the French army gets involved. And in the 1800s, you see a lot more nation states and militaries
00:37:03.360
beginning to adopt physical culture and gymnastic practices because, you know, you need to have strong
00:37:08.320
soldiers. And, you know, if, insert country name here, France, Germany, Russia, England, Italy,
00:37:14.860
Ireland, occasionally, wants to be a strong nation and needs to have strong men and women.
00:37:20.400
Yeah, and particularly the physical culture that developed in Prussia, you know, parts of Germany,
00:37:25.940
that would lay the groundwork for what happened in the 19th century with the golden age
00:37:32.700
Yes, of course. So, you know, in the 19th century, the two most important gymnastic systems are the
00:37:38.960
Prussian system, the turn-round system, which is sort of pommel horses and, you know, bodyweight
00:37:43.680
exercises, and then the Ling system from Sweden. And the turn-round system, really, in many respects,
00:37:51.240
it's, you know, it's more based in Germany and Austria-Hungary and sort of Teutonic Europe,
00:37:56.040
for want of a better phrase. But that's where you get a lot of the early weightlifting clubs and
00:38:00.840
weightlifting gymnasiums emerging. And in France, we have Triad, a Frenchman, opens a gym in the 1850s.
00:38:07.000
But really, it's, you know, what becomes Germany after 1870 when it unifies. That's a lineage of
00:38:13.900
Jan in the 1810s. And the turn-round halls and gyms and the culture of strength that emerges in
00:38:21.000
Germany, eventually sort of kickstart the strong man and strong woman era of the physical culture
00:38:26.260
era, which is in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
00:38:28.900
In these gyms you were just talking about, what kind of exercises were they doing? So they're
00:38:32.700
starting to use strength implements. So what would a workout look like?
00:38:36.500
Men and women swung Indian clubs during this period, lightweight Indian clubs, you know,
00:38:40.520
two to three pounds. There's evidence of wooden dumbbells, again, two to three pounds being used
00:38:45.640
in the 1850s and 1860s. It's really not until the 1890s, early 1900s that we have more serious weight-based
00:38:54.020
implements being used. But certainly in the 1840s and 50s, it's Indian clubs, wooden dumbbells,
00:38:59.680
wooden barbells. They're mainly doing gymnastics, hanging from rings, doing pull-ups, working on the
00:39:05.820
pommel horse, you know, doing bodyweight squats on their tippy toes, stuff like that. But like,
00:39:10.780
it's starting to get intense, you know, in that mid-1800 period.
00:39:14.940
So let's talk about this golden age of physical culture. And there was one guy who played a big
00:39:20.260
role in birthing this age, and he was a Prussian. This guy named Eugen Sandow. Tell us about Sandow.
00:39:26.480
How did Sandow revolutionize physical culture in the 19th century?
00:39:32.360
So Sandow is, or was, you know, in his own lifetime referred to as the world's most perfectly
00:39:37.640
developed specimen. What a small ego that man must have had. He did a tour of the United States in
00:39:43.400
the 1890s, and Dudley Allen Sargent, who was the gym owner, or the gym instructor, pardon me,
00:39:49.160
at Harvard University, measured Sandow and said he'd never seen anyone more perfect. So Sandow,
00:39:54.580
you know, became the world's most perfectly developed specimen. In the early 1900s,
00:39:58.380
National History Museum in London commissioned a bust of Sandow's body to show future generations
00:40:03.560
what a perfect white male looked like. Sandow is the first modern physique star. He's someone who
00:40:09.740
is a weightlifter and wrestler by trade. He's discovered by Professor Attila, an early and
00:40:15.720
very prestigious strongman in the 1880s. And with Attila's entrepreneurship and eye for opportunity,
00:40:23.140
Sandow announces himself on the world stage in the 1880s. There's a strongman in London called Samson,
00:40:29.700
who's playing at the Aquarium Theatre, and he issues a challenge every night when he performs on the stage
00:40:34.320
that if anyone can beat me, they'll win the title of the world's strongest man and have a cash prize.
00:40:40.280
Sandow goes to one of Samson's performances. He wears a suit that's too big for him. He puts up his
00:40:46.200
hand, challenges Samson. He looks like a schoolboy in his dad's clothes. I mean, the audience laughs
00:40:51.180
at Sandow, and then Sandow rips off the suit to reveal this incredibly muscular and lean physique.
00:40:57.400
Strongmen in the 1880s tend to be quite large and smooth. They weren't lean and muscular like Sandow was.
