Old School PT Training Arrows: Bigger or Better by Mark Hatmaker

 

[This offering can be consumed independently BUT, it is best read as a companion to the blog/podcast titled Three Old School Principles You MUST Have to Un-Stick Your PT. Surface understanding serves no good purpose.] 

“Don’t be tempted to mistake a good physical fitness score for tactical superiority.”—Owen West, 1^st Battalion, 1^st Marines, Sharkman Six

Let’s talk Training Arrows.

Training Arrows are an overall “True North” that is meant to correspond to an athlete’s comprehensive fitness/conditioning/skills goals.

Training Arrows will differ according to the athlete’s desired end.  The “True North” for an Old-School Six-Day Bicycle Racer or modern Tour de France hopeful will differ from that of a leather helmet days gridiron athlete of yore as it will differ for the modern-day Peltzman Effected scientifically engineered helmeted modern football player.

Training Arrows are less about the specific “How” than they are about the gestalt of the “Why.”

It is, again, the difference between the tactical [application] and the strategic [theory, heading, bearing, planning.] Again I urge a reading of Three Old School Principles You MUST Have to Un-Stick Your PT.

Of course, here, our focus is conditioning for combat—real world scuffling or sportive endeavors.

Our spotlight today shines not only on this combat arena but how Combat Athletes’ Training Arrows have reversed directions from the turn of 19^th to the 20^th century to the turn of the more recent one.

First, let us begin with what we know…

Today’s Training Arrow Trajectory

Bigger is Better.

More is Better.

Looking like The Rock or Chris Hemsworth is the benchmark.

This thinking makes up a large majority of today’s Training Arrow.

Let us look again at Mr. West’s opening quote.

“Don’t be tempted to mistake a good physical fitness score for tactical superiority.”—Owen West, 1^st Battalion, 1^st Marines

We’ll come back to the possible “Whys” of the reversal of today’s Training Arrows, at the moment, let us look to yesterday.

Past Training Arrows

If we look at athletes of the past, or beyond sports to the conditioning of high-performing Hosses of yore we see the ranks populated less by the comic book expectations we encounter today than a more reserved, more realistic, more, well, I’ll say it, efficient and effective performer.

Yes, the very large strong man was admired and ogled, Louis Cyr comes to mind as our stand-in icon of this class but…most of these plus-sized humans were, well, exactly that, a bit on the plus-size. Not exactly aesthetic wonders, but one need not be an aesthetic wonder to be effective.

If we look to the ranks of physical culture, and/or the combat sports of boxing and wrestling we will allow three exemplary individuals to stand-in for what was the average “large” size of each endeavor.

Keep in mind, these stand-ins were not outliers, they were pretty much the standard.

In physical culture we have Eugen Sandow, coming in at 185 to 195 pounds.

A far cry from today’s heavyweight bodybuilding class, yet, have a look-see at his physique and decide for yourself, “Yeah, but only if he were bigger would he be more pleasing to the eye.”

[Keep in mind, Mr. Sandow was not mere show-muscle, he could perform feats of strength as well. The aesthetic standard of yore also assumed ability—not mere, beach muscle. Use-Of muscle was the watchword.]

In boxing, Jack Dempsey, a heavyweight champion ranging in fighting weight from around 183 to 193—again a far cry from many of today’s heavyweights, yet, does anyone doubt his formidable punch?

In wrestling we have Jim Londos. In the puffery that often surrounds pro wrestling he was usually billed as weighing 200 pounds, but athletes in the know who stood alongside him, men such as David P. Willoughby, assert his weight as around 175 pounds.

[Londos, at a height of 5’ 8”, and a gander at his physique, Willoughby’s eyewitness estimation sounds far more in line with truth.]

The Training Arrow of the time was, forgive the word, weighted towards natural bounds and good performance weight.

This lighter, by current standards, Training Arrow was nothing new to the mind of Americans who were still steeped in the Frontier Tradition.

At the turn of the centuries before the one we are examining, the 1700s to 1800s, the voyageurs, the rivermen were considered Hoss athletes and were offered as physical exemplars in tale after tale of remarkable feats of strength and endurance.

When rivermen were portrayed in film we often get large burly Hosses, as if that was what it took to “get the job done.”

In fact, smallness was coveted. Room in canoes was valuable—larger men eat up room for stackable profits of beaver pelt. The average size was closer to a height of 5’6” to 5’8” with weight topping at around 165 pounds.

Young boys who idolized these Rivermen often lamented growth spurts as it took them out of the range of those they admired.

Leaner & Meaner

The Training Arrows of yore emphasized leaner means meaner not bigger is better.

Like Owen West’s tactical score observation—weight, be it muscle or flab—requires resources to move. Requires energy to shuffle about the planet.

Pre-motorized transportation when it was either you via foot, you on active waterways-paddling, poling, hauling etc., or atop a horse---size mattered. The larger the human animal to heft around, the more problems encountered.

