Podcast #1,026: 5,000 Years of Sweat — Lost Workout Wisdom From the History of Physical Culture

In an age that doesn’t think too much about history, you might be forgiven for thinking that a culture of exercise only emerged in the 20th century. But the idea of purposefully exercising to change one’s body — what folks used to call “physical culture” — likely goes back to the very beginnings of time.

Here to unpack the origins, evolution, and future of fitness is Dr. Conor Heffernan, a Lecturer in the Sociology of Sport at Ulster University and the author of The History of Physical Culture. Today on the show, Conor takes us on a fascinating and wide-ranging tour of physical culture, from the ancient Egyptians, who made their pharaohs run around a pyramid to test their fitness to rule, to the ancient Greeks who used their gymnasiums for both bodily training and intellectual philosophizing, to modern strongmen who became proto fitness influencers, and many periods and societies in between. We discuss how training practices changed over time, where they may be going next, and the evergreen principles from past eras that we could still learn from today.

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Brett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. In an age that doesn’t think too much about history, you might be forgiven for thinking that a culture of exercise only emerged in the 20th century. But the idea of purposely exercising to change one’s body, what folks used to call physical culture, likely goes back to the very beginnings of time. Here to unpack the origins, evolution, future of fitness is doctor Connor Heffernan, a lecturer in the sociology of sport at Ulster University and the author of The History of Physical Culture. Today on the show, Connor takes us on a fascinating and wide ranging tour of physical culture from the ancient Egyptians, who made their pharaohs run around a pyramid to test their fitness to rule, to the ancient Greeks, who used their gymnasiums for both bodily training and intellectual philosophizing, to modern strong men who became proto fitness influencers in many periods and societies in between.

We discuss how training practices changed over time, where they may be going next, and the evergreen principles from past eras that we can still learn from today. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/physicalculture. Alright. Connor Heffernan, welcome to the show.

Connor Heffernan: Thanks so much for having me.

Brett McKay: So you are a historian of physical culture and physical fitness. What led you to researching and writing about the history of exercise?

Connor Heffernan: So when I talk to students, I tell them that I study the desire to look better naked, which is kind of what I do, in a certain sense. It’s funny. I was a history undergrad, history and politics, actually. And I was a terrible history student, really bad. I had to learn about, you know, 11th century French kings. It was not for me. But at the time that I was doing my undergrad, I was training in a gym in Dublin called Hercules Gym. So Herx was founded in 1935, and I would train in the mornings before university with a lot of lifters who were in their sixties seventies.

So they were telling me about Charles Atlas and Eugen Sandow and Vasily Alekseyev and Gerd Bonk and basically anyone and everyone from the past, you know, 60 to 80 years of strength. So, eventually, you know, I’m a struggling history undergrad. A professor sits me down, Patrick Bernhardt. I’m forever in his debt. He says, what do you like? And I was like, well, I like lifting. He goes, okay. Do history on that. I said, can I? And turns out you can.

No one has stopped me since. I’m a very weak willed man, so if someone had stopped me, I would have stopped long, long time ago. But, yes, I managed to marry my love of lifting and fitness and health with a desire to study all of these things. And part of it was I have an insatiable love of learning. So when I was trying to learn how to get bigger and stronger, I was reading powerlifting books from the 1970s in my free time. I was looking at what Vince Gironda was doing for his bodybuilding diets in the ’60s and ’70s. So I’m very blessed that I’ve managed to specialize in the area that I love.

Brett McKay: So it sounds like you’ve been exercising for a large part of your life. What’s your personal history with exercise?

Connor Heffernan: It was funny ’cause I was thinking about this preparing for the podcast and I had the privilege a number of years ago to train with Frank Zane. Frank is a 3 time Mr. Olympia. A lot of people had seen his image online as a sort of, you know, ideal male body. And I asked the same question to Frank, you know, what’s his history of fitness and what role does fitness play in his life? And he said that fitness has sort of 2 phases in his life.

The first phase was fitness as armor. You know, you use fitness to build yourself up and protect yourself from the world, certainly muscle building. And then fitness becomes a bridge. You know? So you use the confidence that you have from the gym or fitness or sport to become a better person. So in my own relationship with health and fitness, it was an armor first. I was an overweight kid, hovered around obesity at one point, which a PE teacher very kindly told me about in front of the rest of the class. And bullies, you know, traditional 98 pound weakling, albeit in a heavier body, use fitness to trim down, slim down, get stronger. And it stuck with me because it’s… I suppose it’s helped me recast my life. The discipline of the gym I used in my work, you know, the healthy eating, the idea of putting in hard work, having a pain threshold, etcetera. These things that really helped to shape my outlook later on. So I’ve gotten over fitness as as armor and more into fitness as bridge.

Brett McKay: So, you wrote a a short history of physical culture that spans thousands of years and cuts across cultures both east and west. And what I love about this book is it explores why humans just as humans today exercise for different reasons, humans in the past exercised for different reasons. Let’s start off with definitions. I’m sure people have heard the phrase physical culture before but what exactly does that mean?

Connor Heffernan: And it’s a term that I really wish would come back and we’ll probably touch on this later in the podcast, but physical culture is, and I’ll borrow from a friend, Jan Todd. She likens it to purposive exercise, and what that is is it’s exercise done sort of for a reason. So the difference between physical culture and a sport is that when you play a sport, you’re primarily trying to, you know, win a game, win medals, score points, score goals, whatever the case may be. Physical culture are those activities that we use to strengthen the body, to increase flexibility, to engage in antiaging, you know, and things that would fall under the umbrella of physical culture would be going to the gym, going for a jog, doing yoga, calisthenics, pilates, whatever you want to do. When I describe it again to the students, I say, you know, physical culture is about the building of the biceps, and sport is about the winning of medals. Sometimes they intersect, weightlifting as a sport being an obvious example, but for the average man or woman or child, it’s about building the body up, making it stronger, more robust, antifragile. And there’s a number of different ways you can do that, which the history of it shows as well.

Brett McKay: So I really do like that term physical culture. It was very popular. We’re gonna get to this period in history, like the 19th century. That’s what they called exercise or fitness was physical culture. But then it just kinda went out of style. Why do you think the term went out of fashion in the early 20th century?

Connor Heffernan: It’s funny. And you’re right. You know, if you and I and some of the listeners, at least I hope, were exercises in 1900, you’d say I’m a physical culturist. But just sounds objectively awesome. One of the reasons it went away is because the physical culture activity splintered. So bodybuilding arises really as a sport in the interwar period, the 1920s and ’30s. Olympic weightlifting becomes really an official sport in 1920 and a formalized sport in 1928. Eventually then powerlifting comes along and CrossFit, etcetera.

