It’s a phrase that means giving yourself opportunities to move your body like your forebears had to: lifting, pushing and pulling things across multiple planes of motion. Though we no longer need to drive fenceposts or chop wood or haul bricks, we can effectively mimic that human work a few times a week—just like it’s 1899, the year that arguably launched the modern age.
Why 1899?
In 1899, notable elements of society began rebelling against the technology advances that were disrupting how people had traditionally worked, moved and interacted.
Henry Ford launched the Detroit Automobile Company in 1899. Guglielmo Marconi sent the first radio signal across the English Channel. Liebig's Extract of Meat Company introduced Oxo beef stock cubes—an ancestor of what we now call ultra-processed food. In response to these and other developments:
Macfadden’s Physical Culture magazine launched in March 1899—the first mass-market American fitness publication, preaching exercise, unprocessed food and abstention from alcohol, tobacco, white bread…and corsets.
Roosevelt’s “The Strenuous Life” speech, on April 10, became era’s most famous argument that ease and comfort cause individual and social decay.
That same month, Sandow’s magazine rebranded to Physical Culture—the British side of the movement, built around Eugen Sandow, the first celebrity strongman.
It was a year that cemented the notion that, regardless what machines could do for us, bodies were meant to move. So, yeah, let’s move like it’s 1899.
In January, I wrote about wanting to set an ambitious, achievable expectation for my physical strength and flexibility in 2026. That became a simple, 7-word mantra that feels like the Move Like It’s 1899 origin story:
Move your body, every day, with purpose
In that spirit, I created Move Like It’s 1899 to offer paying subscribers weekly weighted strength, speed, power and flexibility workouts in weekly ~7-minute videos aimed at (as the saying goes) aging with strength. Each video comes with written explanations of specific progressions and tips I’ve learned over a lifetime of athletics and almost five decades of weight training. I’ll also include a summary of the physiology of that week’s weighted movement and why it’s effective.
Move Like It’s 1899 videos will be more intense and developed cousins of the #WorkoutWednesday bodyweight workouts anyone can do in 3 minutes in street clothes. The goal for this video series to make building muscle, power & flexibility accessible to anyone to wants to have the muscle and mettle to drive a fence post or haul a wheelbarrow full of bricks…like it’s 1899.
Why I’m starting this 1899 series with foam rolling
Subsequent videos will go heavier, with weights and workout-level progressions in multiple planes of motion, and progressions that push past what Workout Wednesday can do. But I started this series with foam rolling for specific reasons, some of them personal, that I think apply to everyone.
Forty-eight years of lifting and seven orthopedic surgeries have taught me that the workout you can’t do with proper form, flexibility and proper warm-up is often the one that hurts you, either immediately or—worse—slowly over time. A lower-back seizure has put me on the floor for hours and days, and after 50 an injury that once cost a week now costs a month. The psychological costs of starting over get harder with age.
In case you missed it: the #WorkoutWednesday video introducing foam rolling basics…
So this is the groundwork, literally: what I do on the floor before and after training so the harder episodes are ones I can keep doing. Learn these first. Everything that follows assumes you have and, more importantly, you’ll be glad you did.
Foam-rolling progressions, and what they’re doing
Three sequences from the video, in the order I do them, with notes on what each one is working. None of this is rolling in the usual sense. The roller is a fulcrum. Gravity does the work that opens your hips, your back, your shoulders and other joints.
Let’s get started.
1. Thoracic spine opener (before a workout)
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