The Lost Secret of a Great Body - PDFCOFFEE.COM (2023)

THE LOST SECRET TO A GREAT MUSCLE BODY IN 20 MINUTES A DAY WITH STUPID LIGHT WEIGHTS

A few words about using this book This book provides a simple set of easy dumbbell exercises and a very specific protocol for performing those exercises. There are several introductory sections on the fascinating history of this type of training, as well as some speculation towards the end about what physiological mechanisms might be at work to make it so surprisingly effective. This section is purely speculative, but it refers to some very recent scientific studies. If you really don't care about any of this and just want to get to the point with the exercises, that's fair, skip the story and get to the point, but whatever you do, DON'T JUST JUMP TO THE EXERCISE SECTION, LOOK AT THE PHOTOS AND THINK: "OK, I CAN SEE WHAT IT'S ABOUT" That's exactly the mistake most people make when reading early 20th century bodybuilding books. They look at the images, "get" them from a modern strength training perspective, and are quick to dismiss them as useless. It is imperative that you first understand a specific EXERCISE FORM, so at least read the section on the W.A.T.C.H Protocol and the Conclusion before following the detailed instructions in the section presenting the exercises. If you correctly understand the CONCEPT and learn to put it into practice correctly, these simple exercises will give you excellent results.

Introduction We are often told that we live in an age where we are constantly bombarded by the media with images of perfect people with perfect bodies, and that this relentless deluge of photoshopped physical specimens distorts our ideas about what we should all look like. Women are attacked on all sides by images of models whose limbs have been digitally elongated and whose skin tone has been artificially balanced to make a normal, attractive woman appear stocky and dimpled by comparison. Iconic images of Brigitte Bardot and Raquel Welsh also look pudgy and dimpled compared to these images, but apparently that doesn't make the photos any less depressing to look at. Men are increasingly bombarded with similar images, and they don't bother them any less. Every other actor in Hollywood now seems to have phenomenal physiques, there are men's fitness magazines featuring perfectly sculpted models on their covers, and even action figures of kids have been transformed into commuting armed bodybuilders. On the other hand, we live in an unprecedented information age: if we're feeling pressured to conform to these images of physical perfection, at least we have more advice than ever on exercise routines, exercise equipment, and optimal nutrition, and you can certainly exercise and train for success without confusion about how to do it, right? Uh... not really. Ironically, in the midst of a time when more people than ever are concerned with the appearance of their bodies, more are joining gyms, hiring personal trainers, and spending fortunes on the latest exercise equipment and supplements. , fewer and fewer people seem capable of developing bodies they are happy with. In fact, many people who say they "work out" or go to the gym will be happy to tell you that it's impossible to develop the kind of physique you see on the cover of Men's Health like you did in the last Bond movie. from sea. or wrapped in expensive underwear that sells even more expensive fragrances. "You have to work out all day and eat a macrobiotic diet to look like this," they'll say, or "You need a personal trainer," or "I'd take tons of weights and a bucket of steroids," and let's not forget digital airbrushing. So they drag themselves into exercise programs they are committed to for their health, expecting no more than a slight improvement in their physical appearance. This is not surprising since these people often follow all the accepted advice in magazines and on the Internet about how much weight to lift for how many sets or how much to walk on the treadmill, what powders and pills to take, what to eat and what not to eat.

etc. but they did not see the promised results. It stands to reason that these people assume that it is their fault, that only the genetically gifted or artificially enhanced can have a good body. Then there are thousands and thousands of other people who would like to have a great body but have read the same exercise advice and decided it's really not for them, thank you very much. Isn't that the reasonable reaction when you read about things like split routines and carb loading, jolting your muscles with constantly changing exercises, or training to the point of vomiting that leads to muscle failure, etc.? - thinking "you know what, it all seems terribly complicated and a bit much after some unpleasant hard work"? At the turn of the century, in a much simpler time, anyone who wanted to take care of her health and fitness and build a good body had far less information at their fingertips to help or harm them. All the advice given came from the commercially available books and courses sold by the vaudeville strongmen and emerging "physical culturalists" of the day. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, there was a great vogue in what was known as "physical culture", with many men becoming known as stage performers performing feats of strength and then flaunting their muscular physiques in front of admiring audiences. . Many of these early exercise science experts wrote books on their training methods or sold mail-order courses to the general public, promising to unlock the secrets to building a beautiful body. Much of this written material still exists and is freely available on the Internet at sites such as www.sandowplus.co.uk. - A fantastic resource where the owners have provided full scans of countless works in an intense labor of love. A quick perusal of this material (which most contemporary fitness-minded readers will provide you with, since it seems so dated and meaningless from a modern perspective) will show that many of these men have recommended workouts shorter than what they recommend. by modern standards. , dumb lightweights. Closer examination will show that each of these men advocated essentially the same routine, performed in the same manner, with more or less the same instructions as to weight, frequency, and particular execution of each exercise. Closer examination of the backgrounds of these men will reveal that many of them were associated with a single professor who had championed the same protocol years before them. Of course, most modern authorities will tell us that the reason for this is quite simple: the men involved only made a quick buck by outright lying to the public. It is said that each one of them built his impressive muscles using the same protocols that we know today as the only healthy way to train - progressive resistance with heavy weights - and then sold that nonsense of useless light but tastier pasta.

The light dumbbell protocol featured in many of these early books is so at odds with what current exercise science tells us about the business of muscle building that all the experts confidently say it may be the only possible explanation. They also tell us that little was known at the time about how exercise affects the human body, and these men simply didn't realize how ineffective their advice was. Accordingly, experts praised these men as the fathers of physical culture and bodybuilding, on the one hand, and casually chided them as self-righteous charlatans and ignorant scoundrels, on the other. Reading through all these ancient texts, it seemed to me that many of them, far from being misunderstood and based on ignorance of the actual workings of the human body, contained detailed studies of human anatomy and physiology that most similar studies contained were surpassed by far. you grow up modern works. As it turns out, the recommended exercise protocol seemed to be based on a radically different paradigm than what we currently believe to be correct. Everyone was fundamentally opposed to this training approach, but no one really investigated whether or not it might work; I just had to try it for a few weeks or months and see what happened. I was recovering from an elbow injury at the time and wanted to cautiously return to sports so I thought I'd give it a try. He had nothing to lose, and anyway, wouldn't it be great if it were true? What if, with minimal equipment, a set of small dumbbells, you could do a basic set of exercises for about twenty minutes a day at home and develop a perfectly respectable, toned, muscular body? I found that the exercise protocol advocated in all of these books and courses did exactly what it said it would. The results were exactly as advertised, and compared to the time and effort invested, the approach is incredibly effective and efficient. I find it a shame that at a time when more and more people are concerned with building a body they can be proud of (or at least not ashamed of going to the beach), a simple approach would help them do exactly what they want. . what they want has been forgotten and abandoned, and instead they are directed towards much more complicated and physically demanding routines designed for serious bodybuilders who often miss or postpone potential workouts altogether. This book provides an overview of the lightweight exercise system popular at the turn of the century, discusses its fascinating history, tries to explain how it works contrary to all conventional training advice, and presents the exercises in an easy-to-follow way. to understand. -understand the format - read.follow.

I hope this book not only provides a method of sculpting the body you've always wanted in a simple and straightforward way, but also shows that physique bodybuilders of the past honestly passed down the secrets of development, instead of cynically selling snakes. oil a strong and beautiful body. Bodies just as they said they would. If you follow the exercises as directed and know the correct way to do them, you will see real results. Modern "experts" will tell you that this is impossible; ignore them and remember the Chinese proverb: "Whoever says that something is impossible should not interrupt someone who is doing it."

Contents 1. Contemporary thought on bodybuilding 2. Sandow and others 3. Professor Louis Attila 4. Hippolyte Triate and the ancient Greeks 5. The W.A.T.C.H. Protocol 6. The exercises 7. What dumbbells do I use? 8. What results can I expect? 9. Who can benefit from these exercises? 10. Are the results "real" or just cosmetic? 11. Possible explanations for the functioning of these exercises 12. Conclusion Annex I Diagram of the main muscles of the body Annex II Acknowledgments

Contemporary Thought on Muscle Building This is a book about an old-fashioned and forgotten dumbbell exercise method that was once so common as to be ubiquitous. In fact, in many turn-of-the-century texts, from the boxing instructions of men like Jem Mace to the wrestling instructions of "Farmer" Burns, to encyclopedias of popular health and medicine, the term "dumbbells" was it is actually used specifically to refer to this type of exercise and not the actual equipment involved. What makes this approach so remarkable is how different it is from what we think of as good training advice in the 21st century. These tips are based on several assumptions about building strength and muscle mass that are now generally accepted. Before we can discuss these outdated exercises and exactly how they differ from modern approaches, we must first provide a brief overview of this contemporary understanding. This is NOT intended to be an exhaustive or scientifically detailed survey of the current body of knowledge on training for muscle mass; there is no need to force you to read a chapter on myofibrillar versus sarcoplasmic hypertrophy and muscle protein synthesis just to learn a few simple dumbbell movements. For our purposes, it will suffice to cover the main points of what is believed to be true about the best way to of building muscle in pure profanity. So when we delve into the various recipes and workout routines offered by 19th and early 20th century bodybuilders, it becomes pretty obvious why their workouts are completely at odds with current thinking. At a very basic level, we now believe that if you train hard enough, some degree of microtrauma will occur within the structure of the working muscles. With rest and optimal nutrition, the body repairs this damage and the muscles regrow slightly in the process (due to an increase in the size of the muscle cells due to a combination of an increase in the size of individual fibers and a increase in fluid within the muscle mass). Cell). The best way to take advantage of this body's natural adaptation to resistance work is generally accepted as follows:

Train with weights heavy enough that you can do 8-10 or more reps in a set if you're only training for muscle size and appearance, and 3-5 reps if you're training specifically for strength. You would then rest to allow for a full recovery and then repeat, gradually increasing the weight used as your strength builds to keep up with development and continually challenge your muscles.

This protocol is believed to provide the best opportunity for maximum gains in strength and muscle size over time, based on the number of sets and repetitions used. This is known as progressive resistance training because the resistance used is gradually increased over the weeks and months that the program is followed. Most people recommend starting with a basic full-body workout three days a week, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, with rest days in between. You can also train multiple body parts in one day, for example your chest and arms, and then train a different body part, such as your legs and back, the next day while the former is at rest. This is a basic split routine. Building off of these basics, trainers offer all sorts of advice on the best number of sets per exercise and body part, ways to focus effort with many different exercises, and different training protocols with specific equipment, but that's about it. few words. This model is considered the only logical and sensible way of training if you want to achieve significant progress in terms of muscle strength and muscle mass. For example, anyone wondering about the effectiveness of training with their own body weight - with push-ups, pull-ups or other similar calisthenics - is cautioned that such exercises are only initially useful for training a complete beginner who is physically out of shape. for the exercise. 🇧🇷 This is because once a student has built enough strength to move their body for a set number of repetitions, they have built all the muscle mass their body needs for that task and simply add the number of repetitions to infinity eventually it becomes a game of diminishing. returns. It's a widely held belief today (one that's regularly proven on hundreds of online fitness and exercise forums) that bodyweight exercise can't actually build even appreciable strength or build any muscle to speak of, at all. and simply "train muscular endurance".

All of this makes perfect sense, is admirably logical, and seems to be backed by solid, undeniable science. When we realize that the dumbbell training protocol that the strongmen once promulgated in their books and correspondence courses goes against ALL of this, it's easy to see why people interested in the history of physical training and bodybuilding they use it routinely and decline. as obviously useless. You can read numerous biographies of these early strength pioneers online, and in virtually every one of them, the author will have something to say when it comes to selling light weight or mail-order training programs: "Of course, these methods were strictly a marketing ploy and had little to do with the way he built his

impressive physique of his own - evidently using progressive resistance training with heavy weights." The reader might reasonably assume this to be a fact given the way it is confidently stated, but a detailed study of the books written by these early strongmen seem to suggest otherwise, it's not just that these modern writers say this with no evidence other than their own opinion based on how these men look in pictures and their own preconceived notions of what it takes to develop those bodies, the problem is that they say these things in direct contradiction to what the men themselves have written about their own training, often in far too much detail.Many of these men speak specifically about the importance of LIGHT DUMBBELL TRAINING for their body and strength development. go see r details why this is the case It's almost as if the modern authors mentioned in real They should not read the writings of the men they praise, but only look at the photos and draw their own conclusions.

The fact is, however, that this ubiquitous light dumbbell protocol recommends training six to seven days a week with weights as light as three, four, or five pounds, never increasing the weight or number of sets, and only doing the routine with a some simple body weights to complement the calisthenics exercises. 🇧🇷 This contradicts everything that has been said before about the best and, in fact, "only" form of strength and muscle training. If ancient bodybuilders were really serious about the efficacy of this strange training method, and if they simply couldn't function through the previously discussed model of "muscle microtrauma, rest and repair, rinse and repeat," then perhaps these men would know something. What We Don't Know If contemporary thinking about muscle building is everything, then surely outdated advice should be discarded to the extreme. If the men who gave this advice were impressively muscular and strong, then it really makes sense to assume that in public they said one thing and in private they did the other, but shouldn't we at least consider the possibility that contemporary thinking on muscle development IS Not all? ? If there's another unexpected dynamic at play with this form of training, these men may have left us with a valuable tool in laying the foundation for an impressive physique, but we're just throwing it away because it doesn't fit what we believe to be TRUE. 🇧🇷

Sandow et al. Any discussion of the strongmen and bodybuilders of the turn of the century scene must begin with the famous Prussian Eugen Sandow. He is not, as is often stated, because he was the first specimen of this breed. It is also not true that he was the strongest, despite what he has claimed. However, many people considered him to be by far the most evolved, and it is certainly true that he changed the stage strongman image forever. In fact, he had a huge and global impact on the general perception of what it means to be strong and well built. Sandow was easily the most famous of all the physique bodybuilders of his time; at the same time, he was a household name throughout Europe and America and even toured the Antipodes and the Far East. He was so famous that you could buy cocoa and cigars with his name and picture on him, and he was the first in a long line to capitalize on that notoriety by selling books and e-mail courses on how to get stronger and develop your body. He was also the first to develop and then sell exercise equipment for this purpose, and made a small fortune marketing free weights and chest expanders. He opened several gyms where people could buy exclusive memberships and learn his "system" of exercises, and essentially became the first franchised personal trainer for celebrities: His dumbbells were made at the behest of the King of England, and the British Army adopted his training method. with some fanfare. Sandow wowed the world: There was something of a "Sandowmania" in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with thousands flocking to his shows to see him lift incredible weights and do backflips while doing it with two barbells. 56 lbs. . After that, ladies lined up backstage to feel his throbbing muscles, and gentlemen from all over the world followed his dumbbell routine and tried to replicate his 'classic' physique. Legions of powerful copyists followed in his footsteps, and Sandow went on to sanction the first Physique competition the world had ever seen, essentially inventing competitive bodybuilding as well. The 1901 contest at the Royal Albert Hall was judged by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, author of Sherlock Holmes, and offered a cash prize and a series of "gilded" statues of Sandow himself as trophies. To honor his unique contribution to bodybuilding, which basically created the possibility of his existence, the modern IFBB still awards its Mr. Olympia winner "A Sandow," a recreation of those original 1901 trophies.

Sandow, second from left, and some of the winners: See what kind of physique men were going for compared to today's aesthetic.

Who was this man and what was special about him? As mentioned above, it is often claimed that Sandow was the first bodybuilder to invent the act of showing muscle while performing solo feats of strength, or that he was the strongest man who ever lived. None of this is remotely true. His real name wasn't even Eugen Sandow and he wasn't Prussian. In reality, he was Frederich Muller, a flat-footed German hustler who, at various times, was an acrobat, wrestler, artistic model, and seaside gigolo. After making a name for himself as a strongman in the Netherlands, he turned up in London in 1889 and found himself in the right place at the right time.

Sandow's classic physique

Popular for years and born of an earlier strongman tradition in the circus, the music hall strongman act enjoyed great fashion on the London stage as several champions of impressive strength played to packed houses and ripped up game packs. . Fold the cards in two, fold the coins and put the chains in the chest. It was common for these men to offer some sort of public challenge, where everyone in the audience was encouraged to attempt to lift their particular weight or compete with them in some other feat for a cash prize. Sandow responded to one of those challenges and embarked directly on the path to fame and fortune. The official and oft-told story is that he easily defeated London's two biggest performers, 'Samson' and his protégé 'Cyclops', and inherited his highest-grossing performance at the venue, catapulting himself to the top spot as headliner. billboard on the London stage. - a situation he clung to for years and cleverly brought to world fame. The actual truth behind this story is more complicated and will be further explored in the next chapter; For now, suffice to say, it wasn't exactly a fair contest. It's not that Sandow wasn't strong, he was. Some of his verified weightlifting skills are still impressive today, and by any normal definition he was a very strong man, nowhere near the strongest man in the world, the strongest man in London, or even the strongest man in the world. world on the night of his famous Space victory. sandow had

something else applies to him: his physique. No one had seen anything like this before.

ageless sandow

Strongman acts were a popular staple at the time and were particularly popular in London. They have been on the stage and in the circus for years and are part of the standard program along with magicians, acrobats, comedians and all other vaudeville professions. These strong men would usually take the stage in a leopard skin vest and leggings and lift huge weights to wow the astonished audience. We're talking about these giant Monty Python ring weights with "ONE TON" written on the side. They'd prop up platforms with entire crowds on them, have cars run over their bellies, and maybe even lift an elephant on a leash around its waist for an encore. The important thing about these guys was how strong they were, not how they looked. They didn't look particularly pretty, they were usually tall, lanky men with wide waists and legs made of logs. Think of the average contestant in today's World's Strongest Man pageant and then add a mustache and a pair of pink socks. In fact, it was Sandow's relatively unusual appearance that set him apart from his rivals, more than what he could do. When he took the stage to challenge "Samson", he was dressed in a specially designed evening gown and looked like a regular theater goer: no one

Looking at him fully dressed, she would have guessed that he was a strong man, and that was the idea. When he stripped off his suit in one fell swoop, like a modern-day stripper Velcroing off her pants, the crowd let out a collective gasp: she looked like a Greek statue carved out of granite. Sandow later incorporated a posing routine into his performance, and when he went to America and signed with the famous Florenz Zeigfield, they forgo much of the show of force and focused on him flexing his muscles in a specially built light box, a cabinet. A photo shoot in which he is shown through strong overhead lighting against a black curtain, emphasizing the shadows and enhancing his impressive muscular definition. He displayed incredible muscular control, tensing and relaxing every part of his perfectly developed body in what today is almost a self-parody of a muscular man flexing his biceps, but at the time he was an absolute revelation. That's what Sandow really pioneered: the image of the beautiful body as something to strive for. And people aspired to that: every man wanted to look like Sandow, and every woman really wanted her man to succeed in that endeavor. Not missing an opportunity to profit from a situation, Sandow published her first book, Sandow's System of Physical Training, in 1894. Anyone can find it reproduced on the Internet today and read it in its entirety for free. As we will see in the next chapter, Sandow was accused of withholding much of what he wrote, since his English was poor and his accuser had the idea that he was providing a scientific discourse on atomic theory, anatomy, and physiology and complexities. of classical sculpture. completely ridiculous, which should tell us something about the real man, as opposed to the myth he has carefully constructed around him. He certainly had help with the book, but obviously, if you read it carefully, it's not even presented as his own work: One chapter is titled "Mr. Sandow Speaks For Himself" in which he shares his thoughts on training and working out. being interviewed (which are interestingly referred to as separate topics), diet, and bathing. The remainder of the book is devoted primarily to many flattering biographies, recounting his early years, his exploits as a strongman and in wrestling, and various other apparent achievements of his. It's basically a 19th-century PR exercise, and it's as true to the facts of Sandow's life as official press releases or Hello magazine articles about celebrities are today. The parts that interest us are a chapter in which an eminent doctor of the time thoroughly measures and evaluates Sandow, the chapters in which he discusses his ideas on "Exercise and Training", and the section at the end containing three separate instructions. with photos of Sandow demonstrating all the movements of "his system". At that time he was probably in his physical prime, and these images, and the others that generously illustrate the rest of the text, are the best ever made of him. For whatever reason, the most popular photos often show him years later, when

Although still in impressive form and probably larger overall, it was no longer the living Greek statue it was here. Sandow makes many grand claims in this book, including that he studied medicine in Brussels, gained a thorough understanding of anatomy and physiology, and then invented this exercise system. As we'll see later, the truth about where he came from would have been less uplifting, but just because he was an arrogant man and a rabid publicist doesn't mean he didn't know what he was talking about when it came to building muscle: you just had to look at him. to realize he wasn't kidding. Sandow says that his personal training at the time consisted entirely of light exercises in the morning with weights and then exertion from him at night, which was "quite exhausting" but only lasted 20 minutes. In his own words, his physique was the result of "light dumbbell exercises supplemented by heavy lifting." This quote is very important: not weight lifting supplemented by light dumbbell shaping exercises, but specifically light weights first, aided by some heavy weight lifting instead of training. At no time did he do multiple sets and reps with heavy weights; he did individual exercises with various weights and heavy objects for about twenty minutes a night. The other part of this quote that is important but easily overlooked is that it makes a clear distinction between light dumbbell exercises and weight lifting. That's central to the whole point I'm trying to make: in Sandow's time, the two things were very different. That's not true in people's minds these days: there is only strength training, and therefore working with small dumbbells would be ineffective strength training. In Sandow's eyes, these were completely different modalities: when he lifted light weights, he didn't think he was lifting weights, no matter how small, nor was he "training with small weights." To him, "training" was anything you do to improve your weightlifting performance, like the z above, which has you standing on one end. So, if he lifted his light dumbbells every morning, he wasn't "lifting" with them, and he wasn't "training" with them, what the hell was he doing? This is where his book excels; the rest is just filler and self exaltation to further his already growing fame. The final part with the exercises goes into great detail on how to perform the exercises with dumbbells and if we read between the lines we can discover a lot.

First, it calls for 2-3lbs of dumbbells for women and juniors and 3-5lbs for adult men. Well, anyone who has ever looked at a dumbbell will realize that if you simply lift it up and down, go through all the usual bends, lifts, and presses, completely relying on your weight to resist your muscles, the difference between a It weighs a 3 pound weight and a 4 or 5 pound weight would be negligible in terms of difficulty or final scores. It certainly seems strange to be so specific. He then advises the student to do some preliminary “free exercises” with dumbbells to feel the weight and warm up. When he describes the kind of "free movement" he expects you to do before "starting the actual exercises," you can tell he's talking about squatting while holding the dumbbells loosely in your hands and raising your arms out to your sides as you hold the dumbbells loosely in your hands. you hold. to them. the dumbbells, spin your arms in circles while holding them, etc... seems like no one read this and thought, "Wait a minute, I thought we were going to do that with the dumbbells anyway, if that's just the warm up, what's that?" What are the correct exercises?” And there you have it, not even Sandow thought that just "lifting" these things or even "training" them, performing multiple sets of movements against 3 or 5 pound resistance, would do anything but warm you up. What he called the "Exercise Series dumbbell presses" had something else in mind: mind is the key word:

“The mind must work so that the muscles feel the tension and get the most out of the toning and building process... THIS IS A POINT THAT MAY NOT IMPRESS THE STUDENT IN TRAINING - IT IS THE BEGINNING OF ALL SUCCESSFUL BODY TRAINING REMAINS.. .there must be a concentration of willpower in the exercises in question, the dumbbells are NOT to be held and used PASSIVELY, BUT APPLIED AS POTENTIALLY EXTENSIVE AND ACTIVE...that the muscles alternately contract and relax in the Process nature intended for their healthy growth and development.

"All movements should be performed evenly and without jerking, but with your muscles tense and your mind focused on the exercise, repeat the alternating movements until your muscles ache..."

In modern parlance, I could have said it like this: hold the dumbbell with each movement.

firmly and try to achieve a rhythmic, self-controlled full contraction in the muscle that is the primary movement. Continue at a steady pace until the muscle is so fully "pumped" that it almost cramps, until you feel that slight "soreness" as you come to temporary muscle failure. This way, despite the lack of weight, the last few reps will be quite difficult. When you stop, fully relax the muscles you were working on and feel them flooded with blood that was just occluded by the intense, sustained contraction you intentionally created.

He talks about alternating self-generated full contraction and full relaxation using the dumbbells as tools to help you effectively activate different muscle groups and get an appropriate response from them.

