Maxick

28 June 1882 – 10 May 1961 · Bregenz, Austria → Buenos Aires

Maxick — born Max Sick in Bregenz — was a competent strongman whose distinctive contribution was the codification and teaching of "muscle control": the visible voluntary isolation and contraction of individual muscles. Through his collaboration with Monte Saldo (Alfred Montague Woollaston) in London he reached a substantial mail-order audience in the 1910s.

Origins

Sick was born in 1882 in Bregenz, on the Austrian shore of Lake Constance, into a family of modest means. He was a sickly child by his own account and took up systematic exercise as a teenager. He performed as a strongman across the German and Austrian variety circuits in his twenties and moved to London in 1909, where he was promoted by the British strongman Monte Saldo as the public face of a mail-order training system.

The work

Maxick's stage act combined conventional lifting with extended demonstrations of muscle control — contracting individual muscle bellies, dancing the pectorals, isolating the latissimus, in a way that was visually striking and at the time considered evidence of unusual neuromuscular development. The lifting was real; he was a good middleweight bent presser and was credited with one-arm lifts comparable to the better British professionals of the period.

He moved to Buenos Aires in 1916 and lived in Argentina for the rest of his life, returning to Europe only briefly. He died in Buenos Aires in May 1961.

Notable feats

• Right-hand bent press of approximately 240 lb (109 kg) at a bodyweight of around 145 lb (66 kg).
• One-hand snatch of approximately 165 lb (75 kg).
• Demonstrations of muscle control performed in stage settings across Britain, Germany, and South America for over forty years.

Method

Muscle Control (1911), written with Saldo, is the principal text. The system involved a course of approximately twenty isolation drills performed in front of a mirror, with attention to voluntary tension of specific muscles and to relaxation of antagonists. The book sold substantially in Britain and the United States through the 1910s and was reissued repeatedly. The discipline survives, in modified form, in modern bodybuilding posing practice; whether muscle control as taught by Maxick had measurable benefits beyond posing is contested.

Legacy

Maxick's specific contribution — muscle control as a teachable practice — has had a longer afterlife than his lifting. Frank Zane and other twentieth-century bodybuilders have credited the Maxick tradition explicitly. The book is in print in modern reprints and parts of it are in the public domain.

Disputed and unresolved

Maxick's lifts above his bodyweight class are well-documented for a small man, but figures sometimes seen (a 270 lb bent press, a 200 lb snatch) are not in the contemporary record and should be treated as later embellishment. The extent of Saldo's authorship of Muscle Control is also unresolved — the book is jointly credited and the prose is largely Saldo's.