The Art of Manliness - 5,000 Years of Sweat： Lost Workout Wisdom From the History of Physical Culture

00:00:00.000 Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.

00:00:11.220 In an age that doesn't think too much about history, you might be forgiven for thinking

00:00:15.220 that a culture of exercise only emerged in the 20th century. But the idea of purposely

00:00:19.880 exercising to change one's body, what folks used to call physical culture, likely goes

00:00:24.620 back to the very beginnings of time. Here to unpack the origins, evolution, and future

00:00:29.600 of fitness is Dr. Conor Heffernan, a lecturer in the sociology of sport at Ulster University

00:00:34.400 and the author of The History of Physical Culture. Today on the show, Conor takes us on a fascinating

00:00:40.040 and wide-ranging tour of physical culture, from the ancient Egyptians who made their pharaohs

00:00:44.380 run around a pyramid to test their fitness to rule, to the ancient Greeks who used their

00:00:48.420 gymnasiums for both bodily training and intellectual philosophizing, to modern strongmen who became

00:00:52.860 proto-fitness influencers in many periods and societies in between. We discuss how training

00:00:57.880 practices changed over time, where they may be going next, and the evergreen principles

00:01:02.200 from past eras that we can still learn from today. After the show's over, check out our

00:01:06.440 show notes at awim.is slash physicalculture.

00:01:19.820 All right, Conor Heffernan, welcome to the show.

00:01:22.860 Thanks so much for having me.

00:01:24.820 So you are a historian of physical culture and physical fitness. What led you to researching

00:01:30.760 and writing about the history of exercise?

00:01:33.020 So when I talk to students, I tell them that I study the desire to look better naked, which

00:01:38.800 is kind of what I do in a certain sense. It's funny, I was a history undergrad, history and

00:01:46.260 politics actually, and I was a terrible history student.

00:01:48.480 Really bad. I had to learn about, you know, 11th century French kings. It was not for me.

00:01:53.860 But at the time that I was doing my undergrad, I was training in a gym in Dublin called Hercules Gym.

00:01:58.520 So Herx was founded in 1935. And I would train in the mornings before university with a lot of

00:02:03.940 lifters who are in their 60s and 70s. So they were telling me about Charles Atlas and Eugene Sandow and

00:02:10.380 Vasily Alexiev and Gerd Bonk and basically anyone and everyone from the past 60 to 80 years of

00:02:16.600 strength. So eventually, you know, I'm a struggling history undergrad. A professor sits me down,

00:02:22.240 Patrick Bernhardt. I'm forever in his debt. He says, what do you like? And I was like, well,

00:02:25.780 I like lifting. He goes, OK, do history on that. Can I? And it turns out you can. No one has stopped

00:02:32.340 me since. I'm a very weak-willed man. So if someone had stopped me, I would have stopped a long,

00:02:36.180 long time ago. But yes, I managed to marry my love of lifting and fitness and health with a desire to

00:02:44.000 study all of these things. And part of it was I have an insatiable love of learning. So when I was

00:02:49.680 trying to learn how to get bigger and stronger, I was reading powerlifting books from the 1970s

00:02:54.960 in my free time. I was looking at what Vince Garanda was doing for his bodybuilding diets in

00:03:00.680 the 60s and 70s. So I'm very blessed that I've managed to specialize in the area that I love.

00:03:08.000 So it sounds like you've been exercising for a large part of your life. What's your personal

00:03:12.600 history with exercise?

00:03:14.180 It was funny because I was thinking about this preparing for the podcast. And I had the privilege

00:03:20.360 a number of years ago to train with Frank Zane. Frank is a three-time Mr. Olympia. A lot of people

00:03:25.020 would see in his image online as a sort of, you know, ideal male body. And I asked the same question to

00:03:30.280 Frank, you know, what's his history of fitness and what role does fitness play in his life?

00:03:34.560 And he said that fitness has sort of two phases in his life. The first phase was fitness as armor.