What follows is a systematic series of dumbbell movements that cover every muscle in the body, with detailed descriptions of how each is performed, with a focus on things like proper standing form, correct pull angles, and best positions. lever for use. Tips on how to position one arm supine for the best contraction, or how to position one shoulder to make it easier to hit a specific part of a deltoid. The instructions are actually very precise once you know exactly what he wants from you. Each exercise is illustrated with a photo of Sandow himself performing it, and I'm kidding you, using just a fig leaf. It could be that those photos were the problem for people who just skimmed through the book. Incredibly well built, Sandow still wields tiny five-pound dumbbells to perform exactly the kind of basic routine you'd get on a free spreadsheet using any standard set of vinyl dumbbells you can buy at Argos (think K-Mart if you're reading this in America). There are pushups, overhead presses, front raises, some old-fashioned punching moves, squats, crunches, and straight-legged pushups. Great deal, nothing special that you can think of. And as for the movements themselves, you're right, but as always, the devil is in the details: when you "get" that you're supposed to squeeze the dumbbells and contract each muscle group rhythmically at a specific cadence and as hard as you can possible on every rep, so follow all the tips on how to hold your arms, backhand angles and what to do with your head, etc. very closely. - You will find that the results of following this routine are very believable on your appearance. . A section on heavy weight exercises and another on barbell exercises follow the light dumbbell section. This has led many commenters to believe that Sandow intended the light dumbbell portion only for absolute beginners who would spend a few weeks lifting their body before beginning the "real" heavy lifting:

exactly as you would expect today. In fact, he specifically states that these later sections are only for people who want to "become athletes," including men who want to make a career out of powerlifting and those who are already strong enough to lift much heavier weights. than five pounds to handle, it's still "recommended to do the easy exercises with lighter weights first until you see visible improvement in your muscles." the muscles of him training with stupidly light dumbbells in Sandow's mind; in fact, he highly recommended it and went on to explain that for those not inclined to become serious athletes, the light dumbbell routine was all they wanted. Also, the sections with heavier weights are not about the kind of strength training we'd expect to be recommended today for building a decent physique (multiple gradually increasing sets of weights). Sandow talked about individual lifts in exercises like this Bent Press. Dumbbell toss and one-arm overhead swing: the kind of exercises he would see with kettlebells today. It's all about proper form and alignment and the "flair" involved in lifting, not reps, sets, or progression. The barbell section is all about ONE HANDED RIFTS, or classic two-handed bench presses with a barbell, not lying on a bench, and pumping reps for multiple sets. He recommends single exercises or reps in the 3-6 range, the same thing we recommend today for building brute strength rather than pure muscle hypertrophy. So, as we can see, it's a mistake to read this text recommending that lean youngsters and absolute beginners do some light dumbbell prep work before moving on to the "real stuff" and switching to heavy weight to build big muscles, but one which has been done over and over again and can be easily understood considering that the people doing it are simply trying to fit the text to what they already "know". In 1897, Sandow published a second book called Strength and How to Get It, which, admittedly, is a great title. The second half pretty much repeats the completely inaccurate autobiography section of the first book and deals with Mr. Sandow even more than last time; in fact, it seems that his stated measurements have increased considerably since the eminent physician in the last book. he measured. There is additional information about his recent US tour and an account of him fighting a lion in front of an audience. (Not really: he fought a lion. He did fight a lion, though contemporary accounts describe him as a fine specimen who was moth-eaten and possibly drugged.) There are some interesting additions to the new book, however, in the first half. it's written

the perspective of someone who is now -three years later- even more famous and celebrated than before and whose ideas, he says, have "taken hold" quite well, but who has obviously had to deal with the inevitable criticism and misrepresentation of any fame or fame. He spends much of the beginning of the book refuting the criticisms leveled at him by other physical culture teachers. He then tries to clear up some common misconceptions about his system; even then, it seemed that people did not quite understand how to do the exercises and needed to be more specific in their instructions. This is great for our purposes, as he further clarifies things:

“The first essential element of success is the power to concentrate the will on the work. Muscles are not developed by muscular action alone... relentless, mechanical exertion will never materially increase a man's strength. He must first learn the great secret, which should not be a secret. He has to use his mind. He may not be able to add a cubit to his height, but it certainly allows him to increase his muscles, strengthen all his organs, and increase his overall vitality. But he has to use his wits and his strength. Through practice and practice the will-power grows much, until in time the whole system is so completely under its control that the muscles can be kept in perfect condition without what is commonly called practice. the effort of the will, the muscles can be trained almost at will"

MI:

“As I said before, it is the brain that develops the muscles. The brain does as much as you lift, even more. For example, if you are reading while sitting, practice tensing your muscles... tensing them more and more, you will find that it has the same effect as the dumbbell exercise... It is highly recommended that all students get used to practicing. this muscle contraction - is an admirable exercise in itself, but perhaps even more valuable because it enhances willpower and helps create the brain-muscle connection that is the foundation of strength and disease."

So once again, it's all about self-directed muscle contraction - the dumbbells are there to help you achieve it and improve it. Sandow obviously had trouble getting some users of his system to understand this or get it right: he mentions at various points in the early chapters of the book that it's common for students in his physical education classes to perform the movements without the need for do it. brings up "Vim". and strength".

"For the beginner, the most difficult part of my system is concentrating so completely on the muscles that you have absolute control over them. However, it can be seen that this control is gradual. As for the willpower exerted, you have to remember that the effect of lifting weights is to contract the muscles, but the same effect is obtained when the muscles are contracted without the weight (but assisted by the use of light dumbbells). ). ). ) I am aware that this strength issue The will power has troubled many of my students, most find it difficult to translate "everything they know" into movements with small dumbbells, so they may be disappointed with the results of their work... the reason is obvious: just they're "going through the motions" and not really striving for it."

Sandow claims that he has also occasionally encountered a student who did this too well and overreached to the point of being "crushed" (probably turning blue in the face, bursting a blood vessel, or causing a horrible fall). carpal tunnel syndrome). He needed to find a way to help his students get a feel for the right amount of tension when maneuvering the weights during their exercises, and thus his greatest invention (at least as far as bank balances go) was born. Sandow created his famous "Spring Grip Dumbbell". Basically, it was a three-pound cast iron dumbbell that had been cut in half and attached with a row of springs down the middle, allowing the practitioner to squeeze the two halves while using it. This made it impossible to follow the movements continuously. If he squeezed the bar and then performed the arm motions exactly as directed, voila, he'll get a deep, strong contraction in the target muscle. At least you couldn't help but get the right feeling in your muscles as you pumped out the reps. Basically, this invention was a corrective device for people who are physically unable to control and contract the correct muscles with just regular dumbbells, and Sandow says so in this book. He makes it very, very clear that this is the purpose of the spring.

hold the bar, but you'll constantly read contrary reports when reading about Sandow.

The same authors who report that he did not actually train with light weights also give credit to his invention as either a breakthrough item intended solely to benefit a gullible audience, or a powerful "grip" exercise machine that doubles as a light serve ( and therefore more or less useless). Clearly these people never read their books properly and obviously never lifted one of their free weights, let alone worked out with one. These things sold in the millions around the world between the 1890s and 1930s, you can still occasionally buy them on eBay or at antique fairs and I have two different pairs, a nickel plated one with leather handles and seven prongs, the "gentlemen's" version, and one enameled in black with five Federn, the "men's version", both over a hundred years old. Remember, this was England at the height of the Victorian and Edwardian eras, so we're basically talking about an expensive upper class version and a cheaper working class version. When you lift them up and squeeze the two pieces together, it's obvious that they were never designed for pinch exercises as such; There's clearly a benefit to increasing grip strength over time, but they're not really particularly hard to pinch. They are easier to close than one of those cheap plastic sneakers you see everywhere.

eg with all feathers - the instructions recommend starting with just the two basic feathers and gradually adding the others as your strength increases. It's pretty clear that the purpose of the device is to increase your ability to feel your muscles working and to help you contract them hard during exercises. They come complete with a handy booklet detailing all the exercises - this is exactly the same routine as in your first and second books, except now it's not Sandow demonstrating in the pictures, but one of his students, stepping instead of the blade. She pairs him up with a rather sexy combination of pantyhose and gladiator sandals. One thing Sandow was criticized for was the price of these cufflinks: they sold for 12s 6p and 7s 6p respectively, a considerable amount in those days, but he argued they were well built and would last a lifetime. . Both pairs I have are over a hundred years old and in excellent condition and still in perfect working order, so that statement was at least factual. He also used the book to introduce another exercise device: a rubber "revealer," which was a type of chest expander but also functioned like one of those pulleys attached to a door you see boxers exercising with in old photographs. . Interestingly, the grips were Sandow dumbbells, so the rubber grips were just ways to further increase and focus the resistance, and the same principle of self-directed maximal muscle contraction must be applied. The best thing about the second book is that there's a testimonial section at the end that includes numerous photos of satisfied students of the Sandow system, many of which look pretty impressive even by today's standards:

I suppose the authors mentioned in the introduction will simply assume that all of these men and boys (of which these two are just one example) were also covertly progressively training with heavy weights over various sets and then simply pretending to use Sandow's system.

Sandow "wrote" several articles, edited a magazine, and was involved in several other books, notably The Construction and Reconstruction of the Human Body, which had a foreword by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and yet is rarely read or heard of. fact that it is extremely detailed and contains a lot of fascinating information about the medical and physiological theories of the time. Once again, it is freely available online and I recommend anyone interested to read it in its entirety as it is packed with fascinating information. I guess, in this case, Sandow just found a much better ghostwriter; Perhaps his friend Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was involved in more than just the prologue? This latest book also includes some examples of people who have been trained in the Sandow Method, and I am including some just to show the kind of results that have been obtained from light dumbbell training:

Not exactly Sandow, but certainly Sandowesque in terms of shape and definition, and while today's aesthetic often calls for a puffier, heavier look, I think most men would be happy as the guy in the bottom left corner above or with this Fifteen-year-old schoolgirl from Sandow:

In his The Gospel of Strength Perpossible, published in Australia in 1902, Sandow summed up his system and perfectly illustrated how different it was from simple weighted movements for a beginner:

“My system is a form of physical education where each part of the body is properly exercised, developed and healed; increased willpower; the various organs are restored and kept in good health, and the individual attains as much physical perfection as possible. It's not about doing skillful stunts or lifting heavy weights; and I use only the lightest weights to avoid unnecessary strain on any part of the body... Exercise without the judicious use of will-power is of little value. In some cases, it is necessary to stimulate this willpower with light dumbbells - the exercises can easily be done in less than half an hour, in principle, 15 minutes is enough. The movements are simple and can be learned in a very short time. It's what I call bodybuilding or a double crunch set - for them

The goal is to enlarge the body, beautify the physique, maintain healthy organs, increase muscular and organic strength, improve posture, and increase body symmetry. From this series I get my own strength and always stay in shape. It is the mind, it is the mind. Muscles really do take a back seat. Lifting a pair of dumbbells a hundred times while focusing your attention on some distant object in Kamchatcha will do you very little good. However, if you focus your mind on a single muscle or group of muscles for three minutes a day and say, "Do this and that," and they respond, there will be immediate development."

Sandow lamented in his second book that in addition to all kinds of attacks on his reputation, which he believed were motivated by professional jealousy, he also had to endure a legion of copyists:

“Several people who never tire of denouncing me and all my works have consecrated themselves as Physical Culture teachers and are now teaching my system! Of course, they would be reluctant to admit this and would claim that it is their own system. All I can say is that, by a strange coincidence, almost all of these systems I've seen are based on the same principles as mine.

Think about it: what principles were you talking about? He certainly cannot have somehow claimed to "own" the principle of lifting weights up and down. He talked about taking a light weight and using it in a very specific way, controlling the level of muscle contraction with the mind or will to achieve balanced physical development of the musculature and muscle control.

Of course, there were people who just ripped Sandow off, but there's another reason why some of the men he felt abused by had dumbbell weight systems identical to his: It's because they came from the same source. It's actually a bit pretentious for Sandow to complain about being ripped off, since he himself was guilty of taking another man's system and passing it off as his own invention. More on that later, now let's look at some of the other men who were around at the same time.

like Sandow or those who appeared immediately after him.

Lionel Strongfort This guy wasn't called Lionel Strongfort any more than Eugen Sandow was called Eugen Sandow. Strongfort's real name was Max Unger and he was also a German, born in Berlin in 1878 and eleven years Sandow's junior. Strongfort began his successful strongman act on stage in 1897, the beginning of Sandow's true fame, specializing in the human bridge act and reproducing the poses of famous classical Greek works of art. The act of human bridging is a feat of 'support', with the performer standing on his hands and knees with his chest raised and torso forming a level surface for any huge, heavy object he will balance and therefore 'support'. '. Strongfort's act included securing a car. Yes, it's a real car: a car... with the engine running... and usually manned by a driver and three passengers! Until well into the 20th century, seeing a car was a big deal, let alone seeing one balanced on a man's stomach. Strongfort's physique was not as impressive as Sandow's, although he was very impressive, but he was actually much stronger and, as he always pointed out, more proportionate. He held a world record lifting 312 pounds once when the previous record was 278 pounds and Sandow hadn't even matched that. In the early 1900s, when Sandow's career and business was at its peak, he retired from acting and jumped on the bandwagon. He began mailing physical education courses, selling exercise equipment, and producing books about his own exploits and his ideas on exercise, training, and bathing. I wonder where he got that idea from. In a nice twist, Strongfort actually added a set of dumbbells to the cost of his class—his didn't have springs like Sandow's, but they were a cool idea nonetheless. They were of hollow cast metal and weighed about four pounds empty, but could be filled with lead and increased in weight up to eight pounds.

Strongfort took several swings using the Sandow method and then gave the exact same recommendations in his Basic Light Dumbbells Course and Advanced Heavy Weightlifting Course. While Sir Arthur Conan Doyle sponsored Sandow, Strongfort had the Marquess of Queensbury on his side, and in many ways he modeled Sandow down to the last detail, especially in regards to light dumbbell exercises. exactly the same, with just a few variations and some interesting additions.

Strongfort Refillable Dumbbells

Al Treloar You won't be surprised to learn that Al Treloar's real name was not Al Treloar. If he's going to pick a new name, I'm not sure why he'd pick "Al Treloar," but I guess he's definitely better than Albert Jenkins, as his mom originally called him. In 1903, after Sandow's first bodybuilding competition two years earlier, there was the first international competition, with finals in New York's Madison Square Garden and heats in Great Britain (which should tell us how popular all this was becoming). physical culture material). Al Treloar was the eventual winner. Treloar was an intelligent man, in fact, he graduated from Harvard University, but physical culture and strongman actions were his obsession. He apparently could break three decks of cards with his bare hands. At the same time, he worked as one of Eugen Sandow's stagehands and we can only assume that he learned something from Sandow during his stay, although he wasn't particularly enamored with the man, to say the least. There is a story attributed to Treloar that Sandow repeatedly performed at train stations when they were on tour and put on an impromptu weight-lifting demonstration for the crowd. He took one of the heavy traveling trunks used in those days and lifted it up with one hand before dropping it on the rocks with a tremendous crash, displaying the great weight of it. Interestingly, Treloar noted, Sandow's own chest was never the closest.

In 1904, after winning the competition, Treloar wrote his book entitled The Science of Muscular Development. Treloar demonstrates his exercises, which as you can imagine are a series of light movements with dumbbells. Once again, the exercises are virtually identical to those in the featured Sandow, but with some notable variations and additions. Interestingly, Treloar's wife Edna (or sometimes Ida) Tempest (I don't know if that was her name, maybe she was better at choosing stage names than her husband) also believed in physical culture and poses for the full length section on the woman. Exercises included in the book. In fact, there are stills of the two posing for early filming and you can find them on Youtube. I highly recommend watching these as it gives you a chance to see Treloar move and you can see the nature of the results. See clearly the expected exercises. to deliver. You can't see Edna's results as clearly as the sensibilities of the time dictated, which she demonstrates while wearing a Victorian bathing suit (ie, she's basically fully clothed). Treloar's book seems to have had the desired effect, we don't know how much money he made from it, but he was considerate and an expert in physical culture.

he offered the position of physical director at the Los Angeles Athletic Club in 1907. He held the position until 1949, so one has to assume they were very happy with him. Treloar's goal with his book is clearly stated at the beginning and I mention it because it's the exact same goal you're reading now:

"Both men and women can do the even more useful work of restoring their own health in their bedrooms...and still achieve great results through exercise." Naturally, the young married man, whose job keeps him away from home and his family for most of his waking hours, is reluctant to hit the gym two nights a week. It is also possible that he exercises himself without a gym; a man as men should be. This book is primarily intended for those who, for one reason or another, cannot or do not want to go to a gym. The bed can reap great benefits from simple exercises with little to no equipment..."

As mentioned above, Treloar was an educated and intelligent man and did not need a ghostwriter. Consequently, he was able to very accurately describe the practice method he recommended, and I highly recommend reading his entire book if you have the time or inclination (although I'll summarize all the main points later in the section on how to do the exercises). ) ) Introduce the light dumbbell exercise method like this:

“Practicing in front of a mirror and watching your muscles work helps direct proper blood flow to the part of the body that is being used and goes a long way toward achieving the desired development. The speed and rhythm of the arm exercises should be slow and deliberate: around forty or fifty counts per minute, slower for the body exercises, although the muscle contraction may be faster when completed. However, the rewind must be slower to allow the tissue to be completely washed out with fresh blood. The beginner must pay close attention to muscle control to the end.

that only the muscles involved in the exercise are contracted.

So again, we're talking about performing these dumbbell movements rhythmically at a specific cadence and using maximal (he says "full") self-controlled muscle contractions followed by relaxation to release the muscle with fresh blood. Treloar recommends using the same lightweight dumbbells around 3 to 5 pounds, but of course the tool itself isn't important. What he's looking for is that particular feeling of maximum contraction and full "pump" within the muscle he's working, and interestingly he claims that as the strength and size of the muscle increases, it takes more time, i.e. many repetitions. , to achieve this effect. , this is the time to use a

"DIFFICULT FORM FOR THIS EXERCISE: USE A SLIGHTLY HEAVY BELL OR TAKE A HARDER POSITION"

This is very important: instead of automatically needing more weight, you can increase the spin by slightly changing the angle of fire and leverage. It was the effect on the muscle that mattered, not how much weight you could lift. Another important point that Treloar makes deserves a separate mention here. Many other bodybuilders of this period and later popularized so-called "self-resistance exercises" or "tension movements" in which one limb is pressed against the resistance generated by another limb by holding it in place, or even the resistance of the other limbs. lifting movements. an imaginary heavyweight. In both modalities, they often spoke of "muscles working against each other" or "the action of one muscle working against the tension created by opposing muscles." This is specifically NOT what Sandow or anyone else recommends for light dumbbell routines, and Treloar makes this very clear:

“You only need to contract the muscles involved (the driving forces), you need to generate fatigue…

All of these different books seem to contradict each other at first in places - they talk about "getting the whole body through the movements", "contracting the muscles fully", etc. 🇧🇷 It's just a matter of common language and terminology in time: the muscles directly involved in what is happening must be thoroughly worked and tightened and not slow down in their work. This is considered "easy" to work with. For example, tensing your entire arm during a push-up movement so that the triceps contraction fights the biceps contraction, such as trying to drive with the parking brake on, would be unnatural use of the arm and would count as "effort." Treloar's book is important because it places this detail at the center of his instructions.

Sergeant Alfred Moss Not much is known about this man, but it at least seems reasonable to assume that his real name was Alf Moss, and as such he stands alone among all the music-hall strongmen of the day simply for failing to give that name. even stupid name itself. Moss was a contender in the early rounds of the international competition, which Treloar ultimately won, but was apparently disqualified for being heavily tattooed. This seems a bit unfair since he was obviously better built than Treloar and had a much better moustache:

Sergeant Moss was a British gymnastics champion and physical education teacher. When he left the army, he assembled a strongman on the stage and then published a book called The Handbook of Free Gymnastics around 1912 that included a detailed section on dumbbell exercises. The word "gymnastics" here does not seem to refer to things like pommel horse exercises, hand vaults, and front levers on rings, although he has covered this and much more in other books, and instead seems to be used in the context of general gymnastics. . Again, the dumbbell movements shown are pretty much the same as we've heard before, with just a few minor changes, but oddly enough, the routine comes across as if it were being intently taught to a class of soldiers by a training instructor. Sandow's dumbbell training principles were adopted by the British Army at the turn of the century, in Sandow's words in Strength and How to Get It:

"It is well known that my system has been virtually adopted in the military; although the method used in the army gym is not absolutely identical to the one I advocate, it is obviously based on the same principles."

Perhaps the military dumbbell routine presented by Sergeant Moss is exactly the system Sandow was talking about. Again, most of the original exercises presented by Sandow are reproduced exactly, but with several additions, this time with military-style movements, primarily tapping and foot flexion movements. There are few details on how to perform the exercises in terms of muscle tension etc. other than "Keep your arms perfectly stiff" or "Legs stay stiff, rotate your arms so the backs of your hands are facing up." etc., but it's clear from the photos that Moss creates extreme stress in the movements, far more than would naturally occur when lifting such small weights (see above). It seems to me that at that time, around 1912, the idea of ​​exactly how to use these little dumbbells was so widely understood by the general population since Sandow and his copyists burst onto the scene that the word "dumbbells" became synonymous. . to be made . of a certain type of training involving self-generated rhythmic tension, and therefore it was thought that the reader would know that this was necessary.

Professor Edmond Desbonnet

While England saw the rise of Sandow, Strongfort, Moss and many others, and America was also graced by Sandow's stage presence and later saw the rise of Treloar and many others, France had Professor Edmond Desbonnet. Desbonnet ran gymnasiums in Lille and later in Paris, and published several books on physical culture, cataloging earlier movement trends and strongmen before him (in works such as The Kings of Strength), and also establishing his own "Method Desbonnet". His method is generally reported to have emerged around 1910, which would leave him open to the charge that he might have been influenced by Sandow's books, but in fact he was writing on fitness and exercise as early as 1884, before Sandow. He wrote that physical culture was solely for the betterment of the individual: the person developed the body solely for himself and himself and not to compete with others. He also wrote that muscles must be developed through "local contractions and little external resistance, and not primarily through vigorous effort." 🇧🇷 He had a great influence on training and bodybuilding methods in France and apparently there are still studies today that faithfully teach his method. It consisted of light dumbbell exercises - again, many identical to those already mentioned - and based on the exact same self-directed maximal contraction training methodology, light barbell exercises with the same approach (at the same time, the light bar weighs 25 pounds). - 50 pounds was known as the "French bar") and a fascinating set of floor exercises that closely resembles the original Pilates floor work, but predates the work of Joseph Pilates by decades.

Dumbbells and light dumbbells used in the Desbonnet method

bobby pandor

Bobby Pandour, believe it or not, was not the name of this gentleman, although it is understandable that he changed it due to his successful stage career, since he was actually a Pole named Wladyslaw Kurcharczyk. As we can see in the photo above, Pandour had it all: the classic Greek statue body, the fig leaf, the incredible mustache and the public loved it. Pandour was born between 1876 and 1882, depending on who you believe, and came to London at the turn of the 20th century. He began his stage career at the height of the strongman craze and soon rose to fame, although he was not a strongman, his act consisted of performing gymnastics and hand balancing exercises with his brother Ludwig and then showing off his muscles. , as Sandow had done before. he had. 🇧🇷 He did this not in a lighted cabinet, but on top of a Roman column with bright overhead lighting contrasting with a black photo curtain behind him. Apparently, his displays of muscle control were amazing to watch. Pandour made a living as the Sandow of the poor, posing for artists who couldn't afford the more expensive original, but he never set foot in the world of the Post.

Order strength courses or exercise books. That last point is exactly why I bring it up here: Pandour is known to have never lifted heavy weights and insisted on building muscle with a pair of ten-pound dumbbells. This is confirmed by several different sources (including the famous Otto Arco) and it is said that he was always tensing and tensing his muscles. Critics of the light weights protocol insist that the men who advocated it actually used heavy weights and multiple sets and only pretended to have used light dumbbell max contraction training because it was easier to sell to a gullible audience, but Pandour , who demonstrated an identical body, also claimed to have exclusively used this method and had nothing to sell and especially nothing to gain from this claim. He can note Pandur's impressive thigh development (something that sets him apart from Sandow), which he attributed to his habit of running up several flights of stairs whenever he got the chance to carry his brother on his back. . I did not include that last idea in the exercise section of this book; I haven't tried it yet, and lastly, I try to avoid exercises that sound like hard and uncomfortable work, but provide a routine that will put you in a frame of mind. good body. If he has siblings nearby and lives at the top of several flights of stairs, be my guest; it certainly seems effective. Google the name Pandor and you'll find it discussed on many bodybuilding, weight training, and bodyweight exercise forums. People often praise the phenomenal muscle development he's achieved, but keep reading and after a few posts someone will say, "There's no way I could have a physique like that with 10 pound dumbbells!" So again they claim, without evidence and in total contradiction to what the man himself said, that he must have been lifting heavy weights. It's worth noting that all of the men mentioned above (and some of their enlightened students as well) managed to sculpt very impressive physiques fifty or sixty years before the discovery of steroids and without modern supplements, real or fake sunscreen, synthetic human growth hormones or Photoshop. . . . 🇧🇷 That alone is enough to wow today, not to mention the suggestion that they might as well have done it with five or even ten pound hand weights. I am fully aware that this sounds like a ridiculous statement, but that is because very few people today have attempted these exotic exercises the way they were meant to be performed. Anyone who does this will find them extremely difficult to perform correctly with anything but a lightweight due to the very specific angles and nature of the tension involved. When you try to assume the very demanding positions recommended by Sandow, Strongfort, Treloar and Moss and then contract the active muscles to the maximum while working rhythmically

If you repeat the exercises for the type of reps that are recommended (between 50 and 100 for some exercises and between 10 and 40 or more for others), you'll find that the only loads that make it POSSIBLE are in the 3 to 5 pound range. As you get stronger, you may need to add some mass, but not as much as you'd think; Due to the leverage and pull angles involved, an extra pound or two will make a world of difference. Try the exercises below and you'll see that Pandor must have been extremely strong to do this type of work with ten pounds on each hand. So we saw that in the late 19th and early 20th centuries there was a group of impressively evolved individuals who insisted on only or partially training with very light dumbbells. Many of them left clear instructions for anyone who wants to follow in their footsteps and do the same. The inquisitive reader may wonder where this kind of training came from: did all these guys come up with the idea at the same time, as they claim? -The latter simply copied Sandow, as he claimed? As it turns out, a former bodybuilder spent years teaching his students exactly this method; Students who included Sandow, Strongfort, Pandour Desbonnet, and many others, including virtually every notable bodybuilder to populate Europe and America after him, several prominent sports personalities, many European royals, and several prominent public figures.

