Johann Guts Muths started a new movement in physical education for school-age boys and young men in Germany and published a book titled ‘Gymnastics for Youths’ in 1793. He built a 6 metre (20 feet) high wooden frame outdoors for climbing, and suspended climbing ropes, a rope ladder, and a climbing pole from it. A wooden ladder was used to climb to the top of the frame, and with the exuberance of young boys athletically climbing it, became the forerunner of wall bars.
Frederick Ludvig Jahn, a younger contemporary of Guts Muths, copied the wooden climbing frame, enlarged it, and made the ladder an integral part of his program. Specific exercises were developed for the ladder, which helped shape the development of the apparatus. Concurrently Per Henrik Ling, a Swedish scholar and athlete, started a physical education movement in his country and began using wall bars.
The wall bars were taken with migrants to the USA and evolved into the type of wall bars commonly used in high school and college gymnasiums, private gyms, and YMCAs in the late 1800s through middle 1900s. Wall bars were also used in health. The U.S. Army had a professional service of physiotherapists that, from World War II into the early 1960s, used what became called the Therapeutic Gymnasium. Among the typical exercise equipment found in these gyms were wall bars. Even today, stall bars are widely used in physiotherapy
Description provided by Glenn Ruscoe of Australia.
References:
Harmsen, L. 2006. History and use of stall bars. The Crossfit Journal Articles, 44, 1-3. Accesed online at http://library.crossfit.com/free/pdf/44_06_Stallbars.pdf on 15 January 2022.
