Bell

The object is a ball of cast iron with a handle on top, and for most of its life nobody thought of it as exercise equipment at all. In eighteenth-century Russia a girya was a weight, the kind you set on the pan of a scale to weigh grain and other goods at market. It came in standard sizes, and the size that mattered was the pood, an old Russian unit equal to about sixteen kilograms, thirty-six pounds, and the girya in every market was a pood or a fraction or a multiple of one. It was a tool for commerce. Its handle existed so that a merchant could pick it up.

The scenes I can give you are imagined: a market in a provincial town, sacks of rye, a scale, the iron weights lined up on a board, a boy sent to fetch the two-pood and staggering back with it. What is on the record is what came next, which is the thing that happens to every heavy object with a handle when there are young men nearby. Somebody picks it up to see if he can. Somebody else picks it up more times. By the nineteenth century the market weight had become a prop for strongmen, swung and lifted in circuses across the empire, its odd shape, a mass hanging below the hand rather than balanced in it, turning out to make lifts that a barbell cannot and to punish grips and shoulders in ways a barbell does not.

I open with the market because this season is about what happens when a tool acquires a philosophy, and the tool came first by a century or two. The girya had no method. It had a handle and a mass and a set of movements that men discovered by playing with it: the swing between the legs, the snatch overhead in one motion, the jerk from the shoulder, the awkward carry. Those movements are good. They train the hips and the back and the grip and the heart together, in a way that few implements do, and they need nothing but the iron and a floor. That was true in 1850 and it is true now.

What the girya did not have, until very recently, was a story about why it was better than everything else, and it is the story that this season is going to weigh, because in the last years of the twentieth century the market weight crossed the ocean with a story attached, and the story sold the tool to a nation, and the tool, being good, did not mind. Within a decade of its arrival the kettlebell, as the English had been calling it since early in the century, was in every gym in America, most of them in the same rack, most of them bought on the strength of a single instructor's account of what the Russians knew.

The Russians did know something. Next episode, what the girya became when it stopped being a weight and started being a sport.