Professor Louis Attila All the honors that Eugen Sandow received (or that he believed he deserved) in the early 20th century and are still associated with his name should have gone to someone else. The true father of modern bodybuilding, the first celebrity personal trainer to royalty, and the first inventor of innovative strength training equipment was actually a man named Professor Louis Attila. Yes, that's right, I said: "They called me." Again, this was a self-proclaimed stage name and again the man in question was German. Born in Karlsruhe in 1844, Ludwig (Louis) Durlacher was another highly intelligent and well-educated bodybuilder: he was an excellent pianist and spoke five languages ​​as a child. The fact that strongmen performing tradition predates not only Sandow but also Durlacher is supported by the fact that as a young man he was evidently obsessed with the circus and stage strongmen of his day and decided to follow in the footsteps of the. Durlacher managed to become an apprentice to an extremely famous theater artist named Felice Napoli, an Italian who was a star in the best circuses and traveled extensively in Europe. Back then, the strongman act was a little different: the actor could still lift heavy weights and perform unusual feats of strength during his performance, but these feats were woven into a story or pantomime and he was expected to perform a role. role (eg the mighty Hercules, or a heroic woodcutter rescuing the damsel in distress, etc.), which may involve a lot of singing and acting. Among Naploli's specialties were "Tomb of Hercules" stunts (identical to the aforementioned human bridge act) and lifting heavy objects while he was suspended by a rope from his legs. He was also famous for his incomparable and amazing physique. The young Durlacher spent only a few years with his first teacher, but we can be sure that he learned a great deal from him, definitely these areas of expertise as well, as his own later career shaped them all in some way. Durlacher joined a shooting and sports club called the Baden Snipers when he was sixteen and became an impressive all-around athlete. There is a story where he saved the life of the Duke of Baden's son, which may be a little PR or true, but supposedly gave him a connection to the duke's grateful family, which he later used to forge connections with the privileged and wealthy. . He also took a look at the life of the other half and decided he wanted some of it and realized that his best path to a better lifestyle was stardom on stage as a strongman, so he formed his own performance at a tender age. nineteen

Renaming himself Louis Attila, he toured Europe with a performance in which he lifted and balanced weights and performed his own variations on tricks he had learned from Napoli. He popularized the human bridge trick, an adaptation of the earlier Tomb of Hercules trick. He invented the feats of the Roman chair and the Roman column, which consist of hanging by your feet from a pole and lifting enormous weights with your entire body. up or back over a chair he was standing on to raise a barbell back to a standing position. These last two were obvious innovations based on Napoli's rope acrobatics. A famous feat of Attila's was performing a powerful rifle exercise with a heavy iron bar, which spun like nothing and then balanced on his chin. There is no doubt that Attila was tremendously strong, but there was a lot of showmanship involved in these powerful maneuvers and many of the feats of strength involved were not what they seemed. They weren't "gimmicks" in the sense that they were outright fraudulent, but they were gimmicks in the sense of relying on a specific "talent" or experience rather than the brute force that the public would think was all that mattered. In that sense he had

he learned the "tricks of his trade" from Napoli and now used them. An eminent "Professor Dubois" once examined his impressive-looking weights and declared them "particularly light". In fact, the mentioned weight, which seemed huge, only weighed forty pounds: light if he's using it for an Olympic lift, but still pretty heavy if he leans back while standing on a chair, it reaches all the way to the floor. and then picking him up, standing up with a slight smile on his face. Performing in a tight burgundy leotard that hugged his body like "the skin of an eel", Attila's physique was very apparent during his performance, and he began to be contacted for exercise advice and the best fit for his strong, manly frame. . Physical. He briefly became an adviser on the issue to most of Europe's crowned heads, including the royal families of Russia, Greece, Norway, Denmark and England. He also educated various wealthy society figures, including Vanderbilt, Rothschild, and Lord Lonsdale of England. When he retired from acting in the late 1880s, Attila opened a healthy physical culture studio in Brussels, where he taught hundreds of students. One of them was a flat-footed German thief named Friedrich Müller, do you remember him? This was the man who would later conquer the world as Eugen Sandow. The official story, which is repeated endlessly, is that Attila trained Sandow until he became the strongest man in his school and then either helped him train for the challenge against Sampson in England or took him to England to challenge Sampson. because he knew his student. . he could easily defeat the English strongman (depending on which version is retold). The rest is history, and in these sanitized versions Attila disappears at this point, only to briefly reappear later in the story as a trainer to some of Sandow's successors. What actually happened was that Sandow wandered across Europe and ended up in Attila's studio, where the professor saw potential in him and over the course of a few years helped him develop his already decent physique and taught him strongman tricks. . Exchange. Attila later returned to the stage in a double act with Sandow and together they toured extensively throughout Europe.

Sandow at 19 years old in the first days of training with Attila

Double performance when Sandow was 21 (Courtesy of Jan and Terry Todd, H.J. Lutcher Stark Center for Physical Education and Sports)

Sandow was a taller and more handsome Teutonic, while Attila himself was a short, much stockier man in his mid-forties. I think it was just the older guy saying, "Hey kid, we can make a fortune off your looks and my knowledge, stick with me." Sandow wasn't a jerk and did exactly that for a while, but as is often the case with the way things go, the two eventually fell out. Somehow Sandow succeeded

Attila had worked on all of this himself and had never mentioned his influential teacher or given him enough credit. Hear what Attila had to say when he moved to London and opened a second gym there in Bloomsbury after he and Sandow parted ways:

“Attila's goal is to teach British youth to develop great strength. He has a special training system that he is willing to adopt in our military and in public schools."

hmmmm, what do you think this particular training system could consist of? That's right: light dumbbell training with targeted muscle contractions. This was the basic training that he gave to all of his students, including Sandow apparently, and the system that he believed was the secret to developing great strength. Sandow stole Attila's Thunder, sold his professor's system as his own, and adopted it not only in the British Army but around the world. Very little concrete information about Attila survives, and the few biographies and articles about him that can be found are based on the same scant sources. Articles often mention the fact that he kept extensive notebooks and scrapbooks throughout his life, and writers often cite this trait as their main reference to him. Attila's entire scrapbook was recently digitally scanned at great expense by the HJ Lutcher Stark Center for Physical Culture and Sports and can be read online free of charge in its entirety at http://www.starkcenter.org - ( click the Donate button if you go there to read). Now we can read this priceless document and see the origin of many things that are routinely written about Attila's life. (*All direct quotes and scrapbook images in this and subsequent chapters are courtesy of Jan and Terry Todd, H.J. Lutcher Stark Center for Physical Culture and Sports*) The scrapbook is very interesting about what happened to continuation, namely that Sandow was appearing in England and Attila was involved in helping him successfully challenge Samson at the Alhambra Theater and establish himself as the world's greatest strongman. As we have already heard, the official version says that Attila knew that his own student could easily defeat the great Sampson and his student Cyclops, so he facilitated Sandow's challenge, Sandow easily won and walked away with the crowd admiring Sampson's work. . The version that Attila himself presents in his scrapbook paints a very different picture:

"I arranged his appearance against Sampson in London: Sandow's chain broke and I won £500 that a baby could have torn apart. A bond that simply hangs in the balance. Lord Clifford, Marquess of Queensbury and Richmond, as Sandow's mentor, I he believed the deed had been done correctly. That's what Sandow's reputation did: it's based on a lie."

So Sampson was badly beaten, no wonder he was a sore underdog, but it's likely Attila and Sandow were playing him at his own game. The above statement was made years later when the two men fell out, but at the time they both benefited from the famous victory. Due to this success, they toured together again, but also broke up, this time permanently. Sandow went to the United States to be with Zeigfield, and Attila eventually opened several studios, first one on Long Island and then his Athletic Studio and Physical Culture School in New York City. The studio has become incredibly successful with a host of celebrity clients including boxer Jim Corbett, Florenz Zeigfield, Oscar Hammerstein and John Philip Souza.

Attila at this time in America

It was Attila who found the idea of ​​Sandow "writing" a book ridiculous, and he and his former student ended up facing each other in court twice, once when he testified in favor of it.

Charges for an alleged debt Sandow owed to a variety artist, and again when Sandow brought charges against his former mentor for "exuding emotion in the mail", alleging that Attila sent him a letter acknowledging that he called him a "rogue". By this time, Sandow had already claimed that he had invented the light weight training protocol and reinvented the experience for him, so Attila's part in his development was greatly reduced, so maybe that was the cause of his development? the discomfort? Attila always insisted that he developed the five-pound dumbbell workout routine that he taught all of his students, saying it was essential to developing a truly strong and impressive physique. Eventually, in 1910, he himself published a version in RK Fox's Police Gazette, but that was sixteen years after Sandow had already popularized and reclaimed the routine and training method. Most of the information in this short section on Attila comes directly from information in his own scrapbook, supplemented by an article titled "Requiem for a Strong Man - Reassessing the Career of Professor Louis Attila" by Kim Beckwith and Jan Todd , published in Magazine. Iron appeared in the game and was based on scrapbook content. This is a great article, packed with interesting information, with the admirable purpose of giving Attila some of the recognition that she so richly and belatedly deserves. Towards the end, however, he provides us with a perfect example of how authors continually (unintentionally) misrepresent what was then written about the light dumbbell protocol. The authors mention the five-pound dumbbell routine and cite an interview with Attila titled "How to Be a Strong Man," included in the scrapbook, in which he describes all of his exercises. They then state the following based on the article:

"While Attila recommended that beginners use light weights, he did his best to make up for the lack of weight by demanding high repetitions...strength and fitness...Attila maintained that light weights were good for beginners and would develop all muscle groups when done scientifically." Use; However, if people train for a while, they learn great feats (of strength)… strength if you don't learn to use it too?”

This is a perfect example of a modern day strength training expert.

something through the lens of your own knowledge. While it is perfectly reasonable to read the article in question as above, what it actually says is:

"My system of light weights is designed to develop all the muscles in the body, but once those muscles are developed, I teach my students how to achieve great things, because what's the use of getting strong if you don't learn how to use it." ? ”

In other words, he made it very clear that it was his light dumbbell system that developed the muscles in his pupils (not to mention that it was for beginners only) and ONLY when those muscles were "developed" enough a lifting student could be introduced to feats. by that time he had already acquired the necessary strength. In summary, Attila says that the light dumbbells developed all the muscles AND made them stronger.

He continues:

“The system consists of a series of exercises with dumbbells, whose weight varies from 2 to 5 pounds depending on the strength of the subject, each movement is designed to have an effect on a different muscle or muscle group. (He then details exercises that would later appear in his book, Professor Attila's Five-Pound Dumbbell Exercises, with particular attention to single-legged squats.) Scoff: Sandow laughed at his first pair of five-pound dumbbells—that was in 1886 when we first joined forces—but there's no stronger proponent of a lighter dumbbell system today than Sandow, and you can't obtain a stronger illustration of its effectiveness, than to compare its development today with that of a photograph taken before he was trained in this method."

That's correct, far from this piece showing that all the strongmen of the time believed in light dumbbell work while Attila was different and knew that that wasn't all it took for strength that he really argues for, despite ridiculed by many of his peers, he believed that light dumbbells developed all the muscles that led to strength

then one can learn how to perform great feats AND THAT THE DUMB BELLS OF LIGHT ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR THE INCREDIBLE SOPHISTICATION OF SANDOWS. (If only we had the "before" photo to compare.) In another scrapbook article in which Attila introduces his new protégé, Max Unger (later Lionel Strongfort), he says:

"The system I developed for training strong men, I call it my 5-pound dumbbell system, and it is now used almost universally by physical training specialists...get strong and fit...in six months a normal man doing such exercises with good physique to be able to carry out most feats of strength commonly seen on stage."

On the other hand, it's not just simple exercises for beginners, it's fundamental foundational work that builds muscle and makes someone functionally strong enough to start lifting:

“Light exercise strengthens the muscles, and working with heavy weights makes it possible to use the strength gained. Once established correctly, the muscle pattern can be maintained for ten minutes of night and morning work with five-pound dumbbells.”

Again, not an easy beginner's workout to be discarded once strength is built, but an invaluable training regimen that maintains daily muscle condition. Elsewhere in the scrapbook, when an interviewer questions Sandow and Attila together, Attila's feelings about light dumbbell exercise become even clearer:

But Mr. Sandow, how did Professor Attila get you to this stage of muscle development? I guess he was giving you very heavy dumbbell exercises.

With an amused smile the great trainer chimed in: "The big mistake is made in training. No doubt they started with 6 or 7 pound dumbbells at the gym you went to? Would it surprise you if I start your average student at 2 or 3 I started Sandow myself when I was five years old and he still trains with dumbbells that only weigh 7 pounds?”… With that he put Sandow's instruments in my hands…” Yes, that's one of the great mysteries of muscle training. – continued with light weights to elaborate..."

This is inscribed '1890 Interview' in Attila's handwriting and appears to have come from a magazine called Rod and Gun. Several interesting things can be gleaned from this quote: that it was common practice in any gym at the time to start a student with dumbbells that weighed 6 or 7 pounds, but Attila thought they were TOO HEAVY to use in his exercises! Which once again confirms that Sandow began training and building his physique with light weights and that even then (in his muscular prime when he appeared on stage with heavy weights every night) Sandow still trained with light weights every day, although now has graduated to 7 lbs. Attila even produces them and gives them to the interviewer! It becomes very clear if you think about it for a second that this "dumbbell workout" they're talking about isn't just common weightlifting movements - Attila's "system" was to use these weights in such a way that 6 or 7 pounds would be difficult and would even suffice for Eugen Sandow at the height of his forces. This is 1890, years before Sandow parted ways with Attila and sold this lightweight dumbbell system. Here neither of them had anything to gain by pretending to train one way or another. They earned money and fame by performing on stage and, in Attila's case, running his high school. He certainly wouldn't make a lot of money training whom he recommended protocols that didn't work or whose students weren't built strong or impressive. Sandow was both and was training with 7-pound dumbbells at the time. This was a man who could do a somersault while he held two 50-pound dumbbells. So what kind of exercise would only require five pounds initially and then when you're muscular and very, very strong, it might still be useful? achieved with only 7? No one seems to have asked this question. The answer is that Professor Attila's "magical" dumbbell system involved sustained, alternating, rhythmic muscle contractions in positions carefully designed to achieve optimal leverage and range of motion.

optimal work of each muscle or muscle group. How the heck this system actually produced the results he claimed we'll see later, but for now, just look at the evidence pointing to its existence and that Attila actually believed in it, and everyone else's as well. your students. Although it seems strange to us, he actually didn't say that light weights are only good for beginners and that to build muscle you have to move to heavy weights, as is often said. He said that the light dumbbell protocol is his big secret, that it can transform a person's body and lay the foundation for great strength, that it can be practiced by both beginners and Sandow, that 2 or 3 pounds for beginners would be enough and that even if he was strong and well built, 3 kilos was enough!

After Sandow left him and their bitter fight, Attila trained a young Max Unger (Lionel Strongfort) to be his new protégé and trained many others including Bobby Pandour and Edmond Desbonnet. In fact, Beckwith and Todd begin their tribute to the Iron Game History professor with this quote:

"A thousand dollars to some charity if I can't prove conclusively that every so-called fitness teacher in this country is either my student or uses one of the systems I've developed and perfected..."

Attila said this in 1894, and he probably shouldn't have paid, as we saw in the last chapter, everyone who had anything in physical culture was actually a graduate of his and/or advocated the light weight protocol he claimed to have invented. , when he was with the Baden snipers in my youth. I have no doubt that the specific routine he established, and particularly the way he systematically moved through the muscles of the entire body, with particular emphasis on what we now call the "posterior chain" or "posterior line," the muscles and fascia in the back - was Attila's own creation. The interesting question, however, is whether the actual training principles used (self-generated tension with light weights) have been used by anyone before him, and whether he got them from his mentor, Felice Napoli, or from some other source.

It turns out that from the 1830s to the 1850s, from before Attila was born until he was only about six years old, an even older bodybuilder was teaching in Europe (initially, oddly enough, in Brussels, just as Attila would later ). This was another person who built an amazing physique and also recommended light dumbbells to his clients. When we look at the incredible story of this man, it seems that this strange training method could be very old.

Hippolyte Triat and the Ancient Greeks When you think of Napoleonic France, the image of lavish, well-equipped gyms with mid-range trainers paying monthly subscriptions and participating in group floor exercise classes and light body-toning classes don't come to mind. immediately. It all sounds a bit like a 21st century gym, with its Pilates and cardio classes and resistance room. However, such a place really existed. We wouldn't know if it weren't for Edmond Desbonnet, a French student of Professor Attila and a photographer and chronicler of the history of physical culture, of whom we've heard before. Desbonnet uncovered historical information about an incredible person who revolutionized exercise and fitness training in the mid-1800s, single-handedly inventing the gym as we see it today, the group exercise class, the idea of ​​exercising for a beautiful body, as well as I eat just strength and conditioning and possibly the bar as well. The man in question is Hippolyte Triat (her real name his, hooray), whose life story was apparently penned by Alexandre Dumas, and who may have been the first man in the modern world to popularize the light dumbbell training protocol that we use. I have read all about it. Born near Nîmes in 1813, Triat was kidnapped by gypsies at the age of six and she spent the next seven years living with them and performing disguised as a girl in a traveling barbed wire show. When he left the gypsies, he was part of a traveling strongman act (that's 1826, sixty years before Sandow supposedly "invented" this form of entertainment and twenty years before Attila was born, which goes to show that there really is no Nothing new under the sun). she, as the story goes, heroically broke her leg rescuing an aristocratic lady from a runaway horse (I know, you couldn't make that up). To compensate the young man, the lady's family paid for her to receive a proper education at the Burgot Jesuit College until she was twenty-two. He learned French, Spanish and Latin and, already interested in physical strength and athleticism, had access to several ancient volumes in the extensive library of the Jesuit college, which dealt with the exercise methods of the ancient Greeks and Romans. Among these works that we know of were the writings of Mercurialis, Plexotis, D'Andry, and the educator of Francis I's "Treatise on the Art of Falling." On leaving school he again presented himself as a strong man, but evidently he had learned something valuable of all his reading because by all accounts he now looked amazing and his strength was something extraordinary. He "invented" a rotating pole device that he hung from and actually trapped horses (this sounds suspiciously like the Roman column that Attila later "reinvented"). To the

He traveled through Spain and even England, eventually ending up in Brussels, where he opened a very successful primary school to educate others.

The only surviving image of the Hippolyte Triat

He later moved to Paris and opened an even more impressive studio, which the novelist Paul Feval (one of his students) wrote about in 1856. It was this report that Desbonnet read, saving Triat's memory from obscurity. Feval placed great emphasis on emulating Triat or the 'revival' of the ancient art of gymnastics based on the ancient Greek Palestra as a place where body and soul can fully exercise as one.

An impression of the Triat Gym in Paris from Desbonnet's book - you can see the rows of students training with light dumbbells doing an exercise straight out of the Attila/Sandow/Treloar and Moss books - exercise 11 in that book actually!

It describes a huge vaulted gallery, a "broad nave" with three stories of balconies surrounding a huge exercise floor. The "cruise" was connected with a network of ropes and trapezoids; Half of the floor is covered with arched horses and parallel bars, the rest is a large open space made of wooden parquet. Favel tells of Triat, who appeared on one of the balconies, with a body that resembled ancient Greek statues and was three or four times stronger than a normal man, then jumped into the void to grab a stray rope, and then jumped into the void to grab onto a stray rope and then jumped into the air. it swung effortlessly. fifty feet above the place. getting up, traversing the vast space like Spider-Man or Burt Lancaster in one of his pirate movies, before descending hand in hand to the ground where he would be doing his nightly gym class. The whole place was lit by recessed gas lamps and the porches were filled with the great and good who came to see the practice of how people went to the theater or the opera. When he himself describes physical education, we hear of floor exercises, large and small dumbbells, iron bars and ball bars, and finally "heavy barbell work," all done in a way that "trains one on one and in a logical and therapeutic order". of all muscles. "of the human body" and that's it: Desbonnet himself couldn't find out anything about Triat (with which he was obsessed) for years and only found out much later, when he himself was an expert in physical culture.

trained in the manner of Sandow and Attila that a man brought his son to Desbonnet and casually mentioned that he had been a Triate student when he was young. Desbonnet questioned him, was introduced to other surviving students, and was able to gather information about the man's methods, which he later incorporated into his own "Desbonnet Method." Triat claimed to have developed a system of "rational gymnastics" that combined the best of ancient knowledge with the best of modern innovative approaches, and in the process invented equipment such as barbells, dumbbells, and cable machines. His system was organized as follows:

"Freehand Exercises: Arm Twists, Lunges, Knee Push-ups, etc... Six Kilo Globe Dumbbells: Place bar behind neck and twist, etc. Heavy Bars & Dumbbells: Single Raises, Snatches, Swings, Presses, charged, etc. Postures: including "the gladiator"

Since, according to Desbonnet's research, the "heavy" dumbbells the student finished this workout with weighed only 30 pounds and the light dumbbells weighed either 12 or 25 pounds, it is reasonable to assume that the light dumbbells weighed about 7 pounds or less. ( about 6 pounds). That means his system was basically a set of what Sandow called a "free motion" warm-up, "good morning" twists and turns, or possibly a pair of squats with a 12-pound bar on your back, a set of alternate exercises. Movements with about 6-pound dumbbells, some twisting exercises with a 25-pound bar, a quick, intense burst of individual exercises like swings and cleans with 30-pound dumbbells or barbells (equivalent to working out with a small 2-pound kettlebell). 1 pound) pud") and then ends with some type of muscle control exercise or pose. This is very similar to the type of training taught by Professor Attila in his study and the subsequent weights associated with it, although nominally "heavy" not it's called that in most modern gyms.If you call a 30lb barbell or dumbbell heavy, most people would laugh at you.To make things even more familiar, Triat would prescribe these exercises

according to the strength and conditioning of the student at first, so everyone started with light dumbbells and 16 pound bars and gradually added the other exercises to the routine as their strength increased until they had them all in one routine, including one set, each completed. in less than an hour". He believed in certain maxims, including "training should not be working to death" and "practice is not exhaustion," which sound similar to Attila and his various acolyte advice to "put your all in, but overexert yourself to keep up." to avoid". . “. etc. Triat also placed great emphasis on the harmonious functioning of the body and the "mind" as a combined force, similar to Sandow and Attila's instruction to concentrate the "will" as the driving force of the muscles and says:

"The aim of these exercises is not to create a muscular Hercules, but men with harmonious appearance, healthy bodies and strong minds."

Speaking of the actual method used in the exercises, we only have this brief excerpt relating to his invention of the various exercise machines (including light weights) used in his study:

“The devices themselves are nothing without the knowledge to use them. A tool is one thing, but using it with the proper understanding is quite another.”

All of this is so similar to the knowledge that Attila would spread forty and fifty years later that one wonders if he was exposed to the methods of the Triate at some point in his youth, or if his mentor Felice Napoli - a man he certainly knew well with the methods modern training methods of their time, some of them absorbed, or even if by the 1850s they became so popular and influential throughout Europe that they simply penetrated everyone's practice. We've certainly seen how quickly Attila's own routine became popular after she became popular through Sandow. As we heard, Triat's methods were heavily influenced by what he read in the ancient texts he was exposed to at the Jesuit school. These titles still exist and we can check them ourselves (at least we can see the images and read some comments about them if we speak English!). One was a famous work by Mercurialis.

Hieronymous Mercurialis de Forli was an Italian writer and physician whose writings include De Arte Gymnastica, written in 1569 as a result of his studies of ancient Roman and Greek writings on athletics and therapeutic exercise in antiquity. The practical recommendations in this work reflect the writings of Socrates, Plato, Galen, and Seneca, and the first and last editions are lavishly illustrated:

Above we see men training heavy slabs of stone or lead with what are clearly light weights and something called "lead." It's easy to see that light dumbbell triathlons and dumbbell twists with fixed 12- to 25-pound weights at arm's length owe a lot to this text. Note the physiques of the men in the illustration and compare them to the images of Sandow and the others in Chapter Two.

The staff of the Todd-McLean Collection of Physical Culture at the University of Texas at Austin have an illustrated copy of the first edition of this text, which appears to be fully translated. These are the same people who did such a great job on Attila's scrapbook, so maybe soon we'll be able to read this famous English text in digitized form (fingers crossed). Until then, I can only guess at the actual instructions for using the "dumbbells" or light weights, but I'd like to think they would include the use of

Weights around 2-5 pounds, focusing the mind, will, or "spirit" to create concentrated rhythmic contractions for long periods of time and doing it daily to build muscle and strength. If this is the case, then the training method advocated by Triat, Attila, Sandow, and all their contemporaries from the mid-18th century to the early 20th century may actually be an echo of the methods used to develop the bodies. that the ancient Greek and Roman statues they so admired were actually replicas. It's interesting to me that while any sane modern commentator would claim that the strongmen of yore (who talked a lot about using light weights) simply MUST have employed heavy progressive resistance to develop their impressive physiques, the physiques of men in question - Triat, Attila, Sandow, Moss, Treloar, Desbonnet, etc., do not really resemble those of modern athletes developed through strong progressive resistance. Although they are very muscular, they constantly exhibit a different look, a different aesthetic than the typical muscular physique of today. They look very similar in size and form of development, and closely resemble De Arte Gymnastica illustrations and classical statues of old. Isn't it reasonable to assume that this could be because everyone trained in the same way and in a different way than we do today?

