Today we’re going to take a look back at the way some people used to train around a century ago. You may wonder what we have to learn from such a long time ago – surely the science of fitness has advanced leaps and bounds since then, and some of the records of these turn of the century strongmen have been broken over. So why should we look to them for lessons?

For starters, even if many modern athletes have broken their records, they’re still miles above what we are capable of right now. We’re pretty sure we can’t bench-press a cow or change the tires on a car using nothing but our bare hands; these men could, so when they talk about strength, we think it’s a good idea to pay attention.

Secondly, these men did all their training with, no supplements and no or minimal equipment. This is good news for us because that’s the equipment we have access to most often!

Besides, as David Epstein suggests in his TED Talk “Are athletes really getting faster, better, stronger?” the higher statistics we see today are a result of several factors, including more specialised athletes, better equipment, and the sheer number of people who go for this sort of thing today. Remove these factors, and their achievements are not that far removed from modern records.

So if those reasons have convinced you that these old timers might have some useful knowledge to impart, let’s look at a few pointers they can give us.

Train everything

Unlike many people today, these athletes focused on training all their body, rather than their abs or their biceps. They aimed to be strong all through, not just where it shows, and they did not specialise. As Arthur Saxon put it:

“If a man has tremendous arms and chest and weak legs then he is only half a strong man. If he should have strong legs and arms and weak lungs or a weak heart, then again he is by no means entitled to be called a strong man, and some day the inevitable breakdown will occur…”
– Arthur Saxon, ‘The Development of Physical Power‘ (1905)

While they trained for strength, and certainly developed tremendous amounts of it, it was all functional strength, the kind you can apply to anything. For example, George Hackenschmidt was not only a weightlifter (the Hack squat is named for him – he devised it), but also a wrestler and a gymnast. In his time he was considered to be the strongest man in the world, but that does not mean he was a lump of muscle – he was certainly agile enough to perform 100 consecutive jumps over a table. With his feet tied together. We’ll just let that sink in.

Strengthening all your body also means strengthening what’s inside it:

“One must consider that, although it is quite possible to enlarge muscles by certain light, prolonged exercises, at the same time the development of the sinews may be neglected, and it is the sinews which transport the action of the muscles to the bone frame. The sinews can only be exercised and strengthened by correspondingly heavy muscle work.”
– George Hackenschmidt, ‘The Way To Live In Health and Physical Fitness‘  (1941)

All this requires a variety of exercises and activities, which has the added bonus of keeping things interesting. Full body exercises (weights, calisthenics, or preferably both), running or cycling, swimming, wrestling – it all goes to build you a stronger body as long as you don’t obsess over any one part.

Be there

When we say these men focused on their training, we mean they really focused. Today we’re constantly bombarded by distractions, and many even use distractions to take their mind off their exercise rather than training mindfully and appreciating what they are doing. If we take our mind off what we are doing, we rather devalue the task, which means it’s that much easier to forget to do it or put it off. However, it also has some practical repercussions on the quality of what we do.

“You may go through the list of exercises with dumbbells a hundred times a day, but unless you fix your mind upon those muscles to which the work is applied, such exercise will bring but little, if any, benefit. If, upon the other hand, you concentrate your mind upon the muscles in use, then immediately development begins.”
– Eugen Sandow, ‘How to Preserve Health & Attain Strength’ (1894)

There are a few good reasons for this. First off, the mind and nervous system play a large part in the recruitment of muscles. If they’re busy watching the news, they’re not going to be organising your muscles as you squat. Your body works best when all the different parts are working together, so that’s a bad thing.

Second, everything you do is a skill. There’s a skill to deadlifts, there’s a skill to push ups, there’s a skill to squats. If you’re not paying attention, you’re not going to nail it.

Focus on what you are doing, study yourself and look for ways to improve. We’re not telling you to mute your sound system while you exercise, but definitely keep your mind on the present and appreciate what you’re doing.

It’s not about size

You may have noticed from the photos scattered around this page that these men were not shaped like a modern body builder. They’re closer to the physique that can be seen on some classical statues than that of a modern Mr. Universe contestant. And yet, their strength was well above that of many heavier men with larger muscles.

Large muscles are not necessarily strong muscles; there are many other factors at play, including mindset and skill. The takeaway from this is, if your objective is to get strong, and you’re working on your strength, don’t worry if you’re not getting Hulk-sized; that’s not part of the game. 

If you’re not convinced, we’ll let this nice old gentleman demonstrate this point.

Take it slow

Now, these men weren’t born strong. They didn’t get strong overnight either; their strength was the result of years of training patiently.

“Years of progressive training and proper living as I am recommending led up to my ability to withstand this rigorous program and to continue to gain in strength and development while maintaining perfect health.”
– Eugen Sandow ‘How to Preserve Health & Attain Strength’ (1894)

Progressive training is the process of slowly increasing the difficulty of the exercise as the body adapts to it over time. This has been a well known concept for centuries. Milo of Croton (Greek wrestler, 6 time Olympic champion, cc. 6th century BCE) was said to have been able to carry a full grown bull on his back, a feat which he trained for by lifting the calf every day for four years as it grew heavier. He also carried it to the slaughter and ate it, which probably ranks as the most well deserved barbecue of all time.

Closer to the present day, strongman Herman Goerner (1891 – 1956) wrestled an elephant as part of his act. The elephant had started off at around 320kg, but had more than doubled in weight to around 680kg by the time they stopped performing.

