I shouldn’t get into fights on the internet. Or in real life for that matter.
But I just can’t help myself sometimes, especially on trivial stuff.
Every time I leave the sanctity of my home gym, I seem to drift into unwanted fitness territory. I stumble over an influencer’s tripod, gasp at some inane exercise or offer opinions that go down as well as the Hinderburg. Admittedly I’m an idiot when I train, but at least I’m the smartest guy in my home gym. During a recent workout I was an innocent bystander to a deadlift PR.
The hero in question was covered in chalk, suited to the nines, and screaming as he pulled the weight from the floor. It was a 600 lbs. deadlift and downright impressive. To use modern parlance, he ‘got after it.’ His training partner however, proved far less impressed and began ragging on him for not using proper form and for rounding his lower back.
The two bantered back and forth before me – innocent, just minding my own business me – was brought in as a third party. Revelling in my role as judge, jury and executioner, I suggested that lifting the weight from the floor and putting it back down again… you know… a deadlift, was far more important than how graceful the lift had been.
Cue conversations about longevity, protecting the back, whatever the latest internet celebrity said etc. We had, I suggested, come to an impasse. Yes correct form will protect you from injury, but that is a different question from whether or not a lift was legtimate. When I pointed out that we were training in a gym and not the IPF Worlds, so really nothing we did was legtimate but rather just silly training, the conversation went rather dead. My opinion that training is, for us non-competitors, just a form of serious play, was the final nail in the coffin.
They grunted and slowly backed away as the sweet sound of silence embraced me once more. The question about form nevertheless struck a chord with me as I’ve spent the past months studying the early origins of Olympic weightlifting which was, itself, entirely divided on this question of form specifically, whether or not athletes used the ‘French’ or ‘German’ method.
The Birth of Weightlifting
What is it about the French and the Germans regarding lifting? The first globally popular gymnastics program, the Turnverein system, was created in the early 1800s after Napoleon Bonaparte’s French army overran Prussia. Prussian gymnast Friedrich Ludwig Jahn began training Prussian boys and men using his Turner system so that Prussia could protect itself against the French in the future. Is this story relevant to weightlifting? Sort of. Is it a fun anecdote? Of course. How many modern bodybuilding systems have their origins in geopolitics?
Anyway…
During the 1870s and 1880s, weightlifting clubs and competitions began to emerge, with some force in Germany and Austria. Some of these clubs were connected to older Turner gyms (so that anecdote was relevant), and others were brand new spaces for men, and it was primarily men, to exercise. Former International Weightlifter Federation President and author of the wonderful IWF history The Lost Past, Gottfried Schödl cited Germany and Austria as the leading nations in weightlifting during this time.
In May 1890 the Österreichischer Athleten Bund was founded in Vienna, thereby becoming the world’s first weightlifting governing body. A subsequent club was founded in Germany the following year and the next decade was witness to multiple national weightlifting federations in Italy, Spain, Denmark, Russia, and so on. In France Edmond Desbonnet, France’s leading physical culturist, informally took charge of the sport’s governance and organization to a large degree by publicizing the sport’s development in the pages of his fitness magazine La Cultur Physique. Now while other weightlifting styles did exist, including a ‘Swiss’ method largely centered on swinging, Desbonnet was a vocal critic of the German method of weightlifting which he distinguished with the grace of French weightlifting.
French Versus German Weightlifting
It is here that we return to my gym problem. How should you lift? Now obviously powerlifters will chime in here with strict and objective measures about the squat, bench, and deadlift. It is, however, always funny to see how even powerlifting has issues with poor judging calls. As weightlifting moved from the 1800s into the 1900s, this was a key question with ramifications lasting into our present day. Should a lift be slow and strict, or was a certain amount of momentum (or ‘body English’ or ‘cheating’) acceptable?
The French method of weightlifting was most acute when it came to overhead pressing. For two-handed barbell lifts, the barbell was cleaned from the floor to the chest and then pressed overhead. The barbell was not allowed to touch any part of the body until it reached the breastbone and, even then, no backbend was allowed as the bar was pressed overhead. The German method, by contrast, allowed lifters to rest the barbell on their waists/bent knees, and drag it up to the chest before pressing it with considerable backbend. For fans of strength sports, we call this method the ‘continental’ clean.
It is very difficult to find video footage of the French method but the below video is a good approximation for what we need here
The other issue came down to one-handed pressing. Under the French method, a one-arm press was straightforward. You picked a dumbbell or barbell up with one hand, brought it up towards the clavicle, and then pressed it overhead. The Germans, however, had little care for such niceties. German pressing allowed lifters to lift the dumbbell from the ground with two hands, reposition it and then, finally press overhead with one hand.
Who Cares?
Apart from a more general concern about the aesthetics of a lift, the German method allowed athletes to lift far heavier weights than the French method. This is easily understood – it simply allowed far more lee-way than a focus on strict form ever word.
Returning to the Lost World Schödl explained that debates concerning these two methods dominated weightlifting prior to 1914. So stubborn that European associations become that it was common for world championships to have different rules from one year to the next depending on the host’s preferences. It wasn’t until 1928, when Olympic weightlifting standardized around the clean and press, clean and jerk and snatch, that consensus was reached. While Olympic weightlifting arguably went the way of the French, later strongman and strongwoman contests adopted more continental rules to encourage heavier feats of strength.
Returning to my council of elders meeting on the deadlift. Does form matter? A key distinction between the professional and the amateur is often the grace that the professional completes their task. Thor pulled 500 kilograms from the floor with relative ease, I make a quarter of that look like a Herculean struggle on a bad day. Should we be strength purists, policing the lifts of anyone who dares to lift like a German? Or should we embrace raw numbers and the pursuit of power?
The answer, I suspect, lies somewhere in the middle.
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