(*The information on Triate in this chapter comes primarily from a series of articles written by David Chapman for Iron Game History, translating Desbonnet's earlier writings.)

The W.A.T.C.H Protocol Well, that's the short story of this peculiar type of lightweight exercise. Before we can begin to describe the exercises themselves, it's necessary to get very specific about the exact method of using the light weights that I think all these different bodybuilders have recommended. Most of the original texts from the 1880s to the early 1900s are written in what today sounds like "exotic" Victorian English, using expressions that are, to say the least, obscure and often confusing. All of this is made even more difficult by the fact that people already have very specific ideas about weights and bodybuilding. Back then, readers approached physical culture and dumbbell exercises with new eyes, everything was new to them, and they had no preconceived notions of what to do. Even then, when students came to the easy dumbbell exercises with an open mind, people had trouble understanding the very precise instructions and sometimes did the wrong exercises and didn't get the right results. Sandow mentions this in his second book; in fact, he says that he prompted him to develop his "spring dumbbells," and the problem must have been so common that people needed help. Some Sandow enthusiasts actually wrote comments trying to clarify the system and help those who "couldn't figure it out". One of these texts was "The Science and Art of Physical Development - With Advice on the Sandow System", written in 1902 by W.R. Pope, a London student of the Sandow Method. This little book is extremely interesting and I have used many of the "tips" that Mr. Pope provides for more information in the exercise section. The author says some interesting things under the title "The art of training":

“To obtain satisfactory results from the exercises, it is absolutely necessary to acquire a correct and complete work style. There are a great number of students who, after working diligently for a month or two, get so little profit or benefit from the system that they give it all up in despair; the common flaw is that they have learned the art of realizing not mastering. training. correctly"

And later:

“I urge everyone to seek help and guidance from a competent instructor”

A photo of Pope with the 16-inch arms he built with his 5-pound dumbbells. The mustache is sold separately.

That last point should tell us a lot: remember, at the time, people who could afford it signed up for expensive private lessons at men's gyms like Attila and Sandow, to be personally trained in the proper use of light weights. Think about it for a minute. If this system is really what modern commentators assume when they look at pictures in books and "recognize" a very simple beginner dumbbell sequence, why the hell would anyone need ongoing, detailed personal instructions on how to do it correctly? If all you did with those small weights were push-ups, presses, and pull-ups, what the heck would those very expensive, ongoing private lessons consist of? “Lift weights, lower weights, lift weights, lower weights… OK, shower? "No, the help and guidance of a competent instructor is recommended, as that is exactly what he is asking for."

Reaching with light dumbbells is not easy to achieve, nor is it easy to understand just by looking at photos of someone else doing it. And here is the even bigger problem for those of us coming to this method of practice in the 21st century: to us, these teachings seem like something else entirely. We are all vaguely familiar with the modern strength training theories discussed in the first chapter: we know exactly what "strength training" entails and how it should be performed when we look at the light dumbbell exercises for which we only "see" a series of training. Beginners with weights that are too light to be of any use. The first thing to realize is that this has nothing to do with weight training. THE WEIGHTS THEMSELVES ARE JUST RANDOM - WHAT YOU ARE DOING WITH YOUR MUSCLES IS IMPORTANT.

Secondly, you should be aware that the word "exercise", as Mr. Pope mentioned above "The Art of Exercise", was used in a different way back then to mean something very different from what we mean by "exercise". " today. . First of all, it must be a physical "art". We tend to think of the proper "exercise" as something difficult and physically demanding: the man who has just returned from a 10-mile run, panting and bending over for air, legs shaky, has finished his "Exercise" by now. : The person lying in a sweaty heap from exhaustion after an hour and a half of intense cardio on machines, ergometers, and ellipticals has just "worked out," etc. with dumbbells was announced - that would have been a "heavy workout" or perhaps "a full body workout." You walk your dog and run around the park a bit, you do this to get him "exercise" but you don't expect him to be so exhausted afterwards that he'll take a day off to recuperate. If you're "training" a racehorse before a big race, you're putting him into a gentle canter to warm his muscles up and keep him in tip-top condition, but you're not whipping him to death for miles until he's foaming with sweat: that would take all your strength and recovery time and would not be good for a run the next day.This is the use of the word "exercise" familiar to strong old men.The light

Weights should fully invigorate and develop all muscles, exercise them to the maximum and flush them with blood rich in healthy nutrients, in order to keep the muscles in peak condition, but not to destroy muscle tissue and expend too much energy. The idea was that if he mastered the art of doing this correctly, through daily "training" by this definition, he could bring his muscles to peak performance. We're talking about a completely different training paradigm than today: destroy muscle fibers, allow them to recover and grow, and then repeat the model we're all thinking about today. When, in "The Science and Art of Physical Development," Pope discusses all the different "exercise systems" available at the time, then decides that after trying them all, Sandow's light method is by far "the better and more efficient." To our modern ears this sounds a bit strange and unlikely at first. He is arguing; heavy weight training with progressive weight gain (oddly enough), exercise machines and cable expanders, track and gym, and light weights and he says they're all good, but the last one (light weights) is "superior". This would definitely get some attention today, because from our point of view all of these training modes do "different things" i.e. build muscle size and strength, work muscles within range but not necessarily within their range. full range, build endurance, explosiveness and plyometrics, total body coordination and strength training and maybe just, relative to light weights, some slight muscle toning… how the heck can the latter be “superior”? Our current thinking about the movement obscures what it is actually saying. What if you read it like this? 🇧🇷

There is one thing you can do to thoroughly "train" each muscle in your body in a systematic way, contracting them rhythmically and forcefully, using your "intent" and holding them for a period of time. We will call this the "art of physical development." Doing this will increase your neurological control over these muscles over time, so your ability to do this will steadily improve over time. This practice has the effect of flushing the tissues with blood and, over time, leads to a particular type of physical development in which the muscles become very dense, defined, larger and better shaped, perfectly proportioned and increasingly receptive. . . This, in turn, allows for greater strength, as you can consciously control, relax, and contract your muscles by using them for other things. It improves full body coordination and therefore flexibility and athleticism and is absolutely wonderful for full body health.

To achieve this effect, there are a number of different approaches you can use: you can exercise with progressively heavier weights, you can pull up chest expanders or cable exercises, run track, do track and field, throw or swing on bars, um Do calisthenics. All muscles contract rhythmically over a period of time, and they all work to some degree, but the easiest, fastest, and most reliable way to achieve this effect is with the simple, light dumbbell protocol.

He really means that. What is the best "superior" method to thoroughly "train", improve and grow all the muscles of the body in this special way, day after day, in the shortest possible time and with the least possible effort? and work better? - Light exercises with dumbbells. As the man says:

"The entire success of a system depends on its ability in the least number of movements... what the student needs is, so to speak, a pocket edition of exercises that are easy to remember and quick to perform, but with the best results".

Isn't that what we all wish for: a pocket edition of exercises we could do every day that would get us in and keep us fit quickly and reliably? I think that's exactly what all the old bodybuilders tried to give us. Unfortunately, "fitness culture" is fragmented into bodybuilding, fitness training, sports science, and functional strength training, etc. The dumbbell log is the last thing you see. It's a shame, because if we could just put all our perfectly rational reservations aside and really try this kind of move for a few weeks or months, and master it the right way, we'd see that the old masters weren't kidding, it does. everything they promised. It works better and faster than any other exercise method I've tried, even though it clearly shouldn't work.

It seems to me that we need a new way of looking at this old way of training. To avoid any confusion and to make absolutely clear what we want to achieve with these outdated exercises, we need a new and clear definition of this exercise protocol. We need to be very clear about what the light dumbbell routine is and what it is not.

NOT strength training in the normal modern sense of the word, NOT a series of light "toning" exercises, NOT a routine where you pretend the weights are heavier than they are and pantomime lifting dumbbells. Slow motion weights, NOT isometrics, NOT involving the action of one muscle against another, NOT some form of mental gymnastics where you somehow "imagine" your biggest muscles. However, it is a very clever and efficient way of achieving powerful and sustained rhythmic contractions and alternating relaxations of all the muscles in the body. It can be done daily in a relatively short period of time with minimal equipment in a small space. This leads to a specific type of muscle growth, hypertrophy, which causes muscles to increase in size, tone, density, and definition very evenly and relatively quickly. It greatly enhances the student's neurological connection to her body (the so-called mind-muscle connection), making it possible for the student to perform the exercises "better" or more completely as this ability increases. This improved neuromuscular control, and the ability to consciously recruit more muscle fibers than before, actually increases the athlete's potential force output and the muscles' response to movement commands from the mind, giving this simple training method benefits that are universal to all other physical activities, sports and sports. other conventional strength training sports can be transferred

Dumbbells are only used, in conjunction with very specific body positions, to help you properly "work" only the muscles that each exercise is targeting, and they should be heavy enough to do the job, but not too heavy. to do it. You must concentrate on the movement the weight

instead of simply fully contracting the muscle. The weight should be within your ability to move throughout the entire exercise without even feeling it, unless you are trying to produce a full muscle contraction at the same time. For example, imagine I told you to stand with both arms out to your sides in a crucifix pose with a dumbbell in each hand, and then asked you to do a kind of reciprocating dumbbell curl. If you're reasonably strong, you could probably try this with two 15- or 20-pound dumbbells, even more if you're really strong. But what if I specify that the arms should be kept perfectly straight, elbows straight and shoulders down, arms exactly parallel to the ground? What if I told you that your elbows should bend as much as possible as you roll the bar toward your shoulder, but your elbows shouldn't move in space, not even a fraction of a millimeter? What if I told you to just rhythmically push up and contract your deltoids, biceps, and then triceps? What if I told you to keep going, alternating between rotating your arms and strong contractions, but relaxing the rest of your muscles (chest, back, etc.)? What if I told you to do 50 perfect reps in about 1 second per rep? There's absolutely no way you could do this well at 15 or 20 pounds - ten pounds would be too much for most normal people - you could do that, which means you could wrestle up to 50 reps with your face wincing and all. shaking, but you would engage all the muscles in your back arms and chest simultaneously and uncontrollably, and his "shape" would be all over the place. Modern safe practice dictates that in this type of position, say with weights, the arms should be slightly bent and the shoulders slightly hunched, rather than the exaggerated military stance with stiff arms just described. This serves to protect the joints and is necessary when working with demanding weights; otherwise we would strain the tendon connections in the elbow and rotator cuff. That's the point: even a ten-pound dumbbell becomes unsafe and very difficult to handle correctly in these positions, defeating the purpose of the exercise. With no weight in your hand, hold your arm out to the side, slightly bent at the elbow, and try to fully contract only the deltoid muscle. Then straighten your arm into a lock, make a fist, and try again to clench your deltoids hard. Which position gave you the best and most complete contraction? As it happens, the second position allows for a better fully conscious contraction. If we take a dumbbell and use it to reinforce that action and rhythmically repeat that contraction several times, the dumbbell should be heavy enough to help, but not so heavy that it affects our ability to perform the exercise correctly and safely. .

To properly perform this exercise, most people, even those who are already strong, would benefit from a dumbbell that is around 3 to 5 pounds. A particularly strong man might work up to 7 or 8 pounds, but beyond that, the weight (although still VERY light by normal strength training standards) would interfere with his ability to get the correct effect on his muscles. . Another person might need just 2 pounds to get the right feel and spin for the required number of reps; even 4 or 5 pounds would be too much for them. Remember, this is NOT strength training, you are not trying to impress anyone, including yourself, with how much weight you can lift. You are trying to create a specific effect on your muscles and you just want the perfect tool to help you do it and nothing else. After 20 to 30 minutes of this type of exercise, when you have worked all the muscles in your body well, you should be very warm inside, slightly sweaty and feeling good. When you've used the correct light weight, your muscles will feel comfortably pumped, toned and hard, and you'll feel energized. On the other hand, if you have tried to use too heavy a weight, the muscle joints in your elbows and rotator cuffs will sore, you will be short of breath from the exertion, and you will not be able to breathe normally and easily. however you need it during the set, and you'll probably wince from the effort. You'll feel like you need to sit back and relax, and we don't want that. These exercises are specifically designed to get the desired results with the lightest possible weight, not the highest possible weight. Think about it: This is the polar opposite of the normal modern strength training protocol. The desired result is not the successful shedding of muscle tissue through intense effort: it is maximally trained muscle tissue and puzzled through self-generated alternating contractions, aided by a slight increase in tension from a small weight.

For the sake of simplicity, so you don't have to define what kind of exercise I'm talking about and say, "Remember, we're talking about contracting the muscles in a self-generated rhythmic way," etc. - and To be clear, although this approach doesn't work, it builds the body in the same way as the progressive resistance approach, I suggest giving this method a new name.

From now on I refer to building muscle through classic light dumbbell exercises as the "W.A.T.C.H protocol" - it means:

Weight Assisted Total Contraction Hypertrophy In other words, the improvements you can bring to your muscular system, the specific type of development and hypertrophy you can achieve, are solely the result of repetitive total muscle contractions that you generate yourself and simply use. . light weight and some specific stances to help you with this. So now when people say you can't build big muscles with small weights, you can say yes, that's true, not through major resistance training protocols, BUT you can significantly improve your musculature in terms of size, strength and general appearance if some lightweights use the W.A.T.C.H. Protocol. Attila called this "the science of muscular development."

W.A.T.C.H Protocol Instructions: 1. Carefully follow the body position instructions for each exercise and do not deviate from that position while performing the exercise. 2. Choose a dumbbell of the right weight to give yourself a bit of a challenge while doing the movements strictly for the recommended number of repetitions for most people, which will be in the 2-5 pound range. As you get stronger you may gain 7 or 8 pounds, but DO NOT be tempted to start with a really heavy bar just to satisfy your ego. The rule of thumb should be to choose the lightest weight that will allow you to perform the exercise effectively and get the right feel in your muscles. 3. Squeeze the dumbbell firmly, creating as complete a deep muscle contraction as possible in only the muscles needed for each specific movement. Try to relax the muscles that are not directly involved. 4. Most exercises are reciprocating movements: Once a movement is complete, completely relax the muscles you were using while beginning to contract the opposite muscle. This feeling of alternate contraction and relaxation is very important. 5. Exercises move systematically through the body: As you complete the exercises for each body part and move on to the next, completely relax the body part you were working on, shake it, and feel it fill with blood.

6. Do not hold your breath at any time while performing the exercises; breathe fully, normally, and easily throughout the exercise. Do not clench your teeth or grimace while tensing your muscles, as this makes you catch your breath involuntarily. Try to cultivate the ability to fully contract your muscles while breathing normally and keeping your face relaxed. 7. The cadence or rhythm/tempo used in the exercises is of the utmost importance. For most exercises, you should initially aim for a little over a second per repetition (timing with a second hand on a watch initially until you get the hang of it). Sandow called it "Waltz Time" and I found it very useful. Maintain this strict cadence and don't pause between movements: move evenly to the proper rhythm, like a pole dancer trains. When you start to feel muscle fatigue and try to keep going, it's natural to slow down or speed up, NO! - Keep the same cadence and you will feel the pain and reach momentary failure faster. Push-ups, crunches, and squats are done at a slightly slower pace. 8. Above all: Focus entirely on the muscle(s) being worked and not on moving the bar across the room. 9. When you are finished with the exercise sequence, go through the body tensing and then relaxing each muscle or group of muscles individually a few times. Then tense your whole body at once, then relax completely: All the old courses recommend a number of "fitness poses" here, but if you feel ridiculous doing these typical "muscular" poses, position won't really matter. do it, just practice muscle control by tensing and then relaxing. Do not miss this part, it is very important.

The Exercises If you read the first part of the book on the history of light dumbbell training, what we now call the W.A.T.C.H. protocol, you may recall that many different bodybuilders were selling versions of essentially the same routine but with various differences in exercise order. exercises and with a few omissions and additions here and there, but they all recommended essentially the same protocol. When I originally started training this method, I used Sandow's practice sequence and then added additional variations that I liked with the look of Treloar, Strongfort, and others. Some I liked and I still use from time to time and others I didn't get along with and gave up. Later I tried what we might call the original routine: that of Professor Attila in his scrapbook articles and in his 1910 book. This seems to me to be the best arrangement of the exercises, and Sandow probably modified it a bit to give it his own kind of stamp (just like everyone else), but he left out some very good back exercises and emphasized the wrists and forearms. The exercises that I present here are from Professor Attila, but with strange variations here and there as an optional, additional or alternative movement; when this happens, a note is included indicating where the exercise came from.

When you exercise: It depends entirely on you: some authors recommend a session every morning, others recommend a single session at night and others recommend splitting it into two sessions, morning and afternoon. I personally like to do it at night or in the late afternoon when I go out and I can't do it at the normal time. The important thing is to do it consistently.

Frequency: Do everything every day. Attila said every day, Sandow said to take a day off if he needed it; others recommend six days a week with one day off. I personally like to do this every day and then take a day off if my body wants it. That way, I tend to take a break every week or so; It could be seven days in a row, one day off, eight days in a row and one day off, or maybe ten days in a row and one day off.

The main thing is not to use the training/recovery/training/recovery/three days a week model because you think you need rest to grow and recover, it's not that kind of training. Your body will respond better if you do this daily. If that's too much for you at first, I'd suggest Monday through Friday with weekends off, but try to build it up every day; remember to do the routine only as part of daily personal hygiene, like brushing your teeth.

how long should i take? At first, you should be able to do it all in about fifteen minutes and work your way up to twenty or twenty-five. As you get better at the exercises and can do more, it might take a little longer, but even now, three years later, it only takes me half an hour at night.

Where should I do the exercises? It doesn't matter, but try to do it in a quiet place so you can be alone and focus on the exercises without anything else. Don't turn on the music, or God forbid you do it in front of the TV while talking to your wife/husband or significant other. The facility they now have in gyms where you can plug headphones into a TV and watch the news or MTV while you "work out" is the wrong type of exercise for our purposes. This type of approach would only result in movements occurring mechanically while your mind is elsewhere. We want your mind to lean in and fully focus on the contraction of the muscle or muscles you are working with each exercise. Exercising in front of a mirror helps a lot at first, both to check that your posture is correct and to see if the relevant muscles are visibly contracting (and indeed to see if others that should be relaxed are involuntarily contracting). Helps develop the ability to control muscles.

Where the hell is the brachialis? Ok, so the following instructions tell you to control and contract specific muscles. Everybody

know where the biceps are, and most people reading this will be familiar with where most of the big muscles are, but if you don't, it's going to be a problem. Many of the old books mentioned in the history section had very detailed sections on human anatomy with meticulous diagrams of all the muscles and their actions, connections, origins and insertions, etc. Mastering the action of each muscle so it was important to have an idea to know where they were and what they are doing. It's still important, but we live in the age of the internet, and luckily you don't need to try to write an entire anatomy section. If you read a mention of a muscle instead, you can Google it and see what it does. There is a simple table in the appendix of this book that shows the locations of all the major muscles and will also help you get a basic understanding of what they do, but a broader understanding would definitely help. For example, it is interesting for non-anatomists to realize that the biceps are involved in rotating the palm of the hand up or down and are attached to the scapula, the trapezius is not just on one side of the neck. , it's huge and it runs down the back and that part of the pectorals is closely involved in the action of the shoulder blades, who would have thought? If you can't be bothered with all that extra reading, that's fair, but at least check out the instructions with the anatomy chart in Appendix I.

The instructions for the following exercises are very detailed. It is important that you understand every detail of how to perform them so that you know how to do them correctly and get the results you want. Read each explanation carefully until you are sure you "got it," then try the exercise. During the first few weeks, check again and again if you have understood all the important points; There are probably a lot of little things that you missed the first time. If you don't "feel" a particular exercise or don't know how to target your target muscles, go back to the description and read it again. I've tried to make the instructions as clear as possible, but this means that each one can seem unnecessarily complicated at first; it will only seem so at first, until you get the hang of it. When you're done, look at the simple list of exercises at the end of the chapter. Within a few weeks you will memorize them all with ease and will be able to perform the entire routine consistently without having to refer to the list. That's where the light dumbbell routine will be, as Pope put it: "a little pocket edition of exercises that are easy to remember and quick to do, even with the

Best results".

Exercise 1.

Alternating Dumbbell Curl:

Stand with your feet together, toes pointed slightly out, and knees slightly bent. Make sure your weight is mostly on your toes – look in the mirror to see if you're leaning forward without realizing it. Center your pelvis so that your weight falls on your toes and you feel your hamstrings supporting you. Relax the gluteal or lower back muscles. Hold the dumbbells loosely in each hand and let them rest lightly in front of your thighs with your palms turned fully forward (Fig. 1)

illustration 1

Alternately raise and lower each arm, as if trying to touch the dumbbell or the palm of the hand in front of the shoulder, and then return them to the original position (Fig. 2). When lifting or rolling a dumbbell to the top position, keep your lateral elbow on your ribs, don't let it lift forward or move anywhere. Squeeze the handle of the bar firmly as you curl it, and try to fully contract your biceps at the top of the movement.

Figure 2

Keep the little side of the twisted arm as wide as possible throughout the movement: keep the dumbbell level and parallel to the floor, with the back of the hand facing the floor. This will help you get a good contraction: if you get too lazy and dip your little finger in a bit so that the bar bends too much, you won't get a proper max contraction every rep. Do not bend or flex your wrist; keep the back of the hand in line with the forearm. At first, focus only on the biceps: contract as far as you can into the pushup and relax on the return, while repeating the movement with the other arm, contracting the biceps into it. Aim for 100 reps at the same cadence mentioned above (this would obviously be 50 on each arm). Depending on the weight you are using and how good you are at squeezing the muscle, you should feel it at 30-50 reps at first, and 60-100 reps, you should feel a deep "sore". . and come to a momentary failure. (These numbers are just a rough guide - you may have the right feeling in twelve or fifteen.) Stop and wave your arms for a few seconds. (As Pope points out, don't confuse a "soreness" with feeling a little tired; if you tense your muscles properly, you'll know exactly when to stop; you'll hit a point well below a hundred if you just do it. On the other hand, if you seem to be able to pump a hundred easily and you don't feel anything, it would be natural to assume the weight is too light - it's much more likely that you're not tensing the muscle enough on each rep, especially if you're hitting the full ten pounds. Feel the muscle contract with a opposite finger (compare to relaxed triceps on back of upper arm), biceps should be rock hard and engorged with blood - if you feel even a little tight, you'll improve neuromuscular control over that muscle, don't worry, your ability to maximally contract the muscle will improve very quickly). train very well: alternately flex the biceps successfully for about a hundred repetitions at a steady pace until they pump and then "ach", which causes you to stop; you can start by activating the triceps

Also this exercise. This involves a strong contraction of the triceps on the back of the arm as you lower the bar while relaxing the biceps on that side while simultaneously contracting the biceps and lifting the bar on the other side. Suddenly, what appears to be a very simple exercise turns into an intricate feat of syncopated muscle control. It's best to spend the first few weeks focusing on at least just the biceps in this first exercise, even if you think it sounds silly. Remember, you must alternate between full tension and full relaxation on each part of the arm, not partial tension, and NOT full arm tension at the same time. If you're really good at muscle control, you can play with the eccentric contraction of the biceps going down instead of engaging the triceps; in other words, tighten your biceps as you come up and try to do it by holding them as hard as you can. you go up, it lengthens on the way down. This is really tricky: try to fully flex your biceps now with your arm straight instead of bending your elbow while keeping your triceps relatively relaxed. This may seem impossible at first, but that's the level of voluntary control over your muscles that these exercises offer over time.

When you have completed exercise one, shake your arm out and rest for about thirty seconds before moving on to exercise two. You want to go directly from one exercise to the next throughout the sequence, but the first two always require a short rest to allow blood to return to the muscle.

Exercise 2.

Alternating Dumbbell Reverse Curl:

Get into the same starting position as the previous exercise, except the dumbbells rest in front of your thighs and the backs of your hands are facing out. (figure 3)

Knitting. 3

Keeping your elbows down and tucked into your sides as before, alternately raise the dumbbells so that the backs of your hands almost touch the front of your shoulders. As before, keep your wrists straight and the dumbbells perfectly level; this time, keep the pinky side of your hand crooked as much as possible and the palm side of your hand toward the ground. (Figure 4)

Knitting. 4

Now focus on flexing the biceps again, albeit in a different position, and also the brachialis muscle on the outside of your upper arm. You will also feel it in the muscles of your forearm. Like last time, first focus on alternately flexing and releasing mainly biceps and brachialis, and aim for 100 reps. You should feel the "pain" and be forced to stop at about half the reps you accomplished in the previous exercise; even if it doesn't appear to be, you are not performing the exercise correctly. Keep trying and you will succeed. If you can do this with proper control over these muscles, you can begin to flex the triceps again as you lower your arm while relaxing the biceps and brachialis; you will find that you get a different and stronger triceps contraction.

your hand in this position. Keep the same cadence/tempo as last time.