00:03:41.220 You know, you use fitness to build yourself up and protect yourself from the world, certainly

00:03:45.300 muscle building. And then fitness becomes a bridge, you know, so you use the confidence

00:03:49.800 that you have from the gym or fitness or sport to become a better person. So in my own relationship

00:03:55.580 with health and fitness, it was an armor first. I was an overweight kid, hovered around

00:04:00.200 obesity at one point, which a PE teacher very kindly told me about in front of the rest of the

00:04:04.800 class. Bullies, you know, traditional 98 pound weakling, albeit in a heavier body. Use fitness

00:04:10.880 to trim down, slim down, get stronger. And it stuck with me because it's, I suppose it's helped me

00:04:17.440 recast my life. The discipline of the gym I used in my work, you know, the healthy eating, the idea of

00:04:24.700 putting in hard work, having a pain threshold, et cetera, is things that really helped to shape my

00:04:29.480 outlook later on. So I've gotten over fitness as armor and more into fitness as bridge.

00:04:35.980 So you wrote a short history of physical culture that spans thousands of years and cuts across

00:04:41.320 cultures, both East and West. And what I love about this book is it explores why humans, just as

00:04:47.760 humans today exercise for different reasons, humans in the past exercised for different reasons.

00:04:54.200 Let's start off definitions. I'm sure people have heard the phrase physical culture before,

00:04:58.300 but what exactly does that mean? And it's a term that I really wish would come back and we'll

00:05:04.220 probably touch on this later in the podcast, but physical culture is, and I'll borrow from a friend,

00:05:10.500 Jan Todd, she likens it to purposive exercise. And what that is, is it's exercise done sort of for a

00:05:17.620 reason. So the difference between physical culture and a sport is that when you play a sport, you're

00:05:22.460 primarily trying to, you know, win a game, win medals, score points, score goals, whatever the

00:05:27.320 case may be. Physical culture are those activities that we use to strengthen the body, to increase

00:05:33.380 flexibility, to engage in anti-aging, you know, and things that would fall under the umbrella of

00:05:39.100 physical culture would be going to the gym, going for a jog, doing yoga, calisthenics, Pilates,

00:05:44.380 whatever we want to do. When I describe it again to students, I say, you know, physical culture is about

00:05:50.380 the building of the biceps and sport is about the winning of medals. Sometimes they intersect

00:05:55.380 weightlifting as a sport being an obvious example, but for the average man or woman or child, it's

00:06:00.720 about building the body up, making it stronger, more robust, anti-fragile. And there's a number of

00:06:06.200 different ways you can do that, which the history of it shows as well. So I really do like that term

00:06:10.780 physical culture. It was very popular. We're going to get to this period in history, like the 19th

00:06:14.640 century. That's what they called exercise or fitness was physical culture, but then it just kind of went

00:06:19.460 out of style. Why do you think the term went out of fashion in the early 20th century?

00:06:24.100 It's funny. And you're right. You know, if you and I, and some of the listeners, at least I hope,

00:06:28.260 were exercises in 1900, you'd say, I'm a physical culturist, but just sounds objectively awesome.

00:06:34.620 One of the reasons it went away is because the physical culture activity splintered. So bodybuilding

00:06:39.520 arises really as a sport in the interwar period, the 1920s and 30s. Olympic weightlifting becomes really

00:06:45.620 an official sport in 1920 and a formalized sport in 1928. Eventually then powerlifting comes along

00:06:51.680 and CrossFit, et cetera. And when these splinters of physical culture came about, people began to

00:06:56.780 specialize in them more. So they didn't want to be a sort of jack of all trades, you know, a physical

00:07:01.680 culturist. They wanted to be a weightlifter or a bodybuilder or a powerlifter or a CrossFitter.

00:07:07.280 So one end is just fitness got specialized and splintered. The other end, and we will talk

00:07:12.920 about this, I have no doubt, Brett, is a lot of physical culture entrepreneurs in the late 1800s,

00:07:18.020 early 1900s were kind of wacky, kind of weird. Bernard McFadden, one of the greatest American

00:07:23.440 physical culturists, he so angered the American medical profession that there are several books

00:07:28.180 written just about Bernard McFadden being an awful person by American doctors. So physical culture kind

00:07:34.640 of got a tarnished name, especially in the US because of some wacky entrepreneurs. And then

00:07:39.620 also there were physical educationalists who wanted to kind of attack that term because they

00:07:45.800 saw it as lesser than the subject, the learned area of PE. So there's a couple of different things

00:07:51.620 going on in why it dropped away. Yeah, I want to talk about Bernard McFadden. We talked about him on

00:07:56.260 the podcast before with Mark Adams in his book, Mr. America. Yeah, the guy was crazy. A lot of crazy 0.95

00:08:02.280 people during that time. So let's take a look at a history of physical culture. And the archaeological

00:08:08.640 records suggest that humans were doing purposive exercise nearly 5,000 years ago in ancient Egypt.