Obviously you don’t want to go around molesting livestock and wildlife as part of your training, but the point of both these stories is that you want to slowly increase the intensity of your exercise as you become stronger.

“Slowly” is the key word here. More intense exercises are the means to an end, not the goal in themselves. As Paul Wade (author of Convict Conditioning) wrote, being able to increase the intensity is a demonstration of an increase in strength, not the cause of it.

You want to stick to the lower intensity exercises until you’re certain you can’t possibly get anything else out of them. In this way, you can keep making better progress over the long term as it gives you a more solid foundation when you get to the more intense ones. Even then, you should bump things up in small increments.

It takes a lot of patience and some humility, but in reality there are no shortcuts to strength. The only way to achieve lasting results is to build slowly over a solid foundation.

Eat properly

Exercise requires fuel. With few exceptions, strongmen gave the subject of nutrition considerable thought, and although there are a few disagreements between them, there’s a general trend towards mixed diets with fresh products and as little processed food as possible. Hackenschmidt, while preferring vegetables and nuts himself, gives some very balanced advice.

“There are very strong people who are strict vegetarians, whilst others eat a good deal of meat. A fare which consists of three-quarters of vegetable food and one-quarter meat would appear to be the most satisfactory for the people of central Europe.”
– George Hackenschmidt, ‘The Way To Live In Health and Physical Fitness‘  (1941)

While Sandow did not have any particular advice about the composition of a diet, he did have this to say about how to eat:

“I eat “plain”, wholesome food for the most part, but do “indulge” on occasion. I have my meals at regular intervals, and prefer simple foods that are easy to digest. I chew my food well and believe strongly that mastication is a key to good health.”
– Eugen Sandow

Chewing well is good advice – it makes food easier to digest. Taking your time over a meal also gives the brain time to realized that it’s being fed – something which it sometimes misses if you scarf down food. That makes you believe you’re hungrier than you really are.

While most strongmen were not frequent drinkers of strong spirits, several of them did enjoy the occasional beer or glass of wine.

There are of course a few outliers – for example, the Saxon brothers (Arthur and his two brothers) would habitually eat 24 eggs and 3 pounds of bacon between them as part of their breakfast, and they certainly didn’t mind the sugar! However, one has to bear in mind that this trio worked at a somewhat higher intensity than most of the other strongmen we mentioned here.

The phrase “everything in moderation” certainly applies here. None of these men advocated an ascetic lifestyle, although they did try to eat clean. Using mealtimes as a quiet period, rather than mindlessly gobbling up junk while doing five other things at the same time, helps both mind and body.

Don’t overdo it

Today we think in terms of “working out” and pushing ourselves to failure, but these men tended to do their best to keep within their limits when training:

“Breathing through the nose is the only proper way of respiration and at the same time an important regulator for the movement of the body, for if for any kind of work the breath through the nose ceases to be sufficient, one ought to either discontinue the work or restrict the movement until breathing has again become normal.”
– George Hackenschmidt, ‘The Way To Live In Health and Physical Fitness‘  (1941)

In other words, don’t push yourself beyond your ability to work. While you need to put in effort to improve, overexertion will not get you better any faster. A little in good form is much better than a lot in poor form.

While strongmen trained consistently, they did not train constantly. They understood the importance of rest:

“Don’t train every day, skip a day now and then to give the muscles time to thoroughly rest and to give nature the opportunity to rebuild them and add to their strength and endurance. Don’t always train with the same amount of weight. Some days use more moderate weights to tone the muscles, on other training days really exert yourself, give the muscles plenty of work to do, then nature will take care of building more strength, muscle and better health.These very vigorous days should not be practiced by the average man more than once or twice a week.”
– Eugen Sandow, ‘How to Preserve Health & Attain Strength’ (1894)

Your body needs time to recover. The muscles obviously need time, but so does the mind – as we have said, you’ll also be exerting your nervous system. That needs its rest too, so make sure it gets it. More importantly, remember why and how you are exercising. It’s so you can enjoy other things in your life, not so that you can exercise more.

Don’t try to rush it by exerting yourself too often, because that will only result in a crash sooner or later. Use the time to cultivate other aspects of your life – our ideal here at Average Norm is to train smart so we can do all sorts of other stuff and stay fit at the same time! These men appreciated this concept too. Several of them followed different pursuits in addition to physical culture, and many of them are recorded as being highly intelligent and interesting company. You don’t get to be that if you’re living a one track life revolving only around exercise.

Give yourself time to rest, recover, and to take care of your life. You’re going to live in your body for the rest of your life, so it makes no sense to try and improve it with short term fixes that are only likely to damage it. Take your time.

In conclusion

Volumes can (and have been) written about each one of these strongmen, but we hope that you found some useful advice in our brief summary of their works, and that the stories of their feats has inspired you to try some things out yourself!

If you are interested in reading more, below are some links to the books quoted in this article:

• Saxon, Arthur: “The Development of Physical Power“
• Hackenschmidt, George: “The Way to Live in Health and Physical Fitness“

Many of Eugen Sandow’s articles and interviews, including the ones quoted above are available online from a number of sources.

There are of course several strongmen who were capable of epic feats, but we just couldn’t fit everyone in one article! If you have any favourites, do let us know about them!

Header image: “The Sandow Trocadero Vaudevilles, direction, Florenz Ziegfeld, Jr.: Sandow in his wonderful performance, lifting the human dumbell” (1894, public domain)

Other photographs: Various, public domain