Again, when you're done with this one, you'll probably need to rest for about thirty seconds to shake off your swollen arm. Don't take too many long rests between movements, as the routine is designed so that each exercise builds the effects of the previous ones until each part of the body has been worked, pumped, and then flushed with fresh blood. 🇧🇷 If you pause too long between exercises, this is counterproductive.

exercise 3

Alternating Dumbbell Crucifix Curls

As before, stand with your knees slightly bent, tensing the balls of your feet instead of your heels (but not so tight that your knees go past your toes), and relaxing your buttocks and lower back to feel the weight of your body. on the back thigh muscles Extend both arms to the sides with palms facing up, holding a dumbbell in each hand. Arms should be straight, elbows bent, shoulders down, head up and looking straight ahead (Fig. 5)

Figure 5

Alternately rotate each dumbbell toward your shoulder; As you do this, squeeze your deltoids and biceps hard on that side. Turn your head and look along the opposite straight arm. As you stretch out your bandaged arm again, turn your head to see

Lower that arm as you straighten and bend the other arm toward your shoulder, contracting your deltoids and biceps (Fig. 6).

Knitting. 6

Sandow described this as primarily an arm exercise focused on the biceps and triceps with secondary deltoid engagement, but Attila calls it a deltoid first exercise and I found that I had better results when it focused on the deltoids first. As you get better at performing the exercises and muscle control improves, you can focus on squeezing the triceps of the straight arm hard while alternating the deltoids and biceps of the bent arm; don't worry too much about this at first. , as this just encourages you to cock everything at once. Achieving a powerful rhythmic "on-off" contraction and relaxation cycle in the deltoids and biceps (and then the triceps as well), keeping everything else relaxed in the back and chest, and breathing normally is much more important than simply creating tension everywhere. Ultimately, aim for fifty reps (twenty-five per side), but keep in mind that as you progress from other arm exercises and your arms are already bloody and "trained" you should get to the point where you feel the pain and it stops. the beginning around my twenties or maybe even earlier.

After pausing for a few seconds, continue with the next exercise.

exercise 4

Simultaneous Dumbbell Crucifix Curl

Continue the same as in the previous exercise (Fig. 5)

This time rotate both dumbbells toward your shoulders at the same time. Again, focus on the strong contraction of the deltoids and biceps first, only this time on both arms at the same time. Tilt your head down so that your chin is closer to your chest. (Figure 7)

Knitting. 7

Then stretch both arms out to the sides and squeeze your deltoids again. This time, tilt your head back to look up (Fig. 8).

Knitting. 8

Again, focus on the deltoids and biceps until you master it so you can easily maintain the correct position, contracting the deltoids and biceps and relaxing the biceps on the way back. Once you've done that, you can begin to forcefully contract your triceps in the straight arm phase of the exercise. Changing the position of your head will give you a better contraction in the deltoids, and as your muscle control improves, it will also help you to consciously engage the trapezius muscle. Be careful when you first specifically contract this muscle in this position, as it can cramp up and be extremely painful. *Most light dumbbell movements are alternating movements and this is one of the few that works both arms at the same time. Be very careful to breathe normally, NOT hold your breath and also make sure you only engage the target muscles and NOT THE ENTIRE UPPER BODY.

By the end of exercise four, you'll have completed the section that specifically focuses on the arms (although the arms are still secondarily involved in most of the other exercises. Your arms should be bloody, pumped, and feeling fully "trained"). Pause for about thirty seconds and completely relax, shaking and trying to get your muscles to move and relax instead of feeling tense and tense.

Then move on to shoulder exercises.

Exercise 5. Standing chest fly with dumbbells

Stand tall with your weight on your toes, knees slightly bent and thighs slightly tucked in, buttocks and back as relaxed as possible. This time, hold the dumbbells directly in front of you with your arms perfectly straight, shoulders down, head up and forward. (Figure 9)

Knitting. 9

Inhale and come up on your toes as you pull both dumbbells to the side at the same time into a crucifix position, but this time with your palms facing forward. She keeps looking forward. (Figure 10)

Figure 10

Squeeze your gastrocnemius calf muscles and deltoids tightly. Do not hold your breath at the end of this simultaneous contraction, just coordinate the movement with a full inhalation. Then, as you exhale, lower yourself back down and bring your arms back to their original position as you relax your deltoids. At first, just focus on your calves and deltoids and coordinate your movement with your breath. Once you've done that and gotten a good rhythmic contraction-relax cycle in your calves and deltoids during this exercise, you can focus on the pecs for phase two. As you bring your arms straight forward and relax your deltoids, make strong contact with your pectorals. Feel that it is this action that pushes the air out of your lungs like a bellows. This action is like a straight arm version of the pec deck machine for those of

You who know him As you get better at the exercises, you can start to bring your arms back more than just to the sides on the fly. Attila talked about hitting her arms behind her back! She maybe she was actually able to do that or maybe she just provided a picture to help the student get more range of motion. I don't know, but be careful not to strain or overextend your arms beyond their natural reach. Taking them a bit beyond the frontal/coronal plane will facilitate a better contraction of the deltoids and can also begin to consciously engage the upper lats. Your deltoids should already have been worked in the last two arm exercises, so you'll likely have a pump and "sore" between 12 and 20 reps.

Go directly to the next exercise

exercise 6

Alternating dumbbell presses

In the same way as before, stand with the dumbbells over each shoulder in the same position as in the final position of exercise four, except that your muscles are all relaxed (Fig. 11).

Figure 11

To those familiar with dumbbell presses, this will seem "wrong" as a standard starting position for the press, but with light dumbbells and the barbell protocol, it actually makes sense. Squeeze one of the dumbbells at arm height and squeeze the deltoid into your working arm. Keep the rest of your body relaxed in the original position. (Figure 12)

Figure 12

Breathing normally, alternate the pushing motion and raise one arm at a time for about twenty to thirty repetitions, or until your deltoids signal you to stop. Focus only on the deltoids of the compression arm at first, but once you've mastered a good rhythmic contraction-relax cycle on this exercise, you can begin to contract the deltoids on your way down, feeling the weight really push up. you and tighten it. hard when the arm reaches the bent position. Once you've mastered this, you can achieve a rhythm where you have a maximum contraction at the top of the press and another in the flexed position with a momentary relaxation between each arm, and then do this simultaneously, doing a delta on the upper part. the position is tight and you are tensing in the bottom position throughout the entire exercise. * Do not hold your breath and do not tense all the muscles of the shoulder girdle at the same time; this is exactly the opposite effect that we need.

Then go directly to the next exercise.

exercise 7

Alternating Dumbbell Front Raises

Stand as before in (Fig. 3) but with dumbbells on the thighs

Focus on creating a strong contraction in the deltoids and alternately raise each arm forward with elbows and wrists straight. (Figure 13)

Figure 13

At first, just focus on holding the contraction as you raise each arm, and relax the muscle as you lower and raise the other arm. Once you can do this effectively by getting a strong peak contraction as you go up the bar, you can start playing by holding the contraction going down as well. In this

More advanced execution of the exercise, the cadence will be as follows: squeeze when lifting/squeeze down/immediately fully relax deltoids/raise other arm squeeze deltoids/lower other arm squeeze deltoids/immediately fully relax deltoids/raise arm Original.. . etc. Being able to fully engage and disengage the deltoid and not engage other muscles will improve results here. Let the dumbbells come down until they lightly touch your thigh, but don't let them rest there completely; Contraction. For me, being flush with the top of the head works best. Your deltoids should be screaming by now, and twenty to thirty reps should be enough for this exercise; Try increasing to fifty.

Try going straight to the next exercise, but for now you may need to lower the dumbbells and rest for a while. If you shake your arms but don't hold them for more than thirty or forty seconds, you're almost there. of the shoulder section.

exercise 8

Simultaneous arm rotations

Get into a crucifix position but with the dumbbells holding the palms of the hands down (Fig. 14)

Figure 14

Tejido. 14a

Keeping your arms straight, swing them up and down from palms to shoulder height repeatedly and quickly about thirty times. You want to contract the deltoids, but this also strengthens and trains the rotator cuffs. Your deltoids should be pretty well trained by now, so they might give up after just 10 or 12 reps. Try to increase to thirty and eventually fifty reps as you get stronger.

Alternate Shoulder Exercise

This exercise is from Al Treloar's book and when I'm in a hurry or just want a change, I use it instead of exercises 5 and 6.

Stand with your knees locked and dumbbells bent forward at a 45-degree angle. Keep your arms straight, parallel to the ground, palms down. You can lean your body slightly forward with your weight on your toes (Fig. 15).

Figure 15

Squeeze your deltoids, then bring both arms straight over your head with your palms facing each other. Keeping your arms completely straight and crossed, allow yourself to return to an upright position (Fig. 16)

Figure 16

Alternate between the two positions, keeping your deltoids tightly contracted. Do fifteen to twenty repetitions, inhaling as you extend the dumbbells forward and out as you raise them overhead.

Alternate Shoulder Exercise 2

Another exercise from the Treloar book. This exercise is very effective and I tend to use it when I'm in a hurry. I can use this and exercise 7 since my only shoulder is moving.

Stand facing a wall or piece of furniture that is about waist height. Lean forward and rest your forehead against a wall or the top of furniture (you can use a towel or pad). Drop your arms to the floor and hold the dumbbells (Fig. 17).

Figure 17 Relaxing all uninvolved muscles as much as possible, then raise the dumbbells out to the sides in a flying motion, keeping your elbows straight as you squeeze your deltoids hard. (Figure 18)

Figure 18

Relax your muscles as you lower yourself to the starting position and begin by repeating fifteen to twenty repetitions. You might be able to go higher, but you probably won't hit fifty - it hits the rear deltoids pretty hard.

Now that you're done with the shoulder exercises: Lower the dumbbells for a short rest and swing your arms for about thirty seconds to a minute. The deltoids have worked a lot now and are still involved as a secondary mover in virtually every upcoming exercise.

exercise 9

Dumbbell Fist Circles 1

Attila tells us to put our thumb on one end of the dumbbell for this exercise and the next. I think it's because we don't need to grip the bar and add extra tension to these movements, and trying to do them with your hands tight on the bar handles, even with such a light weight, is not good for the hamstrings. wrists and elbows. . In fact, these two exercises, while they definitely strengthen the forearm muscles, could be included to both stretch and strengthen that tissue, since at this point in the routine you've already been working a lot on your grip and forearms by continuously pressing and alternating the dumbbells Get into the familiar dumbbell fly position with your palm facing down as in (Figure 14), but with your thumb on one end of the dumbbell. Rotate the dumbbell ten to twenty times, keeping your arms straight and your elbows locked.

exercise 10

Dumbbell Fist Circles 2

Repeat the previous exercise but rotate the dumbbells in the opposite direction.

Pope recommends using lighter weights for wrist exercises than for the other exercises.

Routine: 2 or 3lbs if you're using 5lbs for the main lifts and that's good advice. You can even do the circles with a loose fist and no dumbbells if you find your elbow tendons too much work at first. If you have had problems with elbow tendonitis in the past, be careful about it.

Lower the dumbbells and shake out your hands and wrists for a few seconds before beginning the back section of the exercise.

Attila firmly believed that the back muscles were the seat of power and all real power and that these exercises were the most important in the entire sequence. At first, it will be hard to believe that some of these are actually back exercises. We're used to thinking that the back needs heavy weights to stimulate its muscles in movements like bent-over rows or deadlifts, and working those big muscles effectively with small dumbbells seems impossible, but actually these exercises are great. If you can learn how to do them to really target the large muscles in your back, you'll find that they are all extremely effective. They are some of the hardest to come by though, but stick with them, they are well worth it.

exercise 11

Dumbbell Slam Movement

Stand with your weight primarily on your right foot with your left foot facing forward and your right foot pointing to the side at about forty-five degrees. Hold the dumbbells so that your right hand is at shoulder height and your left is resting on your left thigh. (Figure 19)

Knitting. 19

Then, firmly squeeze your right leg and step forward with your left leg while simultaneously “punching” your right arm up to your face. Keeping your non-striking arm straight, grab the dumbbell on that side as well. Finish the exercise in the position shown in (Fig. 20) and immediately return to the starting position. Repeat this action twelve to fifteen times at first, increasing to twenty-five repetitions.

Figure 20

It's very hard to see or feel this as a back exercise at first, but try to get a full contraction of the latissimus dorsi muscle on the punching side of the arm on both the forward "punch" and back "punch." the starting position. If it helps, you can think of this exercise as an analogy to a boxing cable pull alternating with a one-arm row motion on the return (in other words, imagine you're using one of those cable machines where you're hanging a fixed cable), pull toward the machine behind you, lifting a weight on a rack, and alternate with a similar exercise where you pull on a cable attached to a machine in front of you, as you would on a rowing machine.) It's up to you to create the correct tension and engagement of your back muscles by using the dumbbell to assist you. You need to create tension in the back in extension (when hitting) and contraction (when the hand is withdrawn).

Now repeat the exercise with the feet in reverse order for the left arm/left side of the back, pushing the left leg forward with the right.

This is the exercise the students are doing in the Hippolyte Triat gym picture above.

exercise 12

good morning dead weight

This exercise consists of a complete flexion and extension of the back. Stand up with both dumbbells overhead and straighten your arms. (Figure 21)

Figure 21

Slowly lean forward so the dumbbells are at the level of your knees or shins, or if you are very flexible and can touch your toes lightly without actively "stretching" them, let them touch your toes, just practice Do not exert or discard force and "jump" on the move. (Figure 22)

Figure 22

Then stretch up, keeping your arms in line with your ears, and return to the starting position. Do 12-15 reps and be careful, even if you're only using 2, 3, or 5 pound dumbbells, it's really 4, 6, or 10 pounds that you're hitting your lower back in extension and in one position. in which leverage is present. seems much more. Try to actively engage your lower back muscles with this exercise as you climb. This will really help keep your weight on the balls of your feet instead of your heels and grip the ground with your toes as you stand up. This is one of those moves where light weights are essential, especially early on. Once you master this exercise, you'll be amazed at the amount of stress it creates across your entire back, but especially your erector spinae and quadratus lumborum.

exercise 13

Dumbbell Shrugs

Stand with dumbbells at your sides (Fig. 23) and raise your shoulders toward your ears (Fig. 24)

Knitting. 23

Knitting. 24

Raise and lower them alternately. Try to actively and strongly contract the trapezius muscle as you raise your shoulders, and relax them as you lower them. The deeper diamonds are also involved. It will really help here to review the chart and get a good idea of ​​how big the trapezius muscle is. You must gain the ability to consciously activate all of this while shrugging. Only do ten or twenty reps of this and don't overdo the tension, as you can create a painful spasm in this muscle if you're not careful. Breathe normally and be careful not to inadvertently tense your neck and jaw.

exercise 14

dumbbell crossovers

Stand with dumbbells extended at a 45 degree angle to your sides, palms down (Figure 25)

Figure 25

Keeping arms straight and elbows extended, rotate arms forward so wrists cross in front (see Figure 26), then vigorously rotate back to starting position.

Knitting. 26

Try to tense all your back muscles and contract them forcefully, as if you were doing a cable crossing exercise (i.e., an exercise where you hold the handles of two cables attached to a machine and pull both cables at the same time). ). at the same time (and diagonally so that the handles cross in front of you and a weight comes up on the machine behind you). Squeeze your back hard as you swing your arms out in front of you and again as you bring them back to the starting position. Do fifteen repetitions and work your way up to twenty-five repetitions. This is another exercise where it's quite difficult to get the right amount of tension on the target muscles, especially if you're not already consciously contracting your lats.

Muscle, rhomboids and trapezius by an act of will. Once you master it, the exercise becomes easier and more productive.

exercise 15

Dumbbell Side Curls

Stand with weights at your sides as in (Fig. 27)

Knitting. 27

Lean from side to side so the dumbbell lowers toward the knee on that side (Fig. 28)

Knitting. 28

Squeeze the external obliques on the sides and the Mm. erector spinae and quadratus lumborum in the lower back on the bent side. Change sides twenty to fifty times. Again, it is difficult to actively contract these muscles at first, but the position you assume and the weight of the light dumbbells will help you feel the action of the muscles, and gradually you will be able to flex them voluntarily and produce a powerful rhythmic contraction. . . In Sandow's version, as one bar is lowered toward the knee, the other bar is pulled toward the armpit on the opposite side of the body. You can do the exercise this way if you like, but the simpler movement seems to work better for me, as it facilitates the alternating contraction of the obliques and lower back muscles.

exercise 16

Simultaneous dumbbell back extension

This exercise is particularly difficult to learn, but it's worth it if you do it: It's great for your mid- and upper-back muscles, and it also has a powerful effect on the triceps on the back of your arms. Stand with dumbbells at your sides, arms straight, and palms facing forward (Figure 29).

Knitting. 29

Then extend your stiff arms back and twist them sharply so that your palms are facing back (Fig. 30).

Figure 30

Hold this position with your upper back in isometric tension for about a second, then return to the original position. Repeat about fifteen to twenty times, holding the supine position for about a second each time and contracting the muscles of the middle and upper back and the muscles of the arms. Think about the position you would be in and the kind of tension you would create in the last high position of a parallel bar dip.

Alternative exercises for the back

the ski jumper

This is a variation on the 16 exercises that Lionel Strongfort included in his class. In fact, I had my hands as in exercise 16, so the palms forward in the first position rotate to the palms back in the final position, but I personally found this problematic for the tendons in the elbows, which tend to weigh heavily. before the target muscles have enough. I changed my hand position to a hammer curl position, which is better for me, and now the exercise reminds me of a ski jumper's position. This variation seems to work the triceps primarily and the upper back secondarily, not the other way around, so rather than doing it as an alternative to exercise 16, I use it as the last exercise for the back. You can do that or just choose what you want.

I like it more. Stand with a slight forward bend at the ankles so that the weight is on your toes and hold the dumbbells with your palms facing in and your elbows bent (Figure 31).

Figure 31

Straighten your arms by extending them behind you, keeping the dumbbells in the same grip, and lean forward slightly with your legs straight. There should be a straight line between the heels and the nape of the neck. (Figure 32)

Figure 32

Hold for a second and squeeze your triceps and upper back muscles. Do between fifteen and twenty repetitions.

You are done with the back exercises. Lower the dumbbells for a few seconds and relax your back muscles.

Continue with the leg exercises.

exercise 17

Kalb

Stand with your feet shoulder-width apart and toes pointed forward, dumbbells at your sides, then rise up on your toes as high as you can go. Squeeze your calf muscles hard at the top of the movement (Fig. 33).

Figure 33

As you descend, bend your knees slightly and contract the muscles in front of your shins using your shin extensors.

Figure 34

As you get better, you can repeat the exercise for another twenty repetitions, turning your toes out to the sides at a 45-degree angle to touch the outside of your calves, and again with your toes pointing in. for another twenty repetitions to get to the inside. part.

Knitting. 34th

Knitting. 34b

exercise 18

raise your fingers

Stand up straight and lift your toes so that your weight is on your heels and you have a strong contraction of all the anterior calf and shin muscles (Figure 35)

Figure 35

Keeping your knees straight, begin by repeating twenty repetitions. As the number of calf raises increases, increase them as well, so that you're doing the same number.

exercise 19

Deep knee creases at toes.

The reason I refer to them as "deep squats" and not "back squats" is partly because they refer to when this routine first became popular, and partly because of this movement of the image to distinguish that everyone we have to do modern. "squat" exercise. In modern squats, we keep our knees over our toes, lean forward with a sharp curve in our lower back, and lower ourselves low enough that our thighs are parallel to the floor. This would put a lot of stress on the gluteus maximus (buttocks) and the traditional deep knee flexion exercise targets the quadriceps of the thigh much more. You

it is also much more difficult when done correctly and creates a high level of activity in the thigh and calf muscles, which you can actively increase and increase through self-generated tension. Stand with dumbbells at your sides and weight lifted on toes (Fig. 36)

Figure 36

Keeping your back straight and your pelvis in a neutral position, slowly lower yourself down until your buttocks touch your raised heels (Fig. 37).

Knitting. 37

Keeping your calves tight, sit back on your heels for a moment before slowly straightening your legs back to the starting position. Squeeze your thighs hard when going up, and especially when your legs are down. Exhale as you go down and inhale as you come up. Repeat this in a steady and controlled manner, focusing on the thigh and calf muscles for fifteen to twenty repetitions at first, building up to forty to fifty repetitions over time. Don't rush your progress: getting it right is really hard and you have to do it.

Develop balance, coordination, and range of motion in the hips and knees. *Modern safe practice generally dictates that the knees should never go in front of the toes when squatting, and people will cite this rule as a hard and fast rule that should never be violated. The problem is that it's primarily designed for heavy squats, which we don't do here, and think about it: every time you're standing on your toes to get something out of the fridge or tie your kid's shoelaces, embrace exactly that. position. This is a completely normal position that the human body can easily assume. Be warned, though: if you're not used to taking it personally and you're unsteady, it could hurt your knees. Take it easy and build for it. * If you have knee problems and are not satisfied with this exercise, skip it and do the next variation.

Variation of leg exercises.

goblet cock

Sandow incorporated this heel-down variation into his route, with the slight difference that he kept the dumbbells at his sides as in the previous exercise. He prefers to hold the dumbbells as shown, like holding a cup and trying to keep it straight and not spilling the imaginary contents. This helps align your back, prevents you from leaning forward, and helps your weight land right between your feet. In this movement, although you should still be aiming for a full deep squat, your knees do not go over your toes. This move also hits the hamstrings hard, but also the glutes in the buttocks. Stand with your feet shoulder-width apart, feet flat and pointed slightly to the side. Hold both dumbbells as shown (Fig. 38)

Coward. 38 Slowly squat down so that your buttocks are close to your heels. Look up and try to keep your back straight and your head straight (Fig. 39). As you do this, imagine that the dumbbells are a cup filled with liquid that you must hold upright. Breathe out as you go down and inhale as you come back up.

Knitting. 39

Do between fifteen and twenty repetitions at first and increase to forty or fifty repetitions over time.

If you can do both versions, do ten or fifteen of each, building up to twenty-five each over time.

Even if you do squats with small weights, most people would consider them bodyweight squats and therefore incapable of building muscle or leg strength. Each rep is MUCH heavier than you think and is sure to increase leg size and strength.

exercise 20

Advanced Leg Workout - Single Leg Squat

This is really very difficult to get right. Build it over time. Some people can "just do it" and some can never, no matter how hard they try; it's usually a matter of range of motion and technique, not a lack of strength for those who can't do it. You can do it with or without dumbbells (actually holding the dumbbells while technically making the exercise a bit more difficult in terms of weight, helping with balance and actually making it easier in terms of performance). Stand on one leg and extend the other leg forward (Fig. 40)

Figure 40

Slowly lower yourself to sit on your heels (Figure 41), then rise up and squeeze your thighs firmly.

Knitting. 41

You only need to do three or four repetitions on each leg. Professor Attila promised that this exercise would add inches to your leg length. There are several approaches to developing this exercise: you can start by going as low as you can go, and slowly lower over time as you get stronger. You can do the exercise between two chairs that you hold for support (Figure 41a).

Knitting. 41a

...or you could try a variation of putting one foot on a chair behind you and squatting on your supporting leg so that the knee of your bent leg touches the floor (Figure 41b)

Figure 41b

It doesn't matter which variant you choose, because we are only interested in the effect on the muscle: the extremely strong contraction that the movement creates and that you will consciously learn to train. If you simply can't master the one-legged squat, another way to increase the level of stress your legs will feel during the two-legged squat exercise is to emphasize the action of one leg more than the other when sitting down. stand. from the squat; in other words, shift your weight more to the side so it's distributed between your feet, say 70/30 and then pull yourself up using the strength of one leg more than the other and then switch. Remember, it's how the target muscles feel that matters, not how we get that feeling; it's not how much weight you can lift on dumbbell pulls that matters, but how much tension you rhythmically apply to the target muscles and it doesn't matter. if you can do a perfect single leg squat, just create as much hamstring tension as necessary to induce the right amount of muscle fatigue and pump. If you can do the one-legged squat, don't do it instead of the double-legged squat; do it last, and really finish the hamstrings and really get them working.

You are done with the leg exercises. Shake your legs and relax the muscles in them.

exercise 21

Straight Leg Crunches

Once again, modern practice of safe exercise has determined that straight-leg sit-ups are dangerous because they put too much pressure on the lower back. The problem is that if they put pressure on your lower back, you're not doing it correctly. You should simply assume the same position as if you were touching your toes: you should be able to slightly bend at the hips, not just the lower back. Because people misinterpreted this move and injured themselves by performing it incorrectly (pushing off, flexing in the wrong place, and relying on momentum and back muscles to compensate for the inability to use target muscles), an almost brilliant ab exercise Quit the entire exercise industry. If done correctly, these exercises and the next two are terrific for building toned abs and a super strong core. Lie down with your arms straight above your head (Fig. 42)

Knitting. 42

Then slowly "peel" your torso off the floor, vertebra by vertebra. When your head is off the floor, tuck your chin into your chest, try to keep your arms in line with your ears, and sit down on your toes (Fig. 43).

