Old Age, Gender and Physical Activity The 'older the more valuable' Philosophy and Golf The Allurement of Golf The Moral Value of Golf Every Golfer His Own Doctor The Up Swing - Golf Different forms of Swing - Golf The Making of a Putting Green A Few Golf Maxims Watering Greens The Right and the Left Hand "Strength is Health”: George Barker Windship Health Through Sport Learning to Svim Svimming Learning to Svim - Complete Confidence of Pupil Swimming - Dog Fashion The Great American Spa Boom How to Train the Body for Health and Poise Medicine, Science and Sport Running Back to Nature The Changing Face of Rugby League The Bicycle and Tricycle as Aids to Health and Recreation Passive Smoking What is Strength? Health Insurance Decisions What Makes Man a Sprinter? What to Fish for in February? Sport and its Economic and Social Importance Use of Weights for Health Long live the Revolution British Football Does Ageing Drive Health Expenditures Medicare: Policy Issues Indoor Training for Outdoor Sport Starting and Starters Insured versus Not Insured A Case for Bilateral Taxation and Amenity Rights Theories of the Universe Babylonian Astrology The Wrath of Heaven The Displaced Zodiac and the Beginnings of Astronomy The Duty of the Son of Heaven: Orientation Time Was Once Relative Why Mohammed Needed Astronomers Hamburgers - Sunday and Holiday Variations	"Strength is Health”: George Barker Windship and the First American Weight Training Boom Bryan Hall filled up quickly that chilly February night in 1861 as Chicago’s sporting crowd gathered to see the strongman contest. Dr. George Barker Windship, the health reformer known throughout the United States as the “American Samson” and the “Roxbury Hercules” was scheduled to lecture that evening, and he had agreed to pit his strength against all comers in a public contest following his lecture. Windship normally gave an exhibition of his strength at the end of the lectures he’d been delivering for the past two years, but this night was different. Following the lecture, any man could come on stage, try the weights, and vie for the two hundred dollars in prize money put up by the local promoter. A buzz of speculation filled the hall. How many men would try? Was it true that Windship weighed less than 150 pounds? Wasn’t it dangerous for him to lift such big weights? As the crowd settled into their seats, Windship strode on stage and began the evening’s entertainment with his standard lecture about the rules of health and the special benefits of systematic weight training. It was a lecture Windship had given dozens of times in New England, and his active mind shifted quickly through his mental filing cards as he gracefully explained his beliefs about diet, bathing, ventilation and the proper methods of training.3 Dressed in a black business suit, the five foot seven inch Windship looked every bit the blue-blooded, Harvard-trained physician he actually was. His black hair was combed back to accentuate his piercing eyes, high forehead and sharp features; his shoulders, though broad, gave no hint of unusual strength or power. Some in the crowd had attended lectures by other health reformers, and were surprised by what Windship told them that evening. Here was not another expert arguing for light exercise, vegetarianism and moderation. Windship’s message was diametrically different. The body should be made as strong as possible, he contended, with no weak points. It should be balanced and symmetrical with the muscles full and round and strong, like those of the “Farnesian” Hercules.6 The Chicagoans listened closely as he explained that heavy weights and short workouts were the secret to health and longevity. Training should be systematic, he argued with the intensity of the exercise gradually increasing over time. He maintained that workout sessions should never last more than an hour and that proper rest must be obtained before the next day’s training. As for nutrition, meat and a mixed diet helped build his strength, he explained, while his experiment with vegetarianism resulted in a diminution of his vitality. Drawing to a close, he fielded questions for a few minutes before retiring backstage. There, while mentally preparing himself, he quickly changed into his lifting costume, which revealed the large muscles in his arms and shoulders and the heavy straps throughout his legs and back. He was understandably nervous about the contest. More than the two hundred dollars in prize money was at stake. Windship’s reputation as the strongest man in the world was also on the line. What he and the Chicago audience didn’t realize, however, was that the evening held far greater significance. The contest held that February evening in 1861 was the first true weightlifting competition ever held in the United States. George Barker Windship and his challenger were about to become America’s first competitive weightlifters. Weight Training Before Windship Although Windship was an innovator in many ways, his advocacy of resistance exercise was not as much of an anomaly in the mid-Nineteenth Century as we might immediately assume. In fact, the road to his appearance on the stage of Bryan Hall had been paved by a number of exercise experts who advocated resistance exercise. In Europe, in the late 1780s, for instance, schoolmaster Johann Jacob Du Toit had his young students at the influential, experimental school called the Philanthropinum hold sand-bags out to the sides of their bodies while he walked among them and counted the time as their arms fell.8 In 1802, one of the most famous of the early German exercise textbooks, C. G. Salzmann’s Gymnastics for Youth, was translated into English and published in Philadelphia. Though the book was aimed at school children, it discussed the necessity of strength training for both boys and girls and recommended using a leverage device similar to the modern Weaver-stick to strengthen the arms, hands and shoulders. As for dumbell training, it had been known for several centuries before Windship appeared in Chicago. Following the publication in 1672 of a new edition of Mercurialis’ enormously influential exercise text, De Arte Gymnastica, references to dumbell training appeared in the writing of several prominent eighteenth-century men Essayist Joseph Addison, for example, wrote in the British Spectator, “When, I was some years younger than I am at present, I used to employ myself in a more laborious diversion, which I learned from a Latin treatise of exercises, that is written with great erudition; it is there called fighting with a man’s own shadow; and consists in the brandishing [of] two short sticks, grasped in each hand, and loaded with plugs of lead at either end. This opens the chest, exercises the limbs and gives a man all the pleasure of boxing, without the blows.” In the United States, Benjamin Franklin trained at certain periods of his life on a regular basis with dumbells and believed the hand weights to be an efficient way to get a vigorous workout in a relatively short period of time. In a letter written in 1772, Franklin recommended dumbell training because