Open any muscle mag from the mid-20th century and chances are you’ll find a reference to Rheo H. Blair, and his famous instant protein. Blair’s protein was used by the top bodybuilders of the 1950s ranging from Gironda to Arnie. He was a firm believer in the importance of top quality protein and often got amazing results from his clients.
Today we look at Blair’s 1950s pamphlet entitled the ‘Protein Way of Life.’ There’s some important tidbits to be taken from it.
Once again reaching into my mail- bag, I found of couple of interesting questions that may sound like the same old cookie-cutter questions, but my answers put a new twist on two staple parts of bodybuilding — nutrition and off-season weight gain — and my take on the best type of off-season dieting and how to employ it to anyone’s arsenal.
The Carnivore Diet – the practice of solely consuming meat products – has grown exponentially in the past few years. As someone who has experimented with a range of diets, everything from all fruit to raw meat, it’s remarkable to see an all meat diet gain traction for the lifting community and the general populace. While Vilhjamur Stefannsson popularisedthe Inuit’s meat dominated diet in the early 1900s, an all meat diet for athletes or lifters appears to be a new development.
So being the type of individual that I am, I decided to go through the annals of bodybuilding and see if anyone had dabbled with a carnivore-esque diet in the past. Echoing the wonderful ‘nothing new under the sun series‘ produced by Chaos and Pain (definitely not safe for work!), we have a precedent for the current carnivore diet in the form of Vince Gironda and Rheo H. Blair’s ‘meat and water’ diet, a short term weight loss diet used by bodybuilders prior to a competition.
With that in mind today’s post examines the reasons behind Blair’s experiment, the bodybuilders he used it on and what lessons, if any, his meat and water diet holds for present day lifters.
How many times do you eat a day? Do you eat carbs after 3pm? Post-workout protein shake?
Such are the questions faced by the modern day strength enthusiast. Are we overthinking the way we eat? In a world faced with a growing obesity epidemic and continuous production of low quality foods the answer may appear no. If we dig deeper however we may begin to question why we stick to rigid diet tips by people supposedly in the know. Where should we turn for diet advice? The muscle mags are one place, yet one often has to traverse through forty pages of advertisements before stumbling upon anything remotely sane.
What about the strongmen of yore? What about Eugen Sandow? How did he eat and why?
Everyone enjoys a delicious mouthful of food, but not everyone has the time to fully appreciate it. We are talking, of course, about bodybuilders, fitness enthusiasts, and people who follow strict diet plans in general. Not only that, but being able to cook food on a daily basis has become wishful thinking nowadays, as the fast-paced way of life makes it difficult to find the time to enjoy a hearty home-cooked meal.
You might think that this is a modern trend, but the reality is that people have been searching for a way to make nutrition more efficient for centuries. Concretely, there has always been a need and a desire to reduce the time it takes to prep a wholesome mealwithout skipping on the nutritious goodness. From unsavory high-energy fruit-and-meat blends all the way to today’s “healthy” meal replacements, the history of these foods and products is long and quite interesting. Let’s take a look at how it began, and where it has led us so far.
If it is convenient, it is often found a great help to eat 4 to 6 meals per day, tho this is not necessary.
Many men have found that the addition of a light lunch at about 10 o’clock, another at about 3:30 p.m. and another just before bed time has been the secret of very fast gains. None of their meals would be as large as usual, but much more frequent. This gives the internal organs a better chance to function efficiently compared to the system of overloading them three time a day as is generally done. So whenever circumstances will permit it, we recommend the 5 to 6 meal a day plan for weight gainers. Many doctors use this system for sick people or people with digestive disorders and you should realize that it is a healthful plan.
Thanks to a schedule that keeps me on the road over two hundred days out of the year, this area has become my specialty. Charles Glass and one of his partners, noted nutritionist Mike Watson, have given me so much valuable guidance related to eating, but none may have been more important for me than their ability to get me over my fear of fast food. The fact is, you should always go with real food over supplements. So if you have to choose between another protein bar or a stop at Wendy’s … pull over at Wendy’s. Just be careful of what you order.
Published by the mid-century Bodybuilder Alan Stephens, the following article from Your Physique magazine details some time honoured means of bulking up in the easiest and most efficient way possible. Though much of Stephens’ advice will seem like old hat to those a few years in the Iron Game, his writings were geared toward the beginner and those seeking to change things up.
What’s more. It was never overly complicated. Indeed according to the man himself
All you need to do is follow the right exercises, eat plenty of nourishing food and get as much rest and relaxation on your non training days as you possibly can.
With that in mind though, we’ll dig a little deeper.
Hollywood transformations have long been a subject of intense public scrutiny. From Christina Bale’s incredible body transformations for what seems like most of his movies to Charlize Theron’s weight gain for Monster, we the consumer have read in amazement at the lengths actors seem to go to in order to secure a part.
This, it would seem, is not a recent phenomena. Something that became clear to me recently as I read Heather Addison’s excellent monograph entitled Hollywood and the Rise of Physical Culture. Dealing primarily with the period 1910 to 1940, Addison showcases how both male and female stars of the age faced an almost daily struggle to keep and maintain a svelte physique.
One such technique was the ‘Lamb-Chop and Pineapple’ diet, the topic of today’s post which was favoured by many females actresses during the 1920s.
Describing himself as Arnold’s Seminar Nutritionist, Balik opened his short pamphlet on gaining muscle with the often forgotten law that ‘nothing beats persistence.’ Produced alongside a pamphlet on gaining muscle, which we’ll be discussing in a future post, Balik’s Total Muscularity represents a great insight into the training philosophy of 1970s Muscle Beach bodybuilding. Sparing myself the task of typing out his pamphlet word for word, which I suspect would infringe on some form of copyright law, I decided that a brief synopsis of the book would suffice. At the very least it would pander to our ever decreasing attention spans.
So in today’s post we’re going to look at Balik’s theories on individual body types, the type of diet he recommended and also what we can learn from it nearly forty years after its publication.