00:08:17.560 So what did ancient Egyptian exercise look like? Yeah, and I think the only caveat to say before I

00:08:24.580 start that is the record shows 5,000 years ago. I have no doubt that, you know, there are people lifting

00:08:31.340 heavy things before 5,000 years ago. We just don't have the records to prove it. But ancient Egyptian

00:08:36.440 physical culture is just so fascinating. You know, we have stories and images and especially in some of

00:08:42.460 the tombs of the pharaohs and sort of the wealthy elite of people doing gymnastics, wrestling activities,

00:08:49.580 swinging heavy bags of sand, which to me is a really cool indication about club swinging, which is one of

00:08:55.480 my sort of pet loves in many respects. But they also built fitness into their very culture, even in

00:09:02.180 performative ways at times. So there was a point in Egyptian history when a pharaoh would have to run

00:09:07.680 around one of the pyramids for a set number of laps to prove that they were fit for office. You know,

00:09:13.800 so this idea of being a fit political leader had a physical component to it. So there's really

00:09:19.560 interesting calisthenic routines, you know, in ancient Egypt. And then you do have weight-based

00:09:25.280 routines. You have sand swinging, for want of a better phrase. And there's some evidence of like

00:09:30.160 early stone lifting practices as well going on. So there is a rich culture in ancient Egypt.

00:09:36.160 Now, I really love that idea of making your political leaders do an obstacle course to see if

00:09:41.340 they're fit to lead. I would enjoy like an NFL combine. Every time the UN meets, I think we should

00:09:49.400 do like 40-yard dash, you know, bench 220 for reps, stuff like that. But it made sense in the context

00:09:55.000 of ancient Egypt, because there were wars going on, there were warring states. And the parallel would

00:10:00.820 be, say, somewhere like Sparta, where being a leader also meant you were a general. You know, so there

00:10:06.580 wasn't as fine a distinction at times in Egyptian society between pharaoh and general or pharaoh and

00:10:13.800 soldier. So it did eventually take on a more performative element. This is just something you

00:10:18.120 go through the motions with. But I think even the intent of that shows how seriously and centrally

00:10:23.660 they did take physical fitness. And you also talk about with the Egyptians, one of the reasons

00:10:28.300 they exercised was connected to death, like the rituals of death. What was going on there?

00:10:33.660 Yeah. So, you know, at funeral rites and then even in the tombs themselves, there was

00:10:39.240 events going on. And it's interesting. It's not just ancient Egyptian culture. Like a lot of early

00:10:44.360 strength activities were connected to religious festivals, were connected to funerals and funeral

00:10:49.840 rites and funeral games. And this is a big thing in the ancient world was a sort of celebration of life

00:10:55.380 with a recognition of death combined into it. The celebration of physicality with the acknowledgement

00:11:00.340 that all physical things are unfortunately ephemeral. So for them, fitness is also a way to

00:11:05.280 mediate that barrier between life and death and a time to celebrate. And that's not unique to the

00:11:11.400 Egyptians. You know, in China, there were ancient and very heavy cauldrons called dings that were

00:11:16.280 often lifted in funeral rites and funeral processions as well. So again, I think it does show that

00:11:21.280 interesting relationship and even centrality of fitness within these societies.

00:11:25.340 Okay. So they exercised for, there's a functional purpose for it, you know, maybe training for

00:11:30.460 warfare, but it was also a religious rite as well. You mentioned Indian clubs. You're a big fan of

00:11:35.380 Indian clubs. Let's talk about Indian, ancient Indian physical culture. What did that look like?

