I have a great story to share about the day I met the three best bodybuilders in the world on the same day.
I was 14 at the time and had just started to get interested in bodybuilding. It was wierd because I had been interested in muscles and bodybuilding for a long time, from when I was very young. In the ’70’s, however, bodybuilding was very small and was not main stream at all. There were many myths and old wives’ tales surrounding the sport.
The below text is something I’m rather excited about. Earlier this month, I stumbled across Doug Hepburn’s website from the late 1990s and early 2000s. Hepburn was one of the strongest men of the mid twentieth century, famed for his seemingly inhuman feats of strength.
You can imagine, then the joy I felt when I began reading Doug’s articles on his now defunct website (I’ve included the source at the bottom and would encourage you to check it out!).
I don’t want to give away too much but Hepburn’s ‘Challenge’ was a shot fired at modern lifters to match the feats of strength of gear fear lifters. I’ve published it in its entirety below (including the ALL CAPS text). It’s provocative but shows Doug’s love and promotion of pure strength. Enjoy!
We all know how competitive humans are, especially when it comes to sports. Athletes are pushing themselves harder and harder every day to be the best and achieve what nobody has achieved before. Sometimes they resort to various substances to enhance their performance, but many of those substances are actually quite harmful and forbidden.
Still, this has been happening ever since people discovered that some substances help them improve their athletic performance. The ancient Greeks used sesame seeds, while the Australian Aborigines chewed the pituri plant. On the other hand, Norse warriors were fond of hallucinogenic mushrooms and we there is a lot of evidence that many other ancient cultures had similar traditions.
The greatest problem that faces the young bodybuilding enthusiast is that of gaining weight. It’s usually this reason for taking up weight training in the first place. However, after the inevitable gain of a few pounds body-weight almost immediately the weight-training course has been embarked on, one finds further progress very slow. Each pound towards his ideal body weight is gained with an ever increasing span of time. Once I couldn’t gain more than two or perhaps three pounds a year — training three times a week. Eventually my bodyweight gains became stagnant and no amount of training would alter it.
In 1930s Europe, especially in the first half of the decade, the government sponsored fitness campaigns found in fascist regimes garnered a great deal of envy. As Charlotte MacDonald detailed in her fantastic work on […]
A point previously discussed on this website was the regularity with which early physical culturists promoted light weight training as opposed to heavy lifting. The reasons for this are numerous. In the first instance, light weightlifting is easier to promote to the general public than heavy weightlifting. It requires less equipment, can be done in the comfort of one’s own home and can be done with relative ease. It was for this reason that individuals like Eugen Sandow, Professor Attila and a host of other physical culturists promoted light weightlifting for their followers. A few, like Arthur Saxon, bucked the trend and argued that heavy lifting was needed to build a strong physique.
With that in mind, today’s brief post examines the brief words Eugen Sandow gave to heavy weightlifting in his seminal book, Strength and How to Obtain It. Published by Sandow first in 1897, Strength was, for many, Sandow’s most important work. It came at the height of his popularity, sold widely and was more accessible than some of his later works which were far more medical in composition. Thanks to the British Library in London, I was able to consult Sandow’s 1897 edition, as well as his third edition published in 1905. Sandow did not expand greatly on how to lift heavy but nevertheless provided an insight into the progressive training practices of the late 1890s and early 1900s.
To gain great strength one needs to consider the factors that unite to produce it. For until this is done one cannot be sure upon what lines to work.
The things that make for outstanding physical strength are great vital force, a high degree of nervous energy, and superlative quality of muscular tissue. Contrary to the belief that still persists in some quarters, the mere quantity of muscle that a person possesses is not a decisive factor. And at the beginning the student of this section would do well to understand that clearly.
Born at the turn of the twentieth-century, Tony Sansone is perhaps one of the most famous physical culturists never to turn his hand to bodybuilding. Nevertheless his influence on bodybuilders and those seeking to get in shape was remarkable. Training under both Bernarr McFadden and Charles Atlas, Sansone developed one of the most sought after physiques in 1930s America.
He modelled, quite provocatively at times, wrote extensively on good nutrition and ran a series of gyms, which included a regular training spot for the legendary Steve Reeves. Shunning excessive bulk for definition and aesthetics, Sansone possessed a body that many men today would envy. Indeed, the renowned physical culture historian David Gentle once commented
If Sansone had been born in Greek antiquity, he would have been immortalized as a god.
With this in mind, today’s post looks at Sansone’s simple and effective way to build muscle mass while maintaining a relative level of leanness.
When it comes to a broad meaning of bodybuilding it concerns a process of maximizing the muscle hypertrophy by mixing various exercises into training. The modern meaning of the concept has changed significantly since the first-time bodybuilding came to be. As a sport, bodybuilding focuses on a series of athletes who are showing off their physiques to a panel of judges who then grade them based on their appearance.
While many believe that bodybuilding originated in the 20th century, this sport can actually be traced back to the 11th century India. In order to build up their health and increase stamina, men in India have been lifting stone weights called Nals. However, back in the day, no physical display of the body was present. The ancient Greeks and Egyptians also underwent weight training to improve their aesthetic beauty and refined muscular body, and bodybuilding has gone through several phases until it became the sport we know today.
One of the most popular physical culturists of the entire twentieth-century, there is no denying the impact Charles Atlas had on the muscle making industry. Full of vigour, advice and the occasional insult, Atlas challenged […]
