The Birth, Life and Death of Bodybuilding’s Most Important Forum

Late last year, in 2024, Bodybuilding.com did the unthinkable. They closed the infamous bodybuilding.com forum down. In an age of Tik-Tok and Instagram, younger readers may question why anyone should care. The answer lies in an interesting mix of influencers, trolls, questions about how many days are in a week (yes really!) and a community that has never been surpassed.

The bodybuilding.com forums have a mixed legacy. On the one hand, you could argue that the forums effectively birthed our modern fitness environment, from the status of fitness influencers to the edgy content and constant selling. Indeed, you could also point to the rise of evidence-based training paradigms and a more informed base for lifters. You could, however, deem it as nothing more than a curio existing in an online space. One with little tangible impact.

Here I am going to trace the history of the forums, showcasing how and why they grew so popular. From there, I want to look at its positive impact on modern fitness and, just as critically, its negative effects. I doubt there is any other fitness outlet which will boast as complicated a legacy.

The Fitness Forum

I feel like most people will be familiar with the forum. They were/are effectively online communities usually centered around a specific topic. First devised in the 1970s, forums truly came of age in the 1990s and early 2000s. Before, and during this time, people relied on fitness usenets, which is a different area I’m not going to discuss but for anyone who wants to see what this early tech was like check out this link. Returning to the main focus, the 1990s and 2000s forums became a key component in many fan cultures and sub-cultures like bodybuilding or powerlifting. This, one imagines, is fairly logical. While bodybuilding and powerlifting had magazines one could buy, the information was often misleading in the case of bodybuilding or too specific in the case of powerlifting.

Internet forums allowed lifters to meet with like-minded trainees, and exchange tips and tricks. It was the interactivity of the forum, especially with other users, which made the forum so appealing. And indeed, it continues to this day in the form of Reddit. Rather than hundreds of individual forums, Reddit’s subreddits aggregate them into one place. In terms of early fitness forums, two communities are worth discussing.

The first, incredibly, is the high-intensity workout crew. For those in need of a quick lesson, high-intensity training (HIT) is the workout system best associated with Mike Mentzer. I am going to brashly categorize it as training to failure because that is the basic premise. To be more specific, it is a highly detailed form of working out that pushes trainees to true failure in a shorter period of time. So rather than train for 90 minutes without failing on a single exercise, a trainee could train in 30-40 minutes, seeking out failure, to provide a more efficient workout.

HIT training, it is important to stress, has always been countercultural within bodybuilding circles. The man who invented it, Arthur Jones, criticized the inefficiency of mainstream bodybuilding programs with their seemingly endless reps and sets. Mike Mentzer, the man most associated with it was a bodybuilding philosopher who quit the sport early due to sporting shenanigans. Dorian Yates, its most successful practitioner, was himself an enigma. A great top three for sure, but all people who insured HIT would seem mysterious and a subculture.

One of the first major fitness forums, created in 1995, was a HIT community called Cyperpump. Still findable through the Wayback Machine, Cyperpump was an incredible echo chamber for HIT training. Indeed for many years, it was the only place where you could find Arthur Jones’ written materials. It also became a really excellent place to discuss grip strength which, again, was a fairly niche area. Such places did have their drawbacks admittedly and there is a great Dan John article about the cult of HIT ‘Jedis‘ during this period.

Now the other equally important group was the steroid forum. One of the most notable, and early sites, was the MESO-Rx forum, created in 1997. This isn’t a value call, and certainly NOT an endorsement, but the forum was, for many, one of the better sites in terms of safeguarding. Yes, it pushed extremes and anabolics but members were/are typically pretty good at encouraging folks to mind their health. Another website, founded a little later, was the creatively named Steroids.com (founded in 2001) which became a pretty awesome space for user-led steroid information. Aidan Hughes recently finished a great dissertation on Dan Duchaine, the underground steroid guru from the 1980s. In it, Aidan noted that steroid users have long relied on their own, and others, observations, for dosages. The steroid forums acted as this incredible repository of self-experimentation among users.

What is important to stress about fitness forums is just how quickly they sprung up from the early 00s to the 2010s. There was a massive and near untraceable surge in forums connected to training modalities (Kettlebell, powerlifting, power-building, bodybuilding, weightlifting, strongman/woman, CrossFit) as well as key figures (I loved… LOVED the old Dave Draper forum). It is into this mixture that Bodybuilding.com needs to be placed.