And when these splinters of physical culture came about, people began to specialize in them more. So they didn’t want to be a sort of jack of all trades, you know, a physical culturist. They wanted to be a weightlifter or a bodybuilder or a powerlifter or a CrossFitter. So one end is just fitness got specialized and splintered, the other end and we will talk about this, I have no doubt, Brad, is a lot of physical culture entrepreneurs in the late 1800s, early 1900s were kinda wacky, kinda weird.

Bernarr Macfadden, one of the greatest American physical culturist, he so angered the American medical profession that there are several books written just about Bernarr Macfadden being an awful person by American doctors. So physical culture kinda got a tarnished name, especially in the US, because of some wacky entrepreneurs. And then also there were physical educationists who wanted to kind of attack that term because they saw it as lesser than the the subject, the learned area of the… So there’s a couple of different things going on in why it dropped away.

Brett McKay: Yeah. I wanna talk about Bernarr Macfadden. We talked about him on the podcast before with, Mark Adams in his book, Mr. America. Yeah. The guy was crazy. A lot of crazy people during that time. So, let’s take a look at a history of physical culture and the archaeological records suggest that humans were doing purposive exercise nearly 5000 years ago in ancient Egypt. So what did ancient Egyptian exercise look like?

Connor Heffernan: Yeah. And I think the only caveat to say before I start that is the record shows 5000 years ago. I have no doubt that, you know, there were people lifting heavy things before 5000 years ago. We just don’t have the records to prove it. But ancient Egyptian physical culture is just so fascinating. You know, we have stories and images and especially in some of the tombs of the pharaohs and sort of the wealthy elite, of people doing gymnastics, wrestling activities, swinging heavy bags of sand, which to me is a really cool indication about, club swinging, which is one of my sort of pet loves in many respects. But they also built fitness into their very culture, even in performative ways at times. So there was a point in Egyptian history when a pharaoh would have to run around one of the pyramids for a set number of laps to prove that they were fit for office.

So this idea of being a fit political leader had a physical component to it. So there’s really interesting calisthenic routines, you know, in ancient Egypt. And then you do have weight based routines. You have sand swinging, for want of a better phrase, and there’s some evidence of, like, early stone lifting practices as well going on. So there is a rich culture in ancient Egypt.

Brett McKay: Now I really love that idea of making your political leaders do an obstacle course to see if they’re fit to lead.

Connor Heffernan: I would enjoy, like, an NFL combine. Every time the UN meets, I think we should do, like, 40 yard dash, you know, bench 220 for reps, stuff like that. But it made sense in the context of ancient Egypt because there were wars going on, there were warring states, and the parallel would be, say, somewhere like Sparta where being a leader also meant you were a general. You know, so there wasn’t as fine a distinction at times in Egyptian society between pharaoh and general or pharaoh and soldier. So it did eventually take on a more performative element. This is just something you go through the motions with, but I think even the intent of that shows how seriously and centrally they did take physical fitness.

Brett McKay: And you also talk about with the Egyptians, one of the reasons they exercise was connected to death, like, the rituals of death. What was going on there?

Connor Heffernan: Yeah. So, you know, at funeral rites and then even in the tombs themselves, there was events going on. And it’s interesting. It’s not just ancient Egyptian culture. Like, a lot of early strength activities were connected to religious festivals, were connected to funerals and funeral rites and funeral games. And this is a big thing in the ancient world, was a sort of celebration of life with a recognition of death combined into it, the celebration of physicality with the acknowledgment that all physical things are unfortunately ephemeral. So for them, fitness is also a way to mediate that barrier between life and death and a time to celebrate. And that’s not unique to the Egyptians, you know, in China there were ancient and very heavy cauldrons called dings that were often lifted in funeral rites and funeral processions as well. So again, I think it does show that interesting relationship and even centrality of fitness within these societies.

Brett McKay: Okay. So they exercised for there’s a functional purpose for it, you know, maybe training for warfare, but it was also a religious right as well. You mentioned Indian clubs. You’re a big fan of Indian clubs. Let’s talk about Indian, ancient Indian, physical culture. What did that look like?

Connor Heffernan: Yes. Thank you so much for indulging me. I have literally written the book on Indian clubs, which means I have read it and maybe no one else has. Ancient Indian physical culture is fascinating, and it has parallels with, say, Persian physical culture as well, but we know and Joseph Alter’s work is really central in this as well. That in India, fitness held a deep functional practice.

Soldiers were trained to strengthen their bodies and I’ll run through the activities in a moment. It had a religious practice, we know that wrestlers in particular would train their bodies in certain ways and do certain exercise almost to get into a meditative stance, trance, pardon me, or meditative state. And then it had a health purpose as well. We know of Indian physicians from the ancient world recommending exercise.

Now in terms of what that exercise looked like, and this is a really fascinating thing, we had club swinging, heavy club swinging, and heavy Indian clubs or juries or mugdars or mogas, whatever term you want to apply to it, is intense. I have some traditional Indian clubs in my home gym, and they weigh, you know, 30 kilos each. And there are even photos and videos you can see online of people swinging heavy Indian clubs that have nails dotted all around them to make sure that you’re swinging proper form. But they would swing clubs. They would engage in calisthenics.

So things that we would call in the west Hindu squats or Hindu push ups, you know, these would be part of the regimen. But there was also resistance training. There were knals, which is kinda like a stone donut, if people will indulge me. And you would put your head through the donut and you would do squats and you would lift heavy stones, you know, as, and I know you’ve had David Keohan on the podcast before, a good friend of mine, the Irish stonelifter, and he’s all about the universality of stone lifting, but there was stone lifting in ancient India as well. So you had soldiers and wrestlers, and wrestlers held such a high value in Indian society. Oftentimes, princes would keep wrestlers in their court just as a sort of status symbol, and their training would have been subsidized by the princes.

So you would have had wrestlers and soldiers, but then also, you know, a doctor’s patients engaging in some of these activities. And a lot of the, I suppose, scientific and religious underpinning of that practice was all to do with your vital force and your energy flow and centering your breathing and connecting in with the universal force. So it’s a very fascinating style of physical culture, which still exists today. You know, the traditional Indian akhara, the gymnasium for the wrestlers, holds a lot of the trappings of exercise patterns and movements that were born and popularized centuries ago. Which is an incredible preservation of historical practice.

Brett McKay: Yeah. I’m a big fan of Indian clubs and the Gada. I did a few videos when I did YouTube about this. So if you guys wanna see, a video from me of me 12 years ago swinging Indian clubs, we’ll link to that. And also the Gada. So that’s like like like the Indian clubs, that was a very kind of British version of sort of the clubs that Hindus use, ancient Hindus use. And the Gada, it’s like basically, it looks like a weapon. It’s a steel mace.

