Vanity, insecurity, and the masculine imperative of outdoing that pesky guy eyeing your girl must be as old as our species. Strong shoulders and latissimus dorsi to propel spears that could slay woolly mammoths in Siberia couldn’t have hurt either. Ergo, humans must have lifted weights, or whatever they could fashion into weights — tree trunks, stones, pachyderm femurs — right from the days of Eden. Modern strength sports, including bodybuilding, is — however — a recent art form.
The hyper-masculine bodybuilding aesthetic was willed into existence by one man — Eugen Sandow. At the dawn of the 20th century, Eugen Sandow built a physique that would hold its own in any modern-day gym. He travelled the world, exhibiting his swole biceps, pectorals, and quadriceps to rich men and women There is a story of the royal ladies of an Indian kingdom feeling up his biceps from behind the purdah. He had himself photographed wearing a fig leaf (literally a fig leaf, it’s not a metaphor) hiding the only place on the human body neck down not amenable to enhancement by muscular development.
Eugen Sandow was the founding father, chief evangelist, and chief impresario of the sport of bodybuilding. The official trophy of the current world championship (Mr. Olympia) is called the Sandow, and the statuette is a replica of a classic Eugene Sandow pose holding a primitive pre-welded barbell. The great man’s life would also foreshadow the excesses of the sport, and the hubris common among its practitioners. A car was stuck in a ditch, and Mr. Sandow, felt compelled to live up to his image. He attempted a rescue and died of a brain haemorrhage.
Over the next half century, the world of Eugen Sandow was lawless and fragmented with a lack of standards necessary to make a motley set of feats of strength into a legitimate sport. But some structure eventually emerged. Strength training speciated into three disciplines — powerlifting, Olympic lifting, and the third — more a domain of pathological narcissists than sportspersons — bodybuilding. Powerlifting comprises three basic maximal effort lifts — the squat, the deadlift, and the bench press. Olympic lifting is what you watch every four years on television, and as the name would indicate, it is a feature of the summer Olympics. There are two lifts, the clean and jerk, and snatch. Bodybuilding is cavorting on stage in a banana hammock with muscles popping up from everywhere. It is a subjective sport — what happens in the arena is more pageantry than athletics. Competitors are rated on size, symmetry, conditioning, and balance by a panel of judges.
1965 was a landmark year in the history of bodybuilding. The annual Olympia, which came to be regarded as the world championship, was launched. There is an interesting story behind the contest’s christening. Olympia evokes Mount Olympia and therefore the grand, magnificent, and larger than life. But the idea for the name came from the brand of beer the founders were drinking when the subject came up! The origin story set the stage for what the sport was to become, on the surface an august celebration of the human potential, but in reality, a cesspool of pettiness where competitors worry about whose glutes were most striated and which site injection oil enhanced underdeveloped calves the best.
Bodybuilding found its way out of an extreme subculture, and into the mainstream in the 1970s and 80s with the thunderous entry of the lad from Austria — Arnold Schwarzenegger. If Eugen Sandow is the God of bodybuilding, the Austrian Oak in certainly its prophet. He won a record (broken in the 80s by Lee Haney) seven Olympias. His was a persona that could cross over to the American mainstream. He married a Kennedy, became a Hollywood legend, advisor to Ronald Reagan, two-time governor of California, and embodied the American dream. Arnold, more than any other personality, made muscle an essential part masculinity in popular culture. Researchers have calculated Ken’s (Barbie’s boyfriend) biceps went from an ungainly 12-inches in the 1964 to 27-inches in the mid-1990s.
True believers look back at the 60s and 70s as the golden era of bodybuilding. If Eugen Sandow is God, and Arnold his Prophet, Gold’s Gym, Venice, California is the original Eden. In this dark cavern of metal, legends such as Franco Columbu, Frank Zane, Larry Scott, Dave Draper, and of course, Arnold, lived the idyllic life of the sun, the sand, and iron. Just as nativists in every culture dream of a slice of time in the distant past where the milk flowed, and honey flowed, and everything was all right in God’s earth — so do bodybuilders dream of the Golden Era of Bodybuilding, and Muscle Beach, Venice.
