When Did Fitness Become So Boring?

There’s a problem in fitness that no one wants to contend with. It’s not steroids, and it’s certainly not predatory supplement sellers. Nor is it overpriced gym memberships. The problem, my dear friends, is boredom.

The greatest religious movie ever made, Monty Python’s Life of Brian, sums this up quite well. Begging, nay pleading people to think for themselves, the would-be religious leader Brian tells a mass of people that they are all individuals. Their response? Chanting in unison ‘we are all individuals.’

If you’re of a certain vintage, you will remember joining a gym and not knowing your ass from your elbow. Sure you likely read the Weider mags, or maybe had the fortitude to ask the biggest dude for help but, by and large, a lot of us had to rely on experimenting and playing around in the gym. This beautiful rite of passage, often called ‘dicking-around itis’ is, in my view, what fitness used to be about.

It was play and creativity which helped push Paul Anderson, one of the strongest men in the world, to dig a hole in his back garden to improve his squat.

Who was Paul Anderson?

Paul Anderson is, hands down, one of the strongest men to ever walk on the planet. If he was born 2,000 years ago, there’s a good chance we would have tomb drawings of a portly strongman squatting dinosaurs with logs on his back. Born in Georgia, USA, in 1932, Anderson was a weightlifter, strongman, proto-powerlifter and occasional wrestler.

The problem for Anderson was that powerlifting, as a sport, did not exist in 1950s America. At that time, the only game in town was Olympic weightlifting, then contested through the clean and press, snatch and clean and jerk. Anderson became one of its dominant heavyweights, winning Olympic gold in Melbourne in 1956.

He also, in stereotypical Cold War terms, gave the ‘pesky’ Russians what for. Alongside other American weightlifting legends Tommy Kono, Chuck Vinci and Stan Stanczyk, Anderson went on a weightlifting tour of the USSR where Anderson out-pressed Soviet champion Alexey Medvedev by more than 70 lbs.

After his gold medal in Melbourne, where he competed with a high fever, Anderson turned professional. What this meant, in practice, was that he began to do paid strength shows like a showman. At that time, Olympic weightlifters were required to be amateur, i.e. unpaid, athletes. Thus, from 1956, Anderson traded the Olympic lifts for a steady diet of powerlifts, and outlandish challenges like his Silver Dollar Squat challenge at the Mapes Hotel in Reno, Nevada.

Anderson, reportedly (and it is subject to scrutiny) squatted a barbell loaded with two safes filled with silver dollar coins weighing between 900 lb to 1200 lbs.. If you did it, you won $15,000. Surprisingly, no one cashed in.

So the Shovel….

At this point there’s two massive things to say about Anderson. He was, by all accounts, steroid-free, thus laying claim, alongside older strongman Louis Cyr, of being a genuine, bona fide freak of nature. The second is that the 1950s and 1960s were a period when the strength world had not yet fully standardised. What I mean by this is that while people largely trained with barbells, and dumbbells, gyms and machines, not to mention strength programs, differed greatly from place to place. Many lifters, even the champions, simply had to experiment more.

This is why Anderson’s contemporary, Tommy Kono, advised Olympic weightlifters to run a series of bodybuilding workouts after a meet to ‘freshen up,’ advice that would send shock in today’s app-reliant lifters. Bob Peoples (who trained Anderson early in his career), deadlifted over 700 lbs thanks to his training with a wooden barbell that he loaded with stones from a quarry. Heck, this was the time when many lifters used the ‘hopper deadlift’, in effect a bouncing deadlift from blocks, to improve their pull. It wasn’t the wild west, by any means, but fitness looked different.

That brings us to Paul Anderson, and the hole. Training on his farm in Georgia, Anderson mixed a steady dose of regular weight training with the kind of strongman-adjacent exhibitions his performance career demanded.

On a mission to increase his squat numbers, Anderson dug a hole in the ground, grabbed two large barrels, connected them and got to work, as you can see in the above photo (note the women were not regular features). Once Anderson felt that his power had increased, he filled in the hole a little bit more, thereby increasing his range of motion. For modern lifters this is effectively a pin squat designed to overcome sticking points. Anderson credited his landscaping squat with helping build the power needed to handle his silver-dollar challenge with style.

Should We Get to Digging?

No, unless you have an extremely patient gym owner or landlord in your life. But you should get to thinking.

In 1983 George Ritzer published a great paper on the ‘McDonaldization’ of modern life. The gist of his paper was that society had begun to model itself on the creepy clown and its burger franchise. More and more businesses were looking to become ‘efficient’ and ‘rational’ in their production process, as were consumers. Life was becoming less about creativity and more about results which could be produced the world over without nuance. This was obviously part of a longer trend in capitalism (Henry Ford and his black Model-Ts being one example) but it was the scale of McDonaldization that concerned Ritzer.

Because fitness has McDonaldized too. We respond to the sheer volume of information available to us by clinging to the security of a programme or an app someone else built, something predictable, portable and optimised. We have more data about training than any generation in history and, I suspect, less permission to experiment. None of that is bad, mind. Dan John has a wonderful saying that if you coach yourself, your coach has an idiot for a client, and following the footsteps of people smarter than us is a genuine path to progress. The trouble is when the spreadsheet stops being a tool and becomes a cage.

Where I think we have over-corrected from the days of Joe Weider publishing made up bodybuilding routines from Mr. Olympias, is in following slavishly from one program to the next. I’ll never forget a great Mark Bell anecdote about his ‘sling-shot’ invention (not an official plug although incidentally it saved my bench press). Mark recalled lifters telling him they were so excited to try it but they couldn’t because it would mess up their programming. They were so wedded to their spreadsheets that they couldn’t ‘risk’ moving off course.

Fitness, outside of elite competition, should be fun. Fun, in my idiot’s estimation, is about spontaneity, creativity and plain stupidity. That is what keeps things fresh, keeps the body engaged and keeps us a little more humble about how ‘important’ our workout is.

I’ve yet to dig a hole in my garden, largely because the previous owners put down artificial grass; the spirit of Anderson’s creativity is something I turn to whenever I hit a plateau, or plain boredom in my training. How about back extensions with a safety bar squat? Bear hugging a sandbag and walking around my garden? Walking lunges to failure? Clapping pull-ups. Periodized training programs remain the core of what I do but these movements remind me that humans don’t always need to be rational.

We are all individuals, after all. Might as well train like one.