Knitting. 43

The feet must not leave the ground and MUST NOT SUPPORT THEMSELVES. If you can't get up off the floor and lift your feet when you try to sit up, you're not using the correct muscles in the correct order or biomechanics. Simply sticking your feet under a piece of furniture seems like the solution, but it's not: you'd still be making the wrong move, but now that wrong move will lift you up because your feet will get stuck. If you fight this way, you will strain your back muscles and bend your body in the wrong place. Instead, try activating the deep transverse abdominis muscles by doing what is called "Jerking and Popping" in Pilates: tensing and pulling your pelvic floor muscles while simultaneously pulling your navel in toward your spine. Pull in your lower abdomen just below the waist and build into the squat from there. This stabilizes your core and protects your lower back; it also allows you to sit with the correct muscles. Don't worry about touching your toes when you straighten them, unless you can easily and effortlessly touch them with a flick of your toes while standing. Just make sure you bend at the hips and end up sitting on your "seat bones." Inhale as you come up, and as you exhale, slowly lower yourself back down to the starting position, rotating one vertebra at a time until you are flat again. Do this first without the dumbbells until you can do twenty to twenty-five perfect reps, then try the dumbbells in your hand and go back to the same numbers. Adding light dumbbells to straight hands changes the leverage and makes the movement even more challenging. Twenty or twenty-five in a set is still plenty, although you don't need (or can't) hundreds.

exercise 22

raised leg

Lie on the floor, palms down, next to the hips (Fig. 44)

Knitting. 44

Engage the transverse abdominals as before by lifting the head and tucking the chin in, tucking in the lower abdomen and contracting the pelvic floor, internally stabilizing the torso and preparing the midsection before lifting the legs all the way up and then up to try to touch. the ground behind the head (Fig. 45)

Figure 45

Slowly lower back to the beginning and repeat the exercise ten to twenty times. You can help initially by steadying yourself with your hands and pressing your palms into the ground. Later, when she has mastered this movement, she can begin to straighten the dumbbells with her hands overhead, simultaneously pulling the dumbbells up to her chest while raising her legs. Truly a full body exercise, this advanced version will give all of your abs a tremendous contraction, from the deep transverse abdominis to the more visible rectus abdominis.

That's it for the abs, only about thirty movements. People are often surprised when they ask me about my "abs routine" and I say yes. You expect to hear hundreds of repetitions of different types of push-ups and

Machines from "Abercizer", but I don't do this type of ab exercises and now I just swear by these two simple movements. I've found that crunches tend to "clunch" the abs, whereas these exercises seem to tighten them up and give me a tight, firm core feel. Honestly, if you take the time to master these two exercises, they're phenomenally effective, but if you think these exercises are outdated and you're still undecided about trading your push-ups for these old-fashioned moves, no, just replace them. exercises 21 and 22 with push-ups or bent-leg sit-ups or any other abdominal exercise you prefer.

exercise 23

hyperextensions

Lie on your stomach on the floor and place your hands on your lower back (Fig. 46).

Knitting. 46

Lift your chin off the floor and raise your torso as high as you can, contracting all the muscles along your back line (Figure 47), repeat 10-15 times

Knitting. 47

Keep your toes on the ground at all times: Raising your legs and your head at the same time means you're relying on your glutes and leg muscles for this exercise. Try to use only your leg muscles to stabilize yourself, and rely on a strong contraction of your lower back muscles to lift your upper body.

exercise 24

Lizards

I've named this classic exercise the "push-up" instead of the "push-up" as it's more commonly called in the UK, because I don't want people to think of it as a "push-up" and therefore similar to the movement of a press. weightlifting bench. Everyone is familiar with this exercise and you will probably be surprised to see a detailed description of how to do it correctly, which stretches over several pages. The point is that the way we do it today is radically different from that of the bodybuilders of the late 19th century. Sandow, Attila, Treloar, Strongfort, and Moss included this exercise in their classes, as did many others, but none of them called it push-ups or pushups. Most of the time they didn't call it anything and simply described the movement or when they did refer to the exercise as a "dip" or "floor dip". Interestingly, Attila recommended ten reps, Treloar recommended ten to twenty-five reps, and Sandow said in his book to do as many as possible, but in his guidelines for the numbers in the table at the end, he recommends starting with three! Further, all describe the exercise.

as a movement designed to work the serratus, latissimus dorsi, and triceps muscles, with the pectorals involved secondarily. Today we routinely do push-ups in sets of thirty, fifty, or a hundred, and anyone will tell you that it's primarily a chest exercise with secondary involvement of the deltoids (mainly the anterior deltoids) and triceps. Are those old-fashioned guys telling us that pushups are for the back, sides, and triceps and that we should only do three, ten, or twenty? Apparently they were all ridiculously weak and didn't know what they were talking about - OR ARE WE TALKING ABOUT A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT EXERCISE THAN THE ONE WE KNOW TODAY. In the 1890s and 1900s, the bench press wasn't even a popular move among powerlifters. It's so ubiquitous today that we think of the bench press as a lower bodyweight version of the bench press and an exercise that targets the same muscles: chest, shoulders, and arms. The exercise described here as "push-up" is different. Hit the back muscles, side ribs, and triceps first, then the chest. They increase the impact on target muscles through self-generated muscle contractions and complicate the exercise with small lever and position adjustments. When done correctly, sets of ten to thirty reps should be very challenging. Support yourself on your palms with your body perfectly straight, your torso contracted as if you were doing crunches, and most importantly, your shoulders back and down with your shoulder blades flat. Keep your head in line with your spine and your eyes on the ground. Every muscle in the body needs to be active and active (Fig. 48)

Fig. 48 RIGHT Without tilting your head up, contract your chest and round your back by pushing your shoulders forward from position (Fig. 49)

Figure 49 INCORRECT

Don't lock your arms and then passively let your weight "sit" on them, which pushes your shoulder blade back. (Figure 49a)

Figure 49a INCORRECT

Slowly lower your perfectly straight body to the floor while keeping your back straight. Engage your back and triceps hard and feel like you are actively pulling the floor towards you instead of passively dropping into the bottom position. Hold down for a fraction of a second (Fig. 50)

Figure 50

Push back to the top position by strongly contracting your triceps, serratus muscles over your ribs, and back muscles as you push the floor away from you. Of course the pectorals will be heavily involved, but don't force their action as this will round your back and straighten your shoulders as in (Figure 49). Focus on your back and triceps muscles and maintaining correct posture. KEEP THE SCAPULES IN THEIR NATURAL POSITION AND AVOID TURNING THEM SIDEWAYS AND ALWAYS. Make sure the weight is on the palms of the hands and only slightly on the toes: shift as much weight as possible to the arms, push the toes slightly forward, and as the exercise improves , try to add the nose further forward with each rep. To make the exercise even more challenging, you can lift one leg and keep it elevated and perfectly straight throughout the entire exercise. Perform the exercise at a slow, steady pace of about one second down and one and a half seconds up, exhaling on the way down and inhaling on the way up (like crunches, the breathing pattern is contradictory and contrary to what many now consider normal due to exhalation, while pressing one heavy arm do most of the work, balance the weight up and down, then shift most of the weight to the other arm and press back up, with that arm taking most of the force. tension.at the same rate for up to twenty repetitions or more.This is easier than a one-arm pushup, but much more challenging than the regular version—allowing you to get closer to the level of muscle tone and commitment you need. gain from a one-arm push, but can do more and last longer increase in time the muscle is under tension.

Now that you have finished all the exercises: stand up and swing your muscles. Relax everything, then run through the body alternately tensing and relaxing each part of the body, arms, shoulders, back, chest, legs, etc. Don't hold your breath while contracting and controlling your muscles - try to breathe normally and hold. These tense positions are not too long, a few seconds for each contraction is fine.

Once you are comfortable with all the exercises, you can complete the entire routine in fifteen to twenty minutes. When your repetitions reach the required number, your strength will increase and you will memorize and understand all the instructions you have left to perform in less than half an hour.

Quick list of exercises 1° 2° 3° 4° 5° 6° 7° 8° 9° 10° 11° 12° 13° 14° 15° 16° 17° 18° 19° 20° 21° 22° 23° 24° .

Alternate Dumbbell Curl Alternate Dumbbell Reverse Curl Alternate Dumbbell Curl Crucifix Dumbbell Simultaneous Curl Standing Dumbbell Pectoral Fly Alternate Dumbbell Press Alternate Dumbbell Press Simultaneous Front Raise Arm Circles Dumbbell Wrist Circles 1 (clockwise) Clockwise) Dumbbell Wrist Circles 2 (counterclockwise) Dumbbell Slap Movement Dumbbell Good Dumbbell Deadlift Dumbbell Shrugs Dumbbell Side Curls Dumbbell Simultaneous Back Extensions Calf Raises Raises Deep Knee Raises Toe Pushups Straight Leg Squats Straight Leg Squats Leg Raises Hyperextension Pushups

Additional Workouts: Additional Workouts: Alternate Shoulder Drill 1 Alternate Shoulder Drill 2 Ski Jumper Squat

What dumbbells to use? Regarding the actual weight of the dumbbells, as mentioned earlier in the W.A.T.C.H protocol section, you should first use a set of dumbbells that are heavy enough to help you generate a strong muscle contraction that is focused in the recommended rep range for each concentrated exercise. . and not heavier. Most importantly, you learn complete control of all your muscles and gain the ability to consciously recruit as many muscle fibers as possible when you consciously and rhythmically contract them. It turns out that the best weight to help you do this is one that is heavy enough that you can feel your weight on the working muscle and light enough that you can consciously amplify that slight contraction without injuring yourself by tearing the fibers or muscles. muscles overloading your body. tendons The old advice on this seems to be the best: between two and three pounds for the average woman and three to five pounds for the average man. If you're doing the exercises right, five pounds should be enough for anyone for quite a while, but if you're 6'1" and relatively very strong, maybe we can stretch you out and say five or seven pounds for you. 🇧🇷 Personally , I started with three pound dumbbells, I could easily have done the exercises with 5 pound dumbbells the first time around, but I did an experiment on the potential effectiveness of this weird light dumbbell routine and wanted to see exactly what I could accomplish with the lightest dumbbells possible. I had read all the books in the history department and had a strong suspicion that training is a completely different paradigm-based approach to physique than modern training methods.I'm glad I spent the first month or six weeks trying out the three pound dumbbells as they taught me how to do the exercises correctly I tend to trust more in what I am doing consciously with my muscles "do" to get the effect that what I was doing was just doing it mechanically and relying on the weight to create some level of tension in the muscle. I found that you can squeeze a surprising amount of muscle stimulation out of a meager weight this way. I noticeably increased my neurological control over my muscles quite quickly and actually saw visible results in terms of improved definition, muscle shape, and muscle density in just about three weeks. The biggest and most surprising effect was how my muscles subjectively "felt" as my day went on: I was suddenly very aware of my muscles, but not because they felt big or heavy, they actually felt like they were alive and very, very receptive. a . I felt really good and even if there had been no more results I would have continued with the exercises just for the initial benefits.

After a month to six weeks he had finished all the exercises and had done a hundred repetitions on some (Exercise 1), about sixty on others (Exercise 2 and 6), and on others thirty or forty (Exercise 7). At that time I noticed a measurable increase in the muscles in my arms and shoulders and a significant improvement in the definition of my back. Then I switched to five-pound dumbbells and noticed something very surprising: that small increase in weight made a world of difference. I was now able to achieve the same "sore" sensation and momentary failure much sooner on any exercise (say 60 reps on exercise 1, 30 reps on exercises 2 and 6, and only about twenty on exercise 7). performing the movements with the same level of mindful, strong muscle engagement in each repetition that he had learned with the three-pound dumbbells. I faced the same amount of internal effort against a slightly greater stimulus. I strongly believe that if I had started with the five pound weights, I would have hit the recommended rep range and easily accomplished it, but at the expense of fully engaging my muscles. I would have thought I would fully engage her, but I didn't. Let me put it another way: the numbers are just a rough suggestion. If you commit to doing a hundred or fifty of these, you are likely to miss out on a lot of benefits; Of course you will be able to do a hundred, the dumbbells only weigh a few pounds! - Think of it as trying to repeat a movement perfectly as many times as possible while fully contracting (tightening and then relaxing) the working muscles. That total muscle involvement in the action is all that matters. When I did this with three pounds, I found that I eventually got to the point where I couldn't do the first exercise for about a hundred (about) reps, so it was a good weight to start with. If I had started at five and used the proper full muscle contractions on each rep, I would have gotten to the same point with just fifty or sixty reps, but I still didn't know how to do it; probably would have contracted enough muscle. for 100 reps (because that was Attila's recommended number) and then assumed that was the right amount of muscle engagement for the rest of the routine, not realizing that I could recruit more muscle fibers with each rep. In short, don't be afraid to start at three pounds, or even two pounds if you're smaller, until you really master the exercises and gradually work your way up to four or five pounds. The biggest mistake you could make would be to think, "There isn't much difference between three and five pounds; I might as well go for five" or even "I'm too strong already, I'll do it with that ten pounds." . In terms of the type of dumbbells you should be using, it doesn't really matter. Absolutely any type of cheap and readily available dumbbell will do, don't go crazy buying equipment. You can even use some bricks or other objects of reasonable and balanced weight.

If you don't have dumbbells and want to try out the exercises for a bit before shelling out for a few, it doesn't really matter. The effects come from YOU, not the weights. The dumbbells are just a tool to help you. However, it helps if the dumbbells have thick handles, which makes for a better grip and helps the muscles contract properly. I started with these:

I only used them because we had them lying around the house (the three pounds were my girlfriend's and the five pounds were mine. I bought these a few years ago for practice and never thought I'd do something crazy like use them for curls, presses, and augmentations). They're not even shaped like traditional dumbbells and the handles were too flimsy and hard to squeeze, so as you can see I wrapped them in sponge and tape to give myself something to hold on to. This setting helped a lot and if you only have dumbbells with skinny hard handles I highly recommend it. If you're buying your dumbbells specifically for these exercises, it's worth noting that many of the lighter weights designed primarily for "toning" purposes and aimed at women are now encased in sponge. They're great because they allow for the right kind of "grip" in the grip. Which brings us to Sandow's Spring Grip Dumbbells. If you read Sandow's second book, it becomes clear that it was designed as a corrective device to help people do the exercises correctly. Often the authors (who have obviously never collected a sentence) talk about how they trained a powerful grip "while slightly pumping the biceps" - nothing could be further from the truth. Reading the books, I had a strong suspicion that these dumbbells were just a device to properly activate the muscles and that the springs weren't going to be particularly strong. I searched for a couple (I ended up finding two sets) and found that I was right. With just the two basic springs, they're easy to close and keep closed, and really help you focus on which muscles are working with each movement. Once you get that feeling of the muscle action, you can gradually add more springs and such

increase the intensity of this participation. With all the springs (especially the seven spring set) it's actually quite challenging and feels like you're juggling much heavier weights.

Some of my Sandow dumbbells, 100 years old and still going strong:

So do you need a set of spring dumbbells to do these exercises? Absolutely not. While they're a good idea, there are some downsides. They're only three pounds, and while you can increase the number of springs, I've found that after a while the forearms and grip benefit more from increased resistance than the target muscles. I trained with mine for about a year, going from two dumbbells to seven, but after a while I went back to regular five pound dumbbells because I preferred the feel they gave me. If you find a set of old Sandow dumbbells and want to try them out for exercises, go for it, but don't feel like you need them. Remember, they were originally only intended for people who couldn't trust their own mind and body to do the exercises. However, if you have trouble with this, if you have so little control over your muscles that you simply can't contract them unless they're fighting a lot of resistance, you might want to build your own Sandau machine:

Here's something I did in about ten minutes: Attach pieces of hanging wire to the handle of a cheap plastic utensil, then attach a 1lb weight disk to each end and fold the ends over to hold the disk. There you have a rough dumbbell from Sandow and voila. You should use the weakest grip exercises you can find (proving that Sandow dumbbells weren't primarily designed as clamps), because if the resistance is too strong, your grip will tire before your target muscles. If you really can't get the kind of muscle engagement I'm talking about, it might be worth setting up something like this, or even performing the movements with just a pair of lightweight plastic grippers in your hands instead of dumbbells, just until you get the hang of it. that Way to fully tense the muscles with each movement, and then return to regular dumbbells. In fact, modern "soft" foam dumbbells are just as good as a Sandow Grip dumbbell set; the only difference is that it is still up to you to create the right amount of tension while doing so with your concealer. Make sure it was closed and calibrated to the correct voltage for you.

In short, just get a regular set of 2-3 pound dumbbells or 3-5 pound dumbbells. If they have thick handles or foam handles that can be squeezed, that helps. If you have trouble feeling it right at first, you can try a pair of lightweight, easy-to-grip plastic clamps on exercises, then return to regular dumbbells once you're done. "you got it".

What results can I expect? All the old school bodybuilders who recommended this type of training promised that it would "develop all the muscles of the body" or "bring the musculature to perfect development" or they stated - "the biceps will get bigger and the muscles of the arms, the chest, neck, back, and legs will be strengthened and useful,” and promised, “These exercises will build muscle, and practicing them will maintain that muscle pattern.” They spoke of balanced muscle development and a body that has all the muscles to a "high level of conditioning". All of these terms are radically different from what we use today to describe someone with a great body. Now people are "cast", "in good shape", "raised" or, God forbid, "buff". . I even saw a clip from a reality show recently where a girl said that she likes it when her boyfriends look 'juicy'. God help us all. The fact is that today there is a certain type of physique that has become the "standard" look. You might see a slightly developed version of this physique in a fitness actor or model, a more muscular version in an athlete, an extremely muscular version in a natural bodybuilder, and a grotesquely exaggerated version in a professional bodybuilder on steroids. and growth hormone. This standard body itself is seen to some degree in all of these cases in terms of the proportions of certain muscles to others. Today's muscular bodies tend to have V-shaped torsos, thanks to the development of the latissimus dorsi, big pecs from exercises like the flat, incline, and incline bench press, and big biceps and triceps. Certain muscles are considered more difficult to develop than others, and we often see people who have obviously spent a lot of time doing bicep curls and a lot of bench presses, and they show big arms and hanging pecs, but they aren't deltoid-like. (supposedly one of the hardest muscles to develop). You have to realize that far from you just throw any ancient exercise at a human body and it comes out "fully developed" in exactly the same way every time, as if there is a standard state of full human muscular development that the modern look epitomizes. . above - how the body actually develops depends entirely on what you do with it. The modern look is derived from a commonly accepted paradigm that trains people with progressive heavy resistance in certain popular modern exercises, such as heavy barbell squats, bench presses, barbell and dumbbell rows, and dumbbell flyes.

Sandow V Schwarzenegger (Obviously chem support also comes into play here)

If you look at the strongmen of yesteryear portrayed earlier in this book, while they all have impressive physiques, they just don't look like modern trainers in terms of the type of physique they've developed. However, their bodies share several characteristics, and they share these characteristics with many statues and images of muscular bodies in ancient times. The traits that these men and the classical statues seem to share are: a very defined and powerful appearance with a decent but not excessive size, they tend to have defined but "flat" breasts by modern standards, Legs that are athletic but not massive. Developed arms that have size and definition but are still in proportion. They all have unusually large and rounded deltoids, very well developed backs, and abs that show solidly developed external obliques at the sides. These strongmen of yesteryear are all backs, shoulders, and arms with lean, athletic torsos, while today's muscular aesthetic seems to result in people who are all chest and arms with slim waists and large thighs and buttocks. This depends entirely on the type of exercises adopted. In the bench press and heavy squats, especially where they weren't popular exercises at the time, there was much more emphasis on the one-armed deadlift, which engages the deltoids as a powerful stabilizer. People who notice this often give this reason for the different development, but I think there may be another reason.

Training in the classic lightweight routine popularized by Attila and similarly used earlier by Triat (influenced by ancient Greek training) seems to develop exactly this classic type of physique. As you can see in the exercise sequence, start by strongly tightening the arm muscles, but some of these exercises engage the deltoids secondarily, then move to the shoulders where the deltoids are primarily involved if they are tired, and then to the shoulders. deltoid. Back, where the deltoids intervene secondarily, as well as the triceps. Because you're constantly holding the dumbbells, a lot of work is being done on the arms, and particularly the deltoids, and it's a particular type of work that facilitates more and more conscious neurological recruitment of muscle fibers as you improve. Your back muscles get a lot of stimulation when you learn to do it, as do your core, lower back, and external obliques, but your chest and legs get far less attention than they would in a modern routine. and end up stiff and more defined. so massive I think this light dumbbell routine and the W.A.T.C.H protocol results in a physique that looks like the typical old fashioned. It also seems to me that the muscles that develop the most with any exercise are the ones over which we have the best neuromuscular control, the ones where we can consciously or unconsciously recruit the most muscle fibers. Try to twitch specific muscles "on and off" without relying on any mechanical movement; In other words, we can all flex our biceps by doing the typical "look at those guns" pose, but try to clench your muscles hard without doing any special movements. position; Just sit back and read this, try to squeeze your biceps, triceps, or deltoids. Try it on your pecs, thighs, or buttocks. Try to harden or contract these muscles quickly WITHOUT AFFECTING OTHER MUSCLES NEARBY. I'm willing to bet that most of you will find this possible with some muscles and next to impossible with others. I suggest that the muscles you can do this with have better neurological communication networks built up through normal daily use, and that without pushing your other muscles up or even beyond that level if you just do some mechanical exercises, the muscles with those with better natural control respond much better than those you cannot control. I'll go further and bet most of you can tighten your glutes (buttocks), pecs, and then your biceps to some degree, but you can't separate the tension from your biceps and triceps. I bet you find it much more difficult, if not impossible, to contract your deltoids without engaging the rest of your arm or chest, or to contract your lower back muscles over your kidneys. The muscles that respond best to bodybuilding exercises in most people are these

The ones most people have decent neurological control over, and the ones that are notoriously difficult to develop, are the ones most of us have poor neurological communication with: the deltoids, the lower back, in some people calves etc Dumbbell exercises greatly increase your neurological communication with ALL your muscles and therefore focus particularly on the deltoids, arms and back, producing a type of muscular development that resembles in size and proportion the classical ideal found in statues to see. it is so. :

Doríphorus, the lancer

Or this:

I know... definitely would have benefited from a flattering fig leaf.

Compare that kind of development with these photos of Sandow in his brawny prime:

In the photo below you can even see that Sandow is holding an object in his right hand that he's squeezing like one of his spring dumbbells to focus on tightening his muscles and that's another thing worth mentioning. People these days expect the muscles gained from hard work in the gym to be "there all the time," so to speak.

Despite the fact that most of the photos, fitness models on the covers of Men's Health, etc., are constantly in evidence with them. This has resulted in people constantly peeking out from under their clothes and having that classic "I wear a roll of invisible rug under each arm" look. Much was said in Sandow's day about a strong man's ability to appear perfectly normal in his clothes. If his muscles were relaxed or "at rest," they should look smooth and taut, but normal in size. When he folded them, they were expected to "jump" and transform into a rigid representation of the classical ideal. The skill of an artist to achieve this amazing transformation was the key point. His complete control of his musculature from soft to hard and undulating, through every stage in between, and his resemblance to the perfectly proportioned and balanced physique of yore was what people wanted to see. As a result, when people see old photos of these men, they tend to assume they're just standing there, instead of "actively showing off" certain muscles and looking like this all the time. For example, in the photo above, Sandow is intentionally relaxed in his chest, abdomen, and legs in the first photo as he consciously flaunts his deltoids, and in the second photo he's strongly contracting all of his core muscles at once. So if he's looking for strong thigh and hip development and wants his pecs to be consistently big and round to the point where he needs a bra, these exercises probably aren't for you. On the other hand, if you like the look of the type of muscular development and proportions embodied by former bodybuilders and their students, then that type of physique can be developed in three to six months with light weights. They would have seen visible improvements in four to six weeks and measurable progress toward that goal in about three months. Nowadays, people are mainly concerned with the size of his muscles. Measurements are routinely touted and promised by various approaches that far exceed the measurements we hear from men of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Obviously size was a factor in how impressive their bodies were, but they weren't really huge, and the people imitating them didn't want to be huge either, they wanted a perfectly developed, balanced and impressive body, not huge.

Your muscles will get bigger with that workout, but if it's huge arms and sagging breasts, forget it. Let's face it, serious bodybuilders won't read this book, and if they do, they won't be interested in what the W.A.T.C.H protocol with light dumbbells has to offer them. I believe this style of training can build just the right amount of size and muscle mass for your specific physique, leaving you looking defined and strong. However, the amount of muscle growth that light dumbbells can provide, especially in the arms and shoulders, may surprise you. While reading through various fitness forums to research this eBook, I came across posts from people who trained in modern bodybuilding methods saying they just wanted a body like Brad Pitt in Fight Club or Daniel Craig as Bond. or other actors of a similar build, and not a really "big" type of bodybuilding, but they often followed heavy weight training routines to try and achieve that goal. I am a firm believer that the W.A.T.C.H protocol with a light dumbbell routine popularized by Professor Attila would provide exactly what they were looking for for people with this kind of ambition and, in turn, doing twenty to thirty minutes a day on the comfort of your You would do it in your own homes, without the need for a gym, without supplements, without the need for complicated exercise routines. For women interested in the defined "fit" look exhibited by Cameron Diaz and some of the actresses who toured Hawaii for five seasons of "Lost," this routine would also suit your needs admirably. When I was preparing this book, I originally intended to include only photos of strong men from the old days as illustrations, and I thought I'd use some of the old photos from the previous books to illustrate the exercises. I didn't feel like having photos of my own body or putting those photos on the internet, where they would be susceptible to all kinds of criticism and ridicule (show me someone who spent ten minutes reading YouTube comments and didn't lose all faith in the future of humanity. Everything that is put on the Internet is immediately criticized and ridiculed). So I thought, wait, if I'm reading this book and the author makes all these claims about the effectiveness of this old-fashioned approach to building muscle and improving the physique, I'd probably like to see more evidence than a hundred photographs of fifty-year-old people, whom he supposedly trained with him. If he said he had any success training this way, I'd want to see pictures of him instead of just taking his word for it. So I (reluctantly) decided to pose for the illustrative photos

the exercises and for these:

Rather than try to produce stunning Men's Health-style photos with professional lighting (which I don't have the resources for), I thought I'd shoot the type of photos found on page 31.