Nostalgia for a glorious past requires a present that is in some disarray, and one that has a made clean break with the past. The Golden Age of bodybuilding ended in the early 90s with the rise of what came to be known as Mass Monsters. The pioneer of that era was a British giant called Dorian Yates. He brought in never before seen size. We are talking 5’9” athlete weighing in at 250lb with a six pack and a 5% body fat. But size came at a price. Bodybuilders no longer looked the Greek God ideal of masculinity. Instead, they had entered the uncanny valley. Bodies on stage became a Frankenstein like ensemble of muscle which collectively did little for the cause of beauty and human perfection — which many argue is the entire point of bodybuilding. Over the next two decades the men in banana hammocks because larger and larger and even more disproportionate. Size became all — symmetry, balance, and aesthetics mattered for little. World champion bodies were no longer an ideal the average fan wanted to embody. The sport became a freak show for the extreme, peripheral fan, leaving the 18-year old lad who wanted biceps and abs for the college girls cold. Professional bodybuilders went far beyond what was attainable by even the most dedicated fan, and transcended the human realm. How much fun would cricket be if it were played by robots, with 200-mile-per-hour deliveries and every delivery was hit for six that travelled twice the length of the stadium?
Science is what made these grotesque, distended bodies possible. Testosterone was first synthesized in 1935 by German chemist. Over the next two decades it spread to first to Eastern Bloc athletes and coaches, and began the decades-long process of diffusion into the American community of bodybuilders and the lay public. To be sure Arnold and Frank Columbu dabbled in steroids. But their steroid use seems quaint in the light of the what happened in the 90s. At the turn of the century, steroids exploded in volume and variety. Bodybuilders pumped into their veins many times medically recommended doses. They used equipoise (made for horses), deca durabolin, dianabol, anavar, and anadrol. The sport would still have retained some modicum of sanity had it been just anabolic steroids. But bodybuilders aren’t a bunch known for restraint. Those who lived in the gym and ate 5,000 calories over eight meals a day started abusing insulin and human growth hormone sometime in the aughts. Human growth hormones could previously be extracted only from cadavers. But someone found a way to synthesize it. HGH didn’t just grow muscle, but organs as well, the skull, the forehead, toes, and other appendages at extremities.
What began life as a healthy pursuit of muscle mass and physical and emotional well-being, became a giant pharmaceutical experiment. When you flood the body with artificial testosterone, the body responds by countering the surge with testosterone’s biochemical opposite — Estrogen — which leads to female secondary sexual characteristics such as Gynecomastia. Gyno — which is the term of art among bodybuilders — is breast development in males. To prevent this particular ill effect of testosterone, men take Estrogen blockers. Anabolic steroids have a whole another series of side effects, including male pattern baldness, acne all over (including on the soles of the feet), and it must be noted — infertility and impotence. Testes, the seat of natural testosterone, quickly grasps that its services were no longer needed, and shrinks, sometimes to the size of marbles. The irony is rather stark. Here is a man who looks the Übermensch, but his male parts no longer work, his balls have atrophied, he cannot sire a kid, and he has proto-breasts.
Bodybuilding’s descent into the abyss of the bizarre hit bottom in the aughts. Competitors began dying in their 30s and 40s, and some even in their mid-20s. Mike Matarazzo, died of heart failure at 48; Dallas McCarver at age 26, several organs enlarged; Andreas Munzer, age 31, died of internal bleeding; Naseer El Sonabaty, age 47 of kidney and heart failure. T-nation, a magazine for the hard-core lifter, and the most acerbic gadfly of the sport, started publishing an annual dead pool — the list of bodybuilders most likely to die. It was exactly as ghoulish as it sounds. People died of insulin overdose. Before a contest, muscled hulks took diuretics to strip the body of sub-cutaneous water. One must lose water weight to achieve that dry, vascular look with veins popping up from everywhere. Diuretics led to pissing blood and bodybuilders collapsing on stage. Coaches started talking about how livers recover, but kidneys don’t. If you have lost the latter, you have lost it forever. Any pretence of health and fitness had died a long time ago. Bodybuilding began life with Charles Atlas and Joe Weider ads on magazine that promised the 12-year old,100-lb weakling that he too can build muscle, and take on the bullies. It was about performance, perfecting the human form, physical and mental wellness, and the masculine virtues of courage and self-reliance. The body was temple, now the body was a mad scientist’s basement lab experiment.
