As bodybuilding gained in popularity, the money to be made from the sport also increased. Whenever a lot of money suddenly be- comes involved, everything starts to change. Professional bodybuilders had been making money at the sport since the days of Sandow, but very few were able to make a good living. Many opened gyms, manufactured equipment, got into movies, or supplemented their income through mail-order sales and posing exhibitions. But the prize money available in contests was minimal.
Now, with the Grand Prix events and so many other professional contests, and a total purse in the Olympia exceeding $100,000, there is enough money in bodybuilding competition to attract an increasing number of young athletes. And a larger pro- portion of established stars are staying active through their thirties and even into their forties.
The opportunities available in bodybuilding today are extraordinary. We can see from the proliferation of bodybuilding magazines, from the fact that the circulation of Joe Weider‘s Muscle eJ Fitness has more than quadrupled in the last few years, from the tremendous increase in the number of gyms around the country, and from the sale of gym and fitness equipment that bodybuild- ing has turned into big business.
Bodybuilding events are now televised as a matter of course. The Mr. America competition is held at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas; Manila and Cairo are the sites of Mr. Universe competitions; and the day is approaching when bodybuilding will be included in the Olympics.
Any discussion of bodybuilding would be incomplete without mention of the contribution of Joe Weider and his magazine Muscle Builder (now Muscle & Fitness). Joe has done more than sim- ply provide good articles and photos detailing the lives and training methods of the top physique stars, he has also managed to gather and preserve enormous amounts of valuable training information.
Joe spent a lot of time going into gyms around the country and observing how the stars trained. For instance, he noticed that Larry Scott used a preacher bench to do Curls, and that Chuck Sipes continued to do set after set with great intensity by quickly taking weight off the bar between sets. He took note of these methods, wrote them down, then gave them names. Scott didn’t call his technique “Scott Curls,” and Sipes didn’t realize he was using the “Stripping Method.” But, through Joe, soon everyone had access to these particular training techniques.
In Austria, I trained in the morning and again in the evening because that’s what my daily schedule demanded. Now, this is known as the “Weider Double-Split System,” and is being used by bodybuilders all over the world.
The “Weider Training Principles” are a collection of the best bodybuilding techniques ever created. Joe Weider recognized these principles, tagged them with his own name (the Weider Instinctive Principle, the Weider Priority Principle, the Weider Peak-Contraction Principle, and so on), and promoted them in his magazine. A generation of bodybuilders has benefited from Joe’s ideas on training, nutrition, diet, and anything else new in bodybuilding.
Source: Arnold Schwarzenegger with Bill Dobbins, The Encyclopedia of Modern Bodybuilding (Simon & Schuster: New York, 1985) 61-63.
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The slope unique combination of elements keeps players on their toes, as they must balance speed with caution while navigating the treacherous obstacles that lie ahead.
It’s interesting to hear Arnold discuss the professional side of bodybuilding and the challenges athletes face. His success helped bring greater recognition to the sport and inspired generations of fitness enthusiasts to pursue their goals.
“But, through Joe, soon everyone had access to these particular training techniques.”
LOL…I’m amused by how Arnold diplomatically dodged the fact that Joe W. not merely named and promulgated the various training methods and techniques utilized by champion bodybuilders and physical culturists since Sandow but also, infamously, implied or, more-typically, outright claimed that he’d invented them.
Of course, Weider wasn’t the first fitness industry businessman to do so — Joe’s main rival during the 1960s, Bob Hoffman of York Barbell Co., had done the same long before Joe arrived.
As prolific muscle magazine writer Charles Smith explained decades ago, essentially nothing new in training methods and techniques originated after the late 1890s/early 1910s. All subsequent were merely variations, refinements, machine-adaptations, sometimes sincere re-discoveries, and, definitely better scientific understandings of how and why those methods worked (and, obviously, the introduction of anabolic and growth drugs post-1950/1951) – – but nothing essentially new under the sun since the pioneering Sandow era.
Only the endless series of new fitness industy marketeers appropriating what had existed long before many were even born, lol
Ha, yes, I think that is exactly the tension Arnold is politely skating around here.
What Weider did brilliantly was not necessarily invent the methods, but name them, package them, attach them to stars, and make them feel newly available to ordinary readers. That is a different kind of power, but it is still power.
I completely agree on Hoffman too. One of the funny continuities in physical culture is that every generation rediscovers old practices and then advertises them as breakthroughs. Sandow, Attila, Checkley, the early mail order men, Hoffman, Weider, Nautilus, HIT, and plenty of later internet figures all played some version of this game.
So yes, the methods were old. The marketing was the innovation. And in Weider’s case, the marketing was often so effective that it swallowed the history.