The Old School StrengthTraining Secrets Bible


Book Description

A huge compendium of Old School Strength training secrets, full of great pictures, methods and techniques compiled from a variety of awesome sources.




Great Men,Great Gyms of the Golden Age


Book Description

Take a blast into the past with a whirlwind tour of the greatest Golden age gyms ever to exist; Zuver's, Vince's, Bill Pearl's, Tanny's Dungeon, Yarick's, Muscle Beach, Gold's, Abe Goldberg's, more Culver City secrets. Loaded with tons of great pictures, actual routines, stories from the men that trained at these muscle factories




Body & Soul


Book Description

In the late 1980s Wacquant, a white, French-born, French and American sociology graduate student, entered the Woodlawn gym on 63rd Street in Chicago and began training as a boxer. This text invites us to follow Wacquant's immersion into the everyday world of Chicago's boxers.




Body & Soul


Book Description

When French sociologist Lo"ic Wacquant signed up at a boxing gym in a black neighborhood of Chicago's South Side, he had never contemplated getting close to a ring, let alone climbing into it. Yet for three years he immersed himself among local fighters, amateur and professional. He learned the Sweet science of bruising, participating in all phases of the pugilist's strenuous preparation, from shadow-boxing drills to sparring to fighting in the Golden Gloves tournament. In this experimental ethnography of incandescent intensity, the scholar-turned-boxer fleshes out Pierre Bourdieu's signal concept of habitus, deepening our theoretical grasp of human practice. And he supplies a model for a "carnal sociology" capable of capturing "the taste and ache of action." Body & Soul marries the analytic rigor of the sociologist with the stylistic grace of the novelist to offer a compelling portrait of a bodily craft and of life and labor in the black American ghetto at century's end.




Brothers of Iron


Book Description

In the depths of the Great Depression a scrawny, dirt-poor Jewish kid with a seventh-grade education picked up a barbell and got hooked on weight training. Building his muscles gave him confidence and hope for a better life. He pledged to make the great, transforming power of strength training available to everyone and to give bodybuilding all the glory it deserved.The kid, Joe Weider, enlisted his younger brother Ben in his quest, and together the Weider brothers accomplished things much bigger than Joe's boyhood dreams. The little muscle magazine Joe started, working at his family's dining room table, grew into a publishing empire. From a backyard barbell business, Joe and Ben built equipment and food supplement companies each as big as Weider Publishing. And they transformed bodybuilding into a hugely successful sport, organized under one of the largest and best-run athletic federations in the world.The Weider brothers are heroes to bodybuilders and fans all over the world. They're heroes because they're revolutionaries. The Weiders changed the way people think about exercise, health, and what makes a body beautiful. They changed the world and Brothers of Iron tells their fascinating story.




Stars in the Ring: Jewish Champions in the Golden Age of Boxing


Book Description

For more than sixty years—from the 1890s to the 1950s—boxing was an integral part of American popular culture and a major spectator sport rivaling baseball in popularity. More Jewish athletes have competed as boxers than all other professional sports combined; in the period from 1901 to 1939, 29 Jewish boxers were recognized as world champions and more than 160 Jewish boxers ranked among the top contenders in their respective weight divisions. Stars in the Ring,by renowned boxing historian Mike Silver, presents this vibrant social history in the first illustrated encyclopedic compendium of its kind.




Jersey Joe Walcott


Book Description

Born into extreme poverty in 1914, Jersey Joe Walcott began boxing at the age of 16 to help feed his hungry family. After ten years, without proper training and with little to show for his efforts beyond some frightful beatings, Walcott quit the ring. A chance meeting with a fight promoter who recognized the potential in his iron chin and hard punch turned Walcott's fortunes around, launching one of the greatest comebacks in boxing history. This biography details Walcott's youth, his dismal early career, and his legendary climb to become the heavyweight champion of the world at age 37, at the time the oldest man ever to win the coveted title. Along the way, he battled some of the most feared champions of his day, including Joe Louis, Ezzard Charles, and Rocky Marciano. With numerous period photographs and a foreword from Walcott's grandson, this work provides an intimate look at one of the grittiest, most determined boxers of the 20th century.







The Three Muscleteers


Book Description

The Three Muscleteers is the story of Gold’s Gym and what’s now known around the world as the fitness industry. Not long ago, athletes of most popular sports — football, basketball, baseball — never lifted weights. Coaches and trainers, even doctors, were against it, especially for women. The film Pumping Iron, which made Arnold Schwarzenegger a star, was shot at Gold’s Gym. That, along with the explosion of bodybuilding competitions that followed throughout the ‘80s was a “big bang” moment. Thanks to the trifecta of Joe Weider’s fitness magazines, Arnold’s stardom, and Gold’s Gym, the fitness industry was transformed. As one of the three owners of Gold’s Gym during its golden years, Ed Connors will inspire with his success stories of hundreds of visitors to his home in Venice, CA (only blocks from Gold’s Gym). Visitors he believed were destined for greatness, like action film star and WWE champion John Cena, who helped make Gold’s Gym "the Mecca" and the largest gym chain in the world. Ed believes life is half fate and half what you do with it. The Three Muscleteers amplifies the importance of taking risks, creating the perfect team, and never giving up — inspiring bodybuilders, wrestlers, athletes, actors, architects, CEOs, and anyone willing to take a chance to flex their own muscles.




Muscletown USA


Book Description