00:41:03.220
And when he rips off, you know, his clothes to reveal his muscular physique, he is wearing
00:41:07.320
a singlet, I do hasten to add. He just becomes this international celebrity almost overnight.
00:41:13.020
He beats Samson, starts to call himself the world's strongest man. He tours the United States for
00:41:17.900
several years. He tours really all over the world. He's in India and Australia and New Zealand,
00:41:23.480
South Africa, all over Britain and Ireland and different parts of the world. If you were to say
00:41:28.880
the name Sandow in 1914, and, you know, David Chapman has written a biography on Sandow,
00:41:33.620
which is wonderful, there's a good chance people would have known who you're talking about,
00:41:37.080
regardless of what country you're in. You know, the research that I'm doing at the moment, I've
00:41:40.500
seen reference of Sandow in South America. He never went to South America in his lifetime,
00:41:45.460
but his books and photographs were sold in Chile and Argentina and Brazil, despite never going there.
00:41:51.260
So Sandow was a global emblem of perfection for the physical body. And, you know, he does
00:41:56.920
important things. He hosts the world's first bodybuilding show in 1901 in London. He
00:42:01.440
appears in the first or one of the first recorded videos ever, a Thomas Edison video in the early
00:42:08.260
1890s. He sells supplements, you know, he sells a variety of books, sells magazines,
00:42:13.860
sells children's toys, even. He's a multivariate person. He has a physical culture institute where he
00:42:18.780
claims to cure diseases using exercise and diet alone. So he is, and I really hasten to add why
00:42:26.640
this is important. He becomes a global physique star before radio, before television, before social
00:42:32.400
media. He becomes Arnold Schwarzenegger in the 1970s, in the 1890s and early 1900s. Like it, there is a
00:42:39.920
Sandow phenomenon during that time. And he inspires and encourages thousands, if not millions of people
00:42:46.140
to take up physical culture so that they too can perfect their bodies.
00:42:50.280
So he democratized fitness, like he really popularized it and said, hey, this is something
00:42:53.680
that everyone can do. And there was a money aspect to it. He made money from that. But I think that
00:42:58.500
was, there's a positive aspect because more people started exercising because they're inspired by this
00:43:02.280
guy. But he also kind of brought in that sort of tinge of sexuality that we have with fitness
00:43:08.200
culture today, right? The fitness influencers on Instagram, where they're just looking all sexy
00:43:14.660
and attractive. Like Sandow was doing that in the 1890s, but he's able to get away with it, even that
00:43:20.500
really conservative Victorian era, because he was able to kind of hide it under, well, this is
00:43:25.360
scientific and I'm trying to replicate the Greek gods of old. And so he'd do these poses and he'd say,
00:43:31.840
well, I'm replicating a statue of Hercules. And he'd be naked with just a fig leaf covering his
00:43:39.100
Yeah. And you're right. He manages to navigate a through line between erotica and education,
00:43:45.900
because he'll say, you know, the photos of me in Greco-Roman pose wearing nothing but a fig leaf
00:43:50.820
are educational and inspirational. He would give lectures to doctors, you know, to show how serious
00:43:55.720
and respectable he was. But you're right. There's an erotic component to that. When he did his tour of
00:44:00.520
America in the 1890s, he had private posing sessions where he would stand behind, pardon me, a satin
00:44:06.340
curtain and women could touch his muscles through the curtain to learn about good health and good
00:44:11.980
fitness. And, you know, there was an erotic trade in his images and his photographs. David Chapman's
00:44:17.640
book does talk about this, that, you know, homosexuality was illegal in a lot of countries
00:44:21.700
back then. And many people would have physical culture photos of Sandow, you know, as erotica.
00:44:28.080
But if questioned, they would just say, well, I'm a respectable physical culturist, despite not
00:44:32.600
going to the gym ever in my life. So yeah, there is that sexual component to it that he really does
00:44:37.500
tap into. And even in his marketing and other people do do this as well, eventually, but he will
00:44:42.580
say and suggest that in subtle ways, you know, do my physical culture course, because it'll make you
00:44:48.780
a better man. It'll give you more vigor and vitality using code words for your sort of sexual energy or
00:44:54.460
sexual force. So not only does he sell his body in a certain sense, but he sells the idea that his
00:45:01.700
routines, his fitness systems will make you more sexually attractive and sexually vigorous.
