The father of the young Santiago, Don Justo Ramón, transmitted to his son the virtue of tenacity with great success. The pursuit of excellence in all that goal that was proposed became in the young man a guideline as natural as it was inexorable. This was the case when interest in developing his strength was aroused in Santiago due to an anecdote.
Cajal himself recounts in his youth memoirs that at the age of eighteen he considered himself the strongest among his classmates. He attributed this robustness to having spent his childhood in rural areas, messing around in mischief in Ayerbe and other towns in the province of Huesca, first, and driven by a need for a quasi-scientific exploration of his abilities, later, in addition to a genuine taste by exercising and experiencing nature. But this perception of himself was shattered the day he was beaten in an arm wrestling match by a partner. When the curious Santiago questioned him about the secret of his strength, his partner revealed that he was going to train at a gym in the Plaza del Pilar in Zaragoza. Automatically, Santiago set himself the challenge of surpassing his classmate in strength within six months .
Surrender to physical exercise
He went to the gym and agreed with the owner to exchange muscle physiology classes for attendance at training twice a week. The gratuity he managed to negotiate allowed Santiago to keep Don Justo Ramón—suspicious as he was of his “distractions”—completely oblivious to his son’s new activity. With the determination that was already a pattern in his life, the young Cajal managed to more than fulfill his objective within the period that had been set; not only did he out-strength his partner Morione in said six-month period, but within a year he had become the strongest individual in the gym .
The gyms of the time
In the years when the young Cajal trained, all the gyms had rings, parallel bars and stairs arranged at different angles, which made them quite similar to a certain type of gym today — the boxes — that did not exist two and a half decades ago. Free weight implements varied in size and shape, from rounded ball dumbbells to clubs of different weights , which we now know provide excellent upper limb joint mobility work and have been rescued from oblivion by some knowledgeable enthusiasts.
Spring tensioners also existed by then, present in the athletic scene since 1850, although we are not sure if Santiago made use of them. The pulleys also already had a presence around that time. However, it is no less true that, due to the influence of Swedish gymnastics, some exercises suffered from rigidity and there was little understanding of joint mobility and muscle synergies, much more studied today. Handicaps that were supplied with a willful methodical desire. Paid ground for the young Santiago to face it as one more of his investigations, in this case being to get strong.
“My gymnastic mania”
Young Santiago devoted himself to a varied regimen of exercises that he continued for two hours “with extraordinary ardor,” as he put it. The exercise program would seem to us today to be extraordinarily topical. It included all variations of bodyweight exercises: high bar, parallel bars, “depth jumps and all kinds of tightrope work on the rings and trapeze.” It is what we call calisthenics , a name already common in the second half of the 19th century (with a slightly different meaning from the current one) that later fell into disuse. In addition, he exercised with free weights “sometimes adding weight on the balls, sometimes exaggerating the number of contractions.” In other words, we can affirm that the young Ramón y Cajal trained in a similar way to the current one when it comes to trying to gain strength; a few days, emphasizing metabolic stress; others, on mechanical stress. Santiago’s force training methods would today have the approval of the most seasoned experts. We are not aware that he was injured at any time, so if we stick to the self-taught spirit and critical analysis of which Santiago had already given plenty of samples by then, we must presume that he approached his training with true scientific rigor , without we can go into further conjectures.
His strength gains were so significant that he was involved in several sets to test it. The reality is that he rather embarked on them himself, letting himself be carried away by bravado, as he recognized years later. One of these challenges of strength consisted of winning, by a mere bet, a competition of the traditional Aragonese sport of throwing a bar , which consists of throwing a metal bar of more than four kilos standing up. In fact, to train, he traded his walking stick for a 16-pound iron bar—no less than 5.6 kilos! (if we consider the Huesca pound)—which he camouflaged as an umbrella case using oil paint. Another of his adventures involved a nighttime bare-handed combat duel with another young man for the right to court a lady. The future Nobel laureate had a scare when he knocked his opponent unconscious by using a choking key.
Reached old age, the critical distance that Ramón y Cajal marked with respect to his youthful self is striking. She referred to that episode as “my gymnastic mania.” Decades later, his description of his appearance and physical achievements is dispassionate and even harsh: “My physical appearance had little of Adonis. Broad-shouldered, with monstrous pectorals, my chest circumference exceeded 112 centimeters. When walking, he showed that inelegance and rhythmic swagger characteristic of the fairground Hercules». It must be borne in mind that in 1870, bodybuilding was decades away from the hand of Eugen Sandow, considered the father of said discipline as he was the first to introduce posing routines and enhance athletic aesthetics. Therefore, it is inappropriate to qualify Ramón y Cajal as a bodybuilder. Not even his was an aesthetic goal —he sought to increase his strength— nor would he have felt comfortable with that description. The tastes and even the costumes of his time did not invite such displays.
Sport and moral virtues
It was common then to believe that exercise develops moral virtues and a powerful reforming effect on the psyche . Don Santiago subscribed to this belief. In his memoirs he alludes to “the practice of some English games of obvious educational effectiveness.” Today, although it seems true that sports competition and the successive efforts and disappointments to achieve a competitive level of performance contribute to developing tolerance for frustration, the expectation that sports develop ethical attributes in the person has long since been discarded. At that time, Santiago Ramón y Cajal thought of “English” sports that “used with prudence and measure during adolescence and youth […] develop the spirit of cooperation, solidarity and camaraderie.” On the other hand, of professional boxing he pointed out “the moral de-educating effect caused in a sadistic public and eager for strong and anti-human emotions.” Of his own experience in strength training he went on to write that “excessive muscular development in the young almost inevitably leads to violence and bullying. The display of brute force becomes passion and the cause of foolish conceit. And it is that Don Santiago, despite his rational and investigative spirit, could not escape the common prejudices of his time regarding the practice of sports, some contradictory to each other.
Despite acknowledging healthy virtues in exercise, he considered that strenuous gymnastic activity was detrimental to the intellect, since “violent sports quickly reduce the aptitude for intellectual work” ( today we know that intense physical activity, especially strength, promotes cognitive functions ). This view was held by none other than the Nobel Prize winner “in recognition of his work on the structure of the nervous system,” the same one who had discussed the still-accepted vitalistic theory with one of his professors when he was a student.
Cajal was of the opinion that the exaggerated inclination towards exercise is typical of individuals with little intellectual brilliance. “I was about to be the irremediable victim of athletic stultification,” he went on to say. Perhaps, the current contemplation of these prejudices rooted in a critical, nonconformist and inquiring mind like that of Don Santiago Ramón y Cajal should make us reflect on our convictions and apriorisms and be indulgent with the mentality of past times. The example of don Santiago, with his insights and small mistakes, can continue to inspire us today, more than 120 years after his enormous achievements.
Andrés Rivera is a primary school teacher, history student and sports expert.
