Kasey, a member of the gym, will be putting on a Fight Gone Bad fundraiser on June 2nd at CrossFit Heat. This fundraiser is his Eagle Scout project and will go to the Assist the Officer Foundation! Plan on attending and recruit some fellow friends to join the cause. You can visit Kasey's website - www.workoutforwarriors.com - in order to sign-up, sponsor, or donate. Make sure you read his website and sign-up; don't just show up on Saturday, June 2nd without being in the know on the details.
***We will have a cookout at the gym immediately following the fundraiser.***
Skill Work: Turkish Getup For Time: 800m Run 5 Rounds "Cindy" 400m Run 5 Rounds "Cindy" 800m Run
"Abs"
~Mark Rippetoe
In every weight room in all the countries of the world since the dawn of training with weights, the single biggest distraction from the actual task at hand has been abs. Or rather, an obsession with/ misunderstanding of the biomechanical role of/misunderstanding of the way to train abs. More people, including me, have wasted more time/incurred more injuries doing/gotten very little out of training the damn things than anything in the whole training repertoire except biceps. Some of the things I’m about to say will be met with a lot of disagreement by conventional wisdom exercise-science types and PTs, as well as virtually everybody that trains for appearance. I don’t care – I have to get this off my chest (Atonement? A guilty conscience for having trained lots of people incorrectly? An attempt to come to grips with years of having been wrong?) and perhaps in the process I can be of use to some of you. We’ll see.
First, by “abs”, I mean the muscles that surround the abdomen. I don’t just mean the rectus abdominis, the group in the front that everybody identifies with the term “six-pack” (that I never use), the most graphic visual evidence of both low bodyfat in most people and our remote connection to phylum anellida through its evident septa that separate the muscle into repeated segments. I refer to abs when everybody else refers to “the core” because I insist on being difficult, contrary, disagreeable and out of step with the infomercial people. This is the way I learned it, and I see no compelling reason to update. So in this article “abs” means the rectus, the internal and external obliques running across the lateral aspect of the abdomen, the transversalis (or transversus abdominis), and the muscles of the floor of the abdominal cavity.
Second, the abs stabilize the spine, meaning that they maintain stable if not rigid intervertebral relationships under compressive or shear (moment) loading – that is their primary physical function in a biped. We have been placed under the impression that the primary role of the abs is display to other humans in either courtship ritual or as a means of evoking envy, and this temporary cultural bias has not proven useful to many of us.
Stabilizing the spine is an extremely important thing to do when working or training, since the force generated by the muscles that extend the hips and knees is usually transferred to the external environment through the arms and hands (in the case of the squat the bar is supported by the trunk itself ), which means that the spine is the bridge connecting the force-producing musculature to the task to which it is being applied. This bridge must be rigid – stable enough that as force is applied along its length it pretty much all gets to where it should be transferred, with none absorbed by the bridge itself. Or the spine can be thought of as a wrench handle, the thing that connects the bolt to the turning force. A quick review of all the tools commonly available shows that none of these wrenches are equipped with a rubber handle, since force is quite inefficiently transmitted between these two points by a flexible segment, and force transmission is the wrench’s job. The job of the muscles that stabilize the spine is producing a condition in which force is efficiently transmitted along this potentially moveable column of bones by making them immoveable, so that this potentially flexible column of bones functions like a tempered steel shaft instead of the resolve of a politician.
When you deadlift, for example, you consciously set the lumbar curve of your spine before you pull, you take a deep breath, squeeze everything tight, and push the bar away from the floor. The settingthe- lumbar-curve part is accomplished by the posterior spinal muscles – the erector spinae group. The squeeze-everything-tight part is abs. This is when they get recruited into the pull, and their job is to reinforce from the anterior and the lateral the position established by the posterior spinal muscles. You set your back with your back muscles, and then you reinforce this position from the front and sides with your abs. Some hyperflexible people are capable of getting into a position of spinal overextension. For these people an active focus on ab contraction is necessary for positioning. Most of us find that when we concentrically squeeze the lumbar into extension, we end up in the right position to pull. This ab squeezing makes your trunk into what is essentially a rigid cylinder that surrounds and supports the spine, the effect being that of a hydrostatic column between all points along the contracting abdominal wall and the spine transmitted through the hydrostatically uncompressible gut contents. The force of contraction transmitted through this fluid medium braces the spine into the position set by the back muscles until the moment force of the load overcomes the lifter’s ability to stay in position. In order that this job actually gets done by the muscles whose job it is to do it, they have to function isometrically.
