Iron Icon: Paul Anderson
21 November 2005If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
The new photo is of one of my strength mentors: Paul Anderson. The photo was taken around 1965 and in it Big Andy weighed between 360 to 370 pounds at about 5-10 inches in height. Paul is doing a deadlift and his best was 800 pounds. Note how the little finger on Pauls right hand is straight and not wrapped around the barbell. He had injured this hand in a farm accident and it hindered his gripping ability. Pauls 800-pound effort was done five years before Don Cundy pulled the worlds first official deadlift of 800. Paul never did the deadlift in official exhibitions because he never wanted to eclipse the 760-pound world record of his mentor and friend Bob Peoples. Paul reportedly deadlifted 1,000 pounds using a homemade set of steel hooks to bypass grip limitations. Despite his bulk, Paul was extremely athletic and once beat an Olympic medal winner in a 20-yard dash. He had a 36-inch vertical leap and could do a standing broad jump of over 10-feet. Strength historian Glenn Middleton called Anderson The most scientific trainer of all time and I would agree. Paul was raised in rural Georgia and his isolation and the lack of information in that era forced him into unorthodox and innovative thinking. Back when Paul was first coming up, Olympic lifting, the overhead press, snatch and clean & jerk were the prevailing strength benchmarks. The accepted training orthodoxy of the day for the O-lifts was to practice the three lifts exclusively. When Anderson decided to attempt Olympic lifting he approached proficiency from a totally unique angle: get overwhelmingly strong in order to overcome technical deficiencies. He knew that due to structural limitations and lack of expert coaching he would not be able to excel using conventional methodology: his solution was to overwhelm technique with power.
The prevailing school of thought was to (due to the technically complex nature of the three quick lifts) devote all available training time to the practice of the lifts themselves. In this way technique would be refined and, by varying the repetitions, applicable strength built. All this would combine to improve performance. Anderson, out of ignorance and genius, utilized the odd lifts to improve his pure pulling and pushing power. Deadlifts, squats, bench presses, partial movements, upside down exercises, ropes, chains, barrels and pulley were used to build incredible raw strength. His technique was awful but his pure power so over-the-top that he shattered world records and won the Olympic gold medal, possessing possibly the worst technique ever seen on a world champion. He was quick as a cat, strong as bull and where the top European Olympic lifters exhibited incredible finesse and superb technical sophistication, Paul beat their collective asses with raw strength. He rose quickly on the national scene and a training injury to a top US Olympic lifter put Paul on the US squad embarking on a fateful overseas trip to Europe and Russia. It proved to be his international strength debut. The Russians became infatuated with Paul. Back in those days 260-pounds was considered huge. Pauls sheer size was exponentially impressive because of his raw power, sheer athletic ability and trimness. Soviet Premier (and hero of Stalingrad) Nikita Krushchev requested a private audience with Paul when the United States weightlifters visited the USSR on a State Department tour.
While in Russia Paul requested exercise benches and squat racks to train with; the Russian sport scientists, coaches and athletes watched in puzzlement as Andy trained for Olympic lifting using powerlifts. Bob Hoffman noted that the next time the US lifters visited Russia the Red Lifters had usurped and incorporated Andersons squats and power movements into their training. Paul blew the collective minds of the strength-crazed Russian public when he clean and pressed 402 in a Gorky Park exhibition. At the time the world press record was 363. He was dubbed, Wonder of Nature, and though virtually ignored in his home country, in Russia he attained the ancient equivalent of Rock Star status. Paul did some professional wrestling back in the states to earn money for his youth home and lost his amateur status as a result. Had he been able to compete in Olympic lifting during the sixties he likely would have ruled the heavyweight division until the rise of Alexev in 1970. Paul was the Leonardo DiVinci of strength; inventions and innovations came easy to him. For example, he theorized that breaking any exercise down into component sections (typically he would break a rep stroke down into thirds or quarters) and increasing poundage within the sectional parts would convert into strength gains when the whole rep stroke was reverted to. His first experiment with partials was typically both practical and effective: he filled two fifty-five-gallon barrels with cement after connecting them with a steel bar. He set the contraption in his backyard and dug a deep hole beneath the center of the bar. He would step into the hole and center himself under the bar then squat upward from a dead stop for a few inches. Paul would start by moving the 1000-pound object a few inches for a few repetitions.
Over time he would push his repetitions upward. When he could do 20-reps he would throw a few inches of dirt into the hole and repeat the procedure. Eventually the hole was gone and he was doing 20-reps with 1000. This was the embryonic birth of the modern power rack. Anderson was the first to popularize and formalize the three powerlifts: squat, bench press and deadlift. When the AAU institutionalized the three lifts in 1965 they called Paul in to help establish the rules. Paul eventually squatted 1200-pounds without any supportive gear. He push pressed 565 pounds overhead at a Muscle Beach exhibition and could bench press 600-pounds. He was without peer then and now. I was lucky enough to see him lift at his peak and was (I believe) the only correspondent to talk with him regularly before he passed away from Bright Disease. I saw him lift in 1966 when he put on an exhibition at the Silver Spring Boys Club. Paul squatted 900-pounds for repetitions; no spotters were requested or needed. He used our weights though he did use his own special, extra length bar. The fat 45-pound plates of the day would only allow about 600-pounds to be loaded on the standard Olympic bar of the day. He would routinely bend the bars of the day so he traveled with his own squat bar. He squatted wearing socks (to this day I dont know why) and made his reps with laughable ease. I that same exhibition he clean and pressed 420. The current world record was 418. This exhibition was no major deal for him, just another whistle stop as he barnstormed his way across the country. He pressed 445 in a later exhibition and the only reason he never pressed 500 was he could not clean the weight. (Pull the weight from the floor to the shoulders the damaged hand prevented his pull from equaling his pressing power) In the nineties
I talked with him on numerous occasions and worked up an article for Muscle & Fitness that never was published. He was incapacitated and wheelchair bound towards the end of his life but enjoyed talking with me about training and strength and the old days. Paul remained lucid and quite informed until he passed away. Many of his theories remain untested and underutilized, particularly his fondness for upside down lifts. He thought that there was an entire universe of potential in inverted rows and deadlifts, pulls to the neck and squats with the legs pinioned and the upper body allowed to move from the extended to contracted position all done while hanging upside down. I was sad when he passed away at age 53, if memory serves, and doubt well ever see another strongman to rival this one. He truly was a Wonder of Nature.
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