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!
Discover more from Physical Culture Study
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
This is really a great video. Thank you for sharing, and I enjoyed your participation in it as well! I have several thoughts I want to share, I will probably do that in several comments.
It is interesting that its seems like the European presence, or even dominance, in the strength world seems to have really died out in the 1940s after two world wars. While Europeans, especially Germans, were of great importance in the development of physical culture in the 19th and early 20th century, little of that importance remained after the two world wars. I wonder if this was caused by the world wars or perhaps the general rise of American cultural hegemony, although those two things are of course strongly connected.
About the food supplements and vitamins: I think the rise in vitamin supplements is also related to the Great Depression and WWII. During this time period access to food was greatly decreased, especially in Europe. Nutritional deficiencies were very common, perhaps less so in America, but still, nutritional science and policy apparently focused heavily on vitamin deficiencies. Which is interesting to contrast with the focus on calories and macronutrients nowadays. In that sense I would still consider 1940s supplementation to be heavily influened by wartime and depression-era food trends.
Final comment. About the ”weird” benches. In the 1940s, but also up until the 60s, people stilll heavily believed in the idea of ”ribcage” expansion. The main tool for this was pullovers, ideally done after ”breathing squats”, with or without (heavy) weights. The idea of stretching the ”rib box” under load to increase its size was seen as a way to achieve a highly valued ”barrel chest”. I think this is why there were so many rounded benches, so that one may lie on it and completely ”stretch” out the ribcage. Although its hardly practiced anymore, at least in the gyms I have been, you see pullovers appear in all those old routines, even Arnold’s Encyclopedia lists them in the beginner routine, not to mention Bill Pearl in his books, which are full of them. In the gym I go to they actually do have a moon bench! I bet it’s something you would love to try sometime if you haven’t already! To be honest, I haven’t ever used it because I never use pullovers. I never really got the exercise. I don’t believe in ribcage expansion, I am never sure what they are supposed to train and either way, when it comes to chest or lats I like pressing or pulling way more. Either way, pullovers are a vital piece of iron history!
Thanks Erwin, and really glad you enjoyed the video.
I think your point about Europe is a good one. The two world wars badly disrupted a lot of the institutions, publishing networks and gym cultures that had helped make Germany, Austria, France and Britain so important to physical culture before 1914. At the same time, the United States came out of the 1940s with a much larger commercial fitness industry, stronger magazine networks and a growing cultural reach. So I suspect it is a mixture of destruction in Europe and the increasing ability of American physical culture to export itself.
And yes, I think the vitamin point is spot on. A lot of the language around supplementation in the 1930s and 1940s makes much more sense if you put it beside depression-era nutrition, rationing and wartime concern about deficiency. Vitamins were discussed in a very different nutritional world from the protein-and-macros conversation we are used to now. That wider food history is probably something I should have made more of in the video.