What was it like to be a Bodybuilder in the 1940s?

What was it like to be a bodybuilder in the 1940s? Or, for you younger kids, how did ‘silver-era lifters’ get so jacked?

It’s a question that I think a lot of people come to after a few years in the muscle game. The ‘silver-era’, and kudos to Golden Era Bookworm for coining these terms, lasted roughly from the 1940s to 1960s and was largely pre-anabolic-steroids, particularly in its earlier decades. So for many, it is the last time one can look at physiques without a suspicious eye.

That, in itself, makes it interesting. There is, obviously, so much more at play. It was the ‘silver-era’ in America which laid the groundwork for the eventual public and popular interest in bodybuilding spearheaded by the likes of Arnold, Frank Zane and the ‘pumping-iron’ generation. The silver-era brought formalised bodybuilding federations and shows in the form of the Mr. America competition, early forms of women’s weightlifting, the first generation of supplements and the first real flowering of ‘muscle-beach’ cultures.

A lot of this is well known and captured simplistically with observations about how ‘jacked’ Steve Reeves or John Grimek was. What is often missing is that these were real people and not just black and white images. This is admittedly, where I fall down as a historian. I’m just not great with videos or pictures. Facts and figures? Or a wry anecdote hidden in an Irish accent? I’m your man.

That is why I was incredibly grateful and honoured to feature in the latest Barbell Films documentary ‘Being a Bodybuilder in the 1940s.’ Marcus Kment, the brains behind this endeavour, is, to my mind, one of the greatest public historians on the history of fitness. The quality and care he puts into his documentaries, not to mention the level of old lifting material he calls on, is downright staggering.

Marcus captures all this on film in a way I never could, so let me earn my keep with the one thing I’d throw in… a facts-and-figures man’s small offering. Take the Mr. America contest, the era’s most important show. John Grimek won it in 1940 and then again in 1941, and as the legend has it, he was so far ahead of the field that the organisers brought in a rule stopping anyone from winning it twice.

The most storied physique of the age essentially got banned from the stage for being too good. That tells you more about how seriously these men took their fledgling sport than the size of his arms ever could. That, in miniature, is the silver-era. It was a crowd of men and women bolting together a sport and rewriting its rules on the fly.

So, imagine my delight this weekend when I realised his latest documentary had gone live. I’ll be back next week with your regular scheduled content (I am doing a Reddit AMA today which I’ll link when it goes live) so, in the interim, I recommend this amazing video. Follow Marcus on YouTube and Instagram (where he consistently posts rare images of old school lifters) and enjoy!

If you have any follow up questions about the doc or the ‘silver era’ in general, just post a comment below! Or, better yet, get on over to Reddit so I’m not lonely in the AMA.

As always… Happy Lifting!