The Bodybuilding.com Forum

In the late 1990s, Ryan deLuca created Bodybuilding.com, a website that sought to sell supplements and other fitness items at a reasonable cost to consumers. Following a marketing approach already common in the industry (hello Testosterone Nation!), the site combined advertising and marketing with a variety of articles and workouts freely available to those visiting the site. As someone who came to fitness during this period, I cannot stress enough just how exciting Bodybuilding.com was. During the late 1990s and early 2000s, many of us relied on Joe Weider‘s magazine empire for fitness content.

Bodybuilding.com had generic and fluff pieces with professional bodybuilders. Far more valuable, however, were the articles from readers about their bodybuilding journeys and struggles. Ampllyfing the importance of bodybuilding.com in this regard was its bodybuilding.com forums. Below is a screenshot of the early bodybuilding.com in 2002. What I want to note first is the membership – 4,000.

The following year, in 2003, it had 20,000 users. 2004 and it was 40,000 users. If we take its peak in the early 2010s, there were over 2 million users in 2010 and over 4 million in 2012. Heck even at the time of its closure in 2024, the forum had over 3 million members. Some skepticism is needed when it comes to the accuracy of these figures, and indeed how many of these members could be classed as active. But they do give a sense of how active and vibrant the forum could be.

While other forums existed, few can deny the importance of the good, bad, and ugly of Bodybuilding.com. One of the few in-depth articles I’ve found on the forum, which doesn’t just focus on the influencer Zyzz (more shortly) is Oliver Bateman’s work for Mel magazine. In it, Bateman talks to individual users and members who talk about the excitement, subversiveness, and influence of the forums.

At a superficial glance, the forums offered a really interesting way of finally communicating with experts and athletes in fitness. For the first time, you could chat to Shawn Ray on the Muscular Development forums, Dan John on the Dave Draper forums or a host of exercise scientists in the bodybuilding forums. Heck, I even remember when Serge Nubret was posting, and responding to posts on the bodybuilding forums!

The Good, Bad and the Ugly of the Bodybuilding.com Forum

For myself and many others, the bodybuilding.com forums were where we got our education in fitness. Many an exercise scientist, implicitly or explicitly, can trace their beginnings to Layne Norton’s posting in the forums. Likewise, the contest prep sections let natural and enhanced athletes share their workouts and diet strategies. This was incredibly exciting. Bear in mind that the ‘outer’ fitness world meant magazines and books, with the occasional video. It was impossible to get immediate feedback. Forums gave us that and, I would argue, helped to enhance the baseline level of fitness education. Was it all perfect? Of course not. But it was something.

The forums were also the birth of Meme and influencer cultures, which were less beneficial. Know Your Meme has an entire section dedicated to the bodybuilding.com forums. Memes like ‘Do you even lift?’/’Dat dere Cell Tech’/’I’m 18, Do I Have Potential?’/’Dreamer Bulks’/’no homo’ etc. flooded the forums at various points from the late 2000s and into the 2010s. Some will point to these as harmless fun. I truthfully was less enamored with them. These memes were user-driven and spread beyond the confines of the bodybuilding forum itself.

So too, did the influencers. Because the forums were split into various categories it was possible to have category-specific influencers. Here I think it is useful to distinguish between Lyle McDonald and ‘Zyzz.’ Lyle, whose body composition website is still going strong, was ever-present in the bodybuilding forums. Unlike the Weider magazines many of us had grown up on, Lyle pushed for a more scientific approach to weight training. In many ways, Lyle was an early form of what we would now call an evidence-based fitness influencer. Another such individual was Layne Norton, who began posting in the teen section in 2001. Lyle, Layne, and Eric Helms, used the forums to spread and popularise the science of lifting in all its forms. The flip side to these guys was Zyzz and those like him.

Zyzz was, in essence, among the first online fitness influencers as we would typically understand them. Young, brash, and on steroids, Zyzz told us about the importance of being a ‘sick c**t’, about getting women and having fun. Surrounded by an army of family and friends who, truthfully, all looked the same in terms of physiques and hairstyles, Zyzz preached the gospel of ‘aesthetics’.In an interview with Simply Shredded Zyzz explained his physique plans as

 

 not to be some massed up freak, but rather to have a physique that can be looked as art; streamlined, tapered, and universally appealing.

 

What is probably the most impressive thing about Zyzz was that he built a large following, across multiple forums including 4chan, without the use of today’s modern social media platforms. YouTube was in its early state when Zyzz burst into the forums in the late 2000s and passed away in 2011 aged 22. Everyone is going to have different opinions on Zyzz. He influenced and encouraged others, helped popularise phrases like ‘you mirin’ and promoted the kind of aspirational fitness lifestyles that an ungodly of influencers still use today.

