4. Joe Weider
I started working for Weider in late 1991 as a part-time copy editor at Muscle & Fitness. At the time, I was a grad student in creative writing at USC. That turned into a full-time copyediting job at Men's Fitness in early '92. I was promoted to fitness editor three years later, and left for Men's Health three years after that. The rest is history, or would be, if it were of interest to anyone but me.
Here's why I mentioned creative writing: For most of my time at MF, I was also writing screenplays and trying to get them made into movies. St. Louismagazine decided to do a feature on people from my hometown who were in Los Angeles trying to catch a break in the movie biz. I was one of the people profiled. The magazine hired a photographer to shoot a photo of me, and I got permission from someone at Weider to do the shot in the lobby of Weider's building in Woodland Hills.
Joe Weider happened to walk by in the middle of the shoot, assumed the photographer worked for one of his magazines, and asked him to take some photos of him. The photographer was mildly freaked out by this, but scrambled to accommodate the owner of the building in which we were shooting. He posed Weider next to a sculpture of Weider's head on the upper torso of Robbie Robinson, and, while his assistant adjusted the lights, tried to banter with the Master Blaster.
"Come on, come on!" Weider barked. For the life of me, I can't remember exactly what Weider said next. But I know it was something along the lines of, "Quit screwing around. I've got work to do."
Imagine the weirdness of this: A guy walks into the middle of someone else's photo shoot, asks the photographer to drop what he's doing and take shots of him instead of the person the photographer was hired to shoot, and then yells at the photographer for not moving fast enough.
But that was Weider, who was notorious among his staff for once saying this about one of his employees: "If he was any good he wouldn't be working here." Again, I don't know the exact quote — I wasn't there when he said it, and I'm not sure which employee he was referring to — but the veracity of the quote isn't in dispute.
In case you're wondering, he wasn't talking about me. After six years, I doubt if Weider knew who I was. He knew my name from the magazine and my face from the office, but I don't think he ever put them together.
My former boss at MF tells another story, which, again, I have no reason to doubt: After the editors at MFwon a minor journalism award, the first in the company's history, my boss showed Weider the trophy we'd won. "For what?" he asked. "Shit?"
So Weider wasn't a sweet and nurturing guy. Does that matter? Schwarzenegger is reputed to be a butt-pinching, boobie-grabbing bastard. Hoffman was monomaniacally dishonest. Sandow cheated so flagrantly and consistently on his wife — he lived with a man for a while — that she had him buried in an unmarked grave. (It's rumored, but unverifiable, that he died of complications from syphilis.) And Jack LaLanne might've stiffed a waiter at some point.
I think Weider's essential darkness, his need to have his own way and then not particularly enjoying the results of his hard work, is what makes him so problematic as a fitness icon. He gave the people what they wanted by emphasizing the aesthetics of training over its functional purpose. But while making bodybuilding a purely aesthetic pursuit, he removed it from its original, health-promoting ideal. And he opened the floodgates to unlimited drug use.
You couldn't look at a 300-pound dwarf — five feet tall, four feet wide, and two feet thick — and imagine that this drug-fueled man is healthier than any other junkie lining up at the needle exchange.
Worse, his bodybuilding magazines were fundamentally dishonest about how the bodybuilders they promoted achieved their results. Many T-Nation writers have noted that just about any training program works at the junction of Needle Avenue and Buttock Boulevard. So when you show a professional bodybuilder in contest condition and imply that the average reader can get similar results by following the bodybuilder's workout routine... well, that's horseshit, and everyone involved knows it.
And yet, I think there remains something pure and positive behind Weider's distorted creations. My guess is that most of the people reading Muscle & Fitness and Flexunderstand that the bodybuilders in the photos use steroids, and that few of the readers follow that example. We used the word "aspirational" a lot during my time in magazine publishing, and if oversized muscles were the inspiration for guys to get off their asses and hit the weights, then who am I to argue?
I also think Weider played a role in demystifying training, in showing a path from here to there. The great bodybuilders and strongmen of the pre-steroid era tended to have personal connections to other great bodybuilders and strongmen — that's why so many of the people we've heard of congregated at Muscle Beach and the original Gold's Gym.