00:11:40.980 Yes. Thank you so much for indulging me. I have literally written the book on Indian clubs,

00:11:45.900 which means I have read it and maybe no one else has. Ancient Indian physical culture is fascinating

00:11:51.460 and it has parallels with the Persian physical culture as well. But we know, and Joseph Alter's

00:11:56.720 work is really central in this as well, that in India, fitness held a deep functional practice. You

00:12:03.280 know, soldiers would train to strengthen their bodies and I'll run through the activities in a

00:12:06.780 moment. It had a religious practice. We know that wrestlers in particular would train their bodies in

00:12:12.040 certain ways and do certain exercise almost to get into a meditative stance, trance, pardon me, or

00:12:16.920 meditative state. And then it had a health purpose as well. We know of Indian physicians from the

00:12:22.020 ancient world recommending exercise. Now, in terms of what that exercise looked like, and this is a

00:12:26.620 really fascinating thing, we had club swinging, heavy club swinging and heavy Indian clubs or jories or

00:12:32.280 mugdars or mugas, whatever term you want to apply to it is, it's intense. I have some traditional

00:12:38.340 Indian clubs in my home gym and they weigh, you know, 30 kilos each. And there are even photos and

00:12:44.300 videos you can see online of people swinging heavy Indian clubs that have nails dotted all around

00:12:48.320 them to make sure that you're swinging with proper form. But they would swing clubs, they would engage

00:12:53.640 in calisthenics. So things that we would call in the West Hindu squats or Hindu push-ups, you know,

00:12:58.520 these would be part of the regimen. But there was also resistance training. There were gnaws, which is

00:13:04.360 kind of like a stone donut, if people will indulge me. And you would put your head through the donut and

00:13:09.880 you'd do squats and you would lift heavy stones, you know, as I don't know, you've had David Keown on

00:13:15.560 the podcast before, a good friend of mine, the Irish stone lifter. And he's all about the 0.93

00:13:19.880 universality of stone lifting, but there was stone lifting in ancient India as well. So you had

00:13:24.500 soldiers and wrestlers and wrestlers held such a high value in Indian society. Oftentimes princes would

00:13:30.880 keep wrestlers in their court just as a sort of status symbol and their training would have been

00:13:35.360 subsidized by the princes. So you would have had wrestlers and soldiers, but then also, you know,

00:13:40.620 a doctor's patients engaging in some of these activities. And a lot of the, I suppose, scientific

00:13:48.020 and religious underpinning of the practice was all to do with your vital force and your energy flow and

00:13:53.880 centering your breathing and connecting in with the universal force. So it's a very fascinating style

00:14:00.240 of physical culture, which still exists today. You know, the traditional Indian Akara, the gymnasium for

00:14:05.060 the wrestlers holds a lot of the trappings of exercise patterns and movements that were born

00:14:10.780 and popularized centuries ago, which is an incredible preservation of historical practice.

00:14:16.380 Yeah. I'm a big fan of Indian clubs and the gata. I did a few videos when I did YouTube about this. So

00:14:23.020 if you guys want to see a video from me of me 12 years ago, swinging Indian clubs, we'll link to that.

00:14:30.140 And also the gata. So that's like, like the Indian clubs, that was a very kind of British version of

00:14:36.320 sort of the clubs that Hindus use, ancient Hindus use. And the gata, it's like, basically it looks

00:14:40.080 like a weapon. It's a steel mace.

00:14:42.740 Yeah. Rosalind O'Hanlon wrote a really interesting article many years ago, looking at how a lot of the

00:14:49.240 training implements for wrestlers in particular, like the gatas, were initially used in warfare.

00:14:54.300 So they sort of transitioned away from the battlefield and stayed in the gyms. And you're

00:14:59.040 right. These large, heavy maces, they look like weapons because they were weapons at a certain

00:15:04.740 point. And then they became just for building up strength and vitality.

00:15:09.140 Yeah. I like the gata because it's nice on my, it feels good on my shoulders. I just like

00:15:13.200 swinging it around. It just feels good. Sometimes I'll do that before I bench press even.

00:15:17.660 Yeah. It saved my relationship with the bench press. I, like you, I swing clubs and gatas before

00:15:23.940 I do chest or any sort of chest movements. And, you know, if you think about it, we're quite

00:15:28.380 boring in terms of a lot of our fitness patterns. You don't really swing a lot of weights and you

00:15:32.980 don't really move your shoulder in full rotations the entire time when you're working out in a gym

00:15:37.560 setting. So I think sometimes you have to let the body move the way the body was meant to move.

