Tag: Callisthenics

Resources by Conor HeffernanJul 26, 201912:43 pm

The History of the Pull Up

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There are some exercises so basic, so ubiquitous and so difficult that their origins are often taken for granted. Previously when detailing the history of the squat, we encountered the difficultly of tracing a movement found in every culture and arguably every human movement. The Chin Up and the Pull Up exercises offer a similar problem.

The purpose of today’s post is not to discover the inventor of the pull up, if such a thing is possible, but rather to discuss its evolution over the past two centuries from gymnastic exercise to Crossfit controversies. As will become clear, even a simple movement carries a lot of history.

The History of the Pull Up

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Resources by Conor HeffernanAug 11, 20161:20 pm

Alois P. Swoboda’s Conscious Evolution Course

Though born in Vienna in 1873, Alois P. Swoboda became one of America’s most popular and famous physical culturists of the early twentieth-century. Preaching a system of bodyweight only exercises, Swoboda ran a successful mail-order […]

Resources by Conor HeffernanApr 27, 20162:53 pm

Marian Mason: England’s Trailblazing Woman of Fitness

Although sporting historians have long noted the importance of Englishwomen in the development of sport in general, few studies have devoted themselves to the study of callisthenics. Those that do, often employ problematic timelines. Indeed, although Fletcher, McKrone and Holt famously argued that women used sport and callisthenics to gain some form of social freedoms, all dated their studies from the latter half of the nineteenth-century. A decision which has done a great injustice to Marian Mason, England’s first female physical fitness instructor, who beginning in the 1820s, ran one of the most sought after training studios in all of England.