The dark side of body building

BODY BUILDING ARTICLE

The Dark Side of Bodybuilding
By Paco Prado

After a very profitable career in erotic films, I got into the fitness and gym business and it became of particular interest to me the history of body building, the use of “enhancers” and the abuse of steroids.

Chris Colucci provided a very comprehensive article recently which I use here to bring some clarity to these issues.

When you ask fans of bodybuilding to name some key figures who were around before the 1960s or '70s, and chances are they'd draw a blank once they got past Hoffman, Weider, Sandow, Arnold and Reeves. Bodybuilding may not be a traditional sport like baseball, boxing, or hockey, but it's something we're all passionate about, and it has a rich history going back to the "physical culture" boom of

One of the conflicts between Bob Hoffman of York Barbell and the Weiders in the early days of the sports was really a battle for the soul of strength training. Hoffman advocated training for performance, and the Weiders catered to guys who wanted to train for shape.

There seem to have been two philosophies. One was based in weight lifting, the other was based in pure bodybuilding. That went back to the 1920s, with [George] Jowett and [Alan] Calvert.

Calvert actually had a similar philosophy to Jowett in the beginning, but he changed his way when he read about calisthenics and high-rep training. The Weiders took that "train for shape, and strength will follow" route.

Hoffman, as a weightlifter, never believed in just building muscles for muscles' sake. He wanted those muscles to do something, while Alan Calvert said, "For every one man who wants to be as strong as Sandow, I'll show you a hundred who want to look like him."

I think Calvert was probably more accurate. Everybody wants that look of muscle with the six-pack, veins in the biceps, all that stuff. But Hoffman lived and breathed weightlifting. Colucci gives him credit, he did a lot for the sport of American weightlifting. He took on an entire nation, the Soviet Union, in the 1940s and '50s.

When supplements came in, that was such a financial bonanza for Hoffman and Weider. They just took it and ran with it. The info ads [in magazines] didn't begin in the '90s, they started back in the '50s.

But by starting Muscular Development in 1964, Hoffman did eventually cater to bodybuilders. He had no choice, because as much as he didn't like bodybuilding, he knew it served him through merchandising. Especially when the supplements came out, it was the bodybuilders that he catered to. It was really good business. It was a wise move for Hoffman to create Muscular Development and put John Grimek in as the editor. Grimek was a good guy, a weightlifter and a bodybuilder.

The early “supplements”.

A lot of the early protein stuff came from industrial waste. The soy [found in the earliest protein powders] was soy meal runoff from the soy industry that was extracting the oils for paints and grease. The meal was used to fertilize the ground, or they were feeding it to animals. They shouldn't really have been feeding it to the animals either. It was controversial at the time because they were de-fatting it with solvents, and they were toxic.

Hoffman was bragging that he wasn't using solvents or de-fatting his, but he was left with unstable oils. That's when they started hydrogenating them, to try to stabilize it, but Hoffman had the full meal and his fats were becoming rancid. You had to keep his protein in the fridge.

A lot of those early protein powders were highly questionable.

Also at the beginning there was a great deal of emphasis on eating uncooked food among some bodybuilders. Armand Tanny, who passed away recently, was a raw foodist.

Tanny was wrestling in the Hawaiian Islands in the late '40s, and he was impressed with the Samoans, who were eating raw meat, raw beetles, raw fruit. He said they were so strong and healthy that he just came home, shut off his stove, and within two years he walked away with the Mr. USA and the Pro Mr. America.

How did split training come about? Did it start with the steroid era? It started before the drugs. People will argue when drugs came into the sport — whether they were using Methyltestosterone in the late '40s or early '50s is debatable — but they weren't using synthetic derivatives such as Dianabol or Nilivar at that time.

That differentiation [in training] began in the late '40s and early '50s. George Jowett and Alan Calvert began the three-days-a-week, total-body, double-progressive system, and it held for many years.

Modern bodybuilding really took off in 1939 and 1940, when the AAU came in to run the Mr. America. They took weightlifting out of the prerequisites for it, so you had guys training just for the physique.

The Weider gang, with Clancy Ross and those guys later in the '40s, began to do more specialized training, to get some volume in. Hoffman also followed suit to a certain degree, but he wasn't going to let himself get too close to Weider.

Steroids in bodybuilding didn't really come into play until the early '60s. They were dabbling with it through the '50s, but by then, the training had already differentiated into a more volume style. They're calling it "flushing" and "pumping." They were arguing whether cheating [with exercise technique] was any good.

It seems like some people were writing about steroids in the '40s, but it wasn't until the late '50s when they were introduced to athletes.

But they weren't writing about them in the iron game in the 1940s. Paul de Kruif wrote The Male Hormone in 1945, singing the praises of Methyltestosterone and Testosterone replacement for those medically in need. There were some inklings about, "Well, what could it do for a healthy person?"

Irvin Johnson [who later changed his name to Rheo Blair] had possession of Nilivar between 1956 and '58, when it just came out. Bill Pearl said he first interacted with Nilivar in 1958. But one of the first articles on it, in 1962, was titled something like, "Please Guys, Don't Do It." It was [Ironman publisher] Peary Rader warning against the effects of steroids.

They had already proliferated into high schools and college football at that time. It wasn't in get-go.