But Weider helped the average guy working out in his basement or the neighborhood health club figure out what he was supposed to be doing. We can all quibble with the type of training that Weider emphasized — advanced bodybuilding routines promoted to beginners and intermediates who'd have been much better off following's Sandow's dictum to lift progressively heavier shit — but there's some value in getting people motivated to train in the first place.
Ultimately, I think Weider belongs in two iconic categories: In the fitness world, he's a worthy successor to Hoffman, for better and for worse. And in publishing, he stands alongside Hugh Hefner. Just as Hefner made whacking material mainstream, so Weider made the world safe for muscle porn.
5. Jack LaLanne
You want to know something really scary? I can still sing the opening lines of the theme song from LaLanne's TV show in the 1960s: "It's the new Jack, Jack LaLanne, and the new Jack LaLanne show!"
And I can still see LaLanne, in his goofy-ass jumpsuit and slippers, doing jumping jacks on the tiny screen of our black-and-white TV. I've never figured out why his jumpsuit covered half his deltoids, rather than all or none, but then again, I've never figured out LaLanne, either.
Here you have a guy who was there at the creation, but also not there. He opened a health club in Oakland, California, in 1936, when he was just 21. He hung out at Muscle Beach with the bodybuilding legends of the 1940s, and had the first fitness show on TV. He invented the leg extension machine, cable pulley systems, selectorized weights, the calf machine, and the wrist roller.
On his website, he claims to have been the first to encourage athletes, women, and the elderly to train with weights, and also takes credit for inventing "scientific" training. The older he got, the crazier he got, until he was celebrating birthdays by towing barges through San Francisco Bay while handcuffed and shackled. I have no idea how he did it, just as I can't fathom how Sandow lifted some of the things he lifted or claimed to lift.
So how influential was LaLanne?
Well, unless there's been a spate of shackled septuagenarians towing barges through commercial waterways, I'd say his influence is important but perhaps exaggerated by the man's longevity and penchant for self-promotion. Like everyone else on this list, he may have been an innovator, but in LaLanne's case, it's hard to say how continuous his influence was. I'm a lifelong fitness enthusiast, and LaLanne was the first fitness guru to whom I was exposed, and I can't think of one routine I've ever done that he inspired.
6. Vic Tanny
Vic Tanny was probably the most visionary entrepreneur in the health-club field — in fact, the first commercial gym I ever belonged to was a Vic Tanny in the St. Louis suburbs — even if he expanded too fast and had to sell off his chain two decades before I became a member.
I say "probably" because we can't go back in time and figure out exactly who deserves the most credit. LaLanne claims to have invented the modern health club, but Tanny opened his first club in Rochester in 1935, a year before LaLanne opened his in Oakland. Since Tanny was a full-time schoolteacher, it's hard to imagine that it was a full-time venture.
The next gym Tanny opened was in Santa Monica, California, in 1940; he also opened one in Long Beach. After the war ended, he moved his Santa Monica operation into a former USO facility. The 7,000-square-foot gym, known as The Dungeon, became the hub of the Muscle Beach crowd, which included Tanny's younger brother, Armand, along with Steve Reeves, George Eiferman, Joe Gold, and just about every famous musclehead who passed through Southern California in the late 1940s.
In fact, according to Marla Matzer Rose's Muscle Beach, the Tanny brothers put the "muscle" into Muscle Beach. The place was already a well-known local hangout for gymnasts and acrobats, but the Tannys were among the first bodybuilders to hit the beach.
Tanny expanded his chain quickly in the 1950s, using a formula that today looks a lot like a Ponzi scheme — he'd sign up as many members as he could in one location, often using deceptive and intimidating sales tactics, then use that future revenue stream as collateral to borrow the money to open his next gym. His clubs had distinctive red carpeting, chrome, mirrors, and cabinets filled with accounts receivable. When a substantial number of members got behind in their payments, it fell apart, and he sold off the business in the early '60s.
Today his name has all but disappeared from the conversation, but I see Tanny as an underrated innovator. Whereas Hoffman and Weider had multilayered businesses — magazines that helped them sell their own equipment and supplements — Tanny was, to my knowledge, the first to hit on the idea of franchising one part of the fitness industry.
LaLanne also franchised health clubs, but did so years after Tanny gave him the idea. Both chains were eventually consumed by Bally Total Fitness, which, alas, is rumored to continue some of the sales practices pioneered by Tanny.
