In 1890, over 400 bodybuilders gathered at the national physical exercise competition of the Rajah of Jodhpur. All at once, they started performing free squats known as Bethaks. Sometimes called the Hindu Squat, it’s a variant of the regular squat exercise, where you swing your arms to the rhythm of your motion. A standard regimen involves doing one hundred or more of these.
At the Raja’s contests, grown men performed thousands of these squats for hours on end. One by one, they dropped out due to fatigue. By the time there were just 15 athletes remaining, the Raja called off the contest. It was clear that one of them had earned both the crowd’s attention and the prize of the contest – ten-year-old Mian Ghulam Muhammad.
Ghulam would later be bedridden for weeks. But his legendary training regimen is just one of the reasons the Punjabi lion went undefeated in wrestling for 50 years, under the name ‘The Great Gama’.
Among his fans, he can count Bruce Lee, who mentions Gama’s regimes in “The Art of Expressing the Human Body“. Gama’s regimes were creating takes on classical Indian wrestling traditions; like the cat stretch (also known as the Dand) where you perform a push-up like a cat stretching elegantly, or the Bethak, which Gama performed without end. Bruce Lee had saved an article describing this aspect of Gama’s regimen, attributing the Dand and Bethak to Gama’s legendary 56-inch chest.
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