Pete George: Secrets of Success
from the First Bulgarian Weightlifting Superstar
by Randall J. Strossen
He started lifting weights at eleven, beginning with general training. Within a couple of years, he switched over to Olympic lifting, and his workouts took a simple form: train on the competitive lifts, plus squats, and always try to lift more than he ever had in the past. He went on, at an early age, to break world records and become an Olympic and world champion.
Let's see . . . start very young, begin with general physical preparation, then do almost nothing but the lifts and squats, always go for PRs, become a champion. It's the standard script for the fabulous Bulgarian lifters, right?
Yes, and it is also Pete George's story, and yes, both of Pete's parents were ethnic Bulgarians, even if Pete was raised in Akron, Ohio, and when he was igniting the weightlifting world, no other Bulgarian weightlifter had broken a world record or won either an Olympic or world championship in weightlifting.
In fact, Pete was the first person of Bulgarian ancestry to win an Olympic gold medal in any sport. So, yes, Virginia, the first Bulgarian weightlifting superstar was really a Buckeye.
Pete George was an absolute sensation as a weightlifter, winning the U.S Senior Nationals at sixteen (!), and the World Championships at seventeen.
In 1945, as a mere fifteen-year-old, 147-pound kid, Pete clean & jerked 300 pounds -- in those days, that was a weight people would drive a long way to see a super do. For Pete, becoming the youngest person ever to have reached that benchmark was only the beginning.
He was in seven world championships, winning five and coming in second in the other two, and he was in three Olympics, emerging with one gold medal and two silvers.
And his life didn't end with his weightlifting accomplishments, as Pete went on to graduate from dental school, had a very successful orthodontics practice, and now (2000), at 71 is busily researching obstructive sleep apnea and snoring. He is an internationally recognized expert in the field.
Did we mention that Pete, along with John Davis, sang professionally in Sweden, right after the 1953 World Weightlifting Championships?
Is this guy successful or what? Just what's his secret, and what's his take on souping up weightlifting, both in the U.S. and internationally?
Pete George goes way beyond the story of the 97-pound weakling who transforms himself into a muscleman: Pete describes himself as having just about every imaginable kind of inferiority complex as a kid, but thanks to weightlifting he started on a road to accomplishment that still hasn't run out. And it Pete's case, it all goes back to Larry and Lewis Barnholth and their American College of Modern Weightlifting in Akron, Ohio.
In several parts on this blog:
Lewis Barnholth
Lawrence Barnholth
No photo as of yet, but Claude was
the third man of the Barnholth trilogy.
A great writeup on the College, here:
The Barnholths were passionate about weightlifting and provided not just a place to train, but much more important, an environment where you could have big dreams and make them come true.
Take Pete, for example: a skinny, little weak kid who was considered the dunce of his class in grade school. He gets the idea from a friend that if he lifts weights, he will get stronger, and the Barnholths expand on the belief. Before too long, Larry Barnholth absolutely convinced Pete that he could become the youngest person ever to clean & jerk 300 pounds, which he went on to do. The same thing with becoming a world champion and an Olympic champion -- Larry convinced Pete that he could do it, and Pete turned the dream into reality.
"The most important thing in weightlifting success is setting a goal that you believe you can accomplish; it sounds simplistic, but actually it's very, very valid," said Pete. And it was Larry Barnholth who helped Pete set the goals that marked his meteoric progress, while Lewis Barnholth served as platform coach and helped Pete make each day's sub-goal.
"Larry kept talking about what the mind can believe, the body can achieve. I believed him. I was gullible enough to believe everything that he told me. [When] I was fourteen years old, I entered the Ohio State Weightlifting Championships. Looking over the previous records in the state championships, I felt if I really got all my lifts together, I might be able to possibly get a third.
"I won, but the reason I won was because I was the only man in the contest, and Larry said, 'You are the youngest person to win a state championships in weightlifting. You know what that means? It means you've got the best start of any lifter; therefore, if you have the best start, and if you must keep on training, you will automatically become the greatest weightlifter of all time,' and I believed him. He said, 'You won the state championships at fourteen, you should be able to win the national junior championships at fifteen, the national senior championships at sixteen and the world championships at seventeen.'
