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I would prefer the physique of a bronze era bodybuilder over that of a mass monster any day.

Let's not overlook the fact he also looked absolutely killer in a suit. I might have to get that book.

The most impressive thing is that he built that physique without headphones.

HackenChad in 1908: understands progressive overload
Gym bros 120 years later: E G O  L I F T

I remember reading he was refused induction into the army, because the doctors thought he was so muscular, there had to be something wrong with him.

Hackenschmidt must have had the most insane stabilizers. It's absolutely insane, doing a leg press by balancing the bar on your feet. No wonder this guy was a top level wrestler.

I learned in his book that today men are taught to shovel as much food in their mouths as possible and lift for two hours a day to get big and strong. Hackenshmidt and his colleague Arthur Saxon had a completely different idealogy. They taught that looking after every aspect of mental and physical health made you better and stronger. He emphasized not only sleeping well, but taking care of your own skin by not wearing tight clothes, exposing your skin to the sun everyday for a given time, keeping your bed chambers clean because you spend most of your life in there, and much more things that are never brought up when trying to get physically strong. Simply fascinating

How people are saying these guys are small/unimpressive is beyond me. They look jacked af and 99% of the population would be beyond happy if they had a physique like those.

people who say bronze age body builders look small are the same people who say "6'0ft is average height" and "8 inches is small"

Can we acknowledge the fact that "Hack" built that physique without steroids and obviously was doing something right in that he lived just short of one hundred years, no modern "advanced" bodybuilders, strength competitors, or fitness stars are coming close to that these days.
Just an opinion!
By the way, love your channel and what your doing with your videos.

What impressed me the most is how well-spoken and smart his writing was, he clearly wasn't a "meat-head" but a learned athlete and intellectual which I think more gym-bros should strive to be.

Hackenschmidt’s advice about not expecting too much from light weight, high repetition training, is a not so subtle dig at Sandow’s light dumbell system, which was popular at the time.

the fact that this dude was accurately talking about the differences between strength, endurance, and hypertrophy training literally over 100 years ago (!!!) is absolutely mind-boggling, what a legend

strong, huge, intelligent, influential, and lived a long life... hackenschmidt is such an inspiration man

What a lot of people don’t understand is bronze era also trained for strength much more than mass. This means a LOT more.

Am I the only one that's impressed by the fact he made it to a ripe old age of 90!   Did he ever mention his diet?

Hackenshmidt is such an inspiration to me, he was massive, he was freakishly strong for the time period, he invented staple exercises , the bench press and the hack squat, and an original philosopher of training.

George is regarded as one of the greatest and influential wrestler of all time. He was a visionary honestly.

WTF who says these old school guys were small? They were huge given they didnt have multiple gyms to choose from, a GNC around the corner, educational material at all to tell them how to get big, etc. This is insane. They had to have basically trained in a super natural way and guess as to what nutrition to go towards, how to train and everything. Amazing to me that they did any of this.

It's not said in the video, but it's worth mentioning that Hackenschmidt is also usually credited as the originator of the bench press. This is probably why he had such a huge chest!