Connor Heffernan: Yeah. Rosalind O’Hanlon wrote a really interesting article many years ago, looking at how a lot of the training implements for wrestlers in particular, like the Gadas, were initially used in warfare. So they sort of transitioned away from the battlefield and stayed in the gyms. And you’re right. These large, heavy maces, they look like weapons because they were weapons at a certain point. And then they became just for building up strength and vitality.

Brett McKay: Yeah. I like the Gada ’cause it’s nice on my… It feels good on my shoulders. I just like swinging it around. It just feels good. I’d sometimes I’ll do that before I bench press even.

Connor Heffernan: Yeah. It saved my relationship with the bench press. I, like you, I swing clubs and and Gadas before I do chest or any sort of chest movements. And, you know, if you think about it, we’re quite boring in terms of a lot of our fitness patterns. You don’t really swing a lot of weights and you don’t really move your shoulder in full rotations the entire time when you’re working out in a gym setting. So I think sometimes you have to let the body move the way the body was meant to move, and that’s where things like Gadas and Indian club still have a value.

Brett McKay: So, yeah, you talked about there’s a Chinese ancient physical culture. They were lifting big heavy bells as well as part of funeral rights and things like that. Let’s move to the west. I think, you know, if you live in the United Kingdom or the United States, I think we’re all very familiar with the Greek and Roman influence of physical culture. What did ancient Greeks’ physical culture look like?

Connor Heffernan: Yeah. And you are right to cite the importance of that for the modern trainee because, really, our modern gym environment traces its philosophical and religious and social underpinnings to Greco-Roman physical culture. And, you know, when we talk about ancient Greece, we’re using an umbrella term for, you know, dozens and dozens and dozens of ancient Greek city states. And the two most important ones are, of course, probably Sparta and Athens when it comes to gym cultures. So Sparta, I’m not going to go into a 300 rant, although the first movie did hold up. 2nd movie, I have my qualms about.

You know, in ancient Sparta, physical culture was to train soldiers. It was hard calisthenics combined with boxing and combat. There’s a ancient, Spartan quote that, you know, if you’re a Spartan soldier, you bring your heavy shield into battle, which weighed maybe 8 to 10 kilos, and you had 2 choices. You either returned with your shield or on your shield. So it was a lot more, you know, intense militaristic style of physical culture.

The one that has retained and the one that captured people’s hearts and minds and imaginations in the 19th century was ancient Greece. You know, and the word gymnasium or now gym has its origins in ancient Athenian culture where gymnasium came from 2 words that defector meant naked exercise. So you can guess what the dress code was in the ancient Athenian gyms. But the gym in ancient Athens was just a remarkable place. The gymnasium in that era was a multifunctional center of Athenian society. The gymnasium was the university of its time.

Plato and Aristotle and Socrates taught at the gymnasium. You would go to the gymnasium where you would train your body, predominantly using calisthenics. There were also stone, well, I would say stone dumbbell predecessors called halterias. Mainly calisthenics, mind you, mixed with some wrestling and sports, depending on the gymnasium. You would also have a mentor within the gymnasium setting, an older man from Athenian society who had mentored the younger boys through Athenian society. And it was this idea, and, you know, we still use the phrase today, albeit it was Juvenal, the Roman poet who coined it, you know, mens sana in corpore sano, a healthy mind in a healthy body.

And that’s what you had in Athenian culture in particular that, you know, the gym, the gymnasium, was a central part in a man’s upbringing. It’s where he learned to educate his mind. It’s where he learned polite society. It’s where he learned to make his business connections, and it’s where he learned to, you know, build his biceps and get stronger and look better naked and all of these vain things that are also important in our world.

Brett McKay: Yeah. That was interesting about the Greeks. So, you know, they actually… There’s a functional purpose to their exercise. Like, they train so they could fight more, but they also had an appreciation for just the physical beauty that bodily exercise can bring to a person. It’s like they train for aesthetics too.

Connor Heffernan: Absolutely. And, you know, there were male beauty contests in ancient Greece, and the scholar’s name is Gaisano. Crawford, I think, maybe the surname, who’s written about that almost as a precursor to modern physique or bodybuilding, competition. So you you had a real aesthetic appreciation of the male body and, you know, a lot of the statues that still exist from the classical world that then inspired the sculptors of the Renaissance period in Italy, which then inspired a lot of the 18th, 19th, and even modern day ideas around beauty of the male body stem from that ancient Greek appreciation. And that was a muscular athletic build.

Now, sadly, a lot of those sculptures were enhanced, not in the way that enhanced means nowadays, but, you know, the sculptor would pack on a little bit more muscle mass than the subject actually had. We had old school photoshop in the ancient world, but they had that appreciation of the body, and it is… It was woven through Greek culture, the soldiers trained, you know, you could train for beauty and that was acceptable. Doctors had a really strong view that people should exercise and exercise could help alleviate illness and stave off illness, you know, let exercise be thy medicine to a certain extent. So it was a really encompassing view of beauty and training and the body.

And, you know, even ideas of self mastery were oftentimes explained through the gym. You know, ideas of a rash achieving one’s excellent excellence, pardon me, or I gone, which is the suffering one needs to undergo in order to affect change. Gym metaphors and training metaphors and sporting metaphors were used to really bring home those messages. So it is one of the most encompassing body cultures of the ancient world.

Brett McKay: And then the Romans, they would pick up where the Greeks left off in many ways. Like they copied the Greeks in many aspects of their physical culture. When you look at these ancient physical cultures, uh, both east and west, are there any big takeaways you think that we can get in the 21st century from how they approached fitness?

Connor Heffernan: I really take so much inspiration from the sound mind sound body approach. I think that is something that we talk about a lot with wellbeing, but I think the sound mind was an understanding that, you know, developing your body goes in tandem with developing your mind. It’s not just that going for a run will make you feel better, but it’s that embracing your educational learning or your learning or research about the world in a similar systematic way to physical fitness is a strong way of doing it, but I truthfully think, and I am a bit woo woo by nature. I think the connecting of fitness and your health and your vibrancy and your body to broader elements of the cycle of life and death is a really important thing. And it’s something that we attend and I’m not saying people have to be religious or spiritual, etcetera.

But I think the connecting of fitness to something bigger than yourself is something that was truly there within the ancient world, which sometimes gets lost. I think in mainstream modern fitness cultures, which is about getting jacked or losing 10 pounds or, you know, getting a 500 deadlift, whatever the case may be. I think connecting into something more is always valuable.