"When I first met him, I told him that I felt very weak, and he told me if I were to train, I would become the strongest kid in my class -- it seemed incredible. I said, 'Wait a minute, Larry, maybe I can become the strongest kid in my class, but a world champion, how can this be?' He said, 'Right now you did 180. You should be able to 250 before you're fifteen. The youngest person ever to clean & jerk 300 was Danny Formaterro; he was sixteen years old and he weighed 168 pounds. You've got a better start than he does, so obviously, if he did it at sixteen, you can do it at fifteen.'
"And this sounded logical, but . . . and then he pointed out, 'all you have to do to reach that . . .' He figured out how many pounds there were between what I was doing and what I had to do, how many months, how much I had to increase a month, and it came out to something like a pound and a quarter or something like that. I said, 'Oh, I can do that.' I was firmly convinced that I could achieve all these little sub-goals along the way; it is very important that when you have a goal, you completely rationalize it, so you know exactly what is entailed in doing it and convince yourself that you can do it.
"So I was totally convinced that I could go up a pound and a quarter, I forget now the exact intervals in which I had to do that, but it was completely believable, absolutely believable; there was no doubt in my mind whatsoever that I could do it. While I was still fourteen, I did the 250 clean & jerk, and I did 300 early in June; my birthday is June 29th. I weighed 147.
"After progressing like that there was absolutely no doubt in my mind whatsoever that I would become world and Olympic champion, and that is the most important thing."
Larry Barnholth, who along with his brother Lewis, ran the American College of Modern Weightlifting and was the driving force behind Pete's success.
Today, it's common for the world's top weightlifters to be training with an eye to setting new PRs, but you can't help but wonder how Pete came to adopt this approach more than half a century ago. For starters, Pete points out, you have to remember that
Weightlifting isn't about muscle mass . . .
He credits Chester Teagarden with first explaining to him that weightlifting was a "neural-muscular learning process and the only way you can learn is by trying to lift heavier weights, not by doing a lot of repetitions, because you want to get that feeling of that poundage.
"It's just like biofeedback; you learn the same way. It by that feeling that you experience when you achieve this lift, and that's why I then tried to go after the heaviest weight I could possibly do every time. I felt that anything more than three reps was bodybuilding, and was simply going to make your muscles bigger and not necessarily stronger."
With all these apparent connections, you can't help but wonder if he inspired the success of the Bulgarian weightlifting program, but Pete modestly says that while he probably had some influence, the real success of that program is also due to a coach: Ivan Abadjiev.
Abadjiev lecture, 20 minute read:
"There's no question about it, because when he left, the team started going down; he comes back and it goes up. You don't need any more evidence than that; that man is a genius."
Great coaching, Pete says, "is not a matter of knowing a lot about the technicalities of weightlifting: the form, or the training, or the physiology -- it's the psychology. Psychology gets ninety percent of the credit for the success of any endeavor in lift -- wherever you set your sights, that's where you're gonna end up."
With all this talk about what the mind can do, don't think the mind is automatically your ally, because it can also work against you.
Pete warns that, "People like to think in round numbers that have no physiological significance whatsoever," and uses the four-minute mile as the best example.
"Roger Bannister convinced himself psychologically that he could do it; he did physiological experiments . . . being a medical student at that time. And knowing that physiologically he could do it, he went out and did it physically. And as soon as he did that, he opened the floodgates because people were no longer trying to break the barriers of human capacity; they were simply trying to beat this Englishman who was just another mortal like themselves -- not all of humanity.
"If you think, 'I can beat Roger Bannister,' that's a whole lot different than thinking, 'I can beat the entire human race, the limits of human capacity.' Where the limits are, we don't know. Every so often people come up with what they think the future records will be, and every list I've seen longer than ten years old has been surpassed."
And lest you think that all this sounds like so much touchy-feely psychology, and must mark Pete as some sort of Pollyanna, think again, because he's not afraid to speak his mind, and he's not afraid to swim upstream.
Consider, for example, his feelings about U.S. performance, and how the sport is organized. Improving U.S. weightlifting performances, Pete says, "is a very important question because it's an embarrassment to our country and to weightlifting. Progress in the United States has just been abysmal. We used to be the number one nation in the world and now if one of our lifters breaks into the top ten, we celebrate. It's pathetic."