00:15:41.760 And that's where things like gatas and Indian clubs still have a value.

00:15:44.200 Yeah. So, yeah, you talked about there's a Chinese ancient physical culture. They were

00:15:48.220 lifting big, heavy bells as well as part of funeral rites and things like that. Let's move to the

00:15:53.100 West. I think, you know, if you live in the United Kingdom or the United States, I think we're all

00:15:57.720 very familiar with the Greek and Roman influence of physical culture. What did ancient Greeks physical

00:16:05.320 culture look like?

00:16:06.780 Yeah. And you are right to cite the importance of that for the modern trainee, because really our

00:16:12.020 modern gym environment traces its philosophical and religious and social underpinnings to

00:16:17.700 Greco-Roman physical culture. And, you know, when we talk about ancient Greece, we're using an

00:16:22.200 umbrella term for, you know, dozens and dozens and dozens of ancient Greek city states. And the two

00:16:28.400 most important ones are, of course, probably Sparta and Athens when it comes to gym cultures. So

00:16:33.360 Sparta, I'm not going to go into a 300 rant, although the first movie did hold up. Second movie,

00:16:38.660 I have my qualms about, you know, in ancient Sparta, physical culture was to train soldiers.

00:16:43.660 Hard calisthenics combined with boxing and combat. There's a ancient Spartan quote that, you know,

00:16:49.980 if you're a Spartan soldier, you bring your heavy shield into battle, which weighed maybe eight to

00:16:54.320 10 kilos. And you had two choices. You either returned with your shield or on your shield.

00:16:58.860 So it was a lot more, you know, intense militaristic style of physical culture.

00:17:03.220 The one that has retained and the one that captured people's hearts and minds and imagination

00:17:08.400 in the 19th century was ancient Greece. You know, the word gymnasium or now gym has its origins in

00:17:15.480 ancient Athenian culture where gymnasium came from two words that effectively meant naked exercise.

00:17:20.920 So you can guess what the dress code was in the ancient Athenian gyms. But the gym in ancient

00:17:26.460 Athens was just a remarkable place. The gymnasium in that era was a multifunctional center of Athenian

00:17:34.820 society. The gymnasium was the university of its time. Plato and Aristotle and Socrates taught at the

00:17:40.880 gymnasium. You would go to the gymnasium where you would train your body, predominantly using

00:17:45.380 calisthenics. There were also stone, what would say, stone dumbbell predecessors called haltares,

00:17:51.720 mainly calisthenics, mind you, mixed with some wrestling and sports, depending on the gymnasium.

00:17:57.320 You would also have a mentor within the gymnasium setting, an older man from Athenian society

00:18:01.660 who had mentored the younger boys through Athenian society. And it was this idea, and, you know,

00:18:06.820 we still use the phrase today, albeit it was juvenile, the Roman poet who coined it, you know,

00:18:12.280 mens sana, incorpore sano, a healthy mind and a healthy body. And that's what you had in Athenian

00:18:17.120 culture in particular, that, you know, the gym, the gymnasium was a central part in a man's

00:18:23.260 upbringing. It's where he learned to educate his mind. It's where he learned polite society. It's where

00:18:28.480 he learned to make his business connections. And it's where he learned to, you know, build his biceps

00:18:32.460 and get stronger and look better naked and all of these vain things that are also important in our

00:18:37.800 world. Yeah. That was interesting about the Greeks. So, you know, they actually, there's a functional

00:18:42.140 purpose to their exercise. Like they, they train so they can fight more, but they also had an

00:18:47.120 appreciation for just the physical beauty that bodily exercise can bring to a person. It's like

00:18:52.480 they train for aesthetics too. Absolutely. And you know, there were male beauty contests in ancient Greece

00:18:57.700 and the scholar's name escapes, you know, um, Crawford, I think maybe a surname who's written

00:19:03.680 about that almost as a precursor to modern physique or bodybuilding, uh, competition. So you, you had

00:19:09.220 a real aesthetic appreciation of the male body and, you know, a lot of the statues that still exist from

