Ever since the world was introduced to Pumping Iron, fitness became a phenomenon much larger than ever before. Long before that film turned people on going to the gym, fitness was more geared towards bodybuilders that had more of a closed circuit with a following and mail-order courses were the norm with the most famous being Charles Atlas' Dynamic Tension. There were gyms around the country but nowhere near the quantity it is today.
If you wanted to get fit, you either learned by word of mouth where to find a gym or you found a course in various ads throughout countless magazines and you learned the ins and outs of lifting weights or doing calisthenics in school or through sports training. Gym training for all intents and purposes was geared towards bodybuilding, Olympic Weightlifting, Powerlifting and Some sports training. There was a time when sports coaches banned their athletes from lifting weights because they thought they had slowed them down. It turns out that wasn't always the case.
Back to what this topic is really about. As far back as anyone that ever wrote anything on fitness, somehow, there would be some kind of following. An extreme variation of this is some authors would make claims and instead of trying to help people get fit, it would be more like a snake-oil salesman and put ideas in people's heads that they're method is the very best and nothing else will give you what that method gave. It's marketing and prying on a demographic, that's all it really was and not all courses were that bad and had great success along with people who lived their lives for the better.
When fitness goes to the level of becoming more like a cult in some circles, that's where certain tend to become sketchy. Dynamic Tension was overall very successful and promoted great ideas for fitness, nutrition and what a boy can learn to become more of a man, it worked. The pros did outweigh more than the cons but it's not a course to turn someone superhuman and like a bible thumper, many people thought of it as such. When you treat a course beyond what it is and not think for yourself, you can get caught in a trap.
Here's another example, Alois P. Swoboda's course on Conscience Evolution & Fitness Course. Back before there was Maxick, Charles Atlas and Arnold Schwarzenegger, Swoboda developed a course for exercises purely as a means for living a healthy life without needing weights or other apparatus and focused solely on tension exercises and various calisthenics. Some of the claims he made up were way out there and for all intents and purposes, he was a quack and hard to tell what was truly believable. The people he said that did his course was a list of politicians, lumberjacks, athletes and even Harry Houdini and Charles Atlas which I'll admit is reaching it. He was what you would call a cult leader and claimed nothing came close and his method was the end-all be all. Even at the point where he claimed limbs would grown back, talk about messed up.
This was the norm for many physical culturists back in the day and quite a few were far more famous than others because look at the times back then; there was no internet, no cell phones, no way to truly prove what the best was and many claims never seemed to be real to believe yet many flocked and never had a second thought. It's scary sometimes how people are more like sheep than human.
Many of these courses worked and people changed their lives for the better, some weren't always so lucky and no matter how much they followed it to the T, they either got hurt or didn't understand what they were doing and just went with it without thinking for themselves. Like a typical cult, you want to believe everything a leader tells you, you become one-dimensional and you no longer focus on your individuality, you want to escape to something and if there's any hint of realistic approaches, it becomes painful to bare. Other Physical Culturists or those that claimed to be, pried on people's emotions and self doubt asking them general questions but coming at them with an iron fist while they put a smile on as they do it.
My friend John Peterson is another example of a Physical Culturist that has been known to go off the deep end a time or two and not realize he is drowning. His heart is in the right place and I've learned a lot from him, some good and some pretty damn bad. He does get a bad rap about what he does or claims but without question, he is a fanatic about exercise especially on refurbishing Dynamic Tension in 21st Century Society. His style of training changes quite often, he'll talk about high volume calisthenics one day, weight vest training the next or recently on Isometrics. He has had a bad few years and won't go into detail what those really were and some he has talked to me about were extremely dark but he has delayed his "latest" course so many times, the number is more than the books I've read over my lifetime. I loved his work on Pushing Yourself To Power and has one of the best books on Isometrics out there (even though it's a carbon copy of 7 Seconds To A Perfect Body) but his followers treated it as a one dimensional thing and acted like it was the greatest thing since sliced bread, bullshit, they were stuck in their own head and barely had a good physique to show for it.
Fitness courses in a nutshell, are nothing more than suggestions and ideas that doesn't really have anything new and takes bits and pieces of past courses and molded into a method or series of methods that reflect today's society. Don't misunderstand me, I love promoting various people and I love their work and had the pleasure of experiencing the very best but no single course that has ever been written is the GOAT. You can take the very best of what you learned and mold it to your individual goals or ideas that suit your needs. To be the very fittest you can be, you can't rely on one method unless it is all you can do and your body has extreme limitations, stick to the basics, find what suits you and what interests you. Not everybody is going to do crossfit or strongman and not everyone is going to get fit through MMA style conditioning, it's just not going to happen. Pick what interests you the most and adjust your goals to get the most out of your fitness.
Follow your own path, not strictly from a fitness manual.
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