And, this is not a sarcastic laugh out loud, but a full circle laugh at myself. I had a guy on the Lionquest Exercise channel on YouTube, bring up Swoboda. You know what they say about opportunity. When it knocks you open the door.

I had to dig some of the exercises out of memory, but I also remembered that the Stark Center in the Ottley Coulter collection had a complete course. Now this course didn't have drawings like the one that had been on the old Sandow Website, but it was complete, so having seen the former, I can figure out the latter.

I'll give a quick rundown on Swoboda - rags to riches, supercilious prig, involved in shady business dealings, and cult like following based on some of the metaphysical spiritualism that was popular at the time. Does that sound like someone to take exercise advice from? Probably not, but the exercises themselves are beneficial. Where did Swoboda learn his exercises? Who knows, but he probably took many of the common exercises of the time that used 5 pound dumbbells and created the concept of using muscular tension.

So to sum it up - I'll be working with these exercises for the next few weeks - not exclusively, but as part of the total package. I'd been wanting to move back to more of a tension style of exercise anyway and there were some very good benefits from this style of training.