Let’s review: muscles can produce force by acting on a load through the skeleton in three ways. They can shorten under a load, termed a concentric contraction (I know that sounds redundant, but the conventional terminology is thus, and I must draw the rugged-individualist line somewhere). They can lengthen under a load by controlling the rate of lengthening with their opposing contractile force, termed an eccentric contraction. And they can just maintain the same length and therefore maintain a stable, rigid relationship between the skeletal components; this is termed an isometric contraction. Depending on where the muscles are located, their primary function is either concentric/ eccentric or isometric. The hip and leg muscles’ primary function are to open and close the knee and hip joints in a variety of movements, and are therefore primarily the concentric/eccentric types. They function isometrically when you stand still, but standing still is not a primary activity to which we are adapted – at least it shouldn’t be.
Conversely, the abs’ job is primarily isometric, since spinal stabilization is their principal task. If the skeletal relationships they maintain are motionless, then their primary function is to exert force while allowing no position change, and to do this they must remain the same length under whatever load the spine must be stable against. Thus isometric contraction is their principle mode of action. They can be pressed into service to do a situp, acting concentrically/eccentrically to flex the spine while you are lying down, but it’s not their “normal” function, the one they have developed over millions of years to accomplish. We haven’t been doing situps that long – only since they were invented by Joe Weider back in 1980 – hardly long enough to have changed our inherited muscle physiology to accommodate him. Abs are supposed to keep the spine rigid, and this has some rather important implications for the way we have been thinking about training them to do this function.
Since the basic nature of correct ab function is isometric, the exercises in which the abs perform this function will provide exercises for the abs as well. This may seem childishly apparent, yet virtually every strength coach adds extra concentric/eccentric ab work to the program anyway. The thinking must be that just squatting, deadlifting, pressing, cleaning, snatching, chins, and barbell curls – all of which involve trunk stabilization as a critical performance component – do not provide sufficient ab work by themselves. I disagree. First, these lifts are not done by themselves. They are performed together in workouts composed of several of them the same day. I don’t think a novice needs to do situps as a part of novice-level programming; the program relies so heavily on the good form provided by a rigid spine during all the barbell exercises that the abs are receiving as much work as they can possibly do. This is especially true of heavy work sets in the squat and deadlift which require a high degree of focus on a flat back for completion of the set as the lifter gets stronger. It’s not a factor at first because the weights at first are light, and this is why it is safe. As the loads pass 200 and then 300+ pounds, it becomes enough of a challenge for the now more experienced lifter that a helluva lot of ab work is required to squat and pull properly. At weights above this range, most lifters find that a belt helps them produce harder ab contractions and therefore maintain better spinal stability, and this is why it is common that a lifter’s first squat workout with a belt produces new levels of ab fatigue.
Heavy presses are extremely dependent on abs to keep the spine from overextending, and to maintain the rigid spine as part of the kinetic chain between bar and floor. Chins use the abs differently since there is no compressive load on the spine, but rather tension that must be controlled to maintain control of the body’s position during the set. High-rep chins tap into abs in a palpably different way. Since a long set inevitably fatigues the abs, isometric control diminishes, and eccentric lengthening followed by a concentric reset occurs each rep. This produces ab soreness where squats and deadlifts do not, since the eccentric component of any eccentric/concentric cycle is the part that produces the soreness (I’d look this up if I were you). Abs get sore during limit presses for this reason as well. This is important, because many coaches associate the presence of soreness with effective training and the absence of soreness as indicative that more work needs to be done. It is quite likely that this is the crux of the problem: abs get worked very hard when you use them in their normal isometric role, but they don’t get sore due to the lack of an eccentric component during heavy support. The fact that you’re sore indicates that the muscle belly got longer under a load, while an absence of soreness after heavy squats and pulls merely indicates that your abs did their job and kept your spine rigid. I’m suggesting here that the standard barbell exercises produce sufficient levels of ab work for their own purposes, and that, especially for novices, no other ab work is necessary.