Irvin Johnson; aside from his expertise in nutrition and early supplementation, he also created Tomorrow's Man, a physique magazine aimed at the gay male audience. Was that what motivated Joe Weider to start magazines like Adonisand Body Beautiful? Was he trying to capture a part of the gay market and compete with Johnson? And is this one of the reasons why Bob Hoffman went after Weider with such personal venom?

It seems that Hoffman was really frustrated with Joe. Was Joe a bodybuilder first, or was he a businessman first? Did he have a homosexual orientation, or would he just stop at nothing to make money, in any market?

Weider lost Body Beautiful and Adonis around 1956-57, when American News went under. [Weider published dozens of magazines at that time, and when his distributor, American News, went under, Weider lost millions and discontinued all his non-bodybuilding titles.] But he started right up again in 1961 with another two magazines. So, they were obviously making him money.

The industry is saturated in its peripherals with homosexuals. Even Dan Lurie said back in the '40s that all the photographers he knew were gay. Into the '50s and '60s, nothing really changed. I chose the '50s to deal with it because Peary Rader was addressing it, and Bob Hoffman was addressing it with [an article titled] "Let Me Tell You a Fairy Tale".

Peary was worried about the bodybuilders becoming what he called "strutting egotists," wearing tank tops, showing off, and basically having shallow personalities. He thought they should be rounded individuals. Remember, physical culture was mind, body, and spirit. But he was also worried about them taking that next step and prostituting themselves.

What really happened in those early years was that since there was no readily available porn for gays, most of them looked at body building magazines to satisfy their need for eye candy. Eventually almost every gay person in the country had a dozen body building magazines stuffed between the mattresses. One thing led to another and the gay population started to go to the gyms and became ever more masculine and just as physically fit as body builders who were in competition. Truth be told, it became increasingly more difficult to tell who was and who wasn’t gay any more. This went even further with gays donning leather and heavy tattoos. The stereotypical feminine, weakling sissy was no more.

The use of steroids then became widely spread among other athletes. There were female Soviet Olympic participants who were banned from competition because they were discovered to have used steroids. Some of the adverse effects of steroids started to become well known. One such regrettable victim of this was famous football star Lyle Alzedo who had an untimely death due to renal failure brought on by the use of steroids in the earlier days of his career.

Everyone knows that it's still in the industry now, but it's in other sports too. It's not confined to bodybuilding. It's there in all endeavors that have young, healthy bodies, whether they have pronounced musculature or just have a good athletic look. And when money's involved, it's going to be there.

The sport's already come back around on its ass again. It's gone full-circle, and it's dying off. Teenagers aren't getting into the sport. They're migrating to MMA. They're not going to take the amount of drugs that they need to. They can get the physique they want without taking all that.

Fewer people are going to the competitions. The audience is dying off. There's no creativity anymore — it's just gone since DeMilia left. [Contest promoter Wayne DeMilia left Weider's IFBB in 2004.]

As long as that faction of bodybuilding is flown as the flagship of the sport, you can kiss it goodbye. It'll never totally disappear, but they've got to start getting more marketable athletes. Someone who's going to draw the kids in, and the women in. Like DeMilia said, "You know you're going the wrong way when the homosexuals say, 'We're not coming either.' "

I feel sorry for athletes today in the sense that, if you want to be a doctor or a dentist or a lawyer, if you have the brains and you can get the money to go to school, you can become that.

If a young athlete has the gifts, the genetics, and the resources [to succeed in sports], that's not enough. He also has to make that decision. "Will I take drugs to perform at the top level?" No other profession is required to do that, only athletics.

And then we chastise the athletes. Corrupt politicians scold them in these hearings. It's just all wrong. The whole black market thing, the ban ... that's a whole other political argument that I think should be left alone right now.

You're going to find out who the real mechanics were, who moved bodybuilding along behind the scenes. Guys that didn't get the glory and still aren't getting the recognition today, but without them, it would've been a whole different landscape.

Again, bodybuilding was a business, but it struggled to define itself. Was it a pageant? Was it a sport? Was it a circus? Was it some kind of hybrid of those? It was an avenue for just a small number of people to make money, and others were trying to proliferate and build it into a reputable sport. Yeah, there's definitely contest-fixing, everybody knows that, but it's to the extent that they were being fixed. There have been some very transparent, terrible bodybuilding decisions, right through all the decades.

It's too bad, because the vast majority of people can't pick a winner in bodybuilding anyway, so you don't have to have the same guy winning at all costs to sell your merchandise. The whole lineup looked fantastic in those days, and any one of them could sell the merchandise. They didn't have to fix the damn shows.

I think all the behind-the-scenes politics is something the average fan never really expects, but when I interviewed Dave Draper and Robby Robinson recently, they both mentioned it. A lot of it literally involved politics, especially when it concerned Sergio Oliva.

In 1962, we had just got through the Cuban Missile Crisis. Do you think Joe Weider is going to take a black Cuban who can barely speak English over Dave Draper, who had that California look with a great physique?

I have a chapter in Volume Two called "Arnold's Cuban Muscle Crisis," about the battle between him and Sergio, and what happened in Tijuana in 1973, with that contest and the fixing. [Oliva originally won the 1973 Mr. International, held in Tijuana, but the decision was overturned when he challenged Arnold to an impromptu posedown a month before the Mr. Olympia.]

Muscle, Smoke & Mirrors can be purchased at Amazon.com or at Randy Roach's website.

Arnold is now a Governor. Who'd knew?

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