The Strange Comfort of Squatober

This month I spent €57 on a Squatober T-shirt. That is objectively too much to spend on a T-shirt with a squatting pumpkin on it. Annoyingly, I have spent years looking at these T-shirts, convincing myself that I needed to buy one. I eventually bit the bullet and paid for international postage and duties… all in the name of a whimsical T-shirt.

 

For those unaware, Squatober is exactly what the name implies. Every October, lifters follow a squat-heavy program designed by strength coach Aaron Ausmus and Sorinex, an equipment manufacturer in the US who I would very much classify as a ‘lifter’s manufacturer.’ Workouts are given online, people record their sessions, and, at the end of the month, everyone tries to hit a new PR in the squat. Overseeing this is the ‘Squatfather’ Ausmus and, as I type this out, I understand it sounds like a cult.

But this ‘knee-bending medicine’ is inherently silly and inherently fun. It helps Sorinex sell shirts and belts to people like me (who should know better) and it gives people something to look forward to. The funny thing is that there is obviously nothing special about October. You could do the same thing in March with, I suspect, similar results. But the whole thing has now become a tradition and a ritual for a noticeable number of people online.

For me though it speaks to the importance of challenges in fitness. Training, as a collective, often involves too much choice. Which program? Okay after 12 weeks what do I do? What is the RPE? The tempo? The exercise selection? Should I push today or back off? Do I take pre-workout or not? Am I wearing belts and sleeves or doing without? Challenges remove some of these artificial constraints we place on our training. Instead they give you a hard, and short-lived, rule. Your choice is whether or not you want to abide by it.

Strength culture has, of course, been doing this for a very long time.

The Original Strength Challenge

Go back one hundred years and chances are that heavy squatting would have looked much stranger than it does now. During the 1920s German immigrant to the US, Henry Steinborn, became famous for squatting with his feet flat on the ground. Before then squatting was typically done on your tippy-toes, with the heels elevated. As anyone who has tried to balance will tell you, that isn’t exactly a movement to load with hundreds of pounds.

So, in a time before squat racks existed, Steinborn used a mixture of physics and stupidity to get a heavy barbell across his back. He loaded the barbell, tipped it onto one side, crouched underneath it and levered the thing across his shoulders. Archimedes is attributed as saying ‘Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.’ Chances are he didn’t have Steinborn in mind but the principle still holds.

Steinborn’s workaround captured the American strength world including fitness writer and one-time coach of the men’s Olympic weightlifting team, Mark Berry. During the 1920s and 1930s Berry began to write passionately about the importance of heavy, flat-footed squatting which would build ‘husky men.’ In time Berry began to recommend high-rep high weight back squatting combined with copious amounts of calories to build people’s bodies. This marked the birth of the ‘breathing squat’ program. You took a weight you could squat ten times and, taking deep, belly, breaths between reps, push the rep count to twenty reps, if not higher.

One of Berry’s readers was an Illinois man named Joseph Curtis Hise. He experimented with this ‘breathing squat’ and, as lifters often do, made it much worse. Hise transformed his body, became a minor celebrity in the strength world and wrote enthusiastically to both Berry, and Peary Rader of Iron Man magazine, about his results. Rader later wrote about first reading Hise’s report in a February 1932 edition of The Strong Man. Next thing he knew, he was under a heavy barbell.

The Berry/Hise system was not complicated. You squatted hard, three times a week, drank milk and ate A LOT. Rader later wrote that Hise ate salt pork partly because the salt made him thirsty and hence, he could drink more milk… and who says meat heads can’t be scientists eh?

Hise claimed to have put on 29 pounds in a single month on this system, and at this point we should stress that ‘husky’ men had both muscles and a decent amount of bodyfat. Rader likewise gained significant mass using Berry’s system, as did countless other men who reported to Berry that the program was damn near miraculous. By the end of the 1930s, heavy breathing squats were a recurring part of American strength culture.

What’s in a Number?