00:19:15.280 the classical world that then inspired the sculptors of the Renaissance period in Italy, which then

00:19:19.740 inspired a lot of the 18th, 19th, and even modern day ideas around beauty of the male body stem from

00:19:25.900 that ancient Greek appreciation. And that was a muscular athletic build. Now, sadly, a lot of

00:19:33.260 those sculptures were enhanced, not in the way that enhanced means nowadays, but you know, the sculptor

00:19:37.760 would pack on a little bit more muscle mass than the subject actually had. We had old school Photoshop

00:19:42.360 in the ancient world, but you know, they had that appreciation of the body and it, it was woven

00:19:48.520 through Greek culture. The soldiers trained, you know, you could train for beauty and that was

00:19:53.880 acceptable. Doctors had a really strong view that people should exercise and exercise could help

00:20:00.540 alleviate illness and stave off illness, you know, let exercise be thy medicine to a certain extent.

00:20:05.620 So it was a really encompassing view of beauty and training and the body. And, you know, even

00:20:12.640 ideas of self mastery were oftentimes explained through the gym, you know, ideas of a rat achieving

00:20:18.620 one's excellent excellence, pardon me, or agon, which is the suffering one needs to undergo in order to

00:20:23.280 affect change. Gym metaphors and training metaphors and sporting metaphors were used to really bring

00:20:29.380 home those messages. So it is one of the most encompassing body cultures of the ancient world.

00:20:35.920 And then the Romans, they would pick up where the Greeks left off in many ways. Like they copied 1.00

00:20:40.320 the Greeks in many aspects of their physical culture. When you look at these ancient physical

00:20:44.500 cultures, both East and West, are there any big takeaways you think that we can get in the 21st

00:20:50.460 century from how they approached fitness? I really take so much inspiration from the sound mind sound

00:20:57.580 body approach. I think that is something that we talk about a lot with well being, but I think the

00:21:02.820 sound mind was and understanding that, you know, developing your body goes in tandem with developing

00:21:08.260 your mind. It's not just that going for a run will make you feel better, but it's that embracing your

00:21:13.460 educational learning or your learning or research about the world in a similar systematic way to

00:21:18.320 physical fitness is a strong way of doing it. But I truthfully think, and I am a bit woo-woo by

00:21:23.840 nature, I think the connecting of fitness and your health and your vibrancy and your body to broader

00:21:30.980 elements of the cycle of life and death is a really important thing. And it's something that we

00:21:36.600 attend. And I'm not saying people have to be religious or spiritual, et cetera, but I think the

00:21:41.140 connecting of fitness to something bigger than yourself is something that was truly there within the

00:21:46.000 ancient world, which sometimes gets lost. I think in mainstream modern fitness cultures, which is

00:21:51.440 they're getting jacked or losing 10 pounds or, you know, getting a 500 deadlift, whatever the case may

00:21:56.660 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

00:22:05.400 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

00:22:10.760 don't get sarcopenia, but I really like that idea of, yeah, this is a chance for me to remind myself

00:22:16.280 that I'm alive and it just feels good. So yeah, I really do like that idea of connecting it to

00:22:21.900 vitality. I guess we call it. Yeah. And you know, the body likes to move. Yesterday I was driving for

00:22:28.140 four hours and then sitting down for a long time, which is not how I usually do things. When I got

00:22:32.980 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

00:26:19.400 in that as well.

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

00:26:47.560 with a strength competition.

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

00:27:26.620 still competitive way.

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 0.99

00:28:03.740 that were preserved in Muslim societies and destroyed in European societies, you know, ancient 1.00

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 0.91

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

00:30:57.220 is just so influential in that period.

00:31:00.700 So with the Renaissance, you see the return of exercising, not just for warfare, but just because, 0.90

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, 0.89

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 0.94

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. 0.98

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 1.00

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, 0.99

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 0.65

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

00:37:31.220 of physical culture, correct?

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 0.66

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, 1.00

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

00:43:37.840 private parts. 0.95

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 0.97

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 0.99

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 0.92

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 1.00

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.

The Art of Manliness - September 30, 2024

5,000 Years of Sweat： Lost Workout Wisdom From the History of Physical Culture

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