by Lou Schuler
I remember sitting in a theater in 1976, watching Rocky soon 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.
