article taken from t-nation.com
10 Most Influential Muscleheads
An opinionated look at the men and women
whose passion for the iron made the world
safe for hypertrophy
by Lou Schuler
The current issue of the Atlantic Monthly has this as its cover story: "The 100 Most Influential Americans of All Time."
I found myself growing frustrated as I read it. Once you get past the guys on Mt. Rushmore, it seems like a grab-bag, with an overwhelming 19th-century bias. Were Walt Whitman (#22) and Ralph Waldo Emerson (#33) really more influential than Bill Gates (#54)? Were people in the 1800's so literate that a gay poet and reclusive philosopher changed their lives the way the ubiquity of the personal computer has changed ours?
My second thought was that almost no one on the list had the slightest influence on health, nutrition, or physical fitness. (Unless you count P.T. Barnum, #67, whose influence on bodybuilding in general, and the supplement industry in particular, can't be underestimated.) More than 40 million Americans — well north of 10 percent of American adults — belong to health clubs. Surveys consistently show that the majority of Americans worry about their weight.
Where does that come from? Who convinced us that it was important to exercise? And whose fault is it that most Americans are so goddamned confused about how to do it?
A bit of backstory: Two years ago, I was commissioned to work on a magazine story called "The Best Trainers of All Time." My coauthor and I surveyed a group of folks in the fitness biz and came up with a list of 10 all-time greats.
But several of the people we surveyed expressed disappointment with the results, and, for different reasons, the story never ran in the magazine. But it did make me think about what we lifters do in terms of its historical context. Strange as it seems, there were moments in our nation's history when muscleheads like us inspired genuine and sincere efforts to improve public health and raise awareness of physical fitness and the importance of good nutrition.
Here is my very opinionated ranking of the most influential of our breed.
1. Arnold Schwarzenegger
Professional bodybuilding before Arnold was nothing in terms of its impact on society. After Arnold, it returned to nothing. But in between, Arnold almost single-handedly made bodybuilding appear to be an actual sport involving strategy and gamesmanship to those who knew nothing about it beyond the fact it required grown men to shave their bodies, apply barbecue sauce and baby oil to their skin, and appear onstage next to each other wearing six square inches of fabric.
That was a hell of a trick.
More importantly, Arnold flipped the notion that hypertrophied muscles were a manifestation of blue-collar labor at best, unfettered narcissism at worst. He changed the narrative. With Arnold, muscles were the apogee of aspiration, of achievement, of achieving the American dream... even if you were a veteran of the Austrian army.
That, and he got to fuck a Kennedy.
But Arnold's influence also has a dark side: Along with Jesse Ventura, he's one of two admitted steroid users to become governor of a state. We'd never have heard of either man if they hadn't used steroids. How do you talk about the risks of anabolic drugs with your kids or students or the athletes you coach when they know as well as you that the potential rewards include a massive fortune, worldwide fame, the governorship of our wealthiest state, and sex with a Kennedy?
2. Bob Hoffman
Everything Joe Weider did, Bob Hoffman did first. He published magazines, manufactured weight-lifting equipment, created and pushed nutritional supplements on his audience, and ran a national sports organization as his private fiefdom.
He even hired a sculptor to put a likeness of his head on another man's (more muscular) physique. If you tried to measure their egomania, both men would be off the charts, but Hoffman would probably win, if for no other reason than the fact Hoffman pioneered the marketing of an honorary doctorate as a legitimate academic credential. Even Weider never went that far.
At the start of his career, Weider made no secret of his admiration of Hoffman and his desire to follow in his footsteps. But that was before they became competitors, trading insults and lawsuits throughout the 1950s, as Weider's influence rose and Hoffman's stood poised for a fall.
Hoffman was decades ahead of his time. Starting in the 1930s, he championed strength training for everyone, from his employees to the world's best athletes to (gasp!) women. With his base in York, Pennsylvania, he built an empire of iron that included Strength & Health magazine, York Barbell, and de facto leadership of the once-dominant U.S. weightlifting team.
