You’ve heard this story a thousand times. Ancient Greek wrestler Milo of Croton invented progressive overload by carrying a calf every day until it grew into a bull—the first gym bro to crack the code of getting stronger by gradually increasing the load.
It’s all over Instagram fitness posts, repeated by influencers and treated as gospel in every beginner’s guide to strength training. The story is neat, intuitive, and gives modern lifting culture the ancient pedigree it desperately craves.
There’s just one problem: it’s complete bullshit.
Well, not complete bullshit. Milo was real, and he was genuinely one of history’s most legendary athletes. But the progressive overload story? That tells us way more about modern fitness anxiety than ancient training methods.
Here’s what actually happened. Milo of Croton was a real historical figure, active in the late sixth century BCE and genuinely one of the most celebrated athletes of the ancient world, with multiple Olympic victories in wrestling. But when ancient writers like Pausanias and Athenaeus wrote about him, they weren’t interested in his training methods. They wanted to tell stories about spectacle and excess.
Pausanias focused on Milo’s party tricks—standing on a greased discus, holding a pomegranate without crushing it—and his eventual death when his hands got trapped in a split tree trunk. Athenaeus presented Milo as the ultimate glutton who could carry a four-year-old bull around the Olympic stadium and then eat the entire thing in one sitting. These guys were writing about a legendary figure of wonder and moral drama, not documenting workout routines.
The actual sources never mention a systematic calf-to-bull training program. That story appears in later retellings, but it’s presented as another example of Milo’s freakish strength, not as a method you could follow. Ancient athletes definitely understood training progression—archaeological evidence shows they used graduated training methods and seasonal periodization. But they kept that knowledge practical and local, embedded in coach-athlete relationships, not written down as universal principles that fitness influencers could quote for content.
The real transformation of Milo from legendary strongman to exercise science pioneer happens much later, and for reasons that have everything to do with modern insecurities.
The Renaissance revival of classical antiquity did little to shift this framing. Artists and humanists were fascinated by Milo, but primarily as an opportunity to explore the muscular male body and the moral drama of hubris. Woodcuts attributed to Titian’s workshop and later sculptures by figures such as Pierre Puget depict Milo straining against the tree that traps him, moments before his death. These images belong to a wider visual culture concerned with anatomy, proportion, and the tragic consequences of overreaching. Milo becomes a vehicle for thinking about the limits of the body, not about how to programme its development.
Here’s where it gets interesting. The fitness industry’s obsession with Milo explodes in the late 1800s and early 1900s, right when modern strength training is becoming a commercial enterprise. This isn’t coincidental—it’s driven by a very specific kind of cultural panic.
Picture this: industrialization is moving men away from physical labor and into office jobs. Middle-class guys are suddenly worried they’re going soft, losing their masculine edge to desk work and urban living. Sound familiar? It’s the same anxiety driving today’s “return to traditional masculinity” content and biohacking trends.
Classical antiquity offered the perfect solution. Ancient Greece and Rome weren’t just civilizations—they were brands representing peak physical development and authentic manhood. If you could claim your barbell system or training method was actually rediscovering ancient wisdom, you weren’t selling something new and untested. You were offering timeless truths about human strength that had somehow been forgotten.
The past became a marketing tool. Ancient bodies became advertisements for modern anxieties.
By the 1880s, you start seeing Milo pop up in exercise manuals as historical backing for whatever system the author is selling. But the smoking gun comes in 1925 with a publication by the Milo Bar-Bell Company of Philadelphia. They literally publish an essay called “The Originator of the Progressive System” that presents Milo as the inventor of progressive exercise—carrying that calf daily as it grows into a bull, unknowingly applying the principle of gradual overload.
This is the moment. Milo stops being a legendary wrestler and becomes the founding father of scientific training. The ancient story gets completely reorganized around modern fitness obsessions: consistency, incremental load increases, disciplined self-improvement.
And it’s happening in an advertisement. The Milo Bar-Bell Company isn’t just selling equipment—they’re selling a connection to an imagined Greek golden age where men were naturally strong and noble. Milo becomes a brand ambassador for barbells, posthumously endorsing a training system that wouldn’t exist for another 2,500 years.
From there, the story just snowballs. Mid-twentieth-century exercise science formalizes “progressive resistance exercise” and gives it scientific vocabulary, but the Milo narrative is already baked into popular fitness culture. Coaching manuals and educational materials routinely present him as the ancient predecessor to modern training methods. The legend gets woven into a neat story where current training science appears as the natural evolution of classical wisdom.
But here’s what’s actually striking about this whole thing: it’s not that the Milo story is wrong. Myths have always changed and been repurposed—that’s what myths do. What’s remarkable is how perfectly Milo’s legend has been reshaped to serve modern training ideology. Think about it: Ancient sources gave us spectacle, excess, and moral drama. Renaissance artists gave us anatomy and the consequences of hubris. Modern fitness culture turned Milo into a training manual. The calf became a barbell. The bull became progressive loading. Antiquity became a mirror reflecting exactly the historical legitimacy that modern gym culture wanted to claim.
