Body Building

Body building is a training technique, a competitive sport, and for some a way of life. It has been around in one form or another since the 1880s, when a Prussian man named Eugen Sandow began performing feats of strength for international audiences throughout Europe and the United States. His managers began realizing that the audiences who flocked to see him were more interested in the extreme nature of his muscled physique than they were in seeing how much weight he could lift. Sandow himself was focused on what he referred to as a “the Grecian ideal,” in which he trained purposefully to match the proportions of ancient Greek and Roman statues.

By the early 1900’s, Sandow began organizing contests for other athletes who had trained similarly, and successfully marketed the first widely available exercise equipment. This tradition of fitness entrepreneurs continued most famously by bodybuilder Charles Atlas in the 1950’s. By advertising his “fitness training kits” in comic books and men’s magazines, Atlas was able to raise the profile of the sport for an entirely new (and young) demographic.

The 1977 documentary film Pumping Iron followed contestants as they trained and prepared for the Mr. Olympia competition, and featured both Arnold Schwarzenegger and Lou Ferrigno as main characters. Although the movie brought even more notoriety to the sport, it also brought to light the illegal steroids used by athletes in order to achieve more significant results. While steroids are publicly frowned upon today, there remains a wide variety of legal “performance enhancers” available for modern athletes.

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