Yet, Pete says that now, "There's no real incentive for athletes to become weightlifting champions. In my day it was a wonderful opportunity to see the world, to gain recognition and so forth. For instance, I told my son, who I think had better prospects in weightlifting than did I, 'If you become Olympic champion or world champion, you'll get to see the world, you'll go to Europe . . .' He said, 'We've been to Europe, Dad . . ." In those days, people didn't travel like they do now and coming from the background that I came from, to leave Akron, Ohio and go to New York was really a fantastic adventure."
The challenge, Pete says, is to boost the rewards for success, because, "otherwise we're not going to recruit good talent; anybody who has any real talent and ability will go into something that is a little more remunerative. There is no point in banging your head against a wall if you want to be an athlete: You want to compete somewhere where there is some compensation for what you are doing, and it's not there in weightlifting now."
And don't expect too much sympathy if you want to point fingers and sing the they're-on-drugs blues, because while he is quick to acknowledge the hypertrophy and recovery benefits of anabolic steroids, for example, he stresses that they also have a tremendous placebo effect. So while he says, "There is no question that there are some benefits, I don't think that's by any means all the explanation, and Pete attributes great importance to the psychological factors involved.
"If an athlete thinks, 'They are using drugs and I'm not, so I can't hope to lift as much as they can. I therefore probably will lift twenty percent or ten percent less, and my goal is there and I can't go above that.' We all set goals in our mind -- the most obvious goal in athletics was the four-minute mile. There cannot be any question in anybody's mind that it was a psychological achievement, not a physiological one."
To turn weightlifting around, Pete suggests, for starters, that "it has to be made more popular for spectators" The sport itself is basically flawed as far as spectator appeal is concerned, and weightlifting cannot be a popular sport unless people can understand it and follow it. Toward that end, Pete has long campaigned for reducing the number of bodyweight classes -- to make the sport easier to follow. Similarly, he has argued for improvements in the scoreboard, so that the significance of each attempt would be readily apparent. Pete says that when he has presented these ideas, "the various authorities say, 'well, we're more concerned with the athletes than with the spectators,' but that's nonsense because an athlete competes for the recognition he gets from it. If there's no spectators, there's no recognition."
A short musical intermission/interlude . . .
I guess you're right, but even so, if there's no audience there just ain't no show.
"I can't imagine someone going to a contest who knows nothing about weightlifting and wanting to watch it for spectacular thrills, not that there isn't anything innately interesting about seeing how much a man can lift. But if you don't understand the significance of it, there's no point in watching it," says Pete. "There should be an easy way of following the competition," concludes Pete.
For great results, Pete's message is clear: He credits the power of the mind, and the invaluable role of a good coach: "If the coaches have enough charisma, they can convince their lifters that what they are telling them is going to help them regardless of what it is. [Joel Seedman excluded].
"I was fortunate in having Lewis Barnholth as a coach, and he was extremely good at that. Psychologically he could just get to me, and my lifts would just go like mad."
And from this progress in the gym, Pete learned to make success a way of life.
"Weightlifting and Larry Barnholth let me believe that I can accomplish anything that I really set my mind to do. He told me that every day, in every way I'm getting better and better, better and stronger, paraphrasing the French philosopher Coue.
by Emile Coue, here . . .
"And I believed that. He said, 'See how you're getting stronger every day -- this will apply to your schoolwork as well as your weightlifting.'
"In high school I graduated second in my class, and then I got an academic scholarship to Kent State, graduated from dental school at Ohio State, and did two years of post-graduate study in orthodontics at Columbia.
"It all followed my weightlifting in that I could see my improvement in weightlifting. Larry said, 'You will be improving mentally as well and you'll be doing better in your schoolwork.' He said, 'All you have to do is apply yourself and you will automatically get better.'
"And believing that, all his advice that he gave me, my mental attitude toward my schoolwork started to improve. The mental attitude is the most important ingredient in success in every endeavor in life, everything."
Enjoy Your Lifting!
"....as a mere fifteen-year-old, 147-pound kid, Pete clean & jerked 300 pounds..."
ReplyDeleteAs a fifteen-year-old, 145-pound (and from other sources about Pete, approximately the same height) kid, after five months of determined, consistent, progressive training, JOE Santus could clean and press 55 lbs, barbell bar included.
Ain't the outliers on either end of the genetic bell curve astounding?
Although they are tough to measure, I have great genetics for lounging about all day.
Delete