Furthermore, let me gore an ox or two. Situps may in fact be counterproductive for an amazingly large subset of the training population. When we do situps, we usually use some version of lying down, perhaps at your favorite angle other than horizontal, and then produce an active spinal flexion by concentrically contracting the rectus abdominis, effectively shortening the distance between the “origin” on the ribcage and the “insertion” on the pubis. The eccentric lowering of the shoulders follows, with these same muscles getting longer as we lower the shoulders back to the bench or floor. Some variation of this movement is a “situp” everywhere it’s done. The version of it that involves no actual range of motion of the shoulders relative to the thighs is called a “crunch”; it is useless because of the inability to quantify the work. In a crunch, all the ab contraction does is place the spine in flexion, and then the movement stops without producing a measurable displacement of position, the kind that occurs when your elbows go on to meet your knees. Crunches may be hard for completely detrained veal-calves, but if no actual movement beyond spinal flexion occurs, the exercise rapidly loses its ability to produce an adaptation. I’ve trained women that have done crunches regularly for years that still could not produce three honest situps of any kind.
But the spinal flexion may be the problem for some people. Those with obvious spinal pathologies like a spondylolisthesis often do not tolerate spinal flexion/extension well. I have a member with a grade 2 spondylolisthesis that squats and deadlifts over 200 pounds with no pain or other symptoms when his active surgical practice permits regular training. He cannot do situps or back extensions at all, and we discovered this when a long enough period of uninterrupted training allowed the accumulation of the relevant observations. His back trouble was quite persistent during periods of trying to be a Good Boy and do his situps and hypers, and was absent when time permitted only the basic lifts. The flexion/ extension of his abby-normal spine mashes the discs in an unfriendly way, while plain old squeezing just keeps everything strong and in place.
I myself have had low back problems for many years, and a recent experience leads me to believe that most of them may have been the result of my own misdirected attempts at keeping my abs strong. I was showing a situp variant I like to John Welbourn a couple of months ago, a version we do here on a bench that places the femurs at 90-degrees to the back as you lay down, the backs of the knees across a pair of rollers, the shins tucked under another pair. This produces a very short situp with the hips already in flexion, thus removing the hip flexors from the situp pretty effectively. He hadn’t seen the bench before, so I demonstrated the movement to him with 25 lbs. for ten reps held behind my head in the preferred position for loading the movement. I have done a lot of weight on this bench, and 25 was an easy set, but it had been probably a year since I’d done them. In fact, I know from previous experience with this exercise that I could have done 50 x 10 with no trouble that day, meaning that I had the ab strength having not done this exercise in a long time – having only done squats, presses, pulls, and chins.
Again, it was an easy set, and I got up, walked back into the main gym to squat, and my low back was out. Not bad – in fact I finished my squat workout with the 315 x 10 I had planned to do by just squeezing the shit out of my abs and holding it still – but it was out, and it took several days to fix. It occurs to me that this was perhaps the first time I had been able to see a direct correlation between moving my spine around in flexion/extension and my little facet joint problem I have had for decades that, coincidentally, hadn’t bothered me in about a year.
Let Me Be Clear (aren’t you really tired of that?): I am not saying that situps are bad for everybody that does them. That would be foolish, and I may be a lot of things but I am not foolish in this way. I am suggesting that if you have recurrent back problems like lots of us older lifters have, that situps may be both unnecessary and a possible contributor to the problem. It’s quite likely that pre-existing damage at the spinal-arthritis level will not tolerate a lot of intervertebral movement, and that since we can get enough ab work from the support function our abs provide when squatting, deadlifting, etc., doing them with the intention of keeping your back stable by strengthening the abs may just be another ironic little reason to continue questioning the conventional wisdom.