Berry’s heavy breathing squats, and a short-lived effort by Rader to promote heavy breathing deadlifts, was based around the number 20. 20 reps, hard fought for and done regularly. The number twenty is, obviously, an arbitrary line in the sand. There is no law, in this world or the next, which says that seventeen heavy reps is failure. Or that 21 is somehow better than 20. 20, however, began the rule and because of that, anything less was deemed as wrong. It became tradition.

J.C. Hise showing off his Husky results

When I was a young, stupidly eager, undergraduate, I read everything I could find on fitness and also on why people play. The two seemed to go hand in hand. Why did people train in certain ways and why, oftentimes, did people divide themselves into camps about what was right and what was wrong? This is probably why Bernard Suits’ definition of a game, from the 1960s, has come back into my consciousness.

Suits described game-playing as the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles. Rules deliberately make things harder and less efficient but you accept that inconvenience because without them there would be no game. As an aside quoting Suits to a four year old throwing a tantrum during a game of junior Monopoly is a great way to alienate yourself on family game night.

A twenty-rep squat is a very stupid and inefficient way to make ten hard reps harder. That, in essence, is the point. To make people accept the rules, you also have to offer them incentives. For some, its prize money, for others, its the satisfaction of defeating your son and his cousins at monopoly.

For Berry, Hise and company, breathing squats packed on mass but they also packed on personality. Berry promoted his system in the aftermath of the 1929 Great Depression. He wrote for an alienated and unsure male audience about the character, discipline and raw power his program would build. What twenty reps offered was certainty and measurement in a chaotic world. It offered simplicity.

The Recurring Rules

Simplicity, despite what online influencers try to flog, is often canon in the fitness industry. Twenty reps and milk survives because it is easy to remember. It tends to get repackaged for new generations under largely similar guises. In 1989 Randall Strossen published Super Squats which took the Berry, Hise and Rader tradition and sold it to a new generation with the promise of thirty pounds of muscle in six weeks. Matt Perryman did something similar in 2013 with Squat Every Day.

Perryman’s book was much more nuanced than it is often credited for, and is a wonderful read on recovery and high-frequency programming but its simplicity, its rules, were straightforward. Squat every day, or don’t. It offered both relief and escape, which I, when doing the program, found great comfort in.

These simple rules also rely on often ‘emphatic’ evidence. Berry explicitly asked readers to send in before-and-after transformation photos. Hise’s after photos were arguably among the most famous fitness images of the 1930s. People’s bodies became evidence that they had done the program and, more importantly, that the program worked. This continued into the present age and its challenges.

Bill Phillips turned the fitness challenge and its results, into an industry phenomenon during the 1990s when his Body-for-Life Challenge offered customers a twelve-week diet and training plan that would transform their lives. In 2003, Outside reported that more than 750,000 people requested enrollment kits for the challenge in the previous year, but that only 5% actually finished it. EAS, the supplement company Phillips had built and later sold, attributed about 20 per cent of its $300 million annual revenue to Body-for-Life Challenge participants.

Winners became advertisements for the challenge and for the next round. Returning to Outside, they followed the 2002 challenge champions around Manhattan as they visited retailers, posed for cameras and championed the challenge. Each won $50,000, a year of EAS supplements and a pretty cool-looking EAS jacket. At one point, filming stopped because an empty Doritos packet was in the shot and had to be removed. That attention to detail may tell us more about transformation culture than anything else.

In the online age, CrossFit kicked things up a notch with its Workout of the Day challenges. On September 7, 2003, Crossfit.com published ‘Chelsea’ which asked people to hit 5 pull-ups, ten push-ups, and fifteen squats every minute for up to thirty minutes. The ‘WOD’ ended with the simple instruction to ‘post results to comments.’ This changed the transformation game. Now you didn’t need before or after photos, just a comment to take part.

By the early 2010s, challenges could come from anyone and anywhere. Thirty-day squat graphics moved through blogs and social media with rising daily totals and rest days marked in helpful capital letters. In September 2014, fitness blogger Gennah Nicole ran a “Squatember” challenge and on 1 October jokingly switched to “#Squatober.” This was a year before Sorinex’s documented commercial use of the name.

