Two things have been rattling around my head this month. One is finally reading Max Fisher’s The Chaos Machine. The other is seeing a 21-year-old fitness influencer (who I will not mention by name) so distort his physique through anabolics and insulin that I am so very concerned for his well-being and longevity. At a surface level, the two couldn’t be further apart.
Fisher’s book is a harrowing look into the world social media brought us. Specifically, Fisher shows how social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and YouTube have foisted machine algorithms on the world whose sole goal is to keep you on your screens. The easiest way to do that is, of course, by pushing users towards the extreme, the contrarian and the downright hateful. At the end of the book, Fisher’s depressing conclusion is that algorithms have shaped our brains and our worlds. In a world of content, creators have to be extreme to be noticed.
And then we have the twenty-one-year-old. I’ve often spoken about the death wish in bodybuilding, of how open bodybuilders have destroyed their health by pushing to become bigger and leaner on stage. I have, though, noticed that far more fitness influencers seem to be following the same patterns, without ever hopping on stage. So, what follows is my attempt to connect the pre-social media history of bodybuilding with the social media algorithms that have intensified the practice. And I’m going to do so with a self-confessed 5% freak named Rich Piana.
In early 2016, former fitness model, bodybuilder and budding social media star Rich Piana announced that he was going to gain thirty pounds. For those who don’t remember Rich that may seem pretty underwhelming as content but it was bloody captivating for the sole reason that Rich was already enormous.
He was funny, very candid about steroid use at a time when that was rare, and had spent years modelling as a large bodybuilder. His Bigger by the Day series was entertaining and also the equivalent of a social media science experiment… how far can the big dude push himself?
The first episode went out on YouTube on 4 January. Over the next few weeks we watched Rich eat, train, talk to camera and then, most importantly, weigh himself. It was filmed in a way that screamed unpolished and the results were staggering. By day nine, Rich weighed over 290 lbs. Things progressed and then, a few months later, he did the whole thing in reverse, releasing Better by the Day which showed him trying to diet down by seventy odd pounds. Rich’s great feat was serializing his body into daily social media content. This meant that everything he did, eating, sleeping, training, was part of his bigger project. Bodybuilding.
Rich was absurdly well designed for social media. He had been a competitive bodybuilder pre-social media, although much to his own annoyance, never at an elite level. The internet made him far more popular than his bodybuilding career. His YouTube channel, created in 2011, had more than 250,000 subscribers before 2016 and passed one million in 2017. Before Bigger by the Day came out he had racked up over one hundred million views.
The content just kept coming. There were steroid talks, relationship videos, huge meals and silly but eye-catching workouts like his ‘eight-hour arm workout’, the premise of which was curls and tricep extensions throughout the day while hammering protein shakes.
Most importantly, Rich talked about drugs. In 2016, he released a video telling anyone who could stay ‘natty’ to keep away from steroids. His body was big, but it hurt constantly. He was muscular, but he felt every pound of his muscle. In one reading, Rich was trapped by his own physique but, in the very same video, Piana added that anyone who wanted to be a pro bodybuilder would have to use them. That was his appeal in a nutshell. He was blunt, but in a funny way, and was actively appealing to the hardcore bodybuilding set in a way that Zyzz, a precursor to him, did not.
That explains why Piana founded 5% Nutrition in 2014. The 5% in fitness were the small minority willing to do ‘whatever it takes’ to achieve their goals. They were the ‘freaks’ who were willing to push their body to extremes. This also included Bill Gates, according to Piana, which was always a weird inclusion.
Having just finished The Chaos Machine, it is hard not to view Piana as a bodybuilding version of the influencer Fisher interviewed. He was physically extreme, made engaging long-form content and was confessional. He set up in-groups (the 5%ers) which he contrasted with ‘others’ and was generating massive amounts of daily content. The problem was that Rich did not learn any of this from social media. Bodybuilding had been running this playbook for generations.
The ‘Old Feed’
In 1899, American fitness entrepreneur Bernarr Macfadden launched Physical Culture magazine with the amazing tagline that ‘weakness is a crime, don’t be a criminal.’ Macfadden sold fitness and muscle building as a form of character development in much the same way that his contemporary Eugen Sandow did. In 1897, Sandow’s Strength and How to Obtain It effectively linked fitness to overall character development. Thanks to his health, Sandow was vibrant, a good worker and an attentive partner.
Fast forward to the 1920s and 30s, where we find fitness mail-order entrepreneurs Earle Liederman and Charles Atlas selling the idea that muscles make men or even the 1970s, when a young Arnold Schwarzenegger told Pumping Iron audiences that his body was his primary strength in the modern world. In any case, a ‘before’ and ‘after’ always existed in the form of physique shots or just general contrasts between the trained and the untrained, all in a world before Instagram.
By the middle of the twentieth century, American fitness had split into culture wars between Bob Hoffman of York Barbell and Joe Weider of Mr. Olympia fame. Hoffman favoured Olympic weightlifting and Weider bodybuilding. In one Strength & Health editorial from 1958, Hoffman compared Weider’s associates with rats and hyenas, reserving the term ‘small Hitler’ and ‘small Stalin’ for Weider. Then there were comments from both camps about the ‘misguided’ bodies their respective sports built. Readers were encouraged to choose a side and a system.
In 1970, this pattern repeated itself when Arthur Jones introduced his Nautilus Bulletin, the first in a series of writings on his high-intensity training (HIT) system. Soon finding acolytes in Casey Viator and Mike Mentzer, HIT became the new bodybuilding dogma for some. Why spend needless hours in the gym doing the ‘Arnold’ split when you could be ‘smarter?’ This pattern and structure have existed for a long time. There are gurus with specific systems, visible disciples, and usually, if not always, a system to sell. None of this required an algorithm and played out on magazine racks for nearly a century.