Captured in "The Construction and Reconstruction of the Human Body", which look like clinical photographs from a medical dictionary, they are in black and white, and most importantly, they do not include the subject's face! Now, I don't claim to have developed a particularly special physique, and I'm fully aware that my measurements don't impress anyone who studies measurements, but these are the results I got from training with light 3-pound dumbbells. dumbbells and 5 pound dumbbells in the last three years and I'm happy with them. If these results seem unimpressive to you and don't satisfy your own goals in terms of what you're trying to achieve, that's okay. I am NOT a serious bodybuilder or strength coach and have no desire to become one. I'm just someone who would rather look "fit" than out of shape and I'm willing to work out at home for about a half hour a day to do it. I took all of the light dumbbell exercises that the creators promised. I am 44 years old and started using this training protocol three years ago at 41 just to see what would happen. I don't follow any special diet to gain muscle mass (despite eating healthy) and I don't take any supplements. While the results I got aren't amazing in terms of what I could have accomplished in the same amount of time starting with weight training or strength training, they are MUCH BETTER THAN I EXPECTED AND SEEM EVERYWHERE RELATED TO THE VALUE OF TIME. AND TIME AND EFFORT THAT I HAVE TO SPEND The photos that illustrate the exercises were taken with a 5-megapixel digital camera in natural light, without trying to make them more flattering or enhance anything. The photos above and on the cover of this book were taken with my girlfriend's old 3 megapixel camera phone! I'm not tanned, I have several tattoos (one of them half done), I hate being photographed, and my girlfriend is not a talented photographer to say the least. They are included here just to show you honestly the results I got from these exercises. I am aware that by including these photos in the book I expose myself to inevitable criticism. It is true that these photos of my results using this method will probably elicit the following reactions:

1. From the muscle-bound bodybuilder crowd: "Ha ha! This skinny guy is tiny and looks like he's never worked out in his life. You can tell he only lifts five pound weights; my sister has bigger muscles LOL!" - You need to start doing power squats and get into a cycle of (insert favorite androgen here)…etc, etc.” 2. A little more measured – “Well, he did get some results, but he would have

better results if I had trained with decent weights and eaten more etc...” 3. The Sane – “Speaks in favor of this training approach and its results are very good for a minimal amount of light weight training. Maybe there is something in it? 4. The Negative: "There's no way I could have gotten those results at five pounds!" 5. Even the ridiculous: "You can't look like this at 44 without chemical help!"

Yes, the same photos will undoubtedly evoke all these separate and conflicting reactions at once, and there is absolutely nothing you can do about it. For people who think like number 1: this book is not for you, go ahead. People who think like number 2, that's probably true, but I'm not interested in that, I just wanted a quick and hassle-free way to train in my own home and I have no particular desire to be taller. For people who think like number 3: this book is for you, try the exercises yourself and see what happens. Maybe you can beat my results with the method? For people who think like 4 and 5: yes I have and yes you can. I've just given you detailed instructions on how to do the same, but if you refuse to accept that it's possible, I can't help you. While I'm not interested in getting "big" per se and am more concerned with having a balanced looking musculature, the metrics I got, while small for modern bodybuilders, aren't bad if you look at them from a different perspective. In an article written by George Russell Weaver for Superman magazine in 1938 (find it at sandow.plus), the subject of Sandow's constitution and measures was discussed. The author used measurements from Sandow's first book, taken before witnesses by the eminent physician Dr. Dudley Sergeant in 1893 when Sandow was 26, around the time of the two photos above. According to the good doctor, at the time Sandow was 5'6" and weighed 180 pounds. His dimensions are given as:

Wrist: 7.3 inches (the average of both wrists) Forearms: 13.2 inches (again the average of both) Biceps: 16.5 inches (the average of both)

Neck - 16.5 inches Shoulders - 20.3 inches (measured with calipers) Chest - 44.1 inches (normal) Chest - 46.9 inches (extended) Waist - 32.7 inches Hips - 38 inches Thighs - 23 inches ( Average of both) Calves - 15.5 inches (average) of both)

hmm not very well. Even Sandow's measurements would make you laugh on most modern weightlifting/bodybuilding and fitness forums where every other advertiser claims to have arms that are at least 17 inches and usually 19 or 20 inches long. In his later books, he claimed dimensions much greater than these, and it is these greater that he is generally cited for when discussed in these pages. It is certainly possible that he evolved and was much taller in his thirties than he was in his twenties, but this is the period of his great stage fame and it was just before these luminous images of him appeared in his first book. they were taken. The author goes on to talk about the structure of a man's skeleton and how this bone structure and his particular arrangement of muscle attachments limit the muscle development he can achieve no matter how hard he trains (this is now known in bodybuilding discussions as the genetics of one). in "I'll Never Have 19-Inch Arms With My Genetics") and he points out that while not everyone has the potential to match Sandow's actual measurements, we can all photograph his exact proportions. He then provides a chart that we can use to convert all of our wrist measurements (a good indicator of general skeletal structure) into the general measurements that would give us a build using the same Sandow ratios for our own specific frame. Here's the graph so you can do the math yourself if you want - it's pretty insightful. All you have to do is measure your wrist just below that knobby bone on the outside of your hand.

Your wrist x 1000 = wrist measurement Your wrist x 1833 = forearm measurement Your wrist x 2292 = biceps measurement Your wrist x 2292 = neck measurement Your wrist x 2819 = shoulders (with calipers) Your wrist x 6125 = shoulder measurement chest Your wrist x 4542 = waist measurement

Your wrist x 5.278 = hip circumference Your wrist x 3.194 = thigh circumference Your wrist x 2.153 = calf circumference

I'm the same height as Sandow, but I'm 40 pounds lighter and have a smaller skeleton, with the average circumference of both my wrists being just 6.86 inches. Let's round it up to 6.9, which would give my Sandowesque measurements:

Sandow's 1893 proportions adjusted for my 6.9-inch wrist:

Forearm = 12.7 inches Biceps = 15.8 inches Neck = 15.8 inches Shoulders = 19.45 inches Chest = 42.3 inches Waist = 31.3 inches Hips = 36.4 inches Thighs = 22.0 inches Calf = 14.8 inches

My actual measurements (cold) are: Forearm = 13 inches Biceps = 15.3 inches Neck = 15.5 inches Shoulders = 18.9 inches Chest = 42.2 inches Waist = 31 inches Hips = 36.7 inches Thighs = 22 , 3 inches calf = 14.5 inches

So after training with a routine that Sandow sold as one that would give students a

Physique as he is, and who Professor Attila claimed was entirely responsible for Sandow's own physique, my measurements are very similar to Sandow's proportions of the time (adjusted to my own lighter skeletal build). If my arm and neck were half an inch longer and my calf was a quarter inch longer, it would fit perfectly. More recently, Casey Butt PhD has written extensively on the same subject as Weaver in his e-book Your Maximum Muscle Potential and in The Weight Trainer, and has spent 6 years studying drug-free, pre-steroid champion bodybuilders and the correlation between skeletal structure, body size and muscle potential. He created an extensive set of equations capable of accurately estimating maximum muscle development possible (without medication) based on specific measurements including height, skeletal structure at the wrists and ankles, and percentage of body fat. The Casey Butt Equations predict my absolute maximum muscle potential (training like a pro natural bodybuilder, for size, eating a diet to support muscle growth, etc.)

Body Weight = 186.7 pounds Forearms = 13.4 inches Biceps = 16.8 inches Neck = 16.4 inches Chest = 45.3 inches Thighs = 23.4 inches Calves = 15.7 inches

Mr. Butt points out that ultimately these are still just estimates and that a person's muscle potential is also affected by the individual hormone profile (which varies significantly from person to person and should drop off significantly after age 40). The location of your muscle attachments and whether you have long, full, or short, narrow muscle bellies also influence your personal muscle potential. Due to all of these factors, Butt points out that only a small minority of men with the ideal hormonal profile, long muscular bellies, and an optimal muscle-supporting diet will be able to achieve the maximum muscle potential for their skeletal frame. These are the individuals who become successful bodybuilders. Interestingly, his equations predict absolute maximum measurements for a man about Sandow's height and a bone structure of:

Chest = 1.6817 x 7.0 + 1.3759 x 8.7 + 0.3314 x 69 = 46.6 inches Biceps = 1.2033 x 7.0 + 0.1236 x 69 = 17.0 inches Forearms = 0.9626 x 7.0 + 0.0989 x 69 = 13.6 inches 16.5 inches 69 = 24.5 inches Calves = 0.9298 x 8.7 + 0.1210 x 69 = 16.4 inches

These measurements come from actual measurements made by Dr. Sargent in 1893, who put Sandow on par with today's drug-free elite bodybuilders and the classic pre-steroid era of the 1930s, '40s, and '50s. "genetically typical learners", was never able to reach those ideal levels. To put that into perspective, he thinks that reaching even 95% of them would be a good life goal, while he says that with 90% of those potential measurements, a man would look like a "fitness model." For me, 90% of the measures of estimated maximum muscle potential would be:

Forearm = 12.6 Biceps = 15.12 Neck = 15.12 Chest = 40.77 Thigh = 21.6 Calf = 14.13

My actual measurements slightly exceed all of these and are actually:

Forearm = 97.0% of maximum possible Biceps = 91.0% of maximum possible Neck = 94.5% of maximum possible Chest = 93.15% of maximum possible Thigh = 95.3% of maximum possible Calf = 92.35 % of maximum possible

If you accept Casey Butt's numbers, that's amazing. That means at the age of 44.

after about three years of training with very light 3-5 pound dumbbells for twenty to thirty minutes a day, without a special muscle-building diet (other than a good regular healthy diet), without supplements of any kind, and without treating consciously getting bigger. Either way, I've achieved a decent looking physique that I'm happy with, and that averages around 90% of my drug-free absolute maximum muscle potential, about as muscular (for size) as I could reasonably expect to get anything, which I did. I didn't even measure myself the whole time: I just used the tape measure to write this chapter and was pleasantly surprised to see how what I thought were my modest measurements compared to the proportions Sandow boasted about, and the summed up max. potential muscle mass that my genetics would actually allow. I've even used measurements taken "cold" first thing in the morning, meaning without working out or pumping first and when I'm absolutely light. I also took photos like this. I did this because I did not want to make false claims about my results or the possible effects of this type of training. If I measure myself immediately after the W.A.T.C.H protocol training at night when my muscles are trained and engorged with blood, the readings are as follows:

(My measurements when "pumped" after exercise)

Forearm = 13.5 inches - 100.75%!!! Biceps = 15.6 inches - 92.85% Neck = 15.5 inches - 94.5% Chest = 42.5 inches - 93.8% Waist = 31.0 inches Thighs = 23.0 inches - 98.2% Calf = 14.9 inches - 94.9%

While it's fun to play with, the fact that the forearm pump reading is MORE than 100% of what's actually possible shows that pump readings are meaningless. If I were to do the kind of planned "pumping" that bodybuilders do before a show, I'm sure I could get a few more stitches on the duct tape here and there, but as tempting as that was (I'm sure people do and always did when they declared their measurements to be "true"), there's really no need. As I said before, I was never concerned with absolute muscle size, but with a

Development and a good looking, balanced and "fit" character that he could achieve and maintain with the least amount of time and money possible. I feel like the light dumbbell routine worked across the board, and as Hippolyte Triat previously said:

"The aim of these exercises is not to create a muscular Hercules, but men with harmonious appearance, healthy bodies and strong minds."

I feel like the old light dumbbell approach did exactly that for me, even though I have terrible genetics by bodybuilding standards: I'm in my early 40s, very light boned, short muscles and long tendons, whiter skin that you have seen I have seen and have always had skinny legs and non-existent calves. Despite all of this, with only ridiculously light weights, in twenty to thirty minutes a day I have developed and continue to develop a physique that I am very happy with. By all accepted modern standards this should not be possible, but it was when I followed the instructions of men like Attila, Sandow, Treloar, and Strongfort as carefully as possible. These are the results you can expect from the light dumbbell routine and the W.A.T.C.H protocol once you master the exercises and do them properly and consistently. I can only follow my own personal experience, but it seems to me that the ancient bodybuilders who promoted this deceptively simple training protocol were really trying to give people the key to laying the foundation for a great physique. I have no reason to believe that my hormonal profile is any different than the average for a man my age. So imagine what someone in their late teens, twenties or even early thirties with naturally good hormone levels and naturally long muscular bellies could do: add a specific muscle building diet and protein supplements and I'm sure many people will appreciate my results could exceed or achieve much faster.

Who can benefit from these exercises? I believe everyone can benefit from training light dumbbell exercises with the W.A.T.C.H protocol if they perform the movements correctly and consistently. If your goals are to achieve a beautifully developed, shapely, defined and strong appearance in the shortest possible time and with a minimum of equipment, then you can't go wrong, this approach would be suitable for teenagers who are starting to exercise for the first time, women looking for shape and a "hard body", men who want to "get in shape" after letting go, people who don't have a place for the "gym" in their lives but still want a decent body and the aforementioned who are chasing their favorite Hollywood celebrity bodies, whether it's Brad Pitt's Fight Club torso or Madonna's arms, but they don't really consider themselves fitness enthusiasts. However, it must be said that the type of training that would benefit the most and produce the fastest visible results would be someone who has more or less average body mass ratios and BMI, but wants to add a bit of muscle mass, tone and definition to your body. body. 🇧🇷 A typical "lean and fat" physique would really show the muscle definition and sculpting effect of this approach in a relatively short period of time. So is the man or woman who has been in good shape in the past, from the gym or previous forays into gym bodybuilding, but has had a few kids, climbed the corporate ladder, and hasn't really had time to work out. at one time you could greatly benefit from this approach. While it's easy to pretend to "go back to the gym someday" and never make it, these exercises can be done at home in no time with very little effort. Someone who has been in good shape in the past will already have some inactive muscles and some level of neurological control over them, and reawakening that muscular system with this protocol would likely yield surprising results compared to previous training experiences. However, if your problem is that you are severely overweight or even obese, choosing the light dumbbell routine as your main exercise protocol can be problematic. In the 1880s and early 1900s, the main problem for most people was lack of food, not too much of the wrong kind! The universal problem for the average follower of physical culture was how to build their lean physique (this continued into the 1950s and 1960s; think Charles Atlas' famous sand-faced student, 40-pound wimp, etc.) from fights "bigness" and "downsize" and the elimination of a "corporation" (a beer belly or belly in today's parlance) in some of the early books, but the kind of overweight bodies Sandow and Attila faced. Creative city managers and burly captains of industry would hardly be considered fat these days.

Rules While gaining some level of muscle mass is always helpful when trying to lose weight; in fact, keeping extra muscle on the body burns significant calories, so a muscular person will use more existing calories than a person with negligible muscle mass. I feel good sculpting hard, defined and perfectly proportioned musculature when no one can see it under layers and layers of fatty tissue. There's no denying that if you're severely overweight, you need to take your food intake seriously and burn some serious calories no matter what exercise program you're on. While the W.A.T.C.H protocol is a brilliant addition to the training and exercise arsenal of someone trying to lose a significant amount of weight and sculpt a beautiful body, it shouldn't be your primary focus. Forgiveness. If you are interested in more than just cosmetics and want to improve your health and fitness and improve your physical performance, I believe this approach has much to offer, particularly in improving the neurological communication between your mind and body. I'll talk a bit more about that in the next chapter, but for now suffice it to say that the W.A.T.C.H protocol with light dumbbells would be an ideal workout for any activity that requires improving muscle coordination, physical dexterity, speed, elasticity, and strength.

Are the results "real" or just cosmetic? If at this point in the book you are willing to assuage your disbelief and accept that regular 20-30 minute workouts with ridiculously light weights can actually build an amazing looking muscular physique in just a few short months, unlike anything you have ever thought , when you say "okay, I'm willing to believe that this weird approach actually works and builds muscle"; you may be wondering if the muscles you are producing are "real" or not. In other words, does this routine only seem to work in terms of building muscle and strength? Is the reason it produces results contrary to everything associated with progressive resistance and the gradual breakdown and rebuilding of muscle fibers because it simply pumps blood to the tissues and somehow produces "fake" muscles? This is a very reasonable question that I asked myself when I started noticing very clear results. This idea of ​​light "pumps" or cramping exercises that build muscles that are just for show and not "really strong" is something that has been leveled previously with these types of movements. Classic weightlifting author Harry Paschall, writing under the character "Bosco" in the 1950s, spoke of this type of training, calling it "muscle twist." He was an advocate of weight training, but realized that protocol was the big secret behind the incredible physiques of men like Sandow. He believed that these exercises and the level of muscle control they offered were responsible for the appearance of these men, but that on their own they would only produce what he called "impressive looking bulges"; according to Bosco, even hard training was absolutely necessary. However, he did talk about the "muscle twist" he saw used in the 1940s by professional bodybuilders of the day, which seemed to be performed while sitting in multiple sets per body part, as he puts it "hour after hour." . just pump and pump for the big size. He correctly states that this is unlikely to produce a truly fit or strong physique, but says that even if done in this extreme way, just the addition of some strenuous bodyweight and aerobic exercises would have added to the fitness equation. force. Apprentice. who used it We don't train that way, and the routine in this book includes some strenuous bodyweight exercises. Furthermore, when talking about true masters of muscle control like Sandow, or later men like Sig Klein (who actually married Professor Attila's daughter), he admits that both were strong and impressively built and that this practice of muscle control was closely related. Paschall simply thought that the raw strength of powerlifting should be developed first, and these types of muscle control exercises and movements were later adopted as a useful adjunct – the exact opposite mindset to this one.

followed by men who really did it, who believed that light work should come first and that it was critical to great strength and conditioning. Even in the 1940s and 1950s, when the heavy lifting protocol that included heavy squats and heavy bench presses had completely replaced "physical culture," there was still a tacit recognition that this protocol WORKS, no matter how you look at it. felt now, he believed that the muscles produced were somehow "fake". "and not as good as the 'real' ones produced by hardcore progressive resistance (completely different from the accepted opinion prevailing only fifty years ago, that they work and make you strong, and completely different from the prevailing opinion today, which has completely forgotten about these exercises and I would argue that they just don't work) For those of us interested in reviving the light dumbbell exercises of the turn of the century to sculpt an impressive physique, there are two ways to get there to this “utility t” question of the muscles it produces. The first approach is to simply say, "Who cares?" and for many this will be perfectly satisfactory - after all, if you are not a serious bodybuilder or strength trainer and just want a good physique or an attractive figure; If you just want to look a certain way and be happier with yourself than before, what would it really matter if you weren't as strong as you look now? What would you say to the accusation "Hey, your body looks like Brad Pitt's in Fight Club... I bet you're not as strong as him"? How would you feel if you were told, "You may look like a fitness model on the cover of Men's Health, but you're really out of shape..." like the person who just criticized you and didn't give a damn? little is cared for On the other hand, if you want to look good and be healthy, strong and fit, there is a different perspective. There are (very) basically two types of muscle hypertrophy or muscle growth. One is called myofibrillar hypertrophy and is primarily associated with an increase in the thickness of the muscle fibers within a muscle cell and is usually the result of adaptations the body makes to short, intense all-out efforts. to work. It is widely accepted that the dense working muscles of, say, a light Olympic lifter, accustomed to heavy single lifts, are an example of myofibrillar hypertrophy, while a pumped-up bodybuilder doing multiple sets and repetitions with heavy weights is an example of myofibrillar hypertrophy.

but clearly lighter than the maximum he can lift, illustrates sarcoplasmic hypertrophy. It's actually much more complicated than that, since all muscle growth is a combination of both types of hypertrophy, but you get the point. Thus, if light exercises performed with focused contractions are accused of producing only noticeable "fake" muscle, it is suggested that they induce only some degree of sarcoplasmic hypertrophy (an increase in fluid within the muscle cell) and do not induce growth of individual muscle fibers. A muscle experiencing only sarcoplasmic hypertrophy would be larger but less dense than baseline and would not have significantly increased force output, whereas a muscle experiencing only myofibrillar hypertrophy would be much stiffer and denser than baseline. , although it was not the case. necessarily much larger and would have been demonstrably stronger. After reading the first chapter of this book, it seems like a reasonable assumption about the W.A.T.C.H. After all, you don't use enough weight to break down muscle fibers, so if it's going to work, it just has to produce sarcoplasmic growth, right? We cannot be sure of this without training a group of subjects alone in this exercise modality and taking invasive muscle biopsies before and after exercise, but we can look at the purely subjective evidence; The muscles that this protocol develops do not appear larger or less dense. In fact, the opposite seems to be true: you notice a big increase in muscle stiffness and density in the first few weeks at first, even a feeling that your muscles are getting smaller and tighter than when you started, and then later there is a constant incremental growth that maintains the initial hardness and density. I certainly felt stronger as I progressed through the exercises. Also, as I mentioned, I noticed a tremendous increase in the responsiveness of my muscles to signals from my mind, an improvement in the neurological communication between my brain and my muscles that felt like an increase in the drive and dexterity of the whole body. body. Even if muscles gained through W.A.T.C.H protocol training are predominantly sarcoplasmic in their cellular structure, this does not automatically mean they are useless. My girlfriend is a sports rehab working on a professional rugby team. Because athletes, such as rugby players, require a certain level of muscle size and volume (for impact), as well as components of explosive strength, plyometrics, and endurance for their physical development, it is currently good practice to train for a early stage of sarcoplasm. increase -

You do sub-max loads in the 10-12 rep range, just like bodybuilders do, and once a certain level of muscle mass is reached, you train that new muscle mass for raw strength and power. If you think about it, IF the light weights protocol is somehow an overlooked shortcut to rapid sarcoplasmic growth, this is exactly how Attila trained his students: light weights to fully develop all muscles before teaching them how to build the muscles. Big Perform (Strength) Feats” This would mean that if you only care about how you look and not what you can actually do with your body or how “fit” you can be, you would just follow the easy dumbbell routine and that would do Everything you can. necessary. If you're more concerned with strength and fitness, you can add other things: kettlebells, bodyweight exercises, a regular sport, etc., and pushups at the end of the routine featured in this book. Depending on how hard you're loading them, it will work to a degree, but that might explain the point of light dumbbell routines: I think it's more complicated than that and there's a lot more to it than just sarcoplasmic hypertrophy. Remember how the other type of muscle growth, myofibrillar hypertrophy, depends on the growth of muscle fibers and tends to increase density and definition? Well, it happens due to an increase in the muscle's ability to contract. Sarcoplasmic growth does not appreciably increase muscle strength because it does not imply an increase in contractile capacity. All we do in the W.A.T.C.H protocol is contraction: we (consciously) increase our ability to contract muscles. If you agree that you can do this just as well, or even effectively, with focused contractions and light weights compared to lifting heavy weights, it's not important: muscle contraction and increased ability to contract are key, so I believe that everyone can benefit from the hypertrophy generated by this method cannot be solely sarcoplasmic and must also involve some myofibrillar adaptation. In the next chapter, I'll briefly review some of the research that suggests this may be the case, but now I want to share another reason I'm convinced muscle growth and enhancement is achieved through light. The dumbbell protocol is far from over. . I practice and teach a Chinese internal martial art that is somewhat similar to Taichi. In addition to my martial arts, which current regular practice keeps me flexible, aerobic and functionally strong enough to perform, I have also liked to incorporate a few additional "conditioning" exercises in the past. These weren't all specifically to improve my martial arts, to be honest. Some of them were for appearance and purpose only.

effect they would have on my body. The fact is that there are only a finite number of hours in the day and any time spent only on fitness and appearance is time not spent on practicing and improving martial arts performance. Furthermore, attitudes towards strength training and muscle mass in internal martial arts are similar to attitudes that boxers have had towards strength training in the past. Although many boxers today weight train, this was considered absolutely prohibited in boxing from the 19th century until the 1980s. Boxers and boxing trainers believed that heavy lifting (with heavy weights) would harm their muscles. boxers, making them slower, less powerful, and less agile. Traditional Chinese martial arts masters had (and still have) the same ideas. These ideas are ridiculed by sports scientists in boxing today, who point out that this assumption is ridiculous: a general increase in strength can only make you faster and more powerful, they emphasize, and therefore only consider former trainers. as ignorant and sick. . . informed. The problem is that they weren't misinformed and they weren't stupid, they knew exactly what they were talking about. It's just that modern readers have misunderstood them. They weren't saying that the extra muscle gained from lifting heavy weights would add up and slow their fighters down like that; they were saying that the kind of neurological adaptations the body makes when training to lift heavy weights are incompatible with boxing. They thought a boxer needed strong but finely controlled musculature, perfect neurological communication between mind and muscle, to be able to throw a punch into a fleeting gap on defense or instantly move his body in any direction. They felt that lifting heavy weights developed a different type of neurological adaptation and was better left alone. On the other hand, the Force KNEW it was vital. Modern Chinese martial arts have retained this bias against strength training, so for my additional physical training I have religiously avoided heavy weights and a similar approach to bodybuilding. I trained mainly to train with bodyweight movements, rope climbing, and the like. A couple of years ago I injured my right elbow so badly that I couldn't train properly for about six to eight months, and while I was still able to do many elements of my internal martial arts training, I had to give it all up. of the extra fitness stuff altogether. . As the elbow healed, I became used to spending my spare time exercising and didn't want to give up a significant portion of that time to supplement physical exercise, but I also didn't want to settle for just my appearance as a result. of my exercise (I can be "fit" functionally and aerobically, but I felt like I didn't "look" fit and didn't like it).