That having been said, the 90-degree bench may well be one of the best tools for training the abs in any gym. The movement is short, and while not isometric, short is a better version of spinal flexion than the extreme ROMs typical of the again-popular Roman Chair situp. (They have always hurt my back, and they appear to be an excellent way to so thoroughly disrupt the rectus bellies that rhabdomyolysis has been frequently reported in association with their abuse. So if you do them be sure that you control the movement by keeping the tempo slow.) The much shorter ROM provided by the 90-degree bench more closely mimics the actual function of the abs, while allowing increasingly heavy weight to be used safely. This short, heavy situp is much more useful as a functional approximation of isometric ab work, and for more advanced trainees may be just the extra training needed for stability under very heavy barbell loads. This kind of specific ab work is used for “topping-off” the work inherent in the major exercises, and it can be quite useful for most lifters at the right time in their training career.
However, nobody makes three years of linear progress on abs trained with conventional situps in any form, especially as measured by the ability to show increased weighted situp numbers for years. Or even one year, if I remember my members’ progress correctly. (I am not particularly concerned with the world situp record-guys, currently lead by Skip Chase, who did 110,915 sit-ups in 24 hours. High reps like this are primarily done by learning to use the whole body in the movement, distributing the work across a lot of muscle mass, so that once you cross the 10,000 threshold the problem becomes mastery of boredom. And they don’t leave much time for heavy squats and pulls.) My experience is that you can slowly add weight for the first several months and then progress slides to a halt. But by then the object has been achieved: abs tend to stay strong if you keep using them heavy.
But for most lifters – and I mean the vast majority who will never squat 600, or even 500 – the stresses normally encountered under the bar provide all the work the abs need. They provide it safely, in the context in which it is used, and have the added advantage of not irritating the facet joints and discs with a lot of loaded flexion and extension. Ab training can provide a little additional strength stimulus for a while, but it just reinforces the work the abs are already receiving from squats, presses, and pulls. If you want to do them, wait until it is appropriate, and then choose an exercise that can be done heavy for a short ROM with strength-range reps and sets. When they plateau, just hit them occasionally. But for those of you with recurring low back problems, see what six situp-free months does to your back problems. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised, and just as strong as you were before.
3 Rounds of 75 Reps For Time: 1min Double Unders Wall Balls - 20/14
*At the beginning of each round, do 1min of as many double-unders as possible. At the end of the minute, go directly to wall balls and finish your reps until you reach 75 reps (e.g. 50 double-unders in 1min, then 25 wall balls; 22 double-unders in 1min, then 55 wall balls).
MARK YOUR CALENDARS!
Kasey, a member of the gym, will be putting on a Fight Gone Bad fundraiser on June 2nd at CrossFit Heat. This fundraiser is his Eagle Scout project and will go to the Assist the Officer Foundation! Plan on attending and recruit some fellow friends to join the cause. You can visit Kasey's website - www.workoutforwarriors.com - in order to sign-up, sponsor, or donate. Make sure you read his website and sign-up; don't just show up on Saturday, June 2nd without being in the know on the details.
***We will have a cookout at the gym immediately following the fundraiser.***
Kasey, a member of the gym, will be putting on a Fight Gone Bad fundraiser on June 2nd at CrossFit Heat. This fundraiser is his Eagle Scout project and will go to the Assist the Officer Foundation! Plan on attending and recruit some fellow friends to join the cause. You can visit Kasey's website - www.workoutforwarriors.com - in order to sign-up, sponsor, or donate. Make sure you read his website and sign-up; don't just show up on Saturday, June 2nd without being in the know on the details.
***We will have a cookout at the gym immediately following the fundraiser.***
For Time: 400m Weighted Run - 40/20 lbs 21 Deadlifts - 185/115 lbs 21 Pullups 400m Weighted run 15 Deadlifts 15 Pullups 400m Weighted Run 9 Deadlifts 9 Pullups
*Find anything to carry on the run. It should be in the vicinity of 40lbs for men/20lbs for women. If you feel that you are beast, don't hesitate to get up in the 60lb region.
