Alan Calvert

12 February 1875 – 13 January 1944 · Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Alan Calvert founded the Milo Barbell Company in Philadelphia in 1902, designed and sold the first widely available adjustable plate-loaded barbell in the United States, and edited Strength magazine from 1914 until 1925. He was not a great lifter himself. He was the man who put a usable barbell on a customer's doorstep.

Origins

Calvert was born in Philadelphia in 1875 to a comfortable family with manufacturing connections. He took up dumbbell training in his teens, briefly considered the medical profession, and instead — after a period of correspondence with the European strength press — turned to the question of equipment. Until the early 1900s the barbell available to the American amateur was a fixed-weight implement, often hollow and adjustable only by re-filling the spheres with shot or sand: clumsy, imprecise, and effectively useless for the kind of progressive resistance training Calvert had been reading about.

The work

Calvert founded the Milo Barbell Company in 1902 in Philadelphia. Its first major product was the Milo Triplex barbell — a steel bar with internal sleeves that could accept iron plates of graduated weights, secured by collars. It was the first widely marketed plate-loaded barbell in the United States. The design borrowed elements from the German Berg-style hantel; what was new was the clarity of the catalogue, the regularity of the supply, and the mail-order distribution to amateurs across the United States who had no other source for serious equipment.

In 1914 Calvert founded Strength, the first American magazine devoted to lifting. It absorbed the Milo customer base, and through it Calvert pursued a years-long campaign against fraudulent strongman claims, against the lighter "physical culture" tradition that he regarded as cosmetic, and in favour of progressive heavy training as the central method.

"The man who measures his progress in the size of his barbell, and not in the breadth of his discussion of training, will be the one to make progress."

Notable feats

Calvert was a competent but unremarkable lifter, and never claimed otherwise. His best lifts in private training, recorded in his own hand, were:

• Two-hands continental clean and jerk of approximately 230 lb (104 kg).
• Right-hand bent press of approximately 175 lb (79 kg).

His significance lies elsewhere. The figures attached to Calvert are his commercial and editorial achievements:

• Founder, Milo Barbell Company, 1902 — first widely distributed adjustable barbell in the U.S.
• Founder and editor, Strength magazine, 1914–1925 — first American lifting magazine.
• Author, Super Strength (1924) — the most influential American training book of the 1920s.

Method

Super Strength, published in 1924, is Calvert's most enduring work. It is direct and bracingly unsentimental. Calvert dismisses light dumbbell drill as "kindergarten exercise," sets out a programme based on the squat, deadlift, military press, and continental clean, and is one of the earliest American books to give the squat a central place in serious training. (The squat had been advocated by Hackenschmidt in 1908; Calvert was the first major American writer to take it up.) Calvert was also relentless on the importance of progressive resistance — the customer should add weight to the bar week by week, in measured increments — which the Milo plate system was designed to make possible.

Legacy

Milo Bar-Bell put serious training equipment within reach of the American amateur. Strength magazine, in its years under Calvert, established the editorial standards — citation of figures, scepticism toward extravagant claims, willingness to print disagreement — that distinguish the better strength press from the worse. After Calvert's departure in 1925 the magazine declined; Milo Bar-Bell was eventually acquired by Bob Hoffman in the mid-1930s and absorbed into York Barbell, which kept the Milo name on certain product lines into the 1950s. Super Strength was reissued by Iron Man magazine in the 1960s and by various small publishers since; the book is in the public domain in the United States.

Disputed and unresolved

The claim — sometimes seen — that Calvert "invented" the adjustable barbell is overstated. Plate-loaded designs existed in the German and French equipment trade in the 1890s; Wilhelm Berg in particular had marketed an adjustable hantel before 1900. Calvert's contribution was American manufacturing, mail order, and graduated plate sets sold at amateur prices. That is a substantial achievement in its own right and does not require the inventor claim.

Calvert's later years are not fully documented. He left active editorship of Strength in 1925, after a dispute with the magazine's new ownership; the rest of his life was spent in a relatively private capacity, and the date and circumstances of his death (Philadelphia, January 1944) are recorded only in the local press.