You can make your abdomen trim and strong. You can make your clothes fit much better. You will not have that roll of fat around your middle depleting you of vital energy. You can't be ruptured if you have a strong abdomen. Look at yourself in the mirror right now... .. be honest with yourself. The chances are 9 out of 10 you need abdominal exercises. You need the York Abdominal Course, the only qualified instruction that tells you how to normalize your body. It contains important facts about building internal strength. It lists foods to help you gain Iweight if needed and food you should eat to keep your waist down. When your Vital Zone is not in perfect working order, can have constipation, digestive

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BODYBUILDING

(Continued from page 45)

The exercise often called the French press is not a natural movement, the arms are worked unnaturally and sore muscles, attachments and even bones result. The very wide bench press is not a natural movement. It is common for the pectorals, the points of the shoulders and the elbows to become sore when too much of this movement is practiced. Even some good movements when practiced in sets to excess, will cause sore spots.

There are so many good exercises, natural movements such as nature intended, which will develop the muscles to their limit of strength, and development. I always preferred to have the members of our team and those. who train in our gymnasium practice a number of movements for the same muscle group rather than continuously repeat the same movement. For instance, instead of set after set of the bent over single arm curl, the front curl, the back curl, the thumbs up curl, the twisting curl (often called the Zottman exercise), upright rowing motion, bent over rowing motion, cleaning, are all good movements to develop the biceps and allied muscles.

If your joints, or even the bones get sore, you'll just have to be controlled by how it feels for a time. Do the exercises your muscles will permit. Heat from a good athletic rub, massage which you can do yourself to the affected part, and moderate exercise after a couple of days of rest should get rid of the sore spots. And then avoid as much as possible the movements which made it sore, if you had a sore finger you could not cure it by constantly putting it against a grinding wheel. Give the sore spots a chance to heal.

I am a great believer in development through useful movements. The practice of the three lifts and assistance exercises are all natural movements. They produce, not only a magnificently built body, but a strong and athletic body. Be sure that lifting movement exercises are a part of your training routine. Too many body builders have a tendency to over-develop their best parts and lose the natural symmetry of their bodies.

BEHIND THE SCENES (Continued from page 26)

If the USA WL Team is going through Sydney, I would like to have them stop at the Royal Hotel as my guests. Give my regards to all the York boys, and tell Vinci my machine is easier on both the bar and platform than his "let 'em rip" technique.

Rube Hawe

Yass, N.S.W. Australia

When Rube mentioned in his letter that his Power Machine was not as hard on the floor as the Vinci method, he didn't know how right he was! Mighty Mouse developed a tremendous disregard for floors and platforms after his trip to Munich last year where he watched the leading

STRENGTH

AND HEALTH

Soviet lifters simply step out from under the weights and let the bell crash to the floor from arms length overhead.

When Ike "Betcha" Berger came to York to join Chuck in his bodacious assaults upon the weights, he too was promptly infected with the Vinci credo.

"Let the barbells fall where they will!" So every training session during the year past has been a very audible one, and anybody within a half-mile of the Iron Works could hear Crash after Crash, until the very earth trembled. Protests of the quieter members of the York Gang fell upon ears already deafened by self-inflicted Crashes. And at last the inevitable happened... something had to giveand in this case it was the floor.

It is a sad commentary upon the destructive genius of modern youth that this same sturdy floor, which had withstood, over a period of 25 years, the super-heavy lifting of champions like Terlazzo, Bachtell, Terpak, Grimek, Stanko and Davis. (plus a score of others), finally gave up the ghost to a pair of 123 and 132 lb. Atom Smashers.

Happily the Wrecking Crew has now departed for Melbourne and a blessed. quiet now reigns in the Old Gym. We hope we can have repairs made before the Gremlins return, but we print this as at warning to Rube Hawe and all the folks Down Under .. for Heaven's sake, don't invite these guys in to practice lifting in your hotel unless you have Earthquake and Hurricane insurance!