Don't forget that the last hour of Wednesday's Open Gym (6:30-730pm) is FREE to everyone. Invite a friend from an obstacle-oriented workout!
This is still one of my favorite videos from CrossFit HQ - an old original from back in 2007 with an original female firebreather.
"Breathing, Anterior Pelvic Tilt, and Voodoo Witchcraft"
Who is This Guy?
My name is Jim Laird, and I am a Strength and Conditioning Coach and the founder and co-owner of J&M Strength and Conditioning in Lexington, KY. To give you a brief history about me, I am an elite-level powerlifter who has competed in the 242 class. I have spent the last three years getting myself back on track from two car wrecks, a nasty fall down the stairs, tons of stress from starting a new business, and a bout of Ulcerative Colitis. As a result of these things, for the last three years, my training took a back seat and I was able to complete one, maybe two, lifting session per week.
My Introduction to IFAST
A couple of years ago, my business partner Molly Galbraith decided to go up to IFAST and see Bill Hartman and Mike Robertson for an assessment. She ended up having a lot more improvements to make than we anticipated, so shortly after she got her assessment I went up and got one. It was quite a humbling experience and I learned a lot about myself and how my body compensates and functions. I have learned so much from Mike and Bill in the last number of years that my understanding of how the body works and functions is now at a completely different level and my clients and business have benefited greatly because of it.
My Re-assessment and Intro to Diaphragmatic Breathing
In the past few months I have started to feel better so I have started to train more often. I decided to visit for a reassessment. The main reasons for my recent reassessment were my right shoulder (torn labrum from a car wreck) and wanting some help with my squat. I’ll be honest: I knew what the assessment was and I was expecting to get run through a collection of drills and tests. For a number of weeks I had been practicing lunges, planks, side planks, and some of the various tests. No one wants to look like a fool, especially someone who coaches people for living.
When I arrived for my reassessment, Bill and I briefly discussed my purpose for the visit. He looked at my squat, then put me on a table and conducted a few tests. He concluded my hips were off. He then gave me some very simple but painful exercises to get my hips right. After that, he looked at my shoulder, and this is where it gets interesting. I could write a book on everything he did with me, but I will try to keep this as simple as I can. If you get the general overall principle of what I learned, it will not just help you with your training; it will also make you a better coach.
Bill did a few tests and then explained I was not breathing properly and my left diaphragm was not functioning effectively (the left diaphragm controls breathing in the right lung). After some simple breathing drills I retested. Wow! What a difference in range of motion! On a side note, a funny thing happened: my spinal erectors released. They are always tight, so much so that my friends and I joke that I “brush my teeth” with my spinal erectors. Bill explained that when the diaphragm is functioning properly it turns on all the deep abdominal muscles. Their number one job is to give us stability while we are walking around, therefore allowing prime movers such as spinal erectors and hip flexors to rest for their job doing things like running from bears and lifting heavy objects. Bill proceeded to do Active Release Therapy, or ART, on my shoulder to get the rest of mobility I needed. Bill explained the ART would not be as effective without the breathing.
Breathing Drills
Here is one the drills Bill gave me to help expand my right rib cage:
Now I know that for many of you this seems like voodoo.
If you think I’m crazy and should be wearing a tin foil hat, that’s fine, but take a look at this statement before you dismiss what I’m saying:
“The diaphragm will drive intra-abdominal pressure that helps to activate all the core muscles. If you aren’t breathing properly, you can’t get core the right core activation to build a monster, regardless of the transverse activation.” Charlie Weingroff (Quote from: http://deansomerset.com/2012/02/13/a-weekend-with-charlie)
If you want more information on breathing and how it relates to thoracic spine mobility and function, here is an excellent three part series by Dean Somerset: All Things Thoracic Spine Part 1: Functional Anatomy.
