What I Learned About Lifting in 2024

My ‘new year’ starts a lot earlier than most. While many will count January 1st as the dawn of a new year, I usually see August 1st as my new beginning. Teachers, lecturers, and parents, will know my pain. As an adult, who has never truly left the education system, my sense of time is rigidly fixed by academic years. But I am also keenly aware that for those in the ‘real world,’ January 1st marked the end of 2024 and the beginning of 2025.

As I continue to research an article on the history of the bodybuilding.com forum, I wanted to quickly pause and reflect on three new things I learned about the history of physical culture and fitness in 2024. Think of them less as life lessons – and to be frank, if you rely on me for life lessons there are bigger issues – and rather some curios you can share during sets.

Eugen Sandow, and not Pitbull, was Mr. Worldwide

A dated reference to a 2010s singer? Conor you do surpass yourself.

Eugen Sandow is typically viewed as the world’s first bodybuilding star. The Prussian strongman travelled around the world, hosted a major bodybuilding show in 1901, and was seen by countless men as the perfect physique. None of this was new to me, and if you want to learn more, David Chapman and David Waller have written wonderful Sandow biographies. If you are not the reading sort, you probably didn’t make it this far, but Rogue Fitness also has a free Sandow documentary.

What was new to me was the scope of Sandow’s fame. I had always assumed that Sandow’s products were sold in the British Empire and also North America where Sandow had toured in the 1890s. I have just submitted the first draft of a book on global fitness patterns in the nineteenth century where I learned, remarkably, that Sandow products were also sold in South America and in Japan during the early 1900s! Why this matters is that Sandow never toured these countries and they fell outside the vast network of the British Empire (at least formally).

What this tells us is that Sandow’s popularity was even more widespread than we typically discuss in the Western world and his fame even more impressive. It also hints that our ideas about the perfect male body (inspired by Sandow) were more similar than not during the early 1900s. This is something Sebastian Conrad wrote on some years ago.

History Can Be Revived

This has little to do with me and everything to do with my good friend David Keohan. David, whose story has been featured in GQ magazine, Reuters, the Irish Times, and a host of other outlets, has spent the past few years traveling Ireland and finding historic stones of strength. Thus far he has laid claim to several dozen stones, some of which can be found on this map.

Using a variety of sources from oral histories to poems and biographies, as well as online materials, David has breathed new life into a type of strength that has been ignored within Ireland. More importantly, there has been such amazing ‘buy in’ from others. What started as David’s lone journey has evolved into innumerable Irish and foreign stone lifters taking an interest in this culture.

2024 was a real high point for Irish stone lifting which, to be clear, was not being practiced as recently as 2021. That, quite frankly, is magical.

We Need to Talk about Fitness Influencing

Hot take Conor am I right? In September 2024 YouTube announced that it would be restricting fitness content for users under the age of 16. They have yet to specify what this will entail, and also why it is needed, but to me it is a sign of something very worrying. Research is unequivocal that social media brings harm to users. And I understand the irony of writing that on a website that the majority of people are reading on their smartphones.

I am currently studying the history and evolution of fitness influencers (and also offering a potentially funded PhD to join me!). Before the internet your knowledge about lifting typically came from one of three sources: friends/family, books/magazines and the strongest person in your gym. What wonderfully ignorant days they were eh? Nowadays we have innumerable fitness influencers that you can access instantly.

If I type something niche into social media (hello deficit deadlifts), I am met with innumerable videos from experts teaching me what to do. There is a real problem in online fitness media concerning expertise. When speaking with students I am often shocked by how often the younger generation speaks to me about periodization, reps in reserve, and optimization. Many of them follow highly structured and set routines which is wonderful but so few of them speak about enjoyment anymore. Honestly, it often feels soulless and a numbers game as they tell me about the perfect program they now use.

That is the ‘old man yells at cloud’ element done. The more important piece is that anabolic steroid use continues to be on the rise in the Western world and many authorities are citing alarming trends in younger demographics. These are teenagers, driven to impossible body images, thanks to social media. This isn’t new – I truly believed Cell-Tech Hardcore would turn me into Ronnie Coleman as a youngster – but the accessibility of steroids online has made the problem worse.

