LA PALESTRA NON FA DIVENTARE FORTI

Walk into virtually any gym in the world and you will find any number of pumped up steroid users who think that they are “strong” men because they have eighteen-inch arms, can bench press a heavy bar, or look big in a tank top or T-shirt.

But how many of them are truly powerful?

How many of them have genuine athletic strength they can use?

How many of them could drop and give you twenty perfect one-arm pushups?

How many of them have spines that are strong enough, flexible enough and healthy enough that they can bend over backwards and touch the floor?

How many have the pure knee and hip power to squat right down to the ground and stand up again – on one leg?

How many of them could grab hold of an overhead bar and execute a flawless one-armpullup?

The answer is:

Almost none.

You will find almost no bodybuilder in any gym today who can perform these simple bodyweight feats. And yet the kind of bloated poser you see strutting the average gym floor is viewed by the media and the modern public as the epitome of strength and fitness.

The bodybuilder-type has become the accepted status quo of ultimate conditioning. This seems like total insanity to me. What does it matter how much weight you claim to be able to lift in a gym or on a special machine? How can somebody be considered to be “strong” if he can’t even move his own body around as nature intended?

Becoming Strong

The average gym junkie today is all about appearance, not ability. Flash, not function. These men may have big, artificially pumped up limbs, but all that the size is in the muscle tissue; their tendons and joints are weak. Ask most musclemen to do a deep one-leg squat – ass-to-floor-style – and his knee ligaments would probably snap in two. What strength most bodybuilders do have, they cannot use in a coordinated way; if you asked them to walk on their hands they’d fall flat on their faces.

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry when see the current generation of men duped into handing over a fortune in overpriced gym memberships and for weights and other exercise gadgets, all in the hope of becoming strong and powerful. I want to laugh because I admire the con trick for what it is – a perfect grift. The fitness industry has duped the whole world into thinking it can’t get by without all this equipment; equipment it then sells to the mark, or rents out at exorbitant prices (in the case of gym membership). I want to cry because it’s a tragedy; the average modern trainee – who is not on steroids – makes little gain in size from year to year, and even less progress in true athletic ability.

To become hugely powerful, you don’t need weights, cables, fancy machines, or any other crap that the industry or the informercials are brainwashing you into thinking you can’t do without. You can gain Herculean strength – genuine brawn and vitality – with no special equipment at all. But to unlock this power – the power of your own body – you need to know how. You need the right method, the art.

Such a method does in fact exist. It’s based on traditional, ancient forms of training, techniques which are as old as training itself. This method has evolved by trial-and-error over the centuries, and has proved its superior ability to transform flimsy men into steel-forged warriors time and time again. This method is progressive calisthenics - the art of using the human body to maximize its own development. Calisthenics today is seen as a method of aerobics, circuit training or muscle endurance. It isn’t taken seriously. But in the past – before the second half of twentieth century – all of the world’s strongest athletes earned the bulk of their power through performing calisthenics progressively - to become stronger and stronger, day by day, week by week, year after year.