Anterior Pelvic Tilt, 360 Degrees of Pressure, and My Squat
After getting my shoulder squared away we then moved on to the squat. Bill had me squat for him, as if I were squatting a heavy load. Bill told me that my squat looked great and he wouldn’t change a thing other then where I created my pressure. He pointed out like many power lifters I was pushing out too much into the belly instead of creating 360 degrees of pressure. This caused me to go into anterior pelvic tilt and forced me to run into my hips, so to speak. Here is a great video of Bill explaining this:
So you’re probably wondering, was this effective for me? All I can say is,“Wow! What night and day difference!”
Here I am doing pause squats with 500 pounds a couple of years ago. Notice that I’m wearing Olympic shoes. Look at my low back at the bottom. I was pretty much squatting with my low back.
Here I am two days after working with Bill. This is accessory work after my pull, as I had no plan on going up to 500 on the safety bar (pretty much a front squat). It felt effortless so I kept adding weight. Notice I wore no Olympic shoes. Getting depth was easy, and therefore I was keeping my pelvis in a good position.
Now here is the clincher: one week after working with Bill and working on what he taught me, here is a 400lbs squat with 400lbs of chain, belt only. I was only planning on working on form that day, hence no training partners. I have not had 800lbs on my back since I last competed years ago and I have only been training one, maybe two days a week for the last year. It felt effortless so I kept adding weight. I also did not have any stiffness in my low back at all the next day, which is a first for me. Notice how easy it was for me to get to and find depth, and look at my low back position. In the past I had to fight and search for depth. Not now, because it feels natural.
I am excited to see what I can do with this new information. I also think it proves the fact that no matter who you are, if you want to be successful, you need someone else to take a look at what you’re doing. Since I discovered how important breathing is and how important being able to create 360 degrees of pressure is to not only my health but my performance, we have added some really quick breathing drills to the beginning of each of our classes/training sessions. The results have been dramatic. People are moving better, and there are reports of low back stiffness going away. Here are the two drills we have added:
Conclusion
Like I mentioned, this may seem like voodoo witchcraft to some of you “squat, eat, sleep, repeat” guys out there, but take it from me, it works. I definitely think we should focus on getting really strong at the basic movements, but remember, the body functions as a unit and it will always compensate and find the easiest way to do a particular movement. If you have any glaring weaknesses/imbalances like I did, you are much more prone to injury. Plus, what if I told you that you were leaving lots of weight on the table and it would only take you 5 minutes a day to get significantly stronger. Would you be interested? I sure hope so! So take a few minutes and work on the breathing drills I linked above. They have worked wonders for me and my clients in a short amount of time. I hope you enjoyed this article!
Tabata: Sumo-Deadlift High-Pull - 75/45 lbs 15m Sprint/Push-ups - (regular) Box Jumps - 24"/20" Hang Power Snatch - 75/45 lbs
*Tabata is 20secs work; 10 secs rest for 8 rounds (4mins). *Rest 1min between each exercise. *On the Sprint/Push-ups: Sprint 15m at the beginning of every round and immediately drop down into the push-ups. *Your score for each exercise is the lowest number of reps you make in any round for that exercise.
In 1850, George Barker Windship was a sixteen-year-old freshman at Harvard University. He was five feet tall and 100 pounds. But by the time he graduated, having logged endless hours in the college gymnasium, Windship was known as the strongest man at Harvard.
Soon thereafter, he came across a weightlifting machine on a Rochester, New York street, surrounded by curious passersby. Newly strong, Windship tested the machine, and ended up lifting 420 pounds using a technique now known as a partial deadlift or hand-and-thigh lift. Inspired, he returned to Boston and created his own lifting device by “sinking a hogshead in the ground and placing inside it a barrel, filled with rocks and sand, to which he attached a rope and handle. Then, standing on a platform he constructed above the barrel, he mimicked the partial movements of the lifting machine he had tried in Rochester.” Practicing with this machine and other devices and harnesses he created, Windship reportedly maxed out with a lift of 2,600(!) pounds.