The real irony? This whole retrofitting project actually obscures how ancient athletes really approached training. By turning Milo into a proto-scientist, we lose sight of how Greek and Roman athletes actually understood their bodies and development—as practical knowledge embedded in specific social and cultural contexts, not as universal systems waiting for scientific validation.
Every time someone on Instagram uses Milo to explain progressive overload, they’re not sharing ancient wisdom. They’re participating in a story that says more about our need to feel connected to something timeless and proven than it does about how people actually got strong 2,500 years ago.
Milo didn’t invent progressive overload. We invented Milo as its inventor. And honestly? That’s probably the more interesting story.
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Progressive overload is one of the systems capable of increasing strength and perhaps the worst of them. Don Athaldo, a strongman from New South Wales, Australia in the 1930s and 40s, standing only 1.63m tall and weighing 66 kg, carried a platform and a car on his back for three meters, with a total weight of 1 ton. He held the central axis of a carousel upright and rotated it, with a total weight of one ton. He pushed a car with six passengers up an avenue in Sydney for 800 meters of continuous and gentle incline. Don Athaldo never used the progressive overload method, mainly because he didn’t lift weights, use barbells, plates, machines, cables, or resistance bands; he never went to gyms and never used any substance capable of increasing muscle performance. He was a profound connoisseur of the culture, diet, and training methods of ancient Greece. I have been following this path for 51 years, learning about Greek culture, diet, and training methods, as well as Indian and Japanese methods. The Athaldo system is undoubtedly one of the methods I incorporate into my routine.
Funnily as a younger lifter I would have entirely disagreed with you and shouted something about periodization. Now older, and humbler (!), I agree entirely that there are so many ways up the mountain top. What I ignored as a historian was that older strongmen and women treated strength like practice as opposed to working out. George Hackenschmidt famously said in later life that he never worked out, only practiced. I know people like to critique Jim Wendler’s 531 workout but I’ve run it for several years now and his emphasis on lighter weights, executed perfectly, has gradually built up strength in a way linear progression never did
The question shouldn’t how to develop progressive strength through external means, but how to find this strength already existing within oneself. Through methods that don’t use weights, machines, cables, barbells, iron bars, benches and other paraphernalia, a person will have a better chance of doing so. All the means I mentioned above cause a person to get lost amidst external things and lead them to believe that the solution lies outside of themselves. Thus, they place all their expectations not on their own potential, but on artificial elements that will generate “magical powers” and transform them into a strongman. Isometric exercises, to cite an example, are one of the methods that aims to increase internal potential and mental and physical strength. But what does this method demand other than your own leverage, concentration, breathing, technique, and ways of applying force and counterforce? What kind of progressive training did Alexander Zass use? Instead of looking inward and discovering that their bodies are complete and equipped with the tools capable of generating strength and development; instead of being self-sufficient, people are tempted by external illusions and hypnotized by the innovations of increasingly sophisticated devices, machines, treadmills, and gyms, which increasingly cause them to run away from themselves. Exercise should be a path to self-knowledge and contemplation or meditation. The increase in inner strength occurs not through the progressive increase of load, but when we slowly RECHARGE our cells to generate an increase in nervous energy. This energy is stored and can be transformed into work. Strength is nothing more than the energy stored in our cells and nerves transformed into work. Atlas, another who did not use external means, spoke of increasing magnetism, of personal energy. But how many who frequent a “gym” think about increasing personal magnetism or self-confidence? They are all dependent on external means, robotic, hypnotized, and many are drug users (steroids). I’ve told you so much about Athaldo and it seems you’ve never heard of him. I have some very interesting material about him that is no longer available on the internet. And it can be found on one of my Facebook pages titled “Curso de ginástica espartana online” (Online Spartan Gymnastics Course) Macfadden, Zishe Breitbart, Atlas, Greenstein, Liederman, Athlado and Zass were all strongmen. With the exception of Zass, who wore a chain, what did the others use if not their own means and absolute belief in their own potential (what we also know as faith)?
Thank you for sharing this. It is an interesting line of thought and one that surfaces repeatedly in the history of physical culture. The tension between internal development and external apparatus is not new. In fact, one could say it has been present since the late nineteenth century when gymnasiums began to fill with increasingly specialised equipment.
Many of the figures you mention wrestled with exactly this issue. Bernarr Macfadden, for example, regularly warned readers of Physical Culture not to become dependent on elaborate machinery. He certainly sold exercise devices, but he also insisted that the essential elements of strength were discipline, breathing, posture, and what he often called “vital force.” Charles Atlas made a similar claim in his dynamic tension system, arguing that resistance generated by one’s own body could build strength without heavy apparatus. Even earlier systems of calisthenics and “free exercises” were built on the assumption that the body itself provided sufficient resistance for meaningful development.
At the same time, the historical record suggests that most strongmen were somewhat more eclectic than their rhetoric implied. George Hackenschmidt trained with weights, as did Arthur Saxon and many of the European strength athletes of the late nineteenth century. Macfadden himself occasionally incorporated light apparatus in demonstrations. Alexander Zass is an especially interesting case because, while he became famous for isometric chain training, he also worked extensively with animals, bars, and various forms of resistance during his circus career. In other words, the divide between internal and external methods was often less absolute in practice than in theory.
