Throwback style produces all-round successful results

When Roger LaPointe talks about the importance of working out your whole body, he means it.

Just look around the Bowling Green, Ohio, warehouse of his business, Atomic Athletic, Inc. It's filled with dumbbells, thick climbing ropes and a poster of a man lifting a 300-pound anvil with his beard.

OK, that last one might be taking things a little far, but LaPointe's style definitely hearkens back to the days of the old-time strongman, when functional strength was prized over bulging muscles just for show. He surrounds himself with pieces of equipment that haven't been in vogue in this country for many decades or, in some cases, ever.

"I'm a student of history," says La Pointe, 37. "I can get a historical appreciation of what these other people did. It's also fun and there's a real challenge to it."

The floor around him is littered with granite spheres weighing up to 244 pounds, the kind people today might recognize from the World's Strongest Man competition but which go back thousands of years. LaPointe has wooden clubs from India, kettlebells that look like cannonballs with handles and jade padlocks - think thick bricks with handles - used by Chinese Shaolin monks.

The thing about strongmen who performed a century ago as part of circuses or vaudeville acts is that they weren't just working out to look buff like today's bodybuilders, according to aficionados.

"The old-time weightlifters, their focus was not just on being strong but on being physically fit and being healthy," says Al Myers, vice president of the United States All-Round Weightlifting Association, a group formed to preserve the kinds of lifting done long ago. "Today's generation, it's all about strength."

So modern gym rats sit at a machine and do the same exercise over and over, working one muscle at a time. That doesn't happen when you're swinging around a 35-pound, 3-foot-long wooden club or doing exercises with a perfectly round rock; you work multiple muscle groups and force them to work in harmony.

Aside from encouraging mental and physical toughness, Hillmann says the use of such equipment engages his athletes "from the neck up. ... It's not the same old stuff every single day."

Others are noticing, too.

Traditional strength-training tools now make up about 25 percent of the fitness equipment sold by Atomic Athletic, and in December Men's Health magazine included the company's jade padlocks in its holiday gift guide.