It was around this time that I was reading all those old Strongman books and I began to suspect that the simple dumbbell protocol that kept appearing in those books was more than meets the eye and might offer me a solution. Since it would be a way to get my elbow moving again and it would only take fifteen or twenty minutes at night, I thought I'd give it a try and see what would happen. The results I got were so much better than I expected and I'm still doing it and this is the ONLY supplemental conditioning I do outside of regular indoor martial arts training. Very quickly, however, people in the arts I practiced started mentioning my increasingly visible results, assuming I was lifting weights like a bodybuilder. I was warned that this extra bulk and the "wrong way" I would inevitably learn to use my body would hurt my performance and prevent me from developing real skills. They thought I would do all the "muscular" applications rather than employ a relatively relaxed, unified, and intelligent full-body force. No matter how many times I have told these people that I am definitely NOT lifting heavy weights, and that I actually feel that the exercises promote a GREATER ability to control my muscles (and therefore relax them properly) and use my muscles, they do not give me would believe. It later turned out that this debate had happened before, and that the same exercises had been used in the past by famous boxers, who warned against weight training. Like Sandow before them, they knew the value of the light dumbbell protocol, they knew it was NOT strength training per se, and they knew it provided the kind of strength and neurological adaptation that was extremely useful to them. As Sandow in America by Dr. Sargent, one of the men present was the famed world middleweight boxing champion Mike Donovan. Donovan competed with Sandow in several events using devices that measure the speed of arm movement in a punch. The reason for this test is pretty clear: Donovan was particularly famous for his speed and the tests weren't about "if" but how much Sandow's comparatively large muscles held him back. Everyone present was surprised to find that Sandow's punch was more or less equal to Donovan's: the boxer barely beat him. Much has been said about Sandow having "an enormous reserve of nervous energy that he could only use when necessary": he was "capable of using only the muscles necessary to perform an action that he did not use." state of complete relaxation." It's the kind of neurological adaptation required in boxing that boxers (and some traditional martial artists) thought weight training would ruin. Basically, squeezing the kind of weight you use to mindlessly contract ALL muscles of your arms, back and chest at the same time to fight the weight up or down creates a neurological pattern that teaches all the muscles to "fire" at the same time. 🇧🇷 That would be

effectively, it would be like trying to drive a car forward with the parking brake on, and you would slow it down and cause it to expend more energy than necessary with each bump. Obviously, the type of development Sandow was building didn't have that effect on his movement. This supposed side effect of lifting weights had to do with the term "muscular." Today, we think the term only refers to someone with a lot of muscular development whose size somehow interferes when they move, but that's not how the term was used back then. The term refers very specifically to a condition in which the action of one muscle has been unconsciously "linked" to the action of another muscle: someone who cannot both tense the biceps and fully relax the triceps is, by this definition , "ligated muscle". Maybe you've seen those weird vintage poses where the muscular man stands with his back to the camera, both hands extended above his head and fingers interlocked and spread apart so that his shoulder blades fly to the side and are almost dislocated? YouTube footage of Sandow's Thomas Edison performing exactly this feat.

Famous muscle control expert Otto Arco from behind

This was done to demonstrate something very specific: when the demonstrator pulls hard on these fingers, they contract the muscles that attach the shoulder blades at the top, while also deliberately turning off the muscles in the middle back that attach them there, thereby allows full opening. shoulder blades to the sides.

If you assume this pose and vigorously spread your hands apart and activate ALL YOUR BACK MUSCLES AT THE SAME TIME so that your shoulder blades stay where they are, then by the original definition you have your muscles tied up. This pose was meant to show that the person doing it was definitely not. Ironically, many people who have never touched a weight in their life are muscular by this original definition. If you habitually tense all your muscles at once during a strength exercise, say a bench press, because you need whatever it takes to get the weight there, then you are unconsciously training your muscles to keep them working at the same time, and this is neurological problem. Factor the old boxers were referring to when they said that strength training would turn their boxers into "muscles." However, the light weight protocol taught by Attila to Sandow specifically avoids this: it begins by teaching separate, maximum control of each muscle with weights light enough to allow you to choose which muscles are engaged and to what degree. It makes a person "strong" in a very special way: it gives you precise control over each muscle and teaches you to consciously contract them very hard or all the way, honing the most important neurological component of strength. You may remember that at the beginning of the chapter on Professor Attila it was mentioned that several very famous sportsmen and athletes of the time were students of the famous studio of his. One of those men was the then world heavyweight champion, the famous "gentleman" Jim Corbett. Prior to Corbett's fight with Englishman Charlie Mitchell in Florida in 1894, Attila trained the famed heavyweight champion in his five-pound dumbbell routines, tailoring the specific movements to focus on improving his muscle mass and working the muscles involved in throw his famous left hook. (which is credited as a fabrication, by the way) and the "right half jab" from him.

Corbett's right half punch (Photo courtesy of Jan and Terry Todd, H.J. Lutcher Stark Center for Physical Education and Sports)

This finishing blow, as we can see in an illustration included in a scrapbook article, is identical to the traditional martial arts "lunge blow" and is also essentially the same as Exercise 11, but with a full step. Mitchell was smaller and lighter than Corbett, but he fought hard against the much taller John L. Sullivan and was known for his speed, so it was important that any training Corbett undertook did not affect his speed and dexterity. . Corbett had the worst in the first round, then knocked down Mitchell in the second and again three times in the third to win via very quick KO. Until this time, Corbett was not a notable puncher. There is a clipping in Attila's scrapbook recording the fact that Corbett presented Professor Attila with a gold medal at the Bijou Theater in Brooklyn to officially and publicly thank him for the training he received prior to the fight in Florida.

New champion Corbett meets veteran Jem Mace

A visibly more muscular James J. Corbett in 1894 after training with dumbbells

"The front of the pendant is adorned with a photo of Corbett in combat gear, while the back features Attila's forearm and Five Pound System paraphernalia."

Elsewhere in the scrapbook, Attila also includes a letter of thanks from Corbett:

"This is the first opportunity since I have been struggling to communicate with you, although we did see each other for a moment at Madison Square Garden. I would like to express my great satisfaction with your five-pound weight system that has been so kind to me. , I taught at Asbury Park last fall and have been practicing ever since, and I also carry one of your eight pound canes on my daily trips that you gave me the day I left New York.Well man, that's been great for I have to say, it's a wonderful technique and may have a lot to do with my recent success. I want to present you with a public testimonial for a charitable cause upon my return to town. For now, please accept my sincere thanks: good luck in United States, I am still your friend. Signed JAS J Corbett'.

(All Attila scrapbook references and citations are included courtesy of Jan and Terry Todd, H.J. Lutcher Stark Center for Physical Culture and Sports)

Whenever Patrick Myler's biography, Gentleman Jim Corbett, mentions the champion's fight preparation and conditioning after the Mitchell fight, it always involves lightweight work. While this is the only official mention of light dumbbell work associated with boxing, Corbett certainly wasn't the only boxer to recognize its value. On July 4, 1910, one of the most famous and controversial fights in all of boxing history took place in Reno, Nevada. The first black heavyweight champion, the incredibly talented Jack Johnson, was challenged by former champion Jim Jeffries, the original "Great White Hope." Such was the interest in this colossal clash, and the stakes were so high, that the two men's training camps were closely followed by the media for months. Jeffries had to lose a lot of weight after a long retirement to try to win the championship of the "white race". The gentleman Jim Corbett, now retired, was at his side helping him stay in shape and he definitely didn't like his practice of light dumbbell exercises. His opponent also used the protocol. No one has mentioned this in print to my knowledge, but I know for a fact because I recently came across the following photo from a newspaper report on

Preparations of the two men:

If you look closely at the photo of the two wrestlers with their backs to us, you'll see that they're both holding something distinctive: They're both training with Sandow's patented Spring Grip dumbbells. Jeffries is in the middle of a rep of exercise 4 while Johnson appears to be doing exercise 16. Also, they both have exactly the type of physique this protocol offers: strong and very defined back, large and well-developed deltoids, good development lean, athletic arms and torsos with flat but defined pectorals. In Mike Silver's excellent book, The Arc of Boxing - The Rise and Decline of the Sweet Science, a panel of early boxing experts (until its heyday in the 1930s, '40s, and '50s) criticize modern training methods and gives his point of view on what ancient methods of training and fighting were the best. On the subject of strength training, many echo the idea that HEAVY weight training slows you down, but none of these are against strength or the muscle itself, it's just that you need a certain type of strength. and muscle. Edward Villella, a former welterweight champion from the 1950s who was also a dancer, says:

“We need long-term use of muscle tone; we don't want short muscle tone, we want speed and elasticity. I don't think you should rule out all strength training, you can train with four or five pounds, and you'll be amazed at what it will do for you."

Like these champions of the past, I believe that the type of muscle building offered by light weight exercises and the W.A.T.C.H protocol is highly functional and the resulting fine muscle control makes the training ideal for boxing and martial arts, or for any other sport. Endeavor that requires equal amounts of speed, dexterity, agility, and strength. In my experience, it's far from a "wrong" muscle. In Shaolin Kung Fu there is an ancient training routine called Yijin Jing or "The Classic of Muscle and Tendon Alteration" which consists of a series of foot exercises performed with self-controlled dynamic tension. The practice deals with the use of the will to direct muscular force combined with breath control and aims to literally "transform the tendons": to reshape the muscles, tendons and connective tissue, making them flexible and strong, improving the neurological and muscular function and performance. System. This training is called -

Increased physical and mental vitality. Improves blood circulation and nourishes the meridians. It brings strength and flexibility to the muscles and nourishes the organs. Improves the meridians and nourishes the intestines. Wash the marrow and feed the brain.

If you notice how Sandow describes his system in the introduction to The Gospel of Strength:

“My system is a form of physical education where each part of the body is properly exercised, developed and healed; increased willpower; the various organs produced and maintained in a healthy state, and the individual made as physically perfect as possible."

We can see that the light dumbbell program you talked about has more in common with Yijin Jing, both in terms of performance and expected results, than it does with modern strength training. I strongly believe that the lightweight dumbbell system performed using the W.A.T.C.H protocol can be seen as the lost Western counterpart to the classic muscle shift.

As such, it would make an invaluable introductory or supplemental workout for anyone and represents true "science of muscle building."

Possible explanations of how these exercises work For me it is enough to know - empirically - that these exercises work. However, because the protocol does not use progressive resistance training with heavy weights, many people will be hard to convince and simply won't accept that you can build significant muscle size or strength. These people, of course, point to what they know to be scientifically "true" about how muscle mass is built incrementally, and claim that any method that uses a different approach cannot be valid. For this reason, in this last chapter I have tried to present a scientific validation of the W.A.T.C.H protocol and to propose some plausible mechanisms by which it could deliver its (very real) results. I have no definitive proof that these two proposed mechanisms actually underlie the effectiveness of the light dumbbell, but they do at least show that scientific "truth" is not static, that new discoveries are constantly being made and at least possible to be recognized. by science Mechanisms that could explain how you can make your muscles bigger and stronger by training with ridiculously light weights.

„Kaatsu“-Training

This strange bodybuilding method was invented by Japanese bodybuilding enthusiast J. Sato in the 1970s and was further developed and perfected over the following decades. It's only recently emerged in the world of bodybuilding, but it quickly became very popular (although if you think it's crazy to train with small weights like men did in leopard-print leggings a hundred years ago, wait until you see that). Sato noticed that when he kneeled in the traditional Japanese seiza posture at a Buddhist shrine (don't say it) his legs would go numb, and he felt it was a sensation similar to lifting heavy weights. He experimented with intentionally blocking the blood in his legs and theorized that this "decreased blood flow" was somehow closely related to muscle hypertrophy. Later, while he was recovering from a skiing accident, he claimed to have healed his broken leg by applying this idea and prevented muscle wasting while he was in a cast for several weeks. Over time, Sato experimented with different methods to apply just the right amount of pressure on the different types of tourniquets he used on his extremities (not really, I said tourniquets) to induce hypertrophy in the muscle without causing dangerous ischemia. It is worth noting that during these "experiments" he was hospitalized with a pulmonary embolism! He opted for a lightweight blood pressure monitor that took some getting used to.

occlude blood in the target extremity. The lifter then lifts very light weights while the blood is occluded for a short time; the ideal time seems to be around five minutes, as too much time would be dangerous to the circulatory system and too little would prevent the effects. This protocol resulted in amazing muscle hypertrophy, hence its sudden popularity in bodybuilding. Kaatsu training has been extensively studied scientifically in Japan, where it is discussed as a way for older people whose joints cannot bear significant loads to maintain muscle mass, a way for astronauts to maintain muscle mass in gravity situations, in corrective rehabilitation and as a means for the rapid induction of hypertrophy in athletes. Scientific tests found that even with light weights, lifters were able to induce in three weeks the kind of hypertrophy in their arms that would normally take twelve weeks of traditional progressive resistance training. There are numerous research projects focusing on the effects of low-intensity KAATSU exercise on blood growth hormone and chronic effects on muscle hypertrophy and strength gains (Takarada et al., 2000) and the effects of KAATSU exercise about muscle size. and strength in athletes (Takarada et al., 2002). The results were published in prestigious research journals, attracting enormous public attention. Studies indicate that the protocol appears to stimulate endogenous hormonal responses, including elevated levels of growth hormone. It has been postulated (although no one knows for sure) that the prolonged period of reduced blood flow causes blood to pool in the tissues as they are "pumped" with light weights to induce unusually high concentrations of the human hormone. to develop growth. - significantly higher than normal training! Incredibly, Kaatsu training induces both strength gains and muscle hypertrophy, although not as much as traditional training protocols, which means that while there are no significant contractions, the increase in growth nutrients in the blood produces some degree of hypertrophy. myofibrillar. The protocol calls for training 6 days a week with submaximal loads (20% of the rep max is recommended) and occlusion is maintained for the entire duration of the exercise.

(Sound familiar?) Well, bodybuilders who inject themselves with veterinary steroids and synthetic growth hormones and ignore the inherent risk of shrinking their own testicles to the size of peas will try anything, I guess. Personally, I wouldn't want to get involved in putting arm tourniquets and lifting weights. It's also not clear how you would tie the tourniquet around your torso, but whatever it is, this interesting training method tells us a lot. little time with light weights. Second, it shows us that it is possible to induce muscle hypertrophy in a different way than the commonly accepted method. Third, this strongly suggests that blood flow, or blood flow restriction, through an active muscle appears to be involved in muscle hypertrophy and may be as important a factor as external resistance. In the traditional light dumbbell routine popularized by Attila using the W.A.T.C.H protocol, focused, self-directed muscle contractions, sustained over a period of time, are used to induce a similar sensation of occlusion. This wouldn't be as pronounced as using a tourniquet, but there are a lot more contractions and tensions involved than the Kaatsu protocol, and if you look at the routine, it starts with an arms section where you follow a straight arm exercise. the other .try to maintain maximum pumping sensation. Then there's a shoulder section, etc... then a back section. In my opinion, if you do the exercises with the right tension and rhythm, you will hold your arms, then your shoulders, then your back, then your legs, etc. according to the Kaatsu protocol to induce hypertrophy by tissues exposed in large amounts. to growth hormone. As the tissues are flooded with this nutrient-rich blood, it rhythmically and forcefully contracts them, trying to squeeze as many muscle fibers as possible, over and over again. This is how you eventually shake off your arm or leg and let fresh blood flow in to introduce other growth factors. It seems possible that Professor Attila's "special training method" could work on a similar principle to kaatsu training, but using mind, neurology, and self-directed tension to create the conditions for hypertrophy while using light weights instead of using a tourniquet, and just mindlessly pumping with the light weights.

The McMaster University study

In 2010, a study conducted at McMaster University showed conclusively that heavy weights are not necessary to stimulate muscle hypertrophy and that similar muscle adaptation could be achieved by training with much lighter weights: prolonged effort is the key. and significant muscle fatigue. Basically, you're lifting a light weight, but keep lifting until you can't lift any more. The study compared a heavy lifting group, with 90% of the lifters lifting a 1-rep max, to other groups that trained with different protocols with weights that were only 30% of their 1-rep max. The lifters who reached failure in just 30% of their 1-rep max not only made gains that were just as significant as the other group, they made gains that were superior! The weights used are very light by weightlifting standards, showing that, as the study's mentor, lead graduate student Nicholas Burd, says, "It's not really the weight you're lifting, but the fact that you have fatigue muscle is the critical point where "muscle is being built," the study strongly suggests that muscle hypertrophy is simply a matter of stimulating the muscles to produce new muscle proteins, a process that over time causes the body to build muscle bigger.

Borde explained:

“We conclude that a high-intensity, low-volume exercise bout [90FAIL] is inferior to a low-intensity, high-volume exercise [30FAIL] in stimulating an anabolic response. However, the workload is significant even at low intensity. Our data support the notion that a lower intensity, higher volume resistance exercise paradigm [such as 30FAIL] may be more effective in stimulating hypertrophy [increase in muscle size]."

MI:

“It is important to note that the 30FAIL protocol is not only induced

significant effects on anabolic signaling molecules, but also a direct predictor of exercise-induced muscle mass (ie, myofibrillar protein synthesis). Furthermore, sarcoplasmic protein synthesis (which includes mitochondrial proteins) was higher in 30FAIL, suggesting that this type of training improves not only muscle quality but also oxidative capacity, a benefit more commonly associated with aerobic exercise. In terms of responsiveness, the standard deviations of the SDs were very narrow, showing that the subjects responded very similarly. We have some responses from the Federal Reserve using this exercise paradigm and these results are just as impressive."

Basically, here's a study that PROVES that it's not the weight you're lifting that matters, but the effect you're having on your muscles. Also, it shows that you can produce this effect on the muscle more effectively with a lighter weight! SHOW that the muscle built would exhibit sarcoplasmic and myofibrillar properties and, amazingly, would include some more benefits associated with aerobic fitness training!

I feel that while this study successfully generated the necessary stimulus by having 30% of 1-rep max trainees fail, it is possible to lift a 3- or 5-pound dumbbell and, by focusing on the use of force, muscle contractions Exaggerated, rhythmic movements in each rep for the rep ranges mentioned in the W.A.T.C.H protocol instructions induce the same level of muscle fatigue for the same effect in terms of new muscle protein production.

In summary, I believe that the light dumbbell protocol popular at the turn of the century worked through a combination of the factors suggested in these two examples: it provided athletes with a convenient way to induce muscle fatigue and produce an increase in muscle protein. similarly to the superior method demonstrated in the McMasters University study and caused a high degree of occlusion and blood pumping in the target muscles through focused self-directed contractions over a prolonged period of approximately five minutes per body part as training of Kaatsu, thus doing the job Muscle tissue flooded with blood rich in muscle-building factors, including markedly elevated levels of growth hormone.

There may be other things as well: In the GDR in the 1960s research was carried out on the "radiation effect" of certain exercises. This is the extent to which the effects of working a particular muscle spill over to the other muscles in the body – we all know that training the hamstrings and glutes with, say, heavy squats should have a knock-on effect and increase muscle mass. at all times. the body. Body. This German study apparently found that exercises targeting the erector spinae structures of the lower back had the greatest radiant effect. Who the heck specifically targets the erector spinae? Well Professor Attila did it: exercises 12, 15 and 23 hit that area hard and well targeted and the other back exercises engage it secondarily. Remember that Attila said that the back exercises are the most important of the entire routine. Add to this the concept of "time under tension" or TUT, developed by strength coach Charles Poliquin, who points out that the time a muscle spends under active tension in a given exercise is crucial (he suggests that 30-70 seconds is ideal for hypertrophy). . and 70-100 seconds great for strength endurance - great for light weight routine) and the fact that gripping a heavy grip also has a strong radiating effect on all muscles and we see that there are likely multiple factors at work in this form of exercise. The kind of results found in the two interesting studies above - significant muscle growth stimulated with light weights in a short time with occlusion as the main factor (kaatsu) and prolonged repetitions to the point of "pain" of muscle fatigue with submaximal weights leading to growth. leader greater than progressive resistance with heavy weights (McMasters study) - it was EXACTLY what Professor Attila, Eugen Sandow, Lionel Strongfort, Al Treloar, Alfred Moss, Edmond Desbonnet and Hippolyte Triat before them (and possibly the ancients Greeks before him) had promised to deliver. As Professor Attila said:

"That's one of the great secrets of muscle development: long, continuous training with light weights..."

Conclusion At the end of the 19th century, during a strong masculine craze on the popular stages of Europe, America, and later the rest of the world, several giants of "physical culture" emerged, strong, muscular men who captured the public's collective imagination. The public was captivated by the classic perfect physiques of these athletes, and for the first time in a long time the general population aspired to develop their own bodies in full health and vigour, and mini versions of these new examples of physical perfection. Interested men responded to the public appeal and began teaching and selling in print and by mail exactly what the people wanted: the secret to building that body for themselves. What they revealed was a simple but reliable way to take a light weight and use it consistently in a way that produces significant growth and cosmetic improvement in the practitioner's muscles in a relatively short period of time. He developed a balanced physique with the classic proportions of ancient statues, laid the foundation for the development of true strength by teaching full neurological control of growing musculature, and maintained this impressively developed physique with a minimum of daily exertion. The method they advocated was based on inducing muscle fatigue through prolonged repetitions with light dumbbells, focused self-generated contractions, and a pronounced "pump" and occlusion effect. They said it was the great secret of physical culture. Men and women everywhere followed his advice and built impressively muscular and well-developed bodies just as they were told. Famous boxers and athletes adopted these training methods, improving their physique and sports performance. This method of exercise became so popular that it became ubiquitous, and the word "dumbbells" meant this very exercise. You could buy wooden dumbbells that weigh one pound; the spring-loaded ones that weigh three pounds and the classic cast-iron balls that weigh five to seven pounds. They were literally everywhere. Now those ancient cufflinks are rusting in attics around the world, and the writings of these men are gathering dust in libraries and private collections, some of which can be read online in digital form for historical interest, but no one follows them. training tips they contain. really. no more. Moving forward today, what we collectively believe about building muscle and strength training doesn't square with what these men said. Therefore, a phenomenally effective training methodology capable of delivering excellent results at the same time

in a short time, with far fewer problems than our modern methods, it was abandoned entirely.

The thing is - it still works!

I hope this book has shown that this method really exists, that the big names in physical culture have not sold the public a useless approach and have trained in a very different way. It only seems like it when we assume that heavy resistance training and the protocols we use today are the only way to build muscle, they're not. I hope you have also shown that the approach really works and explained as clearly as possible how you can put it into practice yourself. I have tried to offer scientific evidence that at least supports the general approach of the method, if not conclusively explains how it achieves its results. In short, regardless of the actual mechanisms involved, it is true that by exercising daily with very light dumbbells, you can, in a way, develop a very good physique. Give it a try for yourself and maybe we can bring back this highly effective and affordable training approach. I personally don't like the body types seen in modern bodybuilding and have absolutely no desire to look like that. I have nothing against people going for this style, it's just not for me. Even 60's and 70's bodybuilders are too old for me to want a body like hers. To me, the bodies of the men who trained and popularized the light dumbbell protocol embody a balanced, strong, well-developed, and healthy pattern to strive for.

I leave you some photos of some men (and a woman) who affirm in black and white that they trained like this -some people instinctively doubt it-. Others go right in and grab a pair of light weights. I hope you are in the second group.

People who have definitely trained with light dumbbells:

Sandow (before the mustache!)

Mr. Jim Corbett

Jack Johnson

jim jeffries

Jeffries vs. Johnson: Both trained for this fight with Sandow's 3-pound Spring Grip dumbbells

Treloar

The author above and below

Students of Professor Attila

Edmond Desbonnet and the "Vulcan" student

...and someone who might have:

If you have any questions about the W.A.T.C.H.

Sign in with light dumbbells or submit testimonials and/or before/after photos of your results using this method. I will gladly include them in future editions of the book. You can reach me at:

[email protected]

Anhang yo

Diagram showing the major muscles of the body. (zoom in to see)

Appendix II

Gracias

Many thanks to:

Andy French - Cover design and various IT help

Caron Doyle - Photography, posing for multiple photos and holding on while I write this

Andy, Terry, Chris, Stu and Caron - for being guinea pigs and trying out the exercises.

Jan and Terry Todd: for allowing me to quote at length from their private copy of Attila's scrapbook and including several rare photos.

To the folks at Sandow Plus: For providing a fantastic online resource for information on ancient strength training and its exponents, and for providing free access to the writings of Sandow and others.

Without all this, this book would not exist.