00:45:07.400
Another guy that popped up about the same time as Sandow, we mentioned him earlier. This guy's
00:45:11.760
pretty crazy. His name is Bernard McFadden. So he's actually born Bernard, but he dropped the D
00:45:17.420
and added an extra R because he wanted his name to sound like a lion roaring. So how did this guy
00:45:23.360
add fuel to the fire of the physical culture frenzy that was happening during this period?
00:45:27.860
I think more people should name themselves after animal noises. I just think it'd be a
00:45:33.600
more varied world in so many ways. Bernard McFadden is someone who's actually inspired
00:45:37.500
by Sandow and Sandow comes to America first in 1893. McFadden is just to create a simple binary.
00:45:46.460
Sandow is very concerned with being respectable. Sandow becomes the sort of ceremonial physical
00:45:51.860
culture instructor to the British King in the 1910s. When he opens a physical culture institute,
00:45:57.380
he hires legitimate doctors to run it. He's very concerned about legitimacy. Bernard McFadden
00:46:03.020
is not. Bernard McFadden is alternative medicine and alternative health before we really begin to
00:46:09.080
use those terms. He is important because he founds Physical Culture Magazine in the United States,
00:46:14.220
which is the most popular physical culture or fitness magazine up until the mid 1920s. At its height,
00:46:19.220
it had millions and millions of copies in circulation with every issue. And McFadden falls
00:46:25.320
into what we'd now call the natural fallacy. If it comes from nature, it's good. So he wrote a book,
00:46:31.300
you know, the milk diet, where he would claim that, you know, drinking nothing but milk could cure a
00:46:35.000
variety of illnesses and diseases, even very serious ones. He would claim that you could cure cancer,
00:46:40.140
you know, using exercise alone or specialized diets. There's an entire book written by his ex-wife
00:46:45.420
called Dumbbells and Carrot Strips, which is a wonderful title, where she talked about doing a
00:46:50.260
tour of England with Bernard McFadden. And she was heavily pregnant at the time. And McFadden used to
00:46:55.360
make her lie on her back. And he would jump on her stomach from a height to show people that if a
00:47:00.180
woman is physically trained and strong using his physical culture methods, she is impervious to any
00:47:04.940
risk during pregnancy. So he was an incredibly problematic, off center, off cue sort of individual.
00:47:12.620
But he had a huge following because there was a distrust of American physicians in the early
00:47:17.900
1900s. McFadden really sold the idea that exercise and diet can cure a variety of illnesses. And,
00:47:24.620
you know, he had some good things to say about eating your fruits and vegetables, absolutely.
00:47:28.840
But then he'll say something crazy, like, you know, if you're losing your hair, the best thing to do is
00:47:32.980
to pull on your hair really hard, because that will strengthen the hair fibers. Please do not do that
00:47:37.420
if you're going balding. Or if you've just gotten hair plugs, either way, it will end badly for you.
00:47:41.640
So, you know, he had the good with the absolutely inane, nonsensical things.
00:47:50.040
Yeah, I think what McFadden and Sandow did too, is they were able to
00:47:53.900
take the new means of mass communication that were developing in that time
00:47:57.960
and just use it to the hilt to spread physical culture.
00:48:03.820
Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, they sold magazines, they sold books, they sold fitness
00:48:08.620
supplements, they created health spas and health resorts. They helped popularize equipment,
00:48:13.900
like Sandow is very important in popularizing the five pound dumbbell and encouraging other people
00:48:18.880
to create better forms of training and better implements in a lot of people. And this is
00:48:23.400
something that I've thought long and hard about, but their magazines are transformational. And the
00:48:28.820
reason for that is you could submit a photo of yourself. So, you know, if Connor or Brett had
00:48:33.260
worked out and, you know, built some muscle, we could take a photo of ourselves and submit it into
00:48:37.820
a magazine. And that would be published and, you know, millions of people would read it from all
00:48:42.000
over the world. McFadden's magazines were sold in Europe and America. Sandow's magazines were read
00:48:47.540
and sold all over the British Empire. So you could be a guy from Dublin, to use an Irish example.
00:48:53.240
WN Care, he wins Ireland's first bodybuilding show in 1907. He submits photos of himself to McFadden's
00:48:58.740
magazine in America. So like, this is unheard of, you know, in a pre-social media age, you could
00:49:04.080
effectively post your gym selfies in these magazines and people from all over the world
00:49:08.960
would be able to see it. Like that's a huge shift. And you use the term correctly, democratizing
00:49:14.620
fitness. That is democratizing fitness because now anyone can be celebrated for their physiques
00:49:20.000
or their bodies, not just to select few. Yeah. McFadden, he's just an interesting character.
