How about Some Muscle?

IN THE FALL of 1943 the University of Iowa campus was home to one of the best football teams in the nation. 1 Yet it was not the Iowa Hawkeyes who nearly won the championship that season; instead, the runners-up for 1943 were the Seahawks of the navy preflight program. 2 In the midst of the Seahawks' run to the top of the college football rankings, several graduate students from the physical education program at the University of Iowa sought the opinion of one of their instructors on the training practices of the cadets.Specifically, the students had noticed that the cadets trained with barbells and dumbbells as part of their daily conditioning.Lifting weights, they had been told, was bad for athletes, so would the football players not be better off if they skipped weight training?3 The professor whose insight the students sought was Charles Harold (C.H.) McCloy, by then nearing his fortieth year in physical education and an eminent figure in the field.For his part, McCloy was familiar