When the Magazine Rack Learns Your Name
Bodybuilding media in the pre-internet era could be highly partisan, dishonest and gloriously bitchy. There is no need to romanticize it. Hoffman sold his own barbells through his Strength & Health magazine, while preaching that Olympic weightlifting (the sport he loved) was the only way to develop the body.
Joe Weider’s various muscle magazines went one step further and created Weider as the ‘Master Trainer’ who invented incredible-sounding ‘Weider Principles’ for building muscles. He, too, was feeding readers with very specific ideas and lines, while disparaging the competition at every turn. Readers were not passive in this. They often bought magazines from both camps, figured out what worked for them and, occasionally, may have called BS on what they read.
It was far from a perfect system, but it did have friction. Magazines were published on a set schedule; they had editors and a finite number of pages. Newsstands and retailers had to decide whether to sell bodybuilding magazines, and publishers closely tracked circulation numbers. The system was intricate, but it was not personalized.
If someone lingered over Mike Mentzer’s articles for 68 seconds longer than a Weider editorial, no one knew. The next issue wasn’t changed to give them nothing but Mentzer materials or recommendations for more HIT practices.
YouTube, on the other hand, had begun restructuring itself around this idea before Piana’s rise to fame. In 2012, it introduced watch time into its recommendations. How long someone watched a video for began to shape what the system recommended. By 2016, the year of Bigger by the Day, YouTube’s engineers were using incredibly intricate ways of using personal watch times and preferences to determine what showed up on people’s feeds.
Whereas magazine publishers were trying to figure out what to write about next month, social media platforms were interested in what people might watch next. Fitness and bodybuilding in particular gave it wonderful information.
Built bodies are incredibly valuable in online content. You can track weight lifted, weight gained/lost, calories, cooking, steps, measurements, etc. Each is a form of content. Then we have the arguments in fitness around steroids v. natural, training philosophies, cardio strategies, nutrition, supplements, etc. Fitness has never lacked content, and Piana was able to draw on all of these pathways.
The Eight Hour Workout
Fisher’s Chaos Machine seems to explain all of this quite well. Algorithms reward attention and extreme material so over time, social media platforms made fitness more extreme. The problem is obviously twofold.
First, people do have some agency in all of this. I have students who deliberately curate their feeds to show them specific forms of fitness content and nothing else. While you may argue this creates ‘echo chambers,’ their ruthlessness with unfollowing or blocking extreme content has impressed me. The second, more pressing, problem is that social media platforms did not invent Rich Piana’s body, his hardcore workouts or the idea that a 5% existed.
Recommendations through social media and the drive for more views and more shares simply intensified the patterns that bodybuilding had spent a century building.
When Rich died on August 25th, 2017 (aged 46) people began blaming steroid use. Others pointed to genetic conditions and a host of other issues. The reality, and ground truth, is that the medical examiner could not determine a cause of death. What matters is that Rich kept getting views.
His YouTube channel still has over one million subscribers, and the channels associated with him and 5% Nutrition continue to republish his content. Old videos have been cut into shorts, and ‘uncut’ versions of his series have been re-released and tied to merchandise drops. These efforts would not have been alien to Hoffman or Weider, who knew the value of reusing content.
After Rich
Compare Rich with Sam Sulek, currently one of the biggest bodybuilding stars online. During one recent twenty-eight-day period Piana’s channel attracted roughly 930,000 views. Sulek’s attracted around 4.7 million. A man dead for nine years is still doing roughly a fifth of the monthly traffic of one of bodybuilding’s biggest living creators.
Sulek also follows a recognizably ‘Rich’ pathway to content. He constantly uploads videos, often roughly shot, of everything from training to shopping trips. When Sulek appeared on a podcast recently, he told the host he knew all about Rich’s eight-hour arm workout. Rich’s legacy was living on.
The obvious conclusion is that algorithms and recommendations may make fitness influencers disposable. Someone gets the limelight for one to two years before being replaced. Piana is an argument against that. He has, for want of a better phrase, become recyclable.
Weider spent decades taking training ideas and repackaging them for new readers. Online feeds do something similar with people. Rich’s videos get turned into shorts and suddenly develop a second or third life because somebody still wants to watch them.
And then there is the twenty-one-year-old who so concerned me recently. He is not a competitive bodybuilder, and there is no Mr. Olympia waiting for him. Each time I see him, he appears bigger, leaner and struggling to breathe. Every time, the focus is his body and its growth. The problem, on a surface level, is that yesterday’s physique is the baseline for today.
I obviously don’t know what his feed looks like or what steps led him to his decisions. It would be absurd to blame social media when there are friends, family members and loved ones, not to mention sponsors, who have influence over him. But I do think that bodybuilding supplied him a script for what to do long before his phone did.
To stand out in fitness, you need to be bigger, more muscular, and more extreme. You have to prove that you are willing to do what others won’t. What the algorithm adds is an audience that can be measured instantly in a media environment, continually studying and adapting the ‘what next’ clip. Rich understood the appeal of that unusually early.
He spent 2016 weighing, feeding and training himself for content. There was always another day or another update waiting for fans. And while he passed in 2017, the content has survived him. It has been microdosed in shorts and reels, or podcasts about his workouts.
Fisher is right that the algorithm matters. I just don’t think it needed to teach fitness how to become extreme. Bodybuilding had already spent a century working that out for itself. It supplied the freaks, gurus, transformations, arguments, miracle systems and bodies that demanded another look.
What changed was the magazine rack. It learned who was looking
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