Marker

Thomas Inch was an English strongman, born in 1881, who did what strongmen of his era did: performed, taught by mail, sold courses, and issued challenges. The challenge he is remembered for was an object. Sometime in the early twentieth century he had a dumbbell made that weighed one hundred and seventy-two pounds and nine ounces, a little over seventy-eight kilograms, which by itself was nothing to the strongmen of his day. What made it his was the handle. It was two and three-eighths inches thick, six centimeters, about the diameter of a large jar, far too fat for an ordinary hand to close around.

Inch's claim, repeated across his career, was that he could lift it from the floor with one hand and press it overhead, and that he had done so hundreds of times. His challenge was that nobody else could lift it from the floor at all. Not press it, not clean it: lift it. The weight was within reach of many; the handle was within reach of nobody, and the difference between those two facts was the whole trick. The dumbbell's mass was not the test. The test was whether a hand could hold it.

The scenes I can give you are imagined: the music-hall stage, the thing sitting fat and dull on the boards, a challenger stepping up in shirtsleeves, the crowd's silence as his fingers slid off. What is on the record is the roll of the men who tried and failed, and it reads like a hall of fame. Arthur Saxon, who could lift more overhead in one particular way than anyone alive, could not get it off the floor. Ivan Poddubny, the great Russian wrestler, could not. Decades later, Reg Park, one of the strongest bodybuilders of the mid-century, could not. Inch went to his grave in 1963 with the dumbbell still, by the record, unmatched in the manner he described. The first man widely credited with lifting it after him was an Australian, Bruce White, who also made the first replica. In 1990 Bill Kazmaier, a three-time World's Strongest Man, became the first to press it overhead with proof, though he cleaned it to his shoulder with both hands first. In 2002 Mark Henry cleaned and pressed it with one hand, the nearest anyone has come to the feat Inch claimed for himself.

I open the season with the dumbbell for a reason beyond its charm. For the whole of the strongman era, and for most of human history before it, grip was a spectacle: a party trick, a challenge, a way to separate the merely strong from the strange. Nobody thought the strength of a hand was a window on anything except the hand. Then, in this century, the same quantity, measured not with a fat dumbbell but with a small squeezing gauge, turned out to be one of the strongest predictors of death ever found in a population study. Stronger than blood pressure. A squeeze at a kitchen table, forecasting the grave.

That is the season's story, and its whole difficulty lives in one distinction that the strongman era never had to make and the fitness industry has every incentive to blur. A number can predict something without causing it. The grip forecasts the years. Whether squeezing harder buys any of them is a different question, and the answer, as far as anyone has measured, is the one nobody selling grippers wants to hear. First, though, the men who failed, and what the handle was actually testing.