Women too joined the fray. Feminism implies women have the same right to do boneheaded shit as men have always had. However, anabolic steroids inflict even more grotesque changes on the female form. The clitoris grows, sometimes acquiring the shape and size of small penis. Body and facial hair grows, and sometimes female bodybuilders have to deal with the five o’ clock shadow. There is male pattern baldness and the complete disappearance of breast tissue. The pitch goes down a few octaves and the voice becomes bass enough to pass as a man from across a door.
Bodybuilding’s obsession with absurd size continued in the first decade of the 21st century, and the world of muscles seem to be condemned to a niche of freaks and uber freaks. And then, a new kid hit the block — CrossFit.
The central idea of CrossFit was to execute lifts that involved multiple large muscle groups one after another, racing against some kind of time limit. An athlete might do 30 snatches, followed by 20 deadlifts, followed by 50 push-ups — all the while competing against a dozen other athletes in the gym for time. CrossFit was ideal for conditioning, but it also had the effect of teaching the general populace much about the foundational lifts (the squat, deadlift, and bench) and Olympic lifts (clean and jerk, and the snatch).
For long, the lay person for whom fitness meant long slow distance running, getting progressively thinner and resembling a formless corpse, there was little in the way of strength training alternatives. He could walk into a gym full of muscle heads who obsessed over bicep peaks and fat percentages. If that cesspool of narcissism, and form over function ethos alienated you, well bad luck — bodybuilding was the only game in town.
CrossFit wasn’t about lifting weights fast. It was the long overdue glasnost through and through. CrossFit brought in an entirely new clientele — affluent, hip, competitive, informed, and gender diverse. Most importantly they each carried a megaphone. The first rule of CrossFit, as many an Internet meme said — was that you must always talk of CrossFit.
And talk they did. Denizens of Boxes (CrossFit gyms aren’t gyms, in the same way laptops from Apple aren’t laptops, but “MacBooks”) posted their time and scores on WODs (workout of the day — a specific sequence of lifts that involved multiple large muscle groups), pictures in elaborate workout gear, and various other exercise arcana. Soon much of the metropolitan OECD was dotted with Boxes. Some of the Kool Aid made its way to India, predictably Gurgaon and South Delhi. For the first time in nearly two generations a new, strength-based fitness movement had acquired mass appeal.
The rise of CrossFit has fundamentally changed the world of muscle. Previously gyms used to have two kinds of people. The first were trying to keep some tryst with destiny made on New Year day, or on a birthday, or after a breakup. The bodies didn’t change, and the people didn’t last. Men and women walked on the treadmill set at 5 kilometres an hour while texting, and lifted 5Kg dumbbells as some kind of obligatory good deed for the day. And then they were the bodybuilding faithful doing 40 sets of biceps and 40 sets of calves, with nary an eye on athleticism. Both approaches were moribund- both groups ossified. CrossFit resurrected both the neophyte and the bodybuilding faithful. The former learned the essentials of strength, power, muscular endurance, and flexibility. And the fitness neophyte learned exercise can be a fun, gamified group activity resembling a real sport. The bodybuilding faithful learned full-body, compound exercises build real strength.
And through the Hegelian dynamics of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, bodybuilding survived, co-opting the best of CrossFit. Strength training became acceptable once again to the multitude. Gyms showed up with legit lifting platforms. Those obsessed with visible abdominal biceps learned the clean and jerk and the snatch. Above all — Mr. Olympia (the world championships) introduced some radical changes on the kinds of physiques it rewards. A new classic physique division, which evokes the age of Arnold, is now all the rage. Even for the flagship title — “Mr. Olympia”, symmetry, balance, and aesthetics matter. We aren’t back to the Golden Age yet, but, well… the foundation stone has been laid to reclaim a temple that once stood before barbarians at the gate showed up.
