Oldtime Strength Blog

How about this awesome advertisement for Arthur Saxon’s great book “The Development of Physical Power” which ran in Strength & Health magazine in the mid-1930’s? In 1934, when this ad originally ran, you could order a copy for $1.00… adjusting for inflation, that’s $19 in today’s money so you are actually getting a deal by ordering your copy right here.

If memory serves, many moons ago, a young Brooks Kubik obtained a stack of old magazines and among them was an early issue of Strength and Health which contained this very ad. It inspired Brooks to dive deeper into the Iron Game of many decade’s past and that experience led him to eventually write the modern classic “Dinosaur Training” which has inspired hundreds of thousands of people to start using long lost training methods — so we have much to thank Arthur Saxon for besides the obvious.

For much of the 20th century, one of the biggest “knocks” on weightlifting is that should an individual dare to lift barbells and dumbbells, etc, that his muscles would become so big and so strong that they would lose all flexibility and coordination. This belief persisted well into the 80’s, and I suppose you could say that it still does in some circles. Of course, there have been many, many examples of how this is not at all the case. Above we find a pair of Swedish weightlifters who I would think show very convincingly that they are not musclebound. The top mounter is T. Wahlstrom, junior middleweight champion, and the bottom man is S. Kinnunen, junior lightweight champion of 1956.