Brett McKay: Yeah. I think we approach exercise the way we put it out there in the popular culture, it’s like, just this like chore you gotta do. It’s like, you gotta do this thing. So I, my heart’s healthy and I don’t get sarcopenia, but I really like that idea of, yeah, this is a chance for me to remind myself that I’m alive. And it just feels good. So yeah, I really do like that idea of connecting it to vitality. I guess we can call it.

Connor Heffernan: Yeah. And you know, the body likes to move. Yesterday I was driving for four hours and then sitting down for a long time, which is not how I usually do things. When I got home, I have sandbags in my home gym, myself and my two year old son spent, you know, just 10 minutes flipping heavy sandbags and grunting. Not because we’re sociopaths, but because the body needed some attention. It needed to connect in with its physicality and it needed to do something communal with my son at the same time. So lift sandbags is the takeaway.

Brett McKay: There you go. How did physical culture change during the medieval era?

Connor Heffernan: Yeah, this is a tricky question, right? Because a lot of scholars, very good scholars, I hasten to add, have often written about, you know, the dark ages, which is a problematic term or the middle ages as a time when the Athenian appreciation of the body disappeared. And, you know, you’ll see a narrative that physical culture disappeared during the middle ages. It didn’t disappear. It just didn’t get written about as much.

Now the predominant form of physical culture in the middle ages was obviously soldiers training. But that has always been a strong through line in the history of physical culture is a connection with the military. Even in modern times where, you know, outside of the Marines or special forces, one could argue that machines have lessened the need for physicality and I have family members who serve, so that’s not me throwing shade on any sort of soldiers. But fitness still, even in the modern context, plays an important role in the military. And it did for, you know, knights and people who are fighting in the crusades and all of that stuff.

But, you know, you also, less written about, less known about, but you had people still practicing calisthenics. There weren’t the male beauty competitions of ancient Greece or ancient Athens, but there were people lifting heavy stones. There were people doing gymnastics or calisthenics. There were people training their bodies. Unfortunately, all we know about really from the middle ages is how knights trained and occasionally how a doctor would tell someone to go for a walk or, you know, strengthen their body to avoid an illness.

Brett McKay: Yeah. You talk about if you were… If someone was on the track to become a knight, training began at the age of eight. It was… That was pretty young.

Connor Heffernan: Yeah. And it was like sectioned, you know, progressive overload to use a gym term, I suppose, you know, you’d start off with, and again, quite an Athenian understanding of education. So the knight’s training began at eight. It would start with a lighter introduction to physicality and also education and manners and decorum. And it would ramp up until they’re ready for battle. And the training of knights was systemized depending on the country, depending on the era, depending on the region. It was progressive.

It was always progressive. And in a sense, it helps keep a physical culture going at a time when mainstream society, and I will agree with those scholars who talk about a disappearance of the body, especially in Catholic countries, you know, the Catholic church wasn’t necessarily fond of the physical body. Physical body was seen as a vehicle for sin. So mainstream society didn’t openly celebrate the body, but, you know, certainly the knights had like quite a systematized way of training and hardening themselves for battle.

Brett McKay: Yeah. So they’re doing calisthenics, gymnastics. You quote this one guy, a French historian talking about this one knight who could do a somersault in all his armor, and then he would dance around in his male shirt. And then when he was in his lodgings, he’d always be testing himself with the other squires to see who could throw the Lance the farthest.

Connor Heffernan: I love that so much as Jean Lamont is the knight’s name, just because it shows that strength has always had a fun component to it as well. Like, you know, and to go back to when you talked to David Cohen with stone lifting, like a lot of stone lifting histories are just men or women standing around a stone and saying, go on, see if you can lift that thing over there. Bet you can’t. So the knight doing a somersault on his horse, it’s like, there’s a lot of playfulness in that as well.

Brett McKay: No, yeah. I was reminded of this a couple of weeks ago. I had the teenage boys from church come over to my garage, do like a deadlifting night and did a deadlifting tutorial and it was just fun to watch them get really excited about lifting a heavy thing off and they’re just pumping each other up and clapping. And I was thinking people have been doing this for thousands of years. Like if they were transplanted to the year, you know, 2000 BC, they would fit right in with a strength competition.

Connor Heffernan: Absolutely. And it’s something I’m working on a book at the moment and I’m looking at this sort of human desire to test their strength and to be joyful with their strength and to build their strength. So there’s a very famous book in the history in sociology of sport called Homo Ludens by Johan Huizinga, which talks about the human desire for play. You know, it’s just, there seems to be something ingrained in humanity that there’s a desire for play. I think in a lot of individuals there is that sort of inbuilt spans across time, desire to test strength, and especially in communal settings to do so in a joyful, playful, but still competitive way.

Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. So, medieval era physical culture is kind of relegated to aristocrats who were training to be knight. How did physical culture change during the Renaissance?

Connor Heffernan: The Renaissance of the Renaissance is the great rediscovery of Greco-Roman texts. And there’s a variety of reasons for that. There’s palaces and palladium’s built and they discover sculptures underneath. There’s the sacking of Muslim countries and the transportation of texts that were preserved in Muslim, societies and destroyed in European societies. You know, ancient Greek and Roman texts being brought back into Western libraries and western societies. And people would read about ancient Greco-Roman physical culture and gymnasiums, etcetera. And they began to bring it back. And the Renaissance, which is a European wide experiment with creativity in many respects, sees a more visual physical culture. You have sculptures being built, even if you look at like the Sistine Chapel. And God is pretty jacked and He is holding out his hand and his arm to the human trying to make contact.

The artists begin to really try and capture the body beautiful, the muscular athletic body. You have physicians looking back at Greco-Roman text and beginning to take inspiration from it. Probably the most, influential text is The Arctia Gymnastica by Murkialis. And this is a renaissance physician who effectively compiles a great number of Greco-Roman medical techs and tracks into one book. But the critical thing is he includes illustrations in the book so people can see these muscular images of men wrestling and lifting weights and climbing ropes. And this really inspires ideas around the body. But, you know, you also have Luigi Cornaro, who’s an Italian aristocrat who tells people to live a long life. You know, you need to eat healthily and eat a low calorie diet effectively. So there’s this incredible explosion of interest in the body and the recognition that, even if we are still in a spiritual and religious time and there’s a very Catholic time in their Renaissance period, that there is a joy to be found in the body.

And the renaissance period is when we see, the printing press or at least more illustrated texts coming about and changing and uplifting people’s knowledge around fitness and physical culture and artists showing people what their bodies could be or could be capable of. And it’s not gods that the sculptors are often doing, you know, images of it’s average men or women. And I think there’s something in that as well, that this is a target that could potentially be achieved.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I thought that was interesting about the Renaissance, that with the advent of the printing press. Immediately you saw this uptick in the number of books written about health and wellness. Like the health and wellness industry book industry got started in the 1400s.

