The Strongest Men in Britain Didn’t Train the Same Way

Most people in the gym today are looking for the answer. The program, the split, the system that finally works. A hundred years ago, Britain’s strongest men had already encountered that problem and, in effect, ignored it.

In How to Use a Barbell (1925), William A. Pullum, a coach, promoter, and a central organiser of early twentieth-century British weightlifting, set out to explain how strength was built. He wrote not as a theorist but as a man embedded in a small, competitive world where strength was demonstrated on platforms, in music halls, and in front of paying audiences. Pullum himself was known as the ‘wizard of weightlifting’, a smaller athlete who was capable of pushing incredible amounts of weight overhead with seeming ease.

His book promised clarity for beginners faced with ‘so many and various kinds of advice’, but the most interesting part of the book did something else entirely. It recorded how his own experienced lifters trained.

These were not casual trainees. Arthur Verge, T. W. Clarke, and C. V. Wheeler belonged to a cohort of competitive and performing strongmen whose reputations depended on repeated, public displays of strength. Training primarily at the Camberwell club in London, they were muscular, lean and well known within British weightlifting and physical culture. Their methods mattered because they were so different. In trying to simplify training for beginners, Pullum inadvertently revealed something else entirely: at the upper end of the sport, training was not a system but a set of individual solutions!

What They Actually Did

Verge’s training, as Pullum presents it, rests on regular practice across a range of movements, with strength built gradually rather than tested intermittently. He trained five nights a week for close to a year, putting in two hours a session, working across the fundamental lifts rather than specialising in any single direction. The emphasis falls on repetition and continuation; exercises are not abandoned once learned but returned to, extended, and layered. Pullum notes that Verge paid a lot of attention to the ‘fundamental’ lifts and records an actual training table in which seven movements are practised across twelve weeks, each with its own starting repetitions and scale of increase. Strength here is something accumulated rather than chased.

Clarke and Wheeler represent a different assumption entirely. Both joined the Camberwell Club at seventeen with one ambition — to become as strong as possible — and both built their training around the lifts the B.A.W.L.A. nominated for its Annual Championships. Pullum is explicit about this: Clarke ‘only really concentrated on those lifts which the B.A.W.L.A. nominated,’ and Wheeler’s training, Pullum writes, ‘ran on very similar lines.’ Where Verge distributed effort across movements, Clarke and Wheeler concentrated it. Time was directed toward fewer lifts, pursued with heavier loads and decreasing repetitions as the weights climbed. Wheeler’s 1920 championship preparation table gives a sense of how this looked in practice: the Two Hands Dead Lift starts at 400 lbs for six repetitions, performed in quick succession, the bell brought from floor to hang position without ever resting on the knees.

Placed side by side, the difference is not stylistic but structural. Verge builds broadly over time, returning again and again to a wide range of movements. Clarke and Wheeler build by narrowing — selecting the lifts that matter competitively and driving the weight up through them. Both approaches produce men strong enough to be held up as exemplars within Pullum’s world.

What That Actually Means

The variation here is not decorative. It reflects the fact that early twentieth-century strength culture did not operate with a single, agreed-upon pathway to development. Within a small network of lifters, working with similar implements and often under the same coach, different assumptions about training coexisted in practice.

Pullum recognises the surface of this problem when he notes the confusion facing beginners, but his attempt to resolve it into a coherent system is undercut by his own examples. The divergence is not a misunderstanding. It is practice.

Seen this way, Pullum’s book stops reading like a system and starts reading like a record of emphasis. Verge privileges continuation and accumulation. Clarke and Wheeler privilege selection and load. Each builds strength, but each leaves something out. You can see it clearly once you start looking.

The high-volume lifter who never learns to strain. The specialist who, as Pullum wrote of Wheeler, was ‘a much more wonderful lifter than the record lists have ever indicated’ — all that strength, and so little of it ever formally proved. The competitor who peaks for championships but has nothing left when the demands change.

Pullum’s lifters, intentionally or not, avoided that trap. Not because they shared a system, but because they embodied different ones.

Closing

Pullum set out to clarify strength training for a confused readership and, in doing so, preserved something more useful than a system. His lifters do not resolve into a single method or progression. They remain distinct, shaped by different priorities and sustained by results visible enough to matter in their own time.

Strength doesn’t come from finding the perfect system. It comes from knowing what your system leaves out.