To the 100th anniversary of Russian weightlifting
Weightlifting Implements from Antiquity to Today
English summary of Tyazhelaya Atletika. Ezhegodnik 1985 (Moscow: Fizkultura i Sport, 1985), pp. 6–8: the text is paraphrased, not translated.
Everyone wants strength and a fine physique, and the plain barbell is the basic implement for it. The word comes from the German Stange, a metal rod, now called the bar; before reaching its modern form the barbell was greatly reworked.
Antiquity and the Renaissance
Egyptian warriors used stone or iron beams to decide who was strongest, forebears of the barbell. The Greeks made the first dumbbells, of stone, iron or lead and weighing 1.5–2 kg, and also used stone kettlebells and blocks. The largest, kept in the Olympia museum, weighs 143.5 kg (68×39×33 cm) and is inscribed "Bybon lifted me over his head with one hand"; a 480 kg block of black volcanic stone from Santorini says "Eumastus, son of Critobulus, lifted me from the ground".
Greek youths also lifted and carried stones, raising the load gradually, and sometimes carried a live calf on their shoulders. Vases show a youth lifting a large stone in each hand and another jumping with dumbbells, and a sixth-century BC sculptor carved the Moschophoros, the calf-bearer. Purposeful training evidently gave Greek athletes the strength for such feats, though how they lifted them is unknown. Their dumbbells with thickened ends have changed little and are still widely used.
The Romans followed, training in heavy armour and lead-soled boots or climbing stairs under load. In the Colosseum the performer Athanat walked in 200 kg armour and boots of 100 kg each, and Fuvius Silvius climbed stairs under 320 kg. After Rome fell, deliberate strength training and better implements returned only in the Renaissance.
From the Renaissance to the disc barbell
In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries English soldiers, like the Egyptians, pushed an iron beam, and Scots threw the hammer, an iron ball on a one-metre shaft; all later globe barbells likewise had a one-metre bar. Under Elizabeth I weights were recommended to youths instead of dancing. John Northbrook wrote that a stick with lead weights on its ends strengthened chest and arms, with boxing's pleasure but no blows: arguably the first barbell of adjustable weight. From the seventeenth to the nineteenth century stones, cannonballs, iron bars, clubs, heavy dumbbells and globe barbells of fixed or variable weight gave good results, and strongmen performed in circuses.
Napoleon Laisné's School of Gymnastics (1872) reports that Persian athletes used clubs ("miles"), adding lead to holes at the base when they seemed light, so that weight ranged from 1 to 9 kg. Basques threw an iron bar of 4–9 kg forward and behind the head, with one hand or two. The book explains how to make a dumbbell: cast lens-shaped balls joined by a short iron shaft, riveted at the ends and wrapped in leather as the handle. Globe barbells were made likewise. Others were weight kettlebells, "bulldogs" (heavy dumbbells), "jonglerkas" (juggling kettlebells) and cone-shaped "pyramids".
Globe barbells were solid or loadable, with hollow globes filled with sand or shot. The Germans at first called only the bare bar a Stange; A. Stolz of the anthropological commission in Karlsruhe, later in Russia, advised an iron bar of 50 mm and 50 pounds (20.5 kg) for medium loads, so the 20 kg bar dates from the last century, only its diameter shrinking to 28 mm. "Apollo's axle", a 165 kg wagon axle 50 mm thick, also played a part.
None of these could be loaded quickly. According to the Soviet historian B. Chesnokov, the disc barbell, with metal discs fitting the bar, appeared in Germany in the 1860s. It gradually ousted the globe barbell, at first in training, and has been the only competition barbell since the 1896 Olympics. The German engineer Berg devised the rotating bar early in the twentieth century; it was used in competition from the 1929 European championships in Vienna.
Russia and the USSR
Our peoples have long been famed for their heroes, whose festival contests of strength used an opponent's own weight, boulders, a smith's anvil, a heavy sabre, a horseshoe, a poker, a cast-iron "walking stick", cannonballs, kettlebells and maces. Ivan Poddubny took a cast-iron stick of about a pood (16 kg) on his walks; Ivan Zaikin once tied a rail in a knot, now shown in a Paris museum; Pyotr Krylov of Moscow, "king of kettlebells", jerked a barbell with hollow globes containing two tall soldiers. In the nineteenth century the Azerbaijani Alty Aylykh trained with gymnastic clubs of 46 kg each, still kept in the Azerbaijan Historical Museum.
V. F. Kraevsky, father of Russian athletics, contributed appreciably to the implements. After touring Western Europe he equipped an athletic study in his flat; the magazine Hercules said its kettlebell collection had no equal in Europe. His original disc barbell took cast-iron discs of 2 to 10 pounds locked by a nut, with marks on the bar for a two-hand grip (outer) and a one-hand grip (middle). It was very popular: the writer A. I. Kuprin wrote in the mid-1890s that no Kiev workshop could make one, and only through Dr Ye. F. Garnich-Garnitsky, founder of the Kiev circle where Kuprin trained, did it obtain a disc barbell loadable to six poods.
The disc barbell was first used only in training, and from the first Russian championships (1897) in competitions of every level; before that lifters used the loadable globe barbell. Kraevsky's barbell was improved before the Revolution by the Moscow lifter S. D. Dmitriyev and afterwards by Merited Masters of Sport Ya. Yu. Sparre (Moscow) and N. I. Koshelev (Leningrad). Today major competitions use rubber-coated discs, and the VISTI record barbell, approved for the Moscow Olympics, remains popular worldwide.