00:49:24.900
A lot of problems with him, but he's hilarious. Like I just love reading about the stuff he did
00:49:28.720
like he tried to found a city, physical culture city, and it just was a complete disaster.
00:49:34.100
And he also has the best fitness catchphrase I've ever come across. Weakness is a crime.
00:49:39.600
Don't be a criminal. I just love that. Sickness is a sin. Don't be a sinner. That was his other one.
00:49:47.160
So there's a lot of magazines being put out, books being put out during this time
00:49:51.340
that was offering advice on strength, fitness, health, wellness. Is there any advice from this
00:49:58.620
period, this golden age of physical culture in the late 19th century, early 20th century that
00:50:03.460
one, you think is interesting? And two, you actually think, eh, this is actually pretty good advice that
00:50:07.740
if people will follow today, they would find some benefit from it.
00:50:10.600
So interesting. And I'll put on my cynical hat. There are a lot of tropes and cliches in the
00:50:15.860
fitness industry today that have their origins from the 1890s and early 1900s. The idea of the
00:50:21.260
sickly transformation. I was really sick. I was unathletic. I was really weak. But then I did this
00:50:27.240
very specialized course. And now look at my godly proportions. So that has its origins in fitness
00:50:32.620
books from the 1890s. This idea of transforming your life entirely through fitness and that you went from
00:50:38.060
hero to zero using Sandow's routine, but not McFadden's routine. So the interesting is the
00:50:44.060
sort of marketing tips and tricks, you know, that emerged in the 1890s were still used today.
00:50:49.740
Supplements. Sandow promotes a supplement called plasmon. It's an early protein powder.
00:50:54.120
And he says that he survived for weeks consuming nothing but plasmon. And not only did he maintain
00:50:59.460
his weight, he got stronger. So spurious supplement claims, you know, date from the 1890s, early 1900s.
00:51:05.480
The more substantive, the thing that I think, yeah, that's actually pretty good is a lot of the
00:51:11.120
fitness and you'll see a general theme when I pick out the core values from a lot of these different
00:51:15.320
eras. But a lot of physical culturists would write about the body as a bedrock. And what I mean by that
00:51:21.480
is, you know, get your fitness right, build your body the best that you can. And then this will give
00:51:27.460
you more energy to be a better businessman, a better wife, a better mother, a better husband,
00:51:31.940
better athlete, better student, whatever the case may be. So of course, they had the aesthetic
00:51:36.960
components, especially when you want it to look like Sandow. But even Sandow himself said, you know,
00:51:42.680
if you build your body in this way, it will improve other elements of your life. And I think that's
00:51:48.620
pretty cool. And again, you know, we tend to have the blinkers on and be very narrowly zoomed in
00:51:54.200
in the modern age where it is about the six pack or getting to a certain dress size. And it's like,
00:51:58.960
well, you know, there can be other benefits that aren't entirely vain when it comes to your own
00:52:03.420
fitness journey. So this moves us into the 20th century. And you mentioned at the beginning of
00:52:08.780
this podcast that the term physical culture went out of favor because physical culture started
00:52:14.260
splintering. So what happened? Like, why did it splinter in the West after World War II, particularly?
00:52:20.540
You get a huge, I suppose, explosion of entrepreneurial spirit. And what I mean by that is,
00:52:26.600
you know, in the 1930s, you have Bob Hoffman and the York Barbell Company creating sort of mass
00:52:32.900
produced dumbbells and barbells. Now, Hoffman is not the first person to do that. Alan Calvert does
00:52:36.720
that in America with the Milo Barbell Company in 1903. But you get more ease of access to heavyweights
00:52:45.100
and heavyweight training. So you have, and we'll focus on the US because every country is different,
00:52:50.620
but you have a lot of men coming back from the Second World War, using their GI Bill money to
00:52:55.920
train and to train in different ways. You know, during the 1920s, 1930s, Olympic weightlifting
00:53:01.600
is the most important sport in the world. And in the 40s and 50s in America, there's a golden age
00:53:07.360
of Olympic weightlifting where they win the most amount of their medals. And they have athletes
00:53:11.280
like Tommy Kono winning gold medal after gold medal. But you have an explosion of interest in
00:53:16.040
Olympic weightlifting. There are more, there's greater ease of access to dumbbells and barbells,
00:53:20.920
but you also get a greater emphasis on bodybuilding. The first Mr. America competition
00:53:25.620
is hosted in 1939. It continues throughout the war. And then when people come back from the war,
00:53:31.480
they're like, yeah, you know, I like weight training. I like weightlifting, but I'm really
00:53:34.820
interested in this newly emerging thing called bodybuilding. And I want to try that out.
