Physical Culture Part I: Origins

It can be tempting to look at sport as the summit of peak physical performance. Athletes in team sport specifically display all of the elements we gravitate towards; lean bodies, impressive movement, feats of mental fortitude, great wealth, and of course the fame that comes with achievement. I have been reflecting lately, and come up with a few questions that are worth considering.

We see stick and ball sport more often than athletic sport, why is that?

We see men compete more often than women, why is that?

We see cult of sport personality pushed to sell commercial goods, why is that?

We are going to get at the heart of these issues by starting from the beginning. Let's jump in.

SECTION I - TURNERS INERNATIONAL

For our purpose here, the history of modern physical culture begins in the 19th century with Europeans pulling cultural elements out of conquered nations. For example, tribal communities in India used clubs as part of a daily routine in wrestling schools. These implements found their way into organizations such as the Turners of England and the Sokol Gynmnasts of what is today the Czech Republic. We can dive into a rabbit hole here, but that is for another day. As members of these clubs moved across the Atlantic, so to did their methods.

As the 20th century dawned, so too did the age of bodybuilding and physical culture. Eugene Sandow, Louise Leers, Georg Hackenschmid, and others pioneered a movement in circus tents. Men like Bernarr McFadden would pioneer the use of equipment, diet, and lifestyle for vigor and health. Facilities for physical culture became local legends, like muscle beach in Los Angeles. Alan Calvert would pioneer the manufacture of barbells, sale of magazines, and use of equipment in exercise for health. His business ventures would evolve into the now famous York Barbell.

The cultural valence of the physical movement espoused sober living, cold exposure, weight training, breathing exercises, natural movement, physique, and lifestyles laced with daily hardship. Groups ranging from the Turners clubs to barbell gyms emphasized that men and women alike needed daily physical training and a diet of natural unprocessed foods to obtain full vigor in life. As Eugene Sandow and others began to stand up their respective Mount Everest, the general public began to take notice. Odd lifts (some of which are found in Strongman and Highland Games today) became staples in traveling circus shows, bodybuilders found employment in the same types of oddity display venues. Around the advent and middle of the 20th century, cultural values in the West began to waffle wildly around race, gender, and religion. The impact this had on physical culture cannot be overstated.

SECTION II - PEOPLE ARE BLOCKS OF WOOD

In the 20th century countries around the world leveraged physical culture to drive social progress. The West created the FDA which, intentional or not, made people fat, sick, and dependent on the industrial medical complex. The East created the Lesgaft Institute for Sport to experiment on humans with anabolic steroids and any other drug they could think of. Lets call a spade a spade: at the level of government, the world sees people as tax paying consumer revenue generators, which make great targets for interest rate hike scams and central bank handcuffs. People are just blocks of wood for the fires of industry, whether the bureaucrat is wearing a communist pin or the stars and stripes. I'm not pitching a conspiracy here, I'm just calling a spade a spade. This is the way things played out, and for better or worse we need to move on making choices with our eyes wide open, in my opinion.

What many folks fail to grasp about the way that physical culture developed into different schools (east and west) is that it was all driven by industry and geopolitics. In the west, money was spent on equipment and instructors for physical culture and education in primary schools. This trend stopped when industry recognized early on (1950s or so) that healthy people don't go to the doctor, don't buy medicine, and don't need regular care. Money for physical culture was diverted to build and market the monolithic medical industrial complex we know today. The manufacturing industry adapted our solutions for hungry cities to replace the suburban garden and the single family farmer, with low cost, calorie rich, Orwellian slop that causes addiction at the earliest possible age. In the East, humans were fuel for political rocket ships. The State robbed every person into dark-age poverty, and offered survival on terms of absolute loyalty to the Father land. Children were ripped out of loving homes and placed in gigantic concrete prisons, forced to train and study under strangers until War or political service called them out of their sport schools. Make no mistake, competing in the Olympics was definitely seen as a combat deployment for athletes in the Soviet Union.

Brutal as it was, this landscape produced some pretty incredible knowledge about the human body. In the East, we learned an insane amount about how to develop athletes over a lifespan when effort is 100% and the budget is practically unlimited. Kettlebell training, weightlifting, jump training, drug use, and the Long Term Athlete Development applications for different sport disciplines. In the West, we learned a huge amount about how market economies drive sport participation, how to mine talent using higher education, the best sports for making money, the business of professional sport and how to get amateurs to develop in a system where they make no paycheck. Both taught us that stick and ball sports drive way more revenue than disciplines in athletics like body building, track and field, or endurance events. The East taught us that women can benefit from both hard, heavy training as well as the upper limit for taking drugs.

SECTION III - PHYSICAL CULTURE 3.0

I want to bring this whole discussion around to how we can leverage our historical perspective. Take an example from the world of medicine as a kind, for how we can get there. Peter Attia, in his recent book Outlive, talks about 3 stages of medicine. Moving from medicine 1.0 as treating pain, to 2.0 as resolving medical issues causing pain (with medications), and finally the new frontier of medicine 3.0 being to prevent the medical issue with lifestyle changes in younger age. If the 20th century was physical culture 2.0, we are officially moving into the 3.0 era.

We have more access to equipment, instruction, and great coaching than we have ever had. Physical culture disciplines from all over the world have become mainstream. The options for making a life filled with function are now at our fingertips. So I propose a Bernarr MacFadden nouveau, a lifestyle where we don't pursue endless entertainment. Rather, we engage ever higher levels of health and robust living, spending our limited hours outside of work moving, lifting, running, and striving for greater symmetry and strength.

Structure matters, so we will look to pull elements that fit our time from the centuries that have gone by. Daily training and progress was a staple, built around key performance areas. In the past, specific elements received attention in;

Balance
Strength
Endurance
Mobility/Coordination

As this essay series goes on, we will look more specifically at how we can leverage the past and create a healthier future in each of these categories. We will do some exercise demonstrations, look at tools for training each ability, and work through how to progress them all.

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