it contained “a great quantity of exercise in a handful of minutes,” and, on another occasion, he attributed his continued health and vigor when past eighty years of age to the fact that “I live temperately, drink no wine, and use daily the exercise of the dumbbell. . .” References to training with dumbells, Indian Clubs and other forms of resistance apparati escalated in the early Nineteenth Century. Widespread concern that city-dwellers were becoming sedentary and soft grew in the antebellum period. Gymnastics and resistance exercise were touted repeatedly as urban man’s best defense against this moral and physical decline.Sir John Sinclair discussed dumbell training and described an exercise similar to the modern squat in Volume One of his monumental work, Code of Health and Longevity, published in 1807. In 1828, Charles Beck told the readers of his English translation of F. L. Jahn’s Gymnastics that he had added a chapter on dumbell exercises because the implements were so well known in America. An anonymous book aimed at women entitled A Course of Calisthenics for Young Ladies in Schools and Families With Some Remarks on Physical Education, published in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1831, recommended using weights of four to five pounds made from iron or tin and filled with sand. Walker’s Manly Exercises, the gentleman’s guide to health and exercise first published in the early 1830s contained a lengthy chapter on Indian Club training. Though these, and the literally dozens of other referencesto resistance training, undoubtedly helped Windship’s cause, they were not his chief inspiration. What fired Windship’s imagination, and paved the way for the wide acceptance of his method of heavy weightlifting, was the sudden explosion of interest in human strength which occurred in the middle decades of the Nineteenth Century. This groundswell of interest in the limits of human performance was fed by several sources. Historically, it was fostered by the publication of J. T. Desaguliers’ analysis of the acts of such pioneering strongmen as England’s William Joy and Thomas Topham, and Germany’s Johann Karl Von Eckenberg. Desaguliers was fascinated by these men’s attempts to lift great weights for very short distances. In his book, entitled A Course of Experimental Philosophy, Desaguliers described the mechanical and physiological advantages inherent on certain of the heavy partial movements these strongmen favored. Desaguliers further revealed that he had personally experimented with various methods of heavy lifting, and that he subsequently gave an exhibition of strength feats to the British Royal Society, a scientific body. Desaguliers was especially interested in trying to find ways to scientifically compare the strength of men. He developed several strength testing machines, one of which mimicked the hip and harness lifting done by Topham and Von Eckenberg. Using a steelyard scale to measure the amount of their pull, Desaguliers’ subjects put a harness around their hips, climbed onto a raised platform and hooked the harness to a chain attached to the arm of the scale. As they pulled upward, the strength of their pull could be measured by adjusting the weights on the steelyard. Desaguliers understood, of course, that a harness lift such as this could only test the strength of a man’s hips, back, and thighs. Consequently, he also developed machines to measure arm strength and gripping power. Windship’s interest in heavy weightlifting was no doubt also piqued by the growing number of professional strongmen who were his contemporaries. In the early Nineteenth Century, as touring circuses criss-crossed Europe and America, and as variety theaters opened in the newly industrialized cities of both continents, public displays of strength became common. Furthermore, just as television and films are today, the circus in antebellum America was an important, and influential, transmitter of ideals and images about the body and human potential. In small towns, the circus was often the only popular entertainment seen in an entire year. In large cities, the coming of the circus was an important cultural event, and several shows a day were held to accommodate the crowds. In 1847, for instance, over seventeen thousand people attended a circus in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in one day. Some of these early strength professionals, such as J. A. J. Bihin, known as the Belgian Giant, and Giovanni Belzoni, the so-called Patagonian Giant, were famous on both sides of the Atlantic. Belzoni, in fact, was even described by one of the most prominent physiologists of the 1830s and 1840s as an example of an “ideal” male because of his harmonious muscular development, his amazing strength and his agility.24 Though there was more professional strongman activity in Europe than there was in America at least one professional strongman attached to the Rockwell and Stone Circus toured throughout the Eastern United States in the late 1840s and early 1850s. On one occasion in New York, this French strongman withstood the pull of four horses, a feat which amazed the audience and newspaper reporters, and would later be copied by strongman Louis Cyr. In the mid-Nineteenth Century, interest in specifically training to increase one’s strength became a big business.26 Hippolyte Triat’s elegant and spacious Parisian gymnasium where French aristocrats trained with heavy dumbells and what were probably the first true barbells contributed significantly to the newfound enthusiasm for greater muscular size and the incremental measurement of strength. In America private gymnasiums for men opened. in many large urban centers prior to the Civil War and dumbell training played an important role in the physical transformation of the gyms’ customers. Following the great influx of German immigrants to the United States in 1848, the lifting of heavy dumbells and heavy Indian Clubs became increasingly common, and records began to be established in certain lifts. James Montgomery, for instance, operated a gymnasium in New York City in the 1850s and regularly trained using a one hundred pound dumbell. “Professor” Harrison was considered the clubswinging champion of England in this same era, and was frequently mentioned in American books and magazines for his muscular physique, as well as his finessewith a pair of forty-seven pound Indian Clubs. Several new resistance exercise machines appeared on the market before 1860, the most notable of which was James Chiosso’s Gymnastic Polymachinon, a forerunner of all the selectorized weight machines now available. Furthermore, strength testing machines, probably modeled on Desaguliers’ original plans, appeared in many towns on street corners, in circus sideshows, and at local fairs. On these machines any man could test his “main strength”—the strength of his back, hips, legs and hands—by moving a large weight a very short distance and thus see how he stood in comparison to his neighbors. It was, in fact, a lifting machine of this type which inspired Windship to become a serious weightlifter in 1854.