Health and Strength magazine began publishing in the late nineteenth century and, up until very recently, was still in circulation. Designed for a British audience, the magazine quickly became one of the most well read and well esteemed pieces of its time. In an age when information on weightlifting was hard to come by, Health...
In any normal year, one of sports’ greatest spectacles, the Tour de France, would have concluded about a month ago. This year’s tour has unsurprisingly been rescheduled to begin August 29, but the event pictured in this photograph permanently ended its 85-year run in 2016. The Critérium National de la Route was for many years...
Old physical culture dumbbells really are a strange phenomenon. From squeeze grip dumb-bells to old wooden objects, the devices people used to build their bodies in the early twentieth century sometimes defy belief. One of my favorite examples of this is undoubtedly the Sandow ‘ringing’ dumbbell. Eugen Sandow, who was recently covered in a Rogue...
In December of 1973, I took a workout at the Texas Athletic Club in Austin, Texas, and tested myself for the first time in the deadlift. I was inspired to see what I could lift that day by watching a young woman deadlifting at the gym who had entered a local powerlifting meet as a...
In 2019, I had the opportunity to spend a month traversing through the Stark Center’s numerous collections. Then in the final stages of completing my Ph.D. research, I left Austin after three weeks of frantic typing and photocopying with the unhappy realization that I had a lot more work to do than I realised. This,...