By 1861, Windship had graduated from Harvard Medical School and had made a name for himself as the “American Samson,” a health reformer known across the country for bucking the then-prevailing wisdom about proper nutrition and fitness. While most experts pushed vegetarian diets and exercises with — at most — light weights and moderate resistance, Windship had a very different take on things.
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… [H]eavy 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.
Windship’s health lectures, feats of strength, and impressive physique garnered plenty of attention, disciples, and copycats who developed their own lifting machines to mimic Windship’s machine-based partial deadlift exercise, which came to be known as the “Health Lift.” For example, one New York-based company sold a contraption called “Mann’s Reactionary Lifter” similar to Windship’s device — a “cast iron lifting machine” that could be “adjusted from twenty to twelve hundred pounds”:
Two handles attached to the weighted lever arm so that by standing on the machine’s base, with a handle in each hand and the knees slightly bent, the lifter would simply straighten the legs to move the weighted arm a few inches. Prominently displayed in the advertising for this machine was a fashionably dressed young woman complete with bustle and corset. “Side-lifting” machines, such as Mann’s, were partly designed with women in mind. The idea was that the two side handles made it unnecessary for women to change their clothes for a workout.
The “Health Lift” was deemed the only physical exercise a man or woman needed — or wanted. After all, it was simple, straightforward, and offered fast results: “Pile heavy objects onto a machine, and then lift it. Workout completed, fitness and health improved — instantly.” In cities across the United States, gyms and fitness studios outfitted with similar “Health Lift” machines opened their doors, attracting white collar workers hoping to squeeze a quick workout into their lunch hour.
But while others took the exercise and ran with it, Windship himself didn’t appear very interested in capitalizing on the business opportunities presented by the “Health Lift” craze. He focused his attention elsewhere, patenting and selling the first-ever plate-loading free weight in America. (In other words, it was the great-great-grandfather of not only Olympic barbells, but also those fancy adjustable-weight dumbbells hawked on late night infomercials.
Windship also invented the first all-in-one full-body weight machine — something he called the “Apparatus for Physical Culture,” which “contained a lifting platform, cables for chest work, a rowing machine and a chinning bar.” (Eat your heart out, Soloflex.)
Sadly, Windship didn’t live long enough to see much success from these ventures. He died of a massive stroke at the age of 42.
The Health Lift faded from public view in the years after Windship’s death. With the sudden passing of the most prominent voice of modern weightlifting (and at such a young age), it’s not surprising that people began questioning the health benefits of resistance training. Nonetheless, competitive athletes and influential health reformers continued to employ Windship’s lifting protocols. Robert J. Roberts, the YMCA’s first physical education director, was a Windship disciple, and incorporated heavy lifting into the Y’s physical training program. Even the controversial (and bowel movement-obsessed) physician John Harvey Kellogg (of corn flakes and “Road to Wellville” fame) was a big proponent of the Health Lift.
Eventually, the Health Lift evolved into what we know as a deadlift — arguably the best all-around lift for full-body strength and muscle development. Over the past century and a half, barbell deadlifts gradually surpassed the machine-based Health Lifts in popularity and efficacy. Today, the Health Lift still has its place: With a higher starting position, partial deadlifts (which are now typically done with racks and bars rather than wooden machines) don’t put as much strain on the lower back and therefore enable the lifting of much heavier weights. But as Mark Rippetoe writes in “Starting Strength,” deadlifts incorporate lower back strength — something that’s vital to sports conditioning:
The ability to maintain a rigid lumbar spine under a load is critical for both power transfer and safety. The deadlift builds back strength better than any other exercise, bar none. And back strength built with the deadlift is useful: while the bar is the most ergonomically friendly tool for lifting heavy weights, a 400 lb. barbell makes an awkward 85 lb. box more manageable.
The takeaway: By incorporating lower back strength, deadlifts are an improvement on Windship’s “Health Lift” — the original lift for optimal functional fitness. Plus, deadlifts are fun and more badass-sounding than “Health Lifts.”