I have nothing against steroids. If I did I couldn’t enjoy any bodybuilding or strength show ever. But I am worried about how readily they are now being used. Coming full circle, YouTube’s announcement suggests that the social media platform is aware that fitness content may encourage harmful behaviors from drug use to body dysmorphia. So watch this space in 2025.

Simplicity Makes Me a Happy Panda

Mama told me when I was young
“Come sit beside me, my only son
And listen closely to what I say
And if you do this it’ll help you
Some sunny day

Oh, yeah

Oh, take your time, don’t live too fast
Troubles will come and they will pass

You’ll find a woman, yeah, and you’ll find love
And don’t forget son there is someone up above

And be a simple kind of man
Oh, be something you love and understand
Baby, be a simple kind of man
Oh, won’t you do this for me son, if you can?

Lynyrd Skynyrd nailed it in the 1970s with their iconic song Simple Man. Strip everything back and focus on what matters. When I began lifting as a teenager, everything was complicated. High sets, high volume, blasting, blitzing, shredding, tearing etc. During my 20s it was about strength and periodization, sub-maximal lifting, and pushing my 1rm over time. Now, at the ripe (!) old age of 33, I have drastically simplified my training and diet.

Some of this is by necessity. I am a father and I have a full-time job. I don’t have the time, or recovery ability, to spend countless hours in the gym. Some of this is also the result of a decade-plus of training. I trained to excesses previously so I now have enough solid reps in my past. But some of this is just a shift in focus. I train four days a week, focusing on a main lift each time (squat, bench, deadlift, press), and my dietary advice follows Dan John’s suggestion of protein, veggies, and water.

History helps in this regard as well. In particular, I think about individuals like John Hise and Mark Berry who stressed the importance of hard work and consistency when promoting 20 rep squats in the 1930s. The goal, quite simply, was to take a small group of exercises and work them to perfection. They weren’t unique either. One can look at Reg Park’s famous 5×5 program or John McCallum’s Keys to Progress book which always promoted a small selection of exercises. There is a time for specialization and a time for complication. I have just found a great deal of my enjoyment this year came from simplifying programs and keeping things basic.

Random Media Which Brought Me Joy

It has been a great year for physical culture books, documentaries, and podcasts, as well as forums. Jarrett Hulse’s Ironhistory.com forum continues to be a joy, as does the Stark Center’s Strongman Project. This is to say nothing of Barbell Films, Golden Era Bookworm, and others doing some amazing work in online spaces. Offline I have enjoyed the following books and podcasts immensely

1) Broderick Chow’s Muscle Works. This is a new book from Dr. Broderick Chow which is one part history of physical culture, one part theatre studies of strength and one part personal story about lifting. Broderick is one of my favorite academic authors and this book is just a joy. In it, Broderick neatly argues for the need to understand early strongmen and women from the lense of professional theatre. He also neatly shows the meaning, and often contradictions, lifting has had in his own life

2) Natalia Mehlman Petrzela’s Extreme: Muscle Men podcast. Petrzela wrote a wonderful book, Fit Nation, some years ago, and this latest podcast is a study of 1980s bodybuilding. I won’t spoil it, but it is a wonderful eight-episode series that focuses on the growing steroid trade, muscledom in 1980s America, and Reagan’s War on Drugs.

3) The continued growth of strongman/strongwoman activities. The Arnold and Shaw strength shows, in particular, were really great spectacles this year. The social media and broadcasting was great as always, despite some questionable decisions (but we can have that conversation offline)

Hopes for 2025

I am getting soft and sentimental but my biggest hope is to continue writing and producing media on this website. Look, I get it. Social media like TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube have far bigger platforms, and many people use these platforms to spread fitness history. I prefer long-form writing and it is a great pleasure to see people in those spaces referencing this website. I love the chance to speak to readers through this website, write long-form articles, and indulge in some of the weird and wonderful thoughts I have about fitness. That’ll continue for another year as we enter our 11th (!) year of writing.

Outside of this website, I have just submitted a draft manuscript to my publisher. All going well, this will become a published book on nineteenth-century fitness. Specifically, it will examine how fitness became globalised during this period. Now submitted, I am going back to my book on women’s Olympic weightlifting in the United States. So watch this space!

Finally, I hope to continue training pain-free and get stronger. Walk, breathe deeply, and lift intently. There will be plenty of historical writing and ranting but, taking my advice, I’ll keep it simple.

As always… Happy Lifting!