Making Strength Knowable: Strength Training, Gymnastikē, and Sport Science in the Olympic Tradition
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Abstract
This article examines the historical and epistemological transformation of strength training within the Olympic tradition, from ancient Greek athletic culture to contemporary sport science. Rather than narrating this history as a linear progression from pre-scientific practice to scientific precision, it asks how knowledge about strength, effort, fatigue, recovery, readiness, and performance was produced, authorized, contested, and reorganized across time. Using a qualitative historical-epistemological approach, the article interprets ancient poetic, philosophical, medical, historical, and gymnastic sources alongside scholarship on ancient athletics, Olympism, physical culture, objectivity, quantification, and strength-training science. The analysis identifies six regimes of bodily knowledge: agonistic commemoration, gymnasion-based practical training, medical and dietetic regulation, gymnastikē as specialized expertise, modern Olympism and physical culture, and laboratory-based sport science. The findings show continuity in the practical problems of athletic preparation, but rupture in the forms of authority through which those problems were explained and governed. The article argues that strength training in the Olympic tradition is not merely a history of methods, but a history of how the athletic body became visible, meaningful, trainable, and true.
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Olympic tradition, strength training, gymnasion, bodily knowledge, sport science
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