7. Pudgy Stockton
Tanny's Dungeon was a male-only club. But one of the most appealing figures on Muscle Beach at that time was Abbye "Pudgy" Stockton, a former fat girl who, with the help of some iron therapy, developed one of the most memorable physiques of any woman, ever. Back in the 1940s, long before silicone allowed skinny chicks to have traffic-stopping headlamps, Stockton had the whole package — full breasts, tiny waist, and thickly muscled legs that would've inspired lascivious thoughts, if anyone back then actually had thoughts like that. (The Baby Boomers invented lust, right?)
She was photographed for Life magazine, wrote the "Barbelles" column for Hoffman's Strength & Health, opened gyms for women, and even staged the first-ever weightlifting contest for women. (At 118 pounds, she pressed 100, snatched 105, and got 135 in the clean and jerk.)
Of all the names on this list so far, Stockton is the only one who was never a household name. But in a just universe, she'd be at least as famous as any female fitness icon who followed her, up to and including Richard Simmons. Stockton proved that weights make a woman sexy. You couldn't possibly look at her and conclude that lifting gave women masculine physiques or "bulky" muscles; she was bigger before she started training than she was at the height of her fame. (She peaked at 140 pounds when she worked as a telephone operator shortly before she started her transformation.) It's not her fault that some women still believe the opposite.
And here's a nice bit of historical symmetry: Lisa Lyon, who won the first women's bodybuilding title in 1979 and later posed for Playboyand was the subject of a book of photography by Robert Mapplethorpe, started training at a gym in L.A. in which Stockton worked.
Did Pudgy train the woman who came to symbolize the sexiness of female muscle 40 years after Stockton had pioneered that role? I don't know. But I like the fact that they at least crossed paths, and I like to think that Stockton, if nothing else, helped convince Lyon that a woman's place is in the weight room.
8. Arthur Jones
Indulge me as I take another stumble down memory lane:
When I was on staff at St. Louis magazine in the early '80s, I worked on one of those big "Best Of... " features that all the city magazines do. One of my assignments was to figure out which was the "best gym" in the city. I was a member at Vic Tanny, so I sure as hell knew that wasn't the best. One of the gyms I visited was the local Nautilus Aerobics Plus. All I knew about Nautilus was that it was a type of machine. I had never heard of Arthur Jones or high-intensity training.
The instructor who put me through the workout wasn't built any better than I was, which was scary, considering how skinny I was back then. And the workout seemed insane — one set to failure on a bunch of machines. On one of the exercises, the pullover, he forced me to use such an exaggerated range of motion that I thought my lats were going to detach themselves from my ribs. And the trainer castigated me for my poor shoulder-joint mobility. It wasn't that there was a problem with the system. The problem was that I wasn't good enough for the system.
I went away thinking it was the stupidest workout I'd ever done in my life.
Many years later, when I was at Men's Fitness, I went with a reporter to check out a local trainer who was doing Super Slow workouts with his clients. I didn't do the workout this time, but I still got the feeling of déjà vu: machine-only training, one set to failure, a trainer who had even less muscle than me touting a magical muscle-building system...
Which brings me to Arthur Jones. You can't talk about Jones without pissing off somebody. You either celebrate his achievement in bringing high-intensity training into the conversation, or you demonize him for bringing high-intensity training into the conversation. Try to take the middle ground, and you piss off everybody.
I don't really have an interest in pissing off anybody, much less everybody (there's no upside to having enemies, and it only took me 50 years to figure that out). But to me it's clear that Jones changed the way we talk about training. You can argue about whether he changed it for better or worse, and chances are I'll find some merit in both arguments.
Certainly, as I've gotten older, I've learned the value of making my workouts shorter, finding that I can accomplish in a half-hour what used to take an hour. I also find that, most of the time, there's one set of each exercise that feels as if it's taken the muscles as far as they need to go that day, making subsequent sets unnecessary, if not counterproductive.
So am I doing HIT? I wouldn't describe it that way. I do multiple sets of everything, usually with lower reps, heavier loads, and faster tempos than a HIT man would prescribe. And I don't do anything with machines (cable systems excepted), unless I have a very specific reason for using one. I have yet to encounter a machine that improved on the human range of motion, and I've come across plenty that did the opposite.
My overwhelming feeling about HIT is that it's a useful tool in specific circumstances. And my overwhelming gripe about Jones is that he turned a methodology into a crusade, which to me is exactly backwards. Training is the crusade, and the training system is simply a tool to help you achieve the results you want.
