(Very) Old-School Strength

Remember Milo of Crotana?  He's the ancient wrestler who is said to have invented progressive strength training back in 500 BC or so:  in preparation for his matches, legend holds that he took to lifting a baby calf and walking around a paddock with the calf balanced on his shoulders.   Day after day, the calf grew, and so did Milo's strength (I wrote about him on my old blog). 

Now, except for the fact that he was lifting a calf, Milo's workout wouldn't look out of place at a modern gym:  to get the calf up there, he'd have to do something resembling a power clean; to hoist her onto his shoulders, a push-press.  His strolls about the paddock are classic farmer's walks,  And if Milo was feeling spry, it's not a huge leap to think he might have thrown in some cow-squats, cow-lunges, cow deadlifts, and cow-rows.

Milo might have been onto something by using a living creature for resistance:  all that squirming and bucking added a chaotic element to his workout, forcing his muscles to work even harder, and laying the ground for current concepts like sandbag training, stability work, and, yes, chaotic training, which incorporates unpredictable, random movement into traditional exercise. 

For all the 'advances' in our knowledge of progressive strength training, we haven't come all that far from what that first guy was doing 2500 years ago.  If anything, the newest thinking on the subject, supported by the latest science and the smartest minds, has us training more and more like Milo.

I'm all for innovation, but I love that about strength training. 

I love that we're all still doing the movements that Milo was doing, that Sandow did, that Steve Reeves and Louis Cyr and Paul Anderson and Franco Columbu did to build their muscles and impressive strength. 

And I don't think I'm alone in that:  weight-training enthusiasts are old-school hard-work addicts by nature.  We love those classic moves and that classic equipment, and if some old print surfaces showing Jon Grimek lifting a round iron weight with a handle attached, you can bet that 'kettlebells' are going to be the newest fitness-trend to capture our old-timer imaginations. 

I bring this up because I just heard a recording of a guy named Mark Rippetoe reading the first chapter of his book Starting Strength that features a very Milo-esque workout program based around squats, clean-and-presses, rows and a handful of other classic moves.  I'm paraphrasing here, but Rippetoe states that a strong body is the body in its natural state:  having spent millenia hunting and gathering, our modern bodies function optimally when challenged in a similar manner.  A weak and sedentary body is an evolutionary quirk.  In other words, we're supposed to be strong.

I like this concept, and I like the way Rippetoe presents it in the recording.  Starting Strength could have been written sixty years ago; it could have been written yesterday.  It appeals to our caveman-selves, to our instincts for survival.  And that's what I like about it.