Ye Olde Barbell

If you don't on occasion look at something heavy and wonder 'can I lift that?' then I think a part of you is dead. As a general rule, I view most playground challenges as worthwhile endeavors. 'Can I jump over that?', 'Can I climb that?', 'Can I catch you?'. You don't outgrow those challenges: you abandon them, and you do so to your own detriment. I've come to my own conclusions about societies that allow their adults to limit their development by trading scraped knees for desk posture, but that's a screed for another time.

I'll be back for you, desk jockey.

This is about barbells. More accurately, it's about lifting heavy things, and where barbells fit into that picture. 

Lifting heavy things is hardly a new development. Australopithecus Afarensis used tools 3.9 million years ago, and if our present drives and motivations have been evolutionarily conserved, shortly after wielding the first rock to make cave-burgers out of the slowest available animal, A. afarensis went looking for a bigger rock.

Old habits die hard.

Neolithic societies would erect megalithic structures such as monuments, without the benefit of Fred Flintstone's brontosaurus crane, indicating that a certain degree of brute force must have been necessary. With the forklift and crane still prohibitively non-existent for thousands of years, and with labor saving devices such as the lever and the inclined plane still requiring a liberal application of elbow grease, manual labor would be in vogue for centuries to come. The transition from moving stones as a necessity to moving stones for the purposes of exercise must have happened somewhere between then, and when the Ancient Greeks started to curiously shaped stones called Halteres to aid in training for Olympic events.

Wrap this up in pink vinyl, and you have TV retail potential.

What is interesting about these implements is that even this early in the development of the barbell, we see concessions made to accommodate the human hand. Rarely, if ever, in nature do we see objects of heavy weight with such convenient hand holds: tree branches are easy to grip, but not extremely weighty, logs are either devoid of grip or complicated by its inclusion (ever have the pointy end of a cut branch jam into your tender bits while moving a log?) and stones are, at best, huggable.

They pick things up, and then they put them down.

Why the desire to switch to something that could be easily gripped, versus something harder? Things that are harder to lift should be more challenging, and hence better for to train with, shouldn't they? If all we had to move in the ancient world was tree trunks, auroch carcasses and stones, this would be true, but our dexterous grip strength would no doubt benefit our prowess with tools like hammers, axes, swords and eventually the pinnacle of close-quarters weaponry, the chainsaw. In addition, activities such as wrestling and climbing placed a premium on that same strength.

For hundreds of years, weight training would continue with a haphazard array of implements, owing to the fact that every industry in existence was less of an industry and more of a one-of-a-kind show. Halteres-like doodads would sit alongside weighted shoes, swinging clubs and the big f--king rock.

When the industrial revolution began to make standardization a part of life, lifting implements began to follow suit and the modern barbell began to take shape. The late 19th century, barbells appeared and would be mass produced by a number of different companies, including Berg Hantel, The Milo Barbell Company and York Barbell. Early models would either have hollow spheres on either end, to be loaded with sand or shot, or plates which could be attached by various mechanisms.

You couldn't rock sandals this hard if you tried.

Eventually, the plate-loading model won out due to ease of use, and a standardizing force in the shape of the Olympic games would solidify a peculiar development: the revolving barbell. The Olympic committee would eventually come to recognize only three lifts: the press, the clean and jerk, and the snatch. Eventually, the press would be retired, only leaving two. Much later, in the 1950s, powerlifting developed as a sport in its own right, focusing on the deadlift, the squat and the bench press.

Why would this turn out to be the case? Why these lifts and these implements? Take the clean as an example:

Mock Donny's singlet, and you're mocking a Marine Corps veteran. 

Good luck with that.

In a clean, the barbell travels in as close to a vertical line as it can, and this line is perpendicular to the ground, and directly aligned with your center of balance. If you do not heed this path, your lift will fail or fall short of your potential. Either way, Mark Rippetoe will yell at you.

I can see your skeleton, and it is humerus.

Failing due to not following this path is largely due to the intersection of physics and physiology. If I clean 180kg at a bodyweight of 105kg (possible, if I was Donny Shankle) basic physics and physiology says I have a limited range of weight and leverage in which to play. Outside of that range of values, pulling on the bar will result in me falling forward more than the bar leaving the ground. The barbell makes this procedure remarkably easy due to the fact that the cross-section your body deals with is minimal in size, reducing to a minimum that amount of movement needed to accommodate  it. This doesn't parse easily, so it's probably best to just show Derek Poundstone lifting things:

He picks things up and then he puts them down.

The atlas stone performs roughly the same task as the clean: it brings a mass from the ground to your shoulders. The stone presents an immediate problem in that there's no convenient way to hold it. Remember the Halteres? Remember the hugging? Here it is again. Furthemore, unlike the convenient starting height of the barbell, the stone requires a grip much closer to the ground, increasing the distance needed to go from the ground to your shoulder. Ignoring the issue of grip, were Poundstone to lift it in the same manner as one would clean, several hundred pounds of concrete would stall at his crotch. In order to complete the lift, he needs to shift his body around the stone as it rises, so that it stays balanced above his feet. The same limitations stemming from human physiology and physics that govern success in the deadlift apply here as well, but the body has a much larger volume to contend with in the stone. Do you think a stone lift requires different neural firing patterns and muscular adaptation? It most certainly does. I'm not even going to go into the fact that Olympic bars have bearings in them

No, I lied. I'm going to discuss rotating barbells. If you've ever cleaned or attempted to clean a barbell that doesn't have bearings, or has bearings that are remarkably crappy, you'll know exactly what I'm talking about: in order to clean it, you're going to have to let go of it. Mid clean. Either that, or you will have to develop untold of wrist strength. The reason why is simple: the shift from the knuckle-down position you lifted the bar with from the ground, to the palm-up position you've ended up in requires you to twist the barbell 270 degrees. The rotating barbell has bearings which isolate the bar from the weights, which means you only twist 45lbs, whereas a solid barbell would have you twist the entire weight.

What I'm getting at, after discussing all the minutia of the standard barbell and the clean is that it is an intensely contrived tool, designed to lift weight. Rarely outside of a gym will you find something that wants to be lifted as much as a barbell. Many things possible with the barbell are impossible or made remarkably difficult without it. Anyone who has tried to lift a 155lb concrete-filled tube will attest that it's an entirely different experience from lifting the same weight on an Olympic bar. But who would do such a thing?

Who indeed.

And why would you do such a thing? Because rarely outside of a gym will you find something that wants to be lifted as much as a barbell. Think of any heavy piece of furniture you have ever lifted. Think of having to carry someone on your shoulders. Think of moving a pile of lumber. Though the same principles of lifting apply to these objects as they do to a barbell, the skills required to do so are different, and should be attended to in their own right. Unless the barbell is the only large heavy object you intend to lift (and this excludes the Donny Shankles of the world, who have in fact dedicated themselves to that sport) you should consider the other large heavy objects of the world and what they have to offer.