Connor Heffernan: Effectively and continues to this very day. But that’s, the printing press is huge during this time. There’s also fewer wars, which allows for more stability, greater riches. Obviously we started, you know, 15th and 16th century. So certain European cities begin to enjoy a great deal of riches, which allows them then to have the leisure to do these things. But the written word is just so influential in that period.

Brett McKay: Oh, so with the Renaissance, you see the return of exercising, not just for warfare, but just because, you know, it feels good to exercise, it’s part of humanism. You get to experience your body and you can sculpt the body. It’s a very Greco-Roman… What would a typical Renaissance workout look like, you think?

Connor Heffernan: It’s funny ’cause it does depend on where you are in Europe. We’ll go with Italy, which sort of drank the coup who led the most on, Greco-Roman physical cultures. We don’t have a lot of evidence of resistance training. You know, like what I mean by that, pardon me, is weight-based training, lifting heavy weights. But we do have people copying and mimicking certain calisthenic regimes. Dancing becomes very important and is actually a form of physical culture during this era, but it’s light gymnastics, calisthenics, combined with dancing and gentlemen would dance as well as women. Gentlemen because it’s the aristocracy who gets to do these types of things. And they would combine that then with wrestling and boxing as well to sort of create a well-rounded physique in every sense of the word.

Brett McKay: So I think maybe a takeaway from the Renaissance period of physical culture bring back that idea of exercise is just part of experience in your body, and that, that feels good in and of itself. Then I also just like the idea like, it sounds like the exercise they did is like, they just enjoyed it. Dancing, walking. I mean, it just… It wasn’t like they’re on a treadmill trying to get into zone two. They’re just like, I’m just gonna move my body ’cause it feels good. And I enjoy this.

Connor Heffernan: Yeah, I had this conversation with someone recently as an exercise scientist, he’s a brilliant mind, but my argument was, the vast majority of people don’t need to specialize. A lot of us would be better if we trained as mongrels. And what I meant by that is you have a dog and you’re not sure if it’s one quarter Labrador or one quarter Jack Russell one quarter… It’s just a mixture of everything. And I think in the Renaissance period, they’re training mongrels, as you said. They’re not trying to get into zone two. Monday isn’t chest and biceps or it’s not push pull legs, it’s, they’re doing a little bit of dancing, a little bit of fighting, little bit of training. I think it’s a more fun way to see what your body’s capable of.

Brett McKay: So we shift into the enlightenment after the Renaissance. They put an emphasis on science and rationality. How did that affect physical culture?

Connor Heffernan: It’s one of those sliding doors moments, which is a phrase one of my friends loves to use, and what I mean by that is the Renaissance is so important in popularizing physical fitness again in European society. The Enlightenment is what sustains it in many respects, and in the Enlightenment period, especially in the 1700s and the… The 1600s and 1700s, pardon me, you got philosophers writing about exercise. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who has the best opening to a book ever. Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains. I wish I’d thought of that for any of my own books or blog posts. Jean-Jacques Rousseau writes a seven volume tract on how a boy should be brought up, and a girl as well is brought into it.

It’s called a meal, and physical fitness is part of that. You have John Locke, you know, the man who sort of helps to popularize the idea of the tabula rasa, the blank slate in educational theories. This idea that we’re born with a blank slate and we then learn from our societies. He writes on physical fitness. The philosophers write about physical fitness, which means then that the educators start to take an interest in physical fitness, and it’s in the Enlightenment period that effectively early PE teachers start to emerge, and some of them are powerful, powerful writers. Johann Gutsmuths, who many people would see as maybe the grandfather of modern gymnastics and modern fitness.

He writes a book about the youth, and there’s a chapter in it. The title is we are weak because it does not occur to us to be strong, which I think is just one of the most powerful titles I’ve ever read. It’s up there with Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s chain comment. But the Enlightenment helps to give an institutional backing to physical fitness in a way that hadn’t been done before because these educators like Gutsmuths and others who are based in Switzerland, Denmark in particular in the 1700s. They start to build physical fitness into the day-to-day routine of a school, and that is not happening on a regular basis within the Renaissance period. And because they have books, they’re writing to each other, they know about each other.

A whole network of physical educationists emerge, and really in the 1700s and early 1800s, the doctors are looking towards the philosophers and the educators for knowledge on how to train the body because they are thinking about it and grappling with it and doing experiments in the real world. So the Enlightenment takes the Renaissance celebration of the body and begins to scrutinize it and say, well, this is an important thing. We’re gonna think about what works best and how do we combine this with education to make this something serious, and someone like Gutsmuth, he introduces or reintroduces the idea that physical fitness is tied to the nation state, and one of Gutsmuth’s disciples in the early 19th century, Friedrich Ludwig Jan, creates the Turn-brine system in Prussia.

This is after Napoleon runs through Prussia and Jan creates a gymnastic system because he wants to strengthen Prussian men so they’ll never suffer the indignity of defeat once in his lifetime. But you have people like Jan studying and learning from Gutsmuth who are studying and learning from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, so there are huge heavy hitters in the Enlightenment period writing about fitness, and that helps to give a legitimacy to fitness. It really helps to spawn the discipline of physical education, and then some of the offshoots of that are transformational like Jan reading Gutsmuth’s work and saying, well, I’m gonna take some of that and apply it in a more militaristic setting. So the Enlightenment helps to add a scientific bent to it, but this philosophical bent and weight to it I think is probably the more important of these things.

Brett McKay: Yeah, it also added a nationalistic bent to it as well.

Connor Heffernan: Yeah, of course, and eventually this sort of ties in. In Sweden, PH Ling creates a gymnastic system that has a militaristic component to it. The British army gets involved, the French army gets involved, and in the 1800s, you see a lot more nation, states and militaries beginning to adopt physical culture and gymnastic practices because you need to have strong soldiers. And if, insert country name here, France, Germany, Russia, England, Italy, Ireland occasionally wants to be a strong nation and needs to have strong men and women.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And particularly the physical culture that developed in Prussia in parts of Germany, that would lay the groundwork for what happened in the 19th century with the golden age of physical culture, correct?