Let us look to another Owen West observation to illuminate. Here he refers to a “swole” Marine.

“He has sculpted the perfect build given our working uniform: Like cops, it is protocol to beef up the biceps to fill out the rolled camouflage sleeves. When our Marines start pulling this crap—working on beach muscles for aesthetic purposes—Gunny and I run the extra meat off until they view the extra weight as a burden.”

Leaner does not mean aesthetics were off the table, again have a look at Sandow, Londos, or Dempsey.

The thought was more akin to an Old Master painting on home-spun canvas where a thin medium is used, allowing the contours beneath the paint to be revealed and incorporated as part of the aesthetic effect.

This is in opposition to today’s paint-by-numbers artist who sees deficits on the canvas and seeks to apply globs of paint to provide the illusion of dimensionality.

Start At the Cut

This leaner = meaner equation also applied to combat sports where weight cutting is often part and parcel of the game.

Formerly less ado was made about weight cutting as work-rate and frequency of fights/bouts served as checks on between-work bloating.

Fighters worked closer to their natural weight class simply because, weight cutting steals strength and stamina and winds up being a long-term drain on health.

For men and women putting food on the table each and every week, off time would raise an eyebrow.

Leaner and meaner meant “Why cut weight?”

Start at the cut, live at the cut.

This Training Arrow is opposite today’s beef up and then cut down mentality.

This was seen as counter-productive and health-killing.

So Why Did The Training Arrow Turn From the Target to the Self?

There is likely no single answer, but I will offer a few possible culprits.

One-The Movement from Reality to Fantasy.

Formerly the role models one encountered in life came from amongst those you knew or could at least could lay eyes on.

Men and women in the real world doing real world things to keep food on the table.

Likely these everyday Joes and Joannas had no “extra” time to spend in the gym, or perch upon a Peloton for hours at a time, thusly even these admired ones looked closer to the standard of non-enhanced human perfectibility.

Fully clothed they walked among us looking like “mere mortals” and not Asgard wannabes.

Without a comic book image, film “hero” with bulging muscles in view, CGI created derring do, or extreme outliers as the standard with every click and view, the standard of excellence lay within the power of the individual and not the needle, lab created scoopful, artistry of the photographer et cetera.

Two-Pharmaceutical Candy Shops

As we alluded to in culprit one, many today resort to scoops, needles, pills, sub-lingual concoctions to juice, boost, tweak, and terraform.

This arrow’s influence is most often manifested in the direction of Bigger is Better, as thus far, a potion or powder does not bestow Mr. West’s lamented tactical competence.

Size and “swole” stand in as pharmaceutical camouflage for “locked and loaded.”

We already have Mr. West’s modern day Marine perspective on this subterfuge.

Three—Gamifying Perfectibility

Speaking of Mr. West, let’s hit it again.

“Don’t be tempted to mistake a good physical fitness score for tactical superiority.”—Owen West, 1^st Battalion, 1^st Marines

Physical fitness scores have gone mainstream.

Where formerly this was the realm of military standards or the President’s Physical Fitness Tests, now everything from CrossFit to Yoga, to KneesOverToes has scoring, coveted progressions and standards to meet.

Many eyes [not all, and not all even in the examples I provided] have moved from conditioning being the preparatory fuel that goes into bolstering performance in an endeavor outside of preparation to simply “doing the thing that was supposed to get you ready for the THING.”

In essence we’ve become the simple-minded characters portrayed by Mark Wahlberg and John C. Reilly in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights quizzing one another about our bench press.

Many of us are more concerned with “What do you bench?” “What’s your Fran?” than “What can you do with all that prep?”

The Old School Training Arrow sought to reinforce and support intrepid endeavor be that in combat or fording the river.

The new school Training Arrow often seems to be aimed at nothing more than the reflection seen in the mirror; a solipsistic reflection that is too often compared with the unreality of much media imagery and too little with what actually exists around us.

Even worse, the time and energy spent pursuing this Arrow is fired in the opposite direction of an outward-bound target.

By my way of thinking, Old School Arrows hit the mark.

[For PT constructed on the trajectory of the Old School Training Arrow see our Unleaded Conditioning Volumes. Available volumes include:

Unleaded: Old School Conditioning The Chest Battery

Unleaded: Old School Conditioning--GFF Volume 3A:Scattergun Muscle GFF—Grip/Fingers/Forearms

Unleaded: Old School Conditioning Volume 2B: Stabilizing Muscle—Hips & Thighs

Unleaded: Old School Conditioning Volume 2A:Stabilizing Muscle—The Trunk

Unleaded: Old School Conditioning Volume I: The Pliant Physique

With more on the way!

[For more Rough& Tumble history, Indigenous Ability hacks, and for pragmatic applications of old school tactics historically accurate and viciously verified see our RAW/Unleaded/Black Box Subscription Service.]

Or our brand-spankin’ new podcast The Rough and Tumble Raconteur available on all platforms.