The Health Lift

[Note: I originally published this post on the recently-hacked and now-defunct Five Tribe blog. That site's kaput, but I managed to salvage a few of my favorite posts, including this one.]

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.”

So do ‘em.

[Sources: The H.J. Lutcher Stark Center,  Iron Game History]

A History of Flab

While I await the arrival of my P90X package, I thought I'd take the time to outline my personal history with fitness. From a relative standpoint, it's actually pretty short, since until a few years ago, the only running I did was to hide from my P.E. teachers.

I was not, by any stretch of the imagination, an athletic child. My parents didn't push sports. My dad, in particular, preferred that I engage in sedentary pursuits, like reading, drawing and sitting as motionless as possible. And while my grandmother looked after us kids during the day, she did it from an armchair in front of the Lawrence Welk show, so we were pretty much house-bound. In elementary school, I'm fairly certain I failed the President's Physical Fitness Test because I couldn't perform a single chin up. To borrow a line from Howard Stern, I was raised like a veal.

Thankfully, I never had a sweet tooth, and my diet was okay, so I never got chubby. Still, I was a flabby, unathletic kid, with no strength, endurance, physical coordination, flexibility or balance. In eighth grade P.E., our class had to run laps around the school for a half hour. A friend and I ran until we were just out of sight of our gym teacher, and then hid in the bushes until class ended.

In high school, to avoid P.E., my best friend and I joined a gym. (At our school, we could get ourselves excused from P.E. if we engaged in some sort of extracurricular sport or exercise program, and my buddy's dad got us a cheap membership at his gym.) My friend and I went regularly -- twice a week! -- and over the course of a year or so, I ended up adding some muscle to my frame. But although I learned a lot about how to perform basic resistance exercises (bench presses, lat pull-downs, leg presses, etc.) and got acquainted with concepts like muscle hypertrophy and pyramiding sets, I never took the weight training very seriously. It didn't help that our assigned personal trainer spent most of his time staring at his own abs in the mirror and ignoring us, but we didn't exactly help ourselves, either: After every workout, we'd reward ourselves with a big-ass, sugary ICEE and a cheesesteak with fries.

But it was in college that I really let myself go.

I was the poster child for the "Freshman 15." I subsisted entirely on fatty, carb-loaded foods served buffet-style in my dorm cafeteria: fries, ice cream, spaghetti, fried chicken, pizza. Meanwhile, I exercised as little as humanly possible. A good friend of mine would drag me to the gym with her every morning before class, but while she worked out like a maniac, I slept on a bench in the hallway. Not surprisingly, I got tubby.

In my final semester of college, after my girlfriend moved back home, I took it up a notch and ate with abandon. Breakfast consisted of a chocolate almond croissant. Lunch meant grabbing a Chinese takeout box of golf ball-sized fried, batter-coated chicken chunks with sweet and sour sauce and white rice (and a single piece of broccoli -- my one concession to the vegetable food group). My afternoon snack was a giant slice of pepperoni pizza, and dinner was a heavy-duty fast food meal from Foster's Freeze: a greasy fried chicken sandwich, a heaping order of fries and an enormous strawberry milkshake.

It wasn't until I moved across the country to attend law school that I started shrinking back to a more normal size.

Of course, I didn't lose weight in a healthy way or for healthy reasons. I shed pounds because I was depressed -- I hated my school, I hated the city in which I lived, and I missed my girlfriend, who still lived on the opposite coast. And without a car, I didn't have easy access to fast food chains and pizza joints. This doesn't mean I started watching my nutrition: When I wasn't catching rides to local restaurants with friends, I ate nothing but frozen dinners and Triscuits. (Having only two items on my grocery list made shopping a breeze, and I was too depressed to care about nutrition or variety.) My apartment building had a fitness center in the basement, and since I had trouble sleeping, I spent my evenings running raggedly on the treadmill, glassy eyes glued to whatever was on TV. (It was usually Montel Williams or Jerry Springer. Classy!) I got skinny-fat; I lost weight but built no muscle. Still, I was slowly lurching my way out of the flabby hell I'd entered during college.

After law school, when I returned home to begin my career as a wage slave at a law firm, I put back on some pounds, which wasn't hard to do given the long hours chained to my desk and the restaurant meals charged to the firm. I had a membership to a fitness center (and actually represented a chain of gyms), but rarely stopped in to work out, despite the close proximity of the gym to my office. I didn't get as big and sloppy as I was in college, but after a few years of padding my midsection with lard, I felt sluggish, slow and gross.

To address this, I took up running. Every day, I ran 4 to 6 miles around a lake near my house or in the park. I ran up and down hills, on wooded trails and up steep inclines. I ate better. It was fucking hard, but I felt great. The pounds melted off. My legs were strong. I was averaging 25-30 miles a week, gaining endurance and speed, and soon began interval training.

Things were changing on the home and career fronts, too.  After years of the law firm grind, I managed to land a new, less stressful and more balanced job.  And M and I moved out of the city and fled to the 'burbs, where runners ruled the road, and where a gym was conveniently located less than half a mile from our house. So I decided to start weight training, too. I began working out religiously. With the help of a trainer, I developed a full body workout routine. I signed up for the FitLinxx exercise tracking system at the gym, and started competing against myself and other gym rats for the most weight lifted, the most gym visits, the most reps. This was the perfect motivation tool -- I wanted FitLinxx's validation that I was lifting more than anyone else at the gym. It was structured and data-driven; I could see the results when the Fitlinxx results were posted on the wall every month. I loved it. I hit the gym twice a day, for a morning workout and an evening workout. I made sure I devoted at least an hour a day on weight training, and a half hour a day on cardio. I kept running.  And over the holidays, M and I spent a few days (and a lot of cash) at Canyon Ranch in Tucson, where I learned even more about fitness and nutrition and incorporated my newfound knowledge into my workouts.

But as with most things, I eventully got bored with the repetitive nature of my weights-and-cardio routine. After our second kid was born and I got busier at work, I cut back on my workouts, and for the past year and half, I've been visiting the gym twice a week (at most) rather than twice a day. At night, after the kids are in bed, I make feeble attempts to work out in our home gym, but even when I manage to escape the gravitational pull of the couch and television remote, I end up exercising on cruise control, barely breaking a sweat on the elliptical machine or calling it a day after just a few sets of half-assed bench presses and back rows. I've been backsliding.

I need the motivation to push through this period of laziness and stagnation, and get fit. Hopefully, with P90X, I'll find the structure and motivation I need. 

I'm going to use this blog to keep myself accountable to the program.  And I'm going to do my damndest to post every single day.  I've seen other P90X blogs that trail off after a while; they're like ghost ships sailing around the Internet, waiting for their captains to reappear.  I'm determined not to abandon ship.  I doubt anyone will ever read this, but I know I'll be more likely to keep P90Xing if the alternative is potential public humiliation.

Besides, it's only 90 days, right?