Connor Heffernan: Yes, of course. So in the 19th century, the two most important gymnastics systems are the Prussian system, the Turnverein system, which is sort of pommel horses and body weight exercises, and then the Ling system from Sweden. And the Turnverein system, really in many respects, it’s more based in Germany and Austria-Hungary and sort of Teutonic Europe, for want of a better phrase. But that’s where you get a lot of the early weightlifting clubs and weightlifting gymnasiums emerging. And in France, we have Triat, a Frenchman opens a gym in the 1850s, but really it’s what becomes Germany after 1870 when it unifies. That’s a lineage of Jan in the 1810s. And the Turnverein halls and gyms and the culture of strength that emerges in Germany eventually sort of kickstart the strong man and strong woman era of the physical culture era, which is in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

Brett McKay: In these gyms you were just talking about, what kind of exercises were they doing? So they’re starting to use strength implements. So what would a workout look like?

Connor Heffernan: Men and women swung Indian clubs during this period, lightweight Indian clubs, two to three pounds. There is evidence of wooden dumbbells, again, two to three pounds being used in the 1850s and 1860s. It’s really not until the 1890s, early 1900s that we have more serious weight-based implements being used, but certainly in the 1840s and ’50s, it’s Indian clubs, wooden dumbbells, wooden barbells. They’re mainly doing gymnastics, hanging from rings, doing pull-ups, working on the pommel horse, doing bodyweight squats on their tippy toes, stuff like that. But like it’s starting to get intense in that mid 1800 period.

Brett McKay: So let’s talk about this golden age of physical culture. And there was one guy who played a big role in birthing this age. And he was a Prussian, this guy named Eugene Sandow. Tell us about Sandow. How did Sandow revolutionize physical culture in the 19th century?

Connor Heffernan: So Sandow is, or was in his own lifetime referred to as the world’s most perfectly developed specimen. What a small ego that man must have had. He did a tour of the United States in the 1890s and Dudley Allen Sargent, who was the gym owner, or the gym instructor, pardon me, at Harvard University, measured Sandow and said he’d never seen anyone more perfect. So Sandow became the world’s most perfectly developed specimen. In the early 1900s, the National History Museum in London commissioned a bust of Sandow’s body to show future generations what a perfect white male looked like. Sandow is the first modern physique star. He’s someone who is a weightlifter and wrestler by trade. He’s discovered by Professor Attila, an early and very prestigious strongman in the 1880s. And with Attila’s entrepreneurship and eye for opportunity, Sandow announces himself on the world stage in the 1880s. There’s a strongman in London called Samson, who’s playing at the Aquarium Theatre, and he issues a challenge every night when he performs in the stage, that if anyone can beat me, they’ll win the title of the world’s strongest man and have a cash prize.

Sandow goes to one of Samson’s performances, he wears a suit that’s too big for him. He puts up his hand, challenges Samson. He looks like a schoolboy in his dad’s clothes. And the audience laughs at Sandow, and then Sandow rips off the suit to reveal this incredibly muscular and lean physique. Strongmen in the 1880s tend to be quite large and smooth, they weren’t lean and muscular like Sandow was. And when he rips off his clothes to reveal his muscular physique, he is wearing a singlet, I do hasten to add. He just becomes this international celebrity almost overnight. He beats Samson, starts to call himself the world’s strongest man. He tours the United States for several years. He tours really all over the world. He’s in India and Australia and New Zealand, South Africa, all over Britain and Ireland and different parts of the world.

If you were to say the name Sandow in 1914, and you know, David Chapman has written a biography on Sandow, which is wonderful, there’s a good chance people would have known who you’re talking about regardless of what country you’re in. The research that I’m doing at the moment, I’ve seen reference of Sandow in South America. He never went to South America in his lifetime, but his books and photographs were sold in Chile and Argentina and Brazil despite never going there. So Sandow was a global emblem of perfection for the physical body. And you know, he does important things. He hosts the world’s first bodybuilding show in 1901 in London. He appears in the first or one of the first recorded videos ever, a Thomas Edison video in the early 1890s.

He sells supplements, he sells a variety of books, sells magazines, sells children’s toys, even as a multivariate person. He has a physical culture institute where he claims to cure diseases using exercise and diet alone. So he is… I really hasten to add why this is important. He becomes a global physique star before radio, before television, before social media. He becomes Arnold Schwarzenegger in the 1970s, in the 1890s and early 1900s. There is a Sandow phenomenon during that time. And he inspires and encourages thousands, if not millions of people to take up physical culture so that they too can perfect their bodies.

Brett McKay: So he democratized fitness. Like he really popularized it and said, hey, this is something that everyone can do. And there was a money aspect to it. He made money from that. But I think that there’s a positive aspect ’cause more people started exercising ’cause they’re inspired by this guy. But he also kind of brought in that sort of tinge of sexuality that we have with fitness culture today, right? The fitness influencers we see on Instagram where they’re just looking all sexy and attractive. Like Sandow was doing that in the 1890s, but he’s able to get away with it, even that really conservative Victorian era ’cause he was able to kind of hide it under, well, this is scientific and I’m trying to replicate the Greek gods of old. And so he’d do these poses and he’d say, well, I’m replicating a statue of Hercules. And he’d be naked with just a fig leaf covering his private parts.

Connor Heffernan: Yeah. And you’re right. He manages to navigate a through line between erotica and education. ’cause he’ll say, the photos of me in Greco-Roman pose wearing nothing but a fig leaf are educational and inspirational. He would give lectures to doctors to show how serious and respectful he was. But you’re right, there’s an erotic component to that. When he did his tour of America in the 1890s, he had private posing sessions where he would stand beside, behind, pardon me, a satin curtain and women could touch his muscles through the curtain to learn about good health and good fitness. And there was an erotic trade in his images and his photographs. David Chapman’s book does talk about this, that homosexuality was illegal in a lot of countries back then.

And many people would have physical culture photos of Sandow as erotica. But if questioned, they would just say, well, I’m a respectable physical culturist, despite not going to the gym ever in my life. So yeah, there is that sexual component to it that he really does tap into. And even in his marketing, and other people do do this as well eventually, but he will say and suggest that in subtle ways do my physical culture course, ’cause it’ll make you a better man. It’ll give you more vigor and vitality using code words for your sort of sexual energy or sexual force. So not only does he sell his body in a certain sense, but he sells the idea that his routines, his fitness systems will make you more sexually attractive and sexually vigorous.

Brett McKay: Another guy that popped up about the same time as Sandow, we mentioned him earlier. This guy’s pretty crazy. His name is Bernarr Macfadden. So he’s actually born Bernard, but he dropped the D and added an extra R because he wanted his name to sound like a lion roaring. So how did this guy add fuel to the fire of the physical culture frenzy that was happening during this period?

