The Weightlifting Entrepreneur Alan Calvert and His Strategic Feat in the Early 1900s
On the workout routine through the ages — Part 7 of 8
The quick and highly selective rush through history that I have made so far in this series provides sound anecdotal evidence that a workout routine was rather required to enforce new ideas and their prescientific, medical, educational and political, spiritual and religious, or paternalistic and economic objectives — not to form habitual physical activity of the modern man in any explicit manner. The same seems to apply to the commercial ideas of exercise equipment entrepreneurs who established their businesses in the early 1900s.
Entrepreneurial Spirit Meets Physical Culture
With the rising popularity in the 19th century, the human need for better physical fitness and greater strength created novel business opportunities beyond the gym and sports clubs. It took not long until the marketplace got inhibited by two new groups of entrepreneurs.
The first one comprised exercise equipment manufacturers who were traveling salesmen and face-to-face instructors teaching prospects not only the proper use of their products but also promoting the advantages of physical activity. The other one included mail-order businesses that sold expert exercise programs that either were practiced without any extra weights or employed only lightweight gear like some everyday objects at hand.
The problem was that neither of the two groups was able to fulfill the growing need and hardly could help customers develop the desired muscular physique and strength. Alan Calvert (1875–1944) took a different path.
Alan Calvert’s Startup
Calvert founded the Milo Bar-bell company in Philadelphia in 1902. He filed his first patent application the same year and started to produce an adjustable shot-loaded barbell (ranging from 20 to 200 pounds) — one that came without any filler material like a lead shot but with a shorter handle instead so it could be transformed into a dumbbell if required.
The price tag was ten dollars. Hence, Calvert had to attract the attention of affluent prospects in the first place, in particular businessmen and white-collar workers. But no matter the target group, physical exercises with heavy weights were a new practice in the United States, and adjustable barbells were a completely new product. Americans were unfamiliar with progressive overload and its application to resistance and strength training. Even trade magazines published almost no content that could fill this gap. All this was a huge challenge.
In Search of the Breakthrough
Neither was Calvert himself a strongman nor a champion weightlifter. This did not make promotion any easier when he presented heavy weight training by hosting strength competitions at the Milo premises and by being involved in weightlifting events elsewhere. To make things start working for him he had to find out if it pays to advertise.
Right from the start, the Milo barbell was advertised in trade magazines including Physical Culture with over forty thousand readers, but the response rate remained low. Ads in business newspapers did not work at all. Those few prospects who followed the call to action and responded, received a 24-page booklet entitled ‘Progressive weight lifting’ with expert testimonials.
But at that time Calvert presumed already that educational campaigns are required to show that there is far more than Robert J. Robert’s dumbbell drill (see especially part 5 in this series) along with other popular exercise programs. The fifteen days trial period and the money-back guarantee were insufficient means to grow the market.
The Strategic Feat
By educating the public Calvert did not only sell his equipment. Because he supplied a training course with every shipped order — and he started to do so in 1903 — Calvert intentionally or not started to gather followers, especially when his customers achieved the desired results and sent back letters. He decided to stay in a lively correspondence with many of them, to follow up on how high they aimed, and even to suggest personal milestones. This was a breakthrough marketing tactic that eventually allowed him to fill new fliers and booklets with powerful customer testimonials.
The secret sauce was not that Calvert’s courses were inspired by several experts including Theodor Siebert (1866–1961), a German pioneer of progressive resistance training, and Eugen Sandow (1867–1925), a star among strongmen and a successful bodybuilding entrepreneur. Especially the second edition of his course made the difference.
The Workout Routine Does the Trick
In 1904 Colvert’s course consisted of 24 different exercises and was arranged in a way that made only a few weight adjustments and equipment reconfigurations necessary if one would go through all of them. Thus, the course began with one-handed exercises. Smart, but this did not turn the course into a game-changer. But the enclosed workout routine did. It explained how the course should be split up during the week to reduce each workout session to only fifteen minutes without sacrificing any progress.
Calvert picked the first eleven exercises and recommended practicing them on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. The last seven exercises were assigned to Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays — leaving Sunday to rest. He also advised the weightlifters to run about half a mile at a fair pace twice a week and to climb stairs whenever possible — and they were encouraged to take two or three steps at a time — to make the workout routine complete.
Leading the Pack
Calvert’s course including his vigorous workout routine remained almost the same until 1911 or 1912. He kept promoting his barbell as best in class even though his product was the only barbell sold in the United States for several years — at least until 1905. However, customer feedback with ideas on how to improve the equipment along with new products offered by competitors set him under serious pressure. The product lineup grew eventually. But an inexpensive set of plate-loaded dumbbells was hardly in line with market expectations.
In 1908 the Milo Bar-bell company filed its second patent application. The new Triplex — as the name already suggests — could be easily reconfigured to be used either as a barbell, dumbbell, or kettlebell. And it combined the best of both technologies. The fully redesigned equipment was partly shot-loaded for fine weight adjustments and partly plate-loaded for quick and easy changes of weight.
In a Nutshell
Even though Milo’s competitors could catch up over time, the Triplex commanded the highest price on the market. Moreover, Milo’s leading position was safeguarded by Calvert’s winning strategy which was far more difficult to copy. The workout routine produced customer testimonials and therefore credibility, and sincere testimonials generated new sales.
Main source: Kimberly A. Beckwith (2006) Building strength: Alan Calvert, the Milo Bar-bell company, and modernization of American weight training. Ph.D. dissertation submitted at the University of Texas at Austin.