I doubt if 1 percent of today's sports fans know that the Americans used to dominate Olympic weightlifting the way Tiger Woods dominates golf. Led by Hoffman's York Barbell-affiliated athletes, the U.S. team won eight medals in six weight classes at the 1948 Olympics, including four gold. In fact, York had so many of the strongest lifters in the world in the 1940s and '50s that it was dubbed "Muscletown, U.S.A." (That's also the title of a book by John Fair chronicling Hoffman's rise and fall.)
Hoffman's big mistake was waiting too long to realize that bodybuilding had broader appeal than competitive weightlifting. It seems obvious now, but back in the '50s Hoffman and the writers in his magazine made endless fun of Weider and his focus on bodybuilding. They thought the idea of men going into a gym to build their pecs and lats was absurd, and unleashed their homophobia and anti-semitism on bodybuilders in general and Weider in particular.
By the time Hoffman embraced bodybuilding and the new sport of powerlifting and started publishing Muscular Development magazine in 1963, he was already on the wrong side of history, despite his three decades as the master of the hypertrophied universe.
3. Eugen Sandow
When you read about the feats of strength performed by Sandow, a Prussian born in 1867, you can't fathom that any of these things were done by a human being, much less a 180-pounder who performed them a half-century before the Russkies figured out the magic of man-juice.
In one of his books, he claimed to have done a one-arm shoulder press with 322 pounds with his right arm, 300 with his left, as well as a one-arm snatch with 189 pounds.
I suspect he was exaggerating. Certainly, the shoulder presses don't seem humanly possible. But the feats of strength that were verifiable still stagger the imagination.
Take what he did to Dudley Sargent, the Harvard professor who was one of the founding fathers of modern physical education and exercise science. Sargent was asked by the New York World, Joseph Pulitzer's flagship newspaper, to examine Sandow and try to figure out what made this seemingly perfect man so different from everyone else.
At one point, Sandow knelt down and asked the 175-pound Sargent to step onto his open palm. When he did, Sandow easily lifted him up, keeping his arm straight, and set him down on a table. Then Sandow lay on his back on the floor and had Sargent stand on his abdomen. Sandow relaxed his ab muscles, then flexed them so hard he bounced Sargent into the air.
Maybe he was a genetic freak, sui generis, a statistical outlier many standard deviations away from you, me, and Dupree. Or maybe he figured out secrets of strength and power that we're just now rediscovering. First among them: There's no substitute for lifting really heavy shit.
It's tempting to say that Sandow was the Schwarzenegger of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but he was more and less than that. He started as a circus strongman, performed in the Ziegfeld Follies in the 1890s, and eventually became more famous for his chiseled physique (a likeness of which Weider uses on his Mr. Olympia trophy) than for his otherworldly strength. Thus, he was the first bodybuilder in the modern sense.
But Sandow did more with his physique than acquire fame and fortune, although he had plenty of both. (He made a ton selling equipment for home-based exercise, on top of the money he made with his public performances, and was one of the most famous people in the English-speaking world by the time he died in 1925.)
As personal training consultant to the English royal family, he lobbied the English government for mandatory physical fitness in schools, and advocated such now-standard public-health measures as free school lunches for underprivileged children and prenatal checkups for women.
On top of all that, he wrote books, published a magazine, staged the first-ever bodybuilding contest (with his friend Sir Arthur Conan Doyle as one of the judges), and opened and operated health clubs.
So why doesn't he rank higher? Mostly because his influence was ephemeral; for all his fame, his training "secrets" (lift heavy shit, the heavier the better) were lost for two generations. Worse, the bodybuilding world appropriated his image while mocking his message (did I mention the importance of lifting really heavy shit?).
Thus, it's interesting that he was so far ahead of his time, but you can't really put him above the people whose message has been in continuous circulation.