Zyzz in his Prime

It wasn’t for me but I understand the appeal for many on the forums. He seemed to be living a fun life and encouraged others to do the same. I cannot deny that he was a really important inspiration for a lot of people. For a generation, you could make a plausible argument that he was as, if not more inspiring, than Arnold or Ronnie Coleman in terms of getting people into the gym.

And he also engaged in the ‘edgy’ humor which typified the Misc section of the bodybuilding forums. Here is his ‘trolling’/racially profiling of fellow gymgoers. Hilarious

This ‘edgy’ element brings me to the downright ugly of the forums. Oliver Bateman’s article interviewed several former forum trolls but it is useful to discuss two glaring issues found in the forum, especially the Misc. The first was the often complete disregard shown for women in the Misc. Kieran Dahl wrote a great article on the Misc here and there is one section I want to quote

Gable Tostee first became a Misc. star by posting screenshots of his Tinder and text conversations with women he “rooted,” or had sex with; he entered Misc. lore after creating an ill-advised thread titled “Regarding the balcony tragedy” in the wake of news that one of his Tinder dates had been found dead from a fall from his apartment balcony. (Tostee was later acquitted of murder and manslaughter.)

A Miscer known as YaBoyDave secretly filmed himself having sex with women—“whale-smashing,” in Misc. parlance—and posted the videos on the Misc.; he served 10 months in jail and is now a registered sex offender

There are many, many more stories about women on the Misc I could cite, from the nonchalance of calling them ‘whales’ and ‘sluts’ to more serious posts with their images and nudes on the forum. There was a clear anti-woman element to the forum. Some people may be annoyed by that statement and claim it was harmless fun. It was… for the predominantly male audience of the misc. Which brings me to my next point.

Famously the Misc, and other parts of the forums, were infiltrated by incel groups. This was noted by Laura Bates and briefly became a considerable talking point in 2014 after Elliot Rodger’s murdered 6 people and injured 14 more. Rodgers, who is still a darling among some groups, left a manifesto about his desire to punish women. In searching for his motivations, some noted his regular postings on the bodybuilding.com forum asking about dating advice, and also writing hatefully about women in general. His writings were not unique, a little out there and he was challenged, but the general tenor of the forums meant he was comfortable posting there.

Obviously, not everyone who used the forums was an incel (“not all posters” etc. etc.) but there was a spirit of meanness in the Misc embodied by its troll culture. I was a member of the forums when ‘CandyJunkie’ (Abraham Biggs) died by suicide. He live-streamed the event – which thankfully I missed because of timezones. Saskia E Polder-Verkiel in a research paper about ‘bad’ samaritanism online noted that the tone in CandyJunkie’s suicide thread was ‘jocular’ and that many accused him of faking it. Some encouraged him to do it faster. That happened in 2008 and was probably a high point for concern but it spoke to a callousness about the forums which never really left it. Returning to Dahl, he described the misc’s ethos pretty succinctly

It’s this last quality of the Misc. that Miscers themselves most readily use to characterize the forum. They see the stupidity of getting worked up over little green internet squares. They don’t take themselves seriously—it’s a motley crew of dudes on a bodybuilding site, bro—so nor should anyone else. Their attitude, one adopted from the bro culture with which they’re intertwined, is predicated on actions not having consequences. Break shit and someone else will pay for it.

As someone who used it, it is difficult to disagree.

Why the Forums Mattered

Absent in all of this was the role bodybuilding.com played in its forums. It was very minimal and very light-touch. The forums *could* be a wonderful place for information, creating friendships, and improving one’s health. Hell, that was my own experience with it 90% of the time. It was though, a downright cesspool at times, especially in the Misc section.

It is my firm belief and something I am researching right now, that the forums helped to shape our modern fitness-influencing space. In particular, the teeny/edge-lord humor that many fitness influencers use in their videos and clips and the lifestyle aspirations that Zyzz and others used i.e. get the physique and got the body. This can be found in both the serious scientific videos and the more ‘bro’ style influencers who exist. A lot of the time they are following a Misc style playbook.

This is why the forums’ disappearance is so problematic. For those trying to make sense of how the modern fitness ecosphere exists, a core archive, housed for several decades, is now gone. You can find certain posts and threads through the Wayback Machine, but it is limited by how much it shows. As a historian, it reminds me that the digital world can be easily lost despite the still ongoing influence it has. Other fitness forums exist, and some still wonderfully do. Some had/have a big influence over mainstream fitness and, I feel comfortable in saying, we have not, as an industry, come to grips with how much fitness has changed because of them.

So farewell to the bodybuilding.com forums. I loved you at the time but now researching its broader elements as a historian, I am deeply troubled by your legacy.