The Way to Live: In Health & Physical Fitness
Breaking news...from 1908
“Health can never be divorced from strength.” - George Hackenschmidt, “The Way To Live” (1908)I could wrap it up right here, but let’s continue further…
Consider this analogy - Strength (mental; physical; diet; lifestyle) is your cup. How much life can you currently fit into your cup? Increase your strength, and the size of your cup also increases, allowing you to fit in more life.
Another way to frame this: “Live until you die.” - Dan John
Raise your hand if you’re desperately confused about where to look, who to listen to, and what to do for your personal fitness regimen. I get it; there’s a lot of noise out there.
The great thing about revisiting old texts like “The Way To Live”, is that they are the closest thing you will find to instruction given by people who had to overcome real-life problems, like the real possibility of dying in winter or succumbing to the attacks of disease in their youth.
Needless to say, most fitness influencers today do not have these problems, so their motivation to actually help you is quite low.
People like Hackenschmidt were training to first live a long and robust life, not to sell more books or increase their celebrity. He was concerned with practicing good overall lifestyle choices and not inventing quick fixes.
Hackenschmidt lived a most unusual and colorful life. He traveled the world and knew presidents and kings intimately. Well-educated, in later years, he became a writer and lecturer on philosophy at institutions such as Harvard and Yale universities.
Excerpt from the book’s Forward:
He’s an outstanding example of the old Greek Adage, “A sound mind in a sound body,” or its modern counterpart, the Strength and Health magazine slogan - “Devoted to the Culture of Mind and Body.”
This combination of training manual and biography, “The Way To Live”, was originally published in 1908 and, by 1940, after 21 editions, was considered the largest-selling book on physical culture ever. Georges Karl Julius Hackenschmidt, The Russian Lion, is one of the immortals of the strong man world.
When you follow the advice of George Hackenschmidt, you take instruction from a man who has done things, a man who follows his own system of living with great success as you too can do.
The best proof of its excellence and the splendid results many thousands of men and women have received from the instruction it contains. It should be in the library of every strength and health seeking man or woman.
Thank you for reading!
References -
Archive: "The Way To Live"(Free PDF)
The Rogue Legends Series: George Hackenschmidt (YouTube)
Based on my personal experience, here is a list of modern coaches I recommend who walk the talk and work in service of their students -