Connor Heffernan: I think more people should name themselves after animal noises. I just think it’d be a more varied world in so many ways. Bernarr Macfadden is someone who’s actually inspired by Sandow and Sandow comes to America first in 1893. Macfadden is… To create a simple binary, Sandow is very concerned with being respectable. Sandow becomes the sort of ceremonial physical culture instructor to the British King in the 1910s. When he opens a physical culture institute, he hires legitimate doctors to run it. He’s very concerned about legitimacy, Bernarr Macfadden is not. Bernarr Macfadden is alternative medicine and alternative health before we really begin to use those terms. He is important because he found physical culture magazine in the United States, which is the most popular physical culture fitness magazine up until the mid 1920s.

At its height, it had millions and millions of copies in circulation with every issue. And Macfadden falls into what we’d now call the, I suppose, natural fallacy. If it comes from nature, it’s good. So he wrote a book, The Milk Diet, where he would claim that drinking nothing but milk could cure a variety of illnesses and diseases, even very serious ones. He would claim that you could cure cancer using exercise alone or specialized diets. There’s an entire book written by his ex-wife called Dumbbells and Carrot Strips, which is a wonderful title, where she talks about doing a tour of England with Bernarr Macfadden.

And she was heavily pregnant at the time. And Macfadden used to make her lie on her back, and he would jump on her stomach from a height to show people that if a woman is physically trained and strong using his physical culture methods, she is impervious to any risk during pregnancy. So he was an incredibly problematic, off-center, off-cue sort of individual. But he had a huge following, because there was a distrust of American physicians in the early 1900s. Macfadden really sold the idea that exercise and diet can cure a variety of illnesses. And he had some good things to say about eating your fruits and vegetables, absolutely. But then he’ll say something crazy, like if you’re losing your hair, the best thing to do is to pull on your hair really hard, because that will strengthen the hair fibers. Please do not do that if you’re going balding, or if you’ve just gotten hair plugs, either way, it will end badly for you. So he had the good with the absolutely inane, nonsensical things.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I think what Macfadden and Sandow did too, is they were able to take the new means of mass communication that were developing in that time, and just use it to the hilt to spread physical culture.

Connor Heffernan: Yeah, absolutely. And you know, they sold magazines, they sold books, they sold fitness supplements, they created health spas and health resorts. They helped popularize equipment like Sandow is very important in popularizing the five pound dumbbell and encouraging other people to create better forms of training, better influence in a lot of people. And this is something that I’ve thought long and hard about, but their magazines are transformational. And the reason for that is you could submit a photo of yourself. So if Conor or Brett had worked out and built some muscle, we could take a photo of ourselves and submit it into a magazine. And that would be published and millions of people would read it from all over the world. Macfadden’s magazines were sold in Europe and America. Sandow’s magazines were read and sold all over the British Empire. So you could be a guy from Dublin, to use an Irish example. WN Kerr, he wins Ireland’s first bodybuilding show in 1907. He submits photos of himself to Macfadden’s magazine in America.

So like this is unheard of in a pre social media age, you could effectively post your gym selfies in these magazines and people from all over the world would be able to see it. Like that’s a huge shift. And you use the term correctly democratizing fitness. That is democratizing fitness because now anyone can be celebrated for their physiques or their bodies, not just a select few.

Brett McKay: Yeah. Macfadden, he’s just an interesting character. A lot of problems with him, but he’s hilarious. I just love reading about the stuff he did. Like he tried to found a city, physical culture city, and it just was a complete disaster. And he also has the best fitness catchphrase I’ve ever come across. Weakness is a crime, don’t be a criminal. I just love that.

Connor Heffernan: Sickness is a sin, don’t be a sinner. That was his other one.

Brett McKay: So there’s a lot of magazines being put out, books being put out during this time that was offering advice on strength, fitness, health, wellness. Is there any advice from this period, this golden age of physical culture in the late 19th century, early 20th century, that one, you think is interesting and two, you actually think, Hey, this is actually pretty good advice that if people will follow today, they would find some benefit from it.

Connor Heffernan: So interesting. And I’ll put on my cynical hat. There are a lot of tropes and cliches in the fitness industry today that have their origins from the 1890s and early 1900s. The idea of the sickly transformation. I was really sick. I was unathletic. I was really weak, but then I did this very specialized course. And now look at my godly proportions. So that has its origins in fitness books from the 1890s. This idea of transforming your life entirely through fitness and that you went from hero to zero using Sandow’s routine, but not Macfadden’s routine. So the interesting is the sort of marketing tips and tricks that emerged in the 1890s are still used today. Supplements, Sandow promotes a supplement called Plasmon. It’s an early protein powder. And he says that he survived for weeks consuming nothing but Plasmon. And not only did he maintain his weight, he got stronger.

So spurious supplement claims date from the 1890s, early 1900s. The more substantive, the thing that I think, yeah, that’s actually pretty good is a lot of the fitness, and you’ll see a general theme when I pick out the core values from a lot of these different eras. But a lot of physical cultures would write about the body as a bedrock. And what I mean by that is get your fitness right, build your body the best that you can. And then this will give you more energy to be a better businessman, a better wife, a better mother, a better husband, better athlete, better student, whatever the case may be. So of course, they had the esthetic components, especially when you want you to look like Sandow.

But even Sandow himself said if you build your body in this way, it will improve other elements of your life. And I think that’s pretty cool. And again we tend to have the blinkers on and be very narrowly zoomed in, in the modern age where it is about the six pack or getting to a certain dress size. And it’s like, well there can be other benefits that aren’t entirely vain when it comes to your own fitness journey.

Brett McKay: So this moves us into the 20th century. And you mentioned at the beginning of this podcast that the term physical culture went out of favor because physical culture started splintering. So what happened? Like, why did it splinter in the West after World War II, particularly?

Connor Heffernan: You get a huge, I suppose, explosion of entrepreneurial spirit. And what I mean by that is in the 1930s, you have Bob Hoffman and the York Barbell Company creating sort of mass produced dumbbells and barbells. Now, Hoffman is not the first person to do that. Alan Calvert does that in America with the Milo Barbell Company in 1903. But you get more ease of access to heavyweights and heavyweight training. So you have, and we’ll focus on the US ’cause every country is different, but you have a lot of men coming back from the Second World War, using their GI Bill money to train and to train in different ways. During the 1920s, 1930s, Olympic weightlifting is the most important sport in the world.

And in the ’40s and ’50s, in America, there’s a golden age of Olympic weightlifting where they win the most amount of medals. They have athletes like Tommy Kono winning gold medal after gold medal. But you have an explosion of interest in Olympic weightlifting. There are more… There’s greater ease of access to dumbbells and barbells, but you also get a greater emphasis on bodybuilding. The first Mr. America competition is hosted in 1939. It continues throughout the war. And then when people come back from the war, they’re like, yeah I like weight training. I like weightlifting, but I’m really interested in this newly emerging thing called bodybuilding. And I wanna try that out.

