Al Roy: Mythbreaker – Iron Game History – January, 1992

For reasons which will be examined in a later article, the coaches and physical educators of the early part of this century in the United State were almost unanimous in their belief that heavy lifting would somehow “bind” the muscles of an athlete, making them stiff and slow to contract. Furthermore, narcissism, in both principle and practice, was far less acceptable in those naturalistic days than it is now. In football, for instance, it was thought almost unmanly to do too much preparation for fall practice. “Hell, fall practice was preparation,” was the way the late Bully Gilstrap, a former college player and coach, put it in an interview several years ago. “It was all we got and more than we wanted. What we wanted was to play.”