Alexander Zass: Russian Samson

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

He was called "the iron Samson". He believed that his strength was that he was Russian. Alexander Zass escaped from German captivity, carried a wounded horse from the battlefield, bent horseshoes and tore the chains.

Zass and Rezazad: who is stronger?

Alexander Zass is considered a legendary Russian strongman. And in fact, everything that he showed on the stage of the circus did not fit into the heads of ordinary people. For example, in one of his numbers "iron Samson" lifted a horse weighing 500 kilograms. For comparison, the most outstanding result in modern weightlifting belongs to Iranian Hossein Rezazade, who pushed 263.5 kilograms. And this despite the fact that the weightlifter from Tehran weighs twice as much as Zass. Of course, there is a difference between carrying a horse on your shoulders and lifting a barbell. However, the scale of the physical capabilities of the Russian circus performer is still amazing.

Meanwhile, in tsarist Russia there were many other athletes who earned their bread by power numbers on circus tours. For example, Evgeny Sandov easily squeezed 101.5 kilograms with one hand. Ivan Zaikin surprised that he carried a ship's anchor weighing 409 kilograms. And "Russian Lion" Georg Gakkenschmidt easily lifted his arms with two-pound weights to the side.

At that time, every Russian boy dreamed of becoming a circus strongman. By the way, Alexander Zass himself said in his memoirs that he was greatly impressed by the circus performer Vanya Pud, who lifted huge barrels of water. It happened at the age of seven, and young Shura - as he was called in the family - played a circus strongman, trying to lift a wooden tub.

Get over yourself

In his childhood games, Zass took on weights that even an adult could not lift. The boy did not succeed, but Shura did not give up and pushed for a long time with his last strength. In fact, he performed isometric-static exercises, concentrating muscular tension with an effort of will. The result was not long in coming. After a while, the future "iron Samson" easily lifted the saddle, although quite recently it required considerable effort for this. He saw an obvious relationship between desperate attempts to achieve the "impossible" and increasing strength. However, recognized athletes of that time did not see the point in such training, preferring to "pump" muscles with dynamic exercises.

It will take decades of scientific research to explain this "Samsonian" phenomenon. It turns out that human energy depends on metabolism in the body, which is carried out in two ways - aerobic and anaerobic. Dynamic variable exercise, such as squatting, stimulates the aerobic system. And with static loads - anaerobic, the one that is the biochemical basis of strength capabilities.

Since Alexander Zass mainly trained with static methods, he developed unique strength capabilities that he himself did not even know about. In 1914, as a cavalryman of the 180th Vindavsky regiment, he was ambushed by an Austrian. He himself was not injured, but his horse was wounded in the leg. Without thinking twice, he raised his four-legged friend and carried him half a kilometer to the camp where the regiment was located.

Having done this, Zass believed in the unique capabilities of his body and in the strength of his spirit. Once in captivity, the strong man, shackled, broke the chain and straightened the bars of the prison bars. Later, recalling his escape, "Samson" admitted that without concentration of moral strength, he could hardly accomplish this. Later, this property was noted by the director of the English club of athletes "Camberwell", Mr. Pulum, writing about the "Russian strongman" as "a man who uses his mind no worse than his muscles."

Strength of mind

Nowadays, it has been proven that moral strength, in fact, significantly increases the energy of a person. In particular, scientists from the American Sports Association have empirically established that the muscular abilities of a person under hypnosis, when he was inspired that he possesses incredible strength, is significantly higher than when doping is introduced into the blood. The fact is that the strength of muscle contraction depends on the power of the electrical impulse coming from the brain along the line of the central nervous system. The more intense this impulse, the more calcium ions are released, which affect the strength of a person.

Alexander Zass did not know all these scientific wisdom, but he believed that the concentration of mental strength increases physical strength. And he also believed that the "fortitude" in the Russian people is strong.

Love named Betty

After joining the English circus, Alexander Zass developed a unique circus act in which the pianist Betty Tilbury acted as an assistant. The performance consisted of a strong man hovering under a circus dome and holding a rope in his teeth, on which a platform with a piano and a girl playing music was suspended.

Soon a love broke out between them, lasting ten years. However, other women liked Zass and had fleeting romances. “You cannot be corrected, we will remain just friends,” Betty once told him and married the clown Sid. And the "Russian Samson" never found his family. He wrote to his sister Nadezhda in letters that he was infinitely lonely.