* * *

IT is so quiet in the Gym now that the metaphysical arguments of Jules Bacon, Steve Stanko, George Shandor and Jake Hitchens seem louder and sometimes even funnier than they have in the past. Stray visitors to the gym are always mystified by the verbal pyrotechnics of these members of the York Gang. The mystery is HOW can they get any training done when they are continually yakking? Yet each one of these veterans of the soapbox has acquired a sort of sixth sense which enables him to go from one exercise to the next and perform the required number of repetitions without once pausing for breath or losing a single point in the current argument!

Not long ago a barbell bug from California dropped in for a workout, and he was unable to concentrate on his training because of a particularly virulent wordbattle between the members of the York Debating Society. He just sat around with his mouth open, shaking his head sadly. from side to side. He finally departed for the shower room, and we happened to enter the dressing room shortly afterward. He was talking to himself in the shower. "How do they do it?" he moaned. "How can anybody develop a V shape when all they do is train for 'pear-shaped' tones? I yam going to be glad to get back to Muscle Beach!"

* *

JOE PETERS, Schenectady Police Captain, dropped in to see us recently, accompanied by young Joe Peters, Jr. Joe has been a frequent York visitor over the past 20 years, and the first place he headed for, after saying "hello" in the office, was the Old Gym. We walked back a minute later, and there he stood in the gathering dusk, looking around the big room. There were no trainees working out, and the place was deserted, but he didn't seem to mind. We broke the silence, "Looks just the same, doesn't it?" "Yes," he replied, "it looks just the same as it did twenty

• DECEMBER, 1956

years ago when I first came here to visit. And whenever I see it, it brings back

memories.

وو

"I know what you mean, Joe," I said. "In the half-dark of a Fall evening, the place is full of Ghosts.

Across the room, along the North wall, the old bench still stands in its accustomed place, with the sign over it "For Lifters Only," with its surface highly polished by the "seats of the mighty." How many world famous strength figures have rested here between training lifts, both on their way up to a World Championship and on the way down to the end of their athletic careers... how many dreams have been dreamed. ... how many hopes for lifting fame . how many foot/pounds of energy have been gathered and expended here?

Some of the equipment goes back even farther than the lifetime of the York Barbell Club, for there is the famous handand-thigh platform built by Alan Calvert in 1917, and the big dumbell used by Louis Cyr in the nineteenth century! So the ghosts of strongmen who have never even set foot in the gym are also here, intermingled with the shades of hundreds upon hundreds of lifters of the past generation.

Sometimes we have visitors who are not so famous, men who may sometimes be a little plump and middle-aged, who are driving through York, and who pull up outside and get out of their cars and sort of hesitantly mount the stairs. They may briefly greet someone in the office, but that isn't their real purpose. As soon as they can, they walk back the hall and around the corner and enter the Gym. After a while they come back again and walk down the stairs, get in their cars and drive away. Sometimes the car is crowded with the wife and kids, and we have overheard, on a summer's day when our window was open, a bit of mumbling and grumbling from the occupants, "What's Daddy doing in there-why don't he come back and take us home-what's he doing, Mama?"

What they do not know, and perhaps what Mama doesn't know, is that Papa has come back to the York Gym for a quiet glimpse of his youth. Everyone who has ever lifted here has a memory. And after ten years, or fifteen, or twenty, or twenty-five, a man is entitled to have a quiet bit of communion with the young, strong fellow he used to be..

There have been many high moments in many lives enacted here. A young soldier stopped in a month or so back and after he got to camp he wrote us that when he worked out in the Gym he was so inspired that he was able to press 15 full pounds more than he had ever done. This has happened to hundreds of young lifters, and each one of them has this memory of the gym. . . a high point in his training career.

So the ghosts of the Cyrs, the Terlazzos. the Goods, and the Andersons are joined by ghosts of John Smith and Bill Jones and Jim Brown, and you and you and you, wherever you are. And how many of you have left a portion of your youthful strength and energy here to augment the aura of strength that pervades every nook and cranny of the sweat-stained gym? And how many of you, when you drop in quietly and walk into the gym, find what (Continued on page 58)

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