John Grimek

Does anyone know where to get a copy of his books? I looked around even on eBay, but couldn't find any copies awhile ago.

You ought to be thinking of something else. Many warmen from history used rocks and whatnot for training, but it certainly was not equivalent to loading up hundreds of pounds on a barbell for a squat in todays age.

Ah, here's what I was thinking of

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halteres_(ancient_Greece)

You're right though, it's not super comparable, they look terribly unbalanced and wouldn't have been able to do some of the more complex/nuanced modern movements with them. Seems that weight lifting is more of a 19th century thing after all.

As I posted up-thread I do incorporate some body weight exercises as well, I definitely have respect for them.

The natty limit has been slowly degrading with the rise of factory farming and the proliferation of microplastics and industrial sideproducts. The natty limit five thousand years ago would put modern roiders to shame

The problem is that A) we can only be 100% certain of natty status for athletes who, like Sandow, peaked before test was synthesized - after than we can be fairly certain at most but never completely. But B) the science of how to lift was not perfected during Sandow's time and we didn't know all we known now about training/diets/supplements/etc.; hell they didn't even have the bench press back then! Those guys didn't lift optimally. Lastly C) Sandow did like a shit-ton of coke which probably helped keep him lean.

So we just don't know what the peak natty physique is.

Sandow also supposedly didn't follow any kind of scientific diet regimen either-we'd learned so much in his time. I honestly think, though his physique would be impressive on someone even today, he was not quite peak natty himself as you suggest.

Oh that's pretty awesome. And yeah it's just really good for the joints, even if you do do machine and free weight work as well

Romans used weights, dyel. Even Ancient Greeks had them.

You clearly know nothing about calisthenics if you include rep counts in your exercises. Ever heard of progressive overload?

IIRC they did juice but it wasn't until 1960ish. It wasn't during the 40s/50s that they were using so everything pre '58 you can be 99% sure they were natty

Generally other than a handful of lifters in south California and a very small handful (I believe around 5) of lifters at York Barbell, almost nobody was using testosterone because it was rare and relatively unknown in terms of PED usage. To give you an idea, Dr. Ziegler at York Barbell in PA who experimented with test on those handful of lifters himself even said that test didn't do anything for the strength and mass of half of the guys he tested it on so dosing was probably low as fuck. It wasn't until Dianabol hit the scene in '58 roughly that roids became widespread beyond those 2 extremely tiny groups of lifters. This is for america at least, the Soviets used test (unbeknownst to everyone until the mid 50s) starting in the late 40s