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Alexander Zass was born in 1888 in Vilnius, in what was then the Russian Empire, and he died in 1962 in Essex, England, having spent the last decades of his life as a music-hall strongman under the name that made him: Samson. The Amazing Samson, the Iron Samson. He bent iron bars, drove spikes through planks with his hand, and held back things that should not have been holdable, and those feats are in the independent strength histories, tested by men with reputations to lose. What made him more than another strongman was the story of where the strength came from, and that story is his own.

By his account, he was drafted into the Russian army in the First World War and captured by Austro-Hungarian forces, four times, escaping each time. During his confinements, he said, he trained without weights, because there were none: he pushed and pulled against the bars of his cell and the chains on his wrists, in bursts of fifteen or twenty seconds of maximal effort, against things that did not move. He called it the development of the tendons, and he claimed it built the strength that later bent bars on stage.

I want to be exact about the standing of that story, because the season's honesty depends on it. The escapes and the cell training come to us from Zass himself, in his memoir, published in London in 1926 under the title The Amazing Samson: As Told by Himself, with a foreword by William Pullum, a British weightlifting champion who by the record tested some of the feats personally. The broad outline of capture and escape appears consistently across later accounts, but there is no independent wartime record of the mechanics, and I will not pretend there is. The strength is documented. The chains are testimony.

Pullum's foreword gives the season its first sentence from the record: "The keystone of the Samson system is the development of the strength of the tendons." Strength, in other words, built not by lifting and lowering but by pushing, as hard as possible, against something immovable, and holding. Strength without motion. It sounds like a stage claim, the kind of thing a performer says to make his act into a philosophy he can sell by post, and Zass did sell it, as did others in the same decades; a whole mail-order tradition grew up in the twenties around the idea of pitting one muscle against another, or against a wall, in the privacy of a bedroom.

And then the stage claim had one of the strangest afterlives in this volume. Thirty years after the memoir, a laboratory in Germany put ordinary men on a version of Samson's method and measured what happened to them, and the numbers were so good that the American strength world lost its head. A fad followed, and a barbell company built an empire's decade on it, and its lifters made gains that astonished the country. And the gains were real, and the method was real, and the thing that had actually produced the gains turned out to be in a small brown bottle that nobody was mentioning.

That is the season: a strongman's testimony, a laboratory's number, a fad, and a confound. Next episode, what Samson's system actually claimed, and the mail-order tradition that carried it to a million bedrooms.