When A Challenge Becomes a Show

The ‘quadfather’ Tom Platz spent years making squatting look like theatre. Hard, heavy reps, performed with machine-like precision, had turned Platz’s lower body into one of the most legendary physiques in all of bodybuilding. In 1992, Vince McMahon’s World Bodybuilding Federation found a way to turn Platz’s reputation into an event.

At the time Platz was working for McMahon and so was Fred Hatfield, the powerlifter already known as “Dr Squat.” Hatfield later described the resulting Great American Squat-Off at FIBO in Essen as a “marketing gimmick.” McMahon wanted bodybuilding with some of the drama of professional wrestling, and here were two men who represented different kinds of strength. Who would win? The high-repping bodybuilder, or the low-repping powerlifter?

Once again, the rules became the defining feature. First came a maximal squat. Hatfield won with 855 pounds against Platz’s 765. Then both men took 525 pounds for repetitions. Hatfield managed eleven. Platz did twenty-three. Each man won the test that fitted the character already attached to him.

Given that McMahon made his fame through wrestling, people sometimes grumbled that the ‘squat off’ challenge had been fixed. Years later Bill Kazmaier, who spotted Platz during the rep set, complicated matters by publicly questioning whether the 525-pound bar was genuine. He thought it bent too little and moved too quickly. Others rejected the claim and pointed to similarly absurd squat sets they had seen Platz perform.

I do not particularly care whether that argument can be settled but, for what its worth, I’ve spoken to Platz’s contemporaries who all swore he was capable of insane strength feats. For me, the more interesting question is how much of what we saw was genuine, and how much was pageantry? This is where Squatober begins to make more sense.

Sorinex’s documented use of the name dates to 1 October 2015. Company accounts describe Bert Sorin and Aaron Ausmus joking about finding a way to bring attention to the squat before Ausmus actually tried squatting every day for a month, an insane idea which had already been floating about on online forums at this time. This jokey challenge between the two men became a program and then an annual event.

The early version involved squatting from Monday to Saturday through October, with a PR attempt at the end. The exact programme has changed since then, but the basic conceit has not. For a few weeks, October becomes a different kind of month that is centred about knee bends.

I’ve mentioned Bernard Suits already, so allow me another digression. Johan Huizinga, one of the first fellas to study play seriously, wrote that play happened within temporary limits of time and space… set apart from ordinary life. This later became classed by play theorists as a sort of ‘magic circle’ protected from day-to-day stresses. That could be ninety minutes of a football match, two hours of Monopoly, or a month in the calendar. Squatting during Squatober is different to squatting in May because during Squatober there are different rules and different expectations.

The nice bit about Squatober is that nobody is fooled.

Trainees know that the month is arbitrary. They know “SquatFather” is a joke and they know that the “knee-bending medicine” preached by Sorinex has not been handed down through generations of Celtic oral tradition. They participate because the made-up structure is useful.

It gives them a game, witnesses and a little bit of show.

The game is the unnecessary rule. Squat this much, this often, for this long. The witness is everybody else following and posting the same work. The show is the language, the PR Party, the shirts and the annual performance of being a person who is currently “doing Squatober.” There is still the same old masculine schtick running through some of this, with people posting solemnly about discipline while also posting memes about their knees. The silliness may be part of why I like it.

Most training does not need another theory. It needs to be done often enough, for long enough, without the trainee getting distracted by the next supposedly optimal thing. A challenge can be gimmicky, commercial and physiologically arbitrary while still helping with exactly that problem. It removes a few decisions and gives the effort somewhere to go.

Which is how, nearly a century after Hise helped convince lifters that twenty horrible squats constituted a sensible plan, I ended up paying €57 for a T-shirt celebrating an invented October tradition.

The rules are made up. The squat still counts.

As always… happy lifting!