Kettlebell lifting and athletic gymnastics
On the Development of Athletic Gymnastics
English summary of Tyazhelaya Atletika. Ezhegodnik 1986 (Moscow: Fizkultura i Sport, 1986), pp. 51–53: the text is paraphrased, not translated.
Athletic gymnastics is one of the most accessible forms of physical culture. Weight training has long interested our country as a way to develop the muscles harmoniously, form posture, build strength and improve health. Systems of the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth century include the methods of Hippolyte Triat, I. Muller’s “My System”, and the dumbbell systems of E. Sandow, Stolz and I. V. Lebedev.
Sandow and the early systems
Eugen Sandow did most to popularise exercises for strength, health and physique. His system, progressive for its time, developed strength and proportionate muscles, and brought spring dumbbells, rubber apparatus and textbooks. His books lead among those published in Russia around 1900. L. A. Chaplinsky, theorist and historian of athletics and chairman of the All-Russian Union of Weightlifters, wrote in Russky sport that Sandow could count on immortality in the science of physical development as the first successful populariser, and partly the creator, of the dumbbell system bearing his name.
Growth and controversy in the USSR
From 1962 the journal Sportivnaya zhizn Rossii made athletics popular among adolescents, youths and men with readers’ letters and competition reports; books and exercise complexes followed. The All-Union Conference on Gymnastics (Moscow, 2–5 April 1968) placed athletic gymnastics among the general developmental branches, noted its rapid growth and forecast that many young and middle-aged people would take it up, since it quickly develops strength and acts intensively on the body’s form and function.
Popularisation brought polemics over its value, place in physical education, effect on health, methods and definitions; some praised athletics, others questioned weight training altogether. Competent specialists gave no scientific conclusions, and lack of objective information, common views, sound methods and trained coaches kept attitudes negative for long.
In 1978 an all-union commission on athletic gymnastics was formed under the USSR Weightlifting Federation (chairman R. P. Moroz, secretary R. V. Kalinauskas) to guide volunteer commissions in cities and republics.
Who takes part
Over 200,000 people practise athletics. Leningrad, where it began in 1960 and the first club opened at the Lenin Stadium in 1961, now has over 20 clubs and sections with about 2,000 members. By occupation, 50 % are pupils and students, 40 % workers and engineers, and 10 % scientists, servicemen and others; by age, 39 % are 15–20, 40 % 21–30, 12 % 31–40 and 9 % over 40. Most are thus students of conscription age and young workers.
Athletics helps organise leisure, education and health. It is universal: nearly anyone can do it, alone at home or in gyms under a coach, even those too “old” or “unpromising” for other sections or retired from big-time sport. Schools already use it to attract pupils.
Harmonious physique and all-round ability match ideas of beauty; bodily beauty and polished technique are a means, not an end, of forming an all-round developed personality of communist society. Competition, a natural need, does not conflict with this; contests, held since 1961, draw large audiences and comprise the bench press, barbell squat, deadlift and free exercises. Standards are high, as wins abroad show.
Athletics abroad
The International Federation of Bodybuilders (IFBB) unites 127 countries. Socialist countries attend closely to the sport, growing fastest in the GDR, Bulgaria, China, Poland and Czechoslovakia.
In the GDR mass contests such as “Seeking the Strongest Schoolboy and Schoolgirl” are popular, sports athletics is in the Spartakiad programme, thousands of youths practise it, and specialists say it strengthens character and will. China, an IFBB member since 1984, held its Third Championships (“Hercules Cup”) that year: over 600 competitors, 50 from 12 organisations in the final, about 10,000 spectators.
In Bulgaria athletic gymnastics develops independently of weightlifting: ten competitions in two years, over half international with Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary and Romania, drew over 2,000 spectators, and it has not hindered weightlifting. Poland has developed athletics for over 25 years; its team took part in the 1984 European and 1985 world championships, and the 1986 European championships will be in Warsaw, the first in a socialist country.
Further development of athletics, its management and scientific support will preserve health, raise working capacity and improve ideological work.