00:53:38.800
So you have a fight effectively between Olympic weightlifting and bodybuilding in the 1940s and 1950s.
00:53:45.080
And Olympic weightlifting begins to decline in popularity. Bodybuilding for the sake of building the body
00:53:50.200
begins to increase in popularity. And then by the time you get to the 60s, you have mainstream
00:53:55.900
bodybuilding shows like the Mr. Olympic competition, the competition Arnold Schwarzenegger won seven
00:54:00.080
times. You then have an explosion of interest in powerlifting because there are people who are
00:54:04.040
saying, well, I like strength. I don't like Olympic weightlifting. I don't want to do that
00:54:07.960
bodybuilding thing. So I want to try something else. So, you know, the reasons for this splintering
00:54:13.180
are many. You have more men with disposable income who've been exposed to physical culture
00:54:17.580
in the military. U.S. troops are doing calisthenics. A lot of them are weight training
00:54:22.140
as well. I have an article that I need to write at some point about barbells and dumbbells and
00:54:27.380
weightlifting in U.S. military camps all over the world during the Second World War, you know,
00:54:31.940
in the Philippines, the Asian curtain or whatever the term was. And all around Africa and Europe,
00:54:38.480
men are taken to weight training in the military camps. They come back to the U.S.
00:54:42.020
and it's cheaper to train. There's more people doing it. You have different outlets and people
00:54:47.960
really begin to take to it. And, you know, the golden age of bodybuilding comes in the 50s and
00:54:53.720
60s off the back of that. That will span into 1977 and pumping iron and Arnold Schwarzenegger,
00:54:59.520
which then influences mainstream cultures. But I'm probably jumping ahead of myself. But it is
00:55:04.280
in the 40s and 50s that fitness becomes splintered because there's more access. So there's more
00:55:12.000
people doing it. And there's more people doing it. They begin to do it for different reasons.
00:55:16.340
Lifting weights overhead. I love weightlifting. Lifting weights to build my body. I love bodybuilding.
00:55:20.900
So this just creates different camps within the fitness community.
00:55:24.880
And then there's also splintering. You see other things, offshoots. People just started jogging,
00:55:28.780
just running for the sake of running. That was the thing that started picking up in the 60s and 70s.
00:55:33.220
And then jazzercise and Zumba. And then all the stuff that's happened in the past couple of
00:55:38.440
decades. CrossFit. People just trying different things.
00:55:42.580
Yeah. And Alan Lantham, a geographer, wrote a really wonderful article. I'm pretty sure it's
00:55:46.560
easily accessible on the history of jogging. And as you said, this is people worried about heart
00:55:51.440
disease in the 60s. And they're like, well, let's just start running for, you know,
00:55:55.440
defined periods of time and see how it goes. But it is like the great success story of fitness in the
00:56:01.980
20th century is the diversification and democratization of fitness. And diversification
00:56:06.900
of fitness. Listen, I love lifting heavy weights. I love cycling. I love walking. Not too mad on yoga
00:56:13.080
or jazzercise or Pilates or anything like that. And that's not throwing shade. But it's just what I
00:56:17.420
like and what I don't like. But we're in a period now where there's more things for me to like.
00:56:21.620
And there's more things for me to dislike. In the 1920s, if I wanted to train, it would probably be
00:56:26.860
an Olympic weightlifting. And that would be it. Or I could do gymnastics. But never would those
00:56:31.240
worlds meet. So, you know, some things are goofy. I was part of the functional fitness craze where
00:56:37.060
we were doing barbell back squats on Swiss balls. But some things were good. You know, it's good that
00:56:43.000
we have this diversification and jazzercise and Jane Fonda democratized it for women and leisure clubs
00:56:48.280
began to open up to men, women and children. And, you know, we can do a variety of different things to
00:56:52.720
get healthy and get fit. And that diversity is married with democratization where there's more and
00:56:58.620
more people training. And, you know, training is finally becoming a life cycle pursuit. And what I
00:57:05.280
mean by that is, it's something you do from cradle to grave. And it's something now that, you know,
00:57:09.740
the American College of Sport Medicine or the American College of Medicine encourages some form
00:57:14.040
of training, regardless of the mode, you know, for everyone. It doesn't matter your age, you know,
00:57:18.900
your gender, your occupation. There's an encouragement of physical fitness. So like, listen,
00:57:24.220
I'll laugh at some of it because it's objectively goofy. There's a kangaroo thing now where you put
00:57:29.540
on like space hoppers effectively, and you just jump around for 40 minutes. That looks pretty goofy.