The philosophical dimension you describe—strength as a form of inner cultivation or self-knowledge—was also quite common in early physical culture writing. Many authors framed exercise as a way to develop character, willpower, and confidence rather than simply muscle. The language of “personal magnetism” that Atlas used fits neatly into that tradition. At the same time, other practitioners were more comfortable treating strength as a mechanical problem of progressive overload. Both approaches have long coexisted, sometimes uneasily.
Your reference to Athaldo is intriguing. I must confess that I have only encountered the name in passing and do not know his work in detail. If you have material on him that is difficult to find elsewhere, I would certainly be interested in seeing it. The history of physical culture is full of figures who briefly appeared, influenced a small circle of followers, and then disappeared from the mainstream record. Recovering those voices is often one of the more rewarding parts of this research.
In the end, I suspect the debate between internal cultivation and external apparatus will never fully disappear. Each generation seems to rediscover it in its own way. What remains constant is the desire to understand where strength actually comes from, whether that is framed in physiological, psychological, or even philosophical terms!
Please let me have an e-mail in order to send you many links concerning Athaldo information. Bye, now.
Oh awesome thank you Igal! heffercp@tcd.ie
Hello, Conor, it’s been a while. I note that there are two versions of the death of Milo after he got his arm trapped in the split stump. One is that a pack of wolves got him, the other is that a lion was the predator. In the latter case, Milo would have to have been far afield from his usual haunts in southern Italy. When exactly lions became extinct in southern Europe (southeastern Europe, anyway) is kind of an open question. Some students of the matter believe lions may have survived in the Balkans until the time of the Crusades. Interesting how such disparate fields as bodybuilding and paleontology can intersect!
Please keep up the good work, my friend!
Jan it has been a moment. How are you my friend? So so lovely to hear back from you! I haven’t encountered the Lion story. You are very much my resident classical expert. How does my reading of Milo’s classical feats hold up? I tried for hours to find an antiquity story about him carrying the bull daily with no luck
It’s good to be back in touch with you. I have always wondered about the bull story. Bulls are notoriously irascible and somewhat dangerous beasts. In fact, feral cattle have become something of a public menace in certain parts of California. There is some talk of bringing grizzly bears back to California. Perhaps they and the wild bulls can sort each other out!
William Lindsay Gresham in his delightful little tome “The Book of Strength” that was intended for pubescent boys interested in commencing weight training suggested that the bulls of Milo’s era may have been smaller than modern cattle and he may have had an exceptionally docile bull calf. However, the bulls on Cretan friezes look pretty enormous. Admittedly, these were painted centuries before Milo’s era.
Gresham’s story had a sad ending. His wife Joy left him to go live with the famed Oxbridge scholar and Christian apologist C.S. Lewis. Lewis knew Joy had cancer when she shacked up with him. Gresham killed himself. Joy died. Acceptance of death was a big part of Lewis’ “shtick” in his writings, but he took her death very hard. I have known many godless pagans who accepted the loss of loved ones with more equaniminity and philosophy than Lewis expressed in “A Grief Observed.” Lewis’ demise occurred on November 22, 1963, the same day my future father in law’s old college roommate Jack Kennedy was assasinated. I was on cordial terms with Fr. Michael Watts, the priest who gave Lewis extreme unction. It’s a small world, isn’t it?
Anyway, I sincerely hope we can resume our correspondence on a more regular basis.
With all best wishes,
Jan
It is very good to hear from you again. I must admit the bull story has always puzzled me as well. Anyone who has spent even a little time around cattle knows they are not exactly the most predictable creatures, and the idea of casually carrying one around a field does strain the imagination somewhat. Your point about feral cattle made me laugh, though the image of grizzly bears and wild bulls settling matters between themselves might be slightly too exciting for the Californian authorities.
Gresham’s suggestion about a smaller or unusually docile calf makes a certain amount of sense. The classical story of Milo works beautifully as a parable about progressive overload, but like many ancient anecdotes it probably passed through several layers of embellishment before reaching us. The Minoan bull-leaping frescoes certainly suggest impressive animals, though, as you note, they belong to a much earlier world. It would not be the first time that later storytellers borrowed imagery from older traditions and folded it into a familiar moral tale.
The Gresham story is a sad one, and the triangle involving Joy Davidman and C. S. Lewis has always struck me as a rather tragic episode in literary history. Lewis’s A Grief Observed is a fascinating document precisely because it strips away the calm philosophical voice many people associate with him and replaces it with something much more raw. Whether one agrees with his theology or not, it reads like a man genuinely struggling to reconcile belief with loss. The coincidence of his death on the same day as Kennedy’s assassination is one of those strange historical footnotes that always surprises people when they first hear it.
Your connection to Fr. Michael Watts is another reminder of how small the intellectual world can sometimes feel. The number of unexpected personal links that appear when one follows these stories is always remarkable.
I would be delighted to resume our correspondence more regularly. Conversations like these are far too enjoyable to let lapse for long!