So you have a fight effectively between Olympic weightlifting and bodybuilding in the 1940s and 1950s. And Olympic weightlifting begins to decline in popularity, bodybuilding for the sake of building the body begins to increase in popularity. And then by the time you get to the ’60s, you have mainstream bodybuilding shows like the Mr. Olympic competition, the competition Arnold Schwarzenegger won seven times. You then have an explosion of interest in powerlifting because there are people who are saying, well, I like strength. I don’t like Olympic weightlifting. I don’t wanna do that bodybuilding thing. So I wanna try something else. So the reasons for the splintering are many. You have more men with disposable income who’ve been exposed to physical culture in the military. US troops are doing calisthenics.

A lot of them are weight training as well. I have an article that I need to write at some point about barbells and dumbbells and weightlifting in US military camps all over the world during the second world war in the Philippines, the Asian curtain or whatever the term was. And all around Africa and Europe, men are taking to weight training in the military camps. They come back to the US and it’s cheaper to train. There’s more people doing it. You have different outlets and people really begin to take to it. And the golden age of bodybuilding comes in the ’50s and ’60s off the back of that.

That’ll span into 1977 and pumping iron and Arnold Schwarzenegger, which I know influences mainstream cultures, but I’m probably jumping ahead of myself, but it is in the ’40s and ’50s that fitness becomes splintered because there’s more access. So there’s more people doing it and there’s more people doing it. They begin to do it for different reasons. Lifting weights overhead, allow weightlifting, lifting weights to build my body, allow bodybuilding. So this just creates different camps within the fitness community.

Brett McKay: And then there’s also a splinter and you see other things offshoots. People just started jogging, just running for the sake of running. That was a thing that started picking up in the ’60s and ’70s and then Jazzercise and Zumba, and then all the stuff that’s happened in the past couple of decades, CrossFit, people just trying different things.

Connor Heffernan: Yeah. And Alan Latham, a geographer, wrote a really wonderful article. I’m pretty sure it’s easily accessible on the history of jogging. And as you said, this is people worried about heart disease in the ’60s and they’re like, well, let’s just start running for defined periods of time and see how it goes. But it is like the great success story of fitness in the 20th century is the diversification and democratization of fitness and diversification of fitness. Listen, I love lifting heavy weights. I love cycling. I love walking. Not too mad on yoga or Jazzercise or Pilates or anything like that. And that’s not throwing shade, but it’s just what I like and what I don’t like.

But we’re in a period now where there’s more things for me to like, and there’s more things for me to dislike. In the 1920s, if I wanted to train, I could probably be in Olympic weightlifting and that would be it. Or I could do gymnastics, but never would those worlds meet. So some things are goofy. I was part of the functional fitness craze where we were doing barbell back squats on Swiss balls, but some things were good. It’s good that we have this diversification in Jazzercise and Jane Fonda democratized it for women and leisure clubs began to open up to men, women and children. And we can do a variety of different things to get healthy and get fit.

And that diversity is married with democratization where there’s more and more people training and training is finally becoming a life cycle pursuit. And what I mean by that is it’s something you do from cradle to grave. And it’s something now that the American College of Sport Medicine or the American College of Medicine encourages some form of training, regardless of the mode for everyone. Doesn’t matter your age your gender, your occupation, there’s an encouragement of physical fitness. So like, listen, I’ll laugh at some of it ’cause it’s subjectively goofy. There’s a kangaroo thing now where you put on like space hoppers effectively and you just jump around for 40 minutes. That looks pretty goofy. Sure it’s fun. But I think that diversity and democratization is actually a really cool success story in a industry that is full of horrible lies and people you can’t trust.

Brett McKay: Where do you see physical culture going in the future?

Connor Heffernan: It’s funny, I keep going back to David, David Cohen, but I think there is gonna be a strand in fitness that is gonna go back to more, we’ll call it old school training. Stone lifting has grown in real importance and popularity in the last two decades in particular, and the Rogue Fitness documentaries have been a key part of that. People haven’t seen them. Rogue Fitness, the American barbell manufacturer, did a number of documentaries on stone lifting in Scotland, the Basque region and Iceland. So I think stone lifting and things like club swinging and more old school methods, especially outdoors. I think outdoors is a direction for the fitness industry, which is a very funny thing to say, but stone lifting helps to bring us back to a more natural way of strength and fitness.

I think something like that is probably a new and developing trend in fitness. I think there is going to be a backlash against the specialization and scientification of fitness. There was a, at least in gym-based cultures, and you’ll remember this Brett, that sort of bro science reigns supreme for many years. Do this because the big guy did it. And then we had the rise of the evidence-based training community, and some of them have been very good, but I do think there is a growing backlash against optimization and specialization in training. So we might see more intuitive training styles emerge potentially, but then I think we continue on this process of diversification and democratization and making it more accessible for more people to train.

The only thing I can guarantee is there will be new supplements that people will sell. Will they work? Absolutely not. But the rest is all conjecture, I suppose, based on, sadly, my life spent studying these things from different areas in different countries.

Brett McKay: Well, Conor, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about your work?

Connor Heffernan: Yeah, this has been truly such a pleasure. So thank you. I have my own website I’ve been running since 2014, physicalculturestudy.com. So if people are interested in my own work, please do check that out. I’ve written a number of books. I’m an academic. Academics don’t get paid for any of the books that they write. It goes to the publishing houses. So if you wanna read them, great. If not, read Physical Culture Study. For people who are interested in the history of fitness more broadly, the STAC Center at the University of Texas at Austin is the world’s repository of fitness history.

And they have created a new online database with rogue fitness called the strongmanproject.com. So if people go on to the strongmanproject.com, they’ll get access free to biographies of strong men and women from the last 150 years. But also there are articles and training logs and diaries and personal papers that you can check out there as well. So the strongmanproject.com is something that I will always promote because it’s a really wonderful resource.

Brett McKay: I love it. Well, Conor Heffernan, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Connor Heffernan: Absolutely. Thanks so much.

Brett McKay: My guest today was Conor Heffernan. He’s the author of the book, The History of Physical Culture. It’s available on Amazon.com. You can find more information about his work at his website, physicalculturestudy.com. Also check out our show notes at aom.is/physicalculture where you can find links to resources where we delve deeper into this topic.

Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. The Art of Manliness website has been around for over 16 years now and the podcast for almost 10. And they both have always had one aim, to help men take action to improve every area of their lives, to become better friends, citizens, husbands, and fathers, better men. If you’ve gotten something out of the AOM podcast, please consider giving back by leaving a review or sharing an episode with a friend. As always, thank you for the continued support. And until next time, this is Brett McKay reminding you to tell us in the AOM podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.