The first steps of this venture into the world of strength science commenced when the author at 9 years of age observed with increasing interest his medical father, Dr Isadore Siff, exercising religiously every morning with spring loaded Sandow dumbbells before he went off to work in the neurosurgical department at a major hospital in their home city, Johannesburg, South Africa. Typical childhood curiosity led to Mel being regaled with tales of the old time strongmen whose mighty performances fascinated his father as a youth. He heard about Eugene Sandow, Professor Attila, George Hackenschmidt, Louis Cyr and many other legends whose names were household words near the beginning of the 20th century.
His father also let him read well-worn training books on these strongmen and various coaches, including one published in 1926 (Renwick GR Athletics For Boys) that extolled the merits of logically constructed physical training programmes which included a progressive overload approach, skipping and jumping exercises, an emphasis on the central importance of technical style, an overlapping (‘conjugation’) of “style, speed and endurance training”, and special attention being paid to keeping the muscles “supple, pliant and soft” before moving onto heavier loading.
In a 1958 athletics textbook he also read that high jump training in the former USSR sometimes involved using weighted vests and weight training. At that time, during the last two years of his schooling at Marist Brothers College, he had developed a passion for track and field, but was unable to try such strength training ideas out, because schools in South Africa had no weight training facilities.
However, soon after he started studying at the University of the Witwatersrand (“Wits”) in 1960, Mel, eager to experiment with the little information which he had read in that publication, managed to locate the Weightlifting Club on campus which operated from a dilapidated post World War II prefabricated hut and immediately he began training there. Encouraged by the Club committee, he rapidly took up competitive weightlifting, a sport that was eventually to dominate over all of his other sports and lay the foundation for many years of competition and research in that field.
The South African Amateur Weightlifting Federation (SAAWLF) periodically held training workshops and invited various overseas lifters and coaches to address them. It was then that Mel began to appreciate that there was indeed a science behind the art of strength training, a point that was driven strongly home in the late 1960s when the renowned and approachable British athletics coach, Geoff Dyson, spoke at Wits on topics such as programme design and organisation of training. His 1946 textbook, A New System of Training, appeared to be one of the earliest English language books on what later came to be known as “periodisation” and this innovative material convinced Mel that careful objective and subjective organisation must be a vital part of sports training. Many years later, it surprised Mel that many Western coaches seemed to be enthralled with this ‘new’ training approach when it surfaced under its now popular name of “periodisation”.
During the early 1970s, the SAAWLF invited the legendary strong man from Belgium, Serge Reding, the great rival of Alexeyev, to visit South Africa and, as fate would have it, he lived in the Siff family home in Johannesburg for much of his stay. This afforded Mel the unique opportunity of training with Serge and learning firsthand from this enormously powerful lifter training methods that he had never even heard of. He learned about many different forms of periodisation, jump or rebound training (this later became known as ‘plyometrics’), sport specific electrical stimulation, formal restoration, complex training and innumerable lifting variations. No other single individual played such an extensive practical role in laying the foundations for all of the subsequent work that Mel carried out. His death just a few years later came as a sad blow to the entire Siff family who had become very close to this refined, genteel and helpful example of the Iron Game.
At about the same time, Mel, who was completing a Masters in applied mathematics began to see increasing applications for mathematical analysis in his own sport and he was fascinated to read about “force plates” to measure forces and torques involved in human movement. The only such devices were obtainable commercially from the USA at very high cost, but a fellow lifter and staff member in the Department of Civil Engineering, Andy Hofmeyr, stated that it would be relatively simple to construct a similar device using the expertise that he had acquired from making load cells for measuring forces and torques in bridges, buildings and other civil engineering projects. Not too long afterwards, Andy had constructed a successful force plate, which Mel eventually used for his PhD research.
A further going invaluable source of international research and coaching information came from the West German publication, Lehrbeilage Gewichtheben, which was very generously sent for many years to Mel by Lothar Spitz, prominent West German weightlifting coach whom he met at the 1979 World Weightlifting Championships in Thessaloniki, Greece. At the same event, the author met, filmed and observed during training some of the most renowned Russian lifters and coaches such as Vardanian, Rachmanov and Medvedev, an occasion that yielded insights that stimulated a great deal of his subsequent research.
During the early 1970s Mel made contact with Dr Michael Yessis, whose invaluable translations of Soviet training material in the “Yessis Review” and the “Soviet Sports Review” made available to him information that would never otherwise have reached the West. During 1983, he was able to invite Dr Yessis, then a professor in physical education at the University of California, Fullerton, to lecture widely throughout South Africa on strength training science and Soviet athletic training, ultimately leading to a friendship which paved the way to many later collaborative efforts.
This contact, augmented by his regular visits to Dr Yessis in the USA, furnished Mel with an extensive working familiarity with Soviet sports science and ultimately inspired him to visit Russia in July 1990 and November 1991. Dr Siff spent several weeks there with various Russian colleagues, in particular Dr Yuri Verkhoshansky, widely regarded as one of the world's most respected experts in special strength training and the programming of sports training. Possibly he is best known in the West for his concept of 'shock' training or plyometrics, as it is now popularly known..
They discussed their mutual research interests and met with other sports scientists at major Russian research institutes. A staff member and scientific interpreter at one of these institutes, Linna Moratcheva, served as an invaluable link between the author and his Russian colleagues, organising working meetings and willingly devoting much of her time to translating many of the difficult concepts.
Subsequently, Mel invited Dr Verkhoshansky to visit South Africa on a lecture tour in March 1992. During the month that he spent in Mel’s home, he was able to discuss extensively with Mel the broad spectrum of Russian strength research and training, aided by Linna Moratcheva as their able interpreter.
The relaxing and unique atmosphere afforded by the African countryside, including its Game Parks and hospitable citizens, though entirely peripheral to the task of authorship, served to facilitate highly productive discussion between the two scientists which transcended the importance of purity of language translation and accuracy of content. These meetings led to their collaborative writing of the first edition of “Supertraining”, upon which a great deal of this new edition has been based. At times, the African birthplace of the latest edition of this book suggested important analogies between the impressive physical performance of its wild animals and fitness qualities such as strength, speed, power, agility, reactive ability and plyometrics. This, in turn, indicated that many training secrets from 'darkest Africa' could be extracted by observant analysis of nature and applied with scientific guidance to advancing the sporting endeavours of humankind. That the land of the strongest land animal (the elephant), the fastest animal on earth (the cheetah), the most powerful ape (the gorilla) and many of the world's most effective jumping creatures (such as the graceful springbok) should have given birth to this 'strength-speed' book is coincidentally noteworthy.
Dr Mel Siff was Senior Lecturer in mechanical engineering at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa for many years, where his major areas of research were biomechanics, ergonomics, strength conditioning and injury rehabilitation. His Masters degree (Applied Mathematics) was awarded summa cum laude in brain research and his PhD was in physiology, specialising in biomechanics. He has presented papers interna¬tionally at conferences in sports science, physiology, physiotherapy, sports medicine, psychology, engineering, ergonomics, physical education, linguistics and communication. He has published widely and lectured in several countries, including the USA, England, Israel, Australia and the Far East. A former weightlifter who received university, provincial and national awards for many years, he was chairman of the South African Universities Weightlifting Association for more than two decades and was manager-coach of the South African national weightlifting team in 1983 and 1984. He received two Meritorious Service awards for 'exceptional contribution to sport' and Weightlifting at his university, whose Sports Council passed a resolution (20/78) thanking him 'for doing more for Wits (University) sport than any other individual in the history of the university'.
Dr Mel Siff sadly passed away in March 2003
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