00:57:34.140
Sure, it's fun. But I think that diversity and democratization is actually a really,
00:57:37.880
a really cool success story in an industry that is full of horrible lies and people you can't trust.
00:57:45.460
Where do you see physical culture going in the future?
00:57:48.320
It's funny, I keep going back to David, David Cohn, but I think there is going to be a strand
00:57:54.320
in fitness that is going to go back to more, we'll call it old school training. Stone lifting has
00:58:00.340
grown in real importance and popularity in the last two decades in particular. And the Rogue Fitness
00:58:05.340
documentaries have been a key part of that. People haven't seen them. Rogue Fitness, the American
00:58:09.360
barbell manufacturer did a number of documentaries on stone lifting in Scotland, the Basque region and
00:58:14.180
Iceland. So I think stone lifting, you know, and things like club swinging and more old school
00:58:19.080
methods, especially outdoors. I think outdoors is a direction for the fitness industry, which is a
00:58:24.100
very funny thing to say, but stone lifting helps to bring us back to a more natural way of strength
00:58:29.260
and fitness. I think something like that is probably a new and developing trend in fitness.
00:58:34.900
I think there is going to be a backlash against the specialization and scientification of fitness.
00:58:41.340
There was a, at least in gym based cultures, and you'll remember this, Brett, that sort of bro
00:58:47.040
science reign supreme for many years, you know, do this because the big guy did it. And then we had the
00:58:52.360
rise of the evidence based training community, and some of them have been very good. But I do think there
00:58:57.800
is a growing backlash against optimization and specialization in training. So we might see, you know,
00:59:04.000
more intuitive training styles emerge potentially. But then I think we continue on this process of
00:59:09.980
diversification and democratization and making it more accessible for more people to train.
00:59:16.300
The only thing I can guarantee is there will be new supplements that people will sell. Will they
00:59:22.000
work? Absolutely not. But, you know, the rest is all conjecture, I suppose, based on, sadly, my life
00:59:28.720
spent studying these things from different eras in different countries.
00:59:33.200
Well, Connor, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about your work?
00:59:36.180
Yeah, and this has been like truly such a pleasure. So thank you. I have my own website. I've been
00:59:41.400
running since 2014, physicalculturestudy.com. So if people are interested in my own work, please do
00:59:46.360
check that out. You know, I've written a number of books. I'm an academic. Academics don't get paid
00:59:50.480
for any of the books that they write. It goes to the publishing houses. So, you know, if you want to
00:59:54.440
read them, great. If not, read Physical Culture Study. For people who are interested in the history of
00:59:58.960
fitness more broadly, the Stark Center at the University of Texas at Austin is the world's repository
01:00:04.560
of fitness history. And they've created a new online database with Rogue Fitness called the
01:00:09.940
strongmanproject.com. So if people go on to the strongmanproject.com, they'll get access free to
01:00:15.940
biographies of strong men and women from the last 150 years. But also, like, there are articles and
01:00:21.540
training logs and diaries and personal papers that you can check out there as well. So the
01:00:26.500
strongmanproject.com is something that I will always promote because it's a really wonderful
01:00:31.000
resource. I love it. Well, Conor Heffernan, thanks for your time. It's been a pleasure.
01:00:34.340
Absolutely. Thanks so much. My guest today was Conor Heffernan. He's the author of the book,
01:00:38.780
The History of Physical Culture. It's available on amazon.com. You can find more information about
01:00:42.880
his work at his website, physicalculturestudy.com. Also, check out our show notes at aom.is
01:00:47.560
slash physicalculture, where you can find links to resources when we delve deeper into this topic.
01:00:56.500
Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM Podcast. The Art of Manliness website has been
01:01:02.220
around for over 16 years now, and the podcast for almost 10. And they both have always had one aim,
01:01:07.480
to help men take action to improve every area of their lives, to become better friends, citizens,
01:01:12.500
husbands, and fathers, better men. If you've gotten something out of the AOM Podcast,
01:01:17.360
please consider giving back by leaving a review or sharing an episode with a friend.
01:01:21.100
As always, thank you for the continued support. And until next time, it's Brett McKay.
01:01:24.420
Remind you to not listen to the AOM Podcast, but put what you've heard into action.