It's like being so passionate about wool that you can't bring yourself to say the word "cotton," much less acknowledge its merits. If you thought about it rationally, you'd probably conclude that cotton is the better choice more often than not, but there are certainly times when it makes sense to opt for wool. And, for that matter, you can't rule out synthetic fibers. But if you put so much emotion into your choice of fabric that you begin to imagine an anti-wool conspiracy, it may be time to redeploy your emotional resources.
As Forrest Gump once said, "That's all I have to say about that."
9. Sylvester Stallone
I remember sitting in a theater in 1976, watching Rockysoon after it came out. The theater was packed. There's a scene where Rocky, played by Stallone, is trying to seduce Adrian, played by a famous director's younger sister. Stallone pulls off his sweater, and you could hear a gasp from the audience, the women as well as the men. Stallone was wearing a wife-beater underneath the sweater, and his muscles were soft and smooth, compared to the sliced-and-diced flesh he would display in subsequent movies. But still, by bicentennial standards, he was a specimen. And everyone noticed.
I can't prove that Stallone's delts kick-started the strength-training craze of the '80s and '90s. To my knowledge, nobody was even keeping track of exercise trends back then. But I do know it was the height of the running boom, and you never had to wait to use a bench in your local gym. Within a few years, there were more gyms, bigger gyms, and no such thing as an uninterrupted workout at any of them.
Sure, Stallone was never half the muscle icon Schwarzenegger was, which is why Arnold is #1 on this list and Sly is #9. And we'd probably all agree that the bigger Stallone got, the worse his movies became.
But I can't shake the idea that a lot of people sitting in that audience in 1976 started thinking about muscles for the first time after seeing the Stallion in his wife-beater. The women couldn't help but notice how a few pounds of contractile tissue profoundly improved a man's reproductive suitability, and the men couldn't help but notice the reaction of the women.
Whether it's correlation or coincidence, a lot of people who saw that movie in 1976 started working out with weights soon after.
10. Louie Simmons
I spent a couple of years in the mid-'90s doing Westside-inspired workouts, and it seemed as if, after three decades of exercise, my body finally got to where it was supposed to be. I set personal records in the all three power lifts, but that's beside the point; I'd guess 90 percent of the guys reading this, and a quarter of the women, have better PRs. The key is that I finally felt strong, more than 30 years after I'd started training for strength.
How influential will Simmons, Dave Tate, and Westside be a generation from now? I haven't a clue. Is Westside-endorsed conjugate periodization a better choice than linear periodization, or any other organized training system? Don't know.
What I do know, or at least believe, is that Westside is the Muscle Beach of our time. I don't mean the actual Westside Barbell in Columbus, which is a warehouse with more chalk dust than an army of third graders could clap out of their erasers in a year. And the facility isn't open to any but the most gifted and dedicated powerlifters who happen to be in central Ohio. (Unless you're a journalist and can get a magazine to send you there on assignment... )
But to many of us, there's a Westside ideal, a spirit that rivals the community that congregated at Tanny's Dungeon or the original Gold's Gym. The price of admission is a willingness to learn from the masters and do your best to implement the lessons. You don't have to be gifted. You just have to be serious. You can learn the ropes here and at Tate's site, elitefts.com.
Sometimes, via phone or email, you get the chance to interact with one of those masters. As Simmons and Tate both explained to me, in different ways, there's an obligation that comes with being the biggest and strongest. You help people who want to be bigger and stronger.
And, in the end, isn't that the most influence you could possibly have?
Lou Schuler is author, with Alwyn Cosgrove, of The New Rules of Lifting, and writes the Male Pattern Fitness blog at
www.louschuler.com.
Useful links
Atlantic Monthly feature:
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200612/influentials-mainLisa Lyon:
http://www.iol.ie/~webfoto/maple7j.htmPudgy Stockton:
http://letsgetstrong.tribe.net/photos/8bb51487-a7a3-4942-a830-2eee751eefa0http://www.1stimpact.com/ironman/gallery/gallery.cfm?galleryID=30http://images.google.comStallone in the original Rocky:
http://www.oscars.org/press/pressreleases/images/030602.jpg© 1998 — 2006 Testosterone, LLC. All Rights Reserved.
