A Brief History of Bodybuilding

 Back in the ’50s and ’60s — often regarded as the Golden Era of Bodybuilding — almost all trainees would begin their sessions with high repetition (light weight) squats alternated with light breathing pullovers — because those were the exercises promoted by the publishers of the two leading magazines at the time on the subject — Bob Hoffman of Strength and Health, and Perry Rader of Iron Man. The other leading publications, were those of Joe Weider, who insisted on naming everything after himself — whether it was exercise, a principle, a supplement, a piece of equipment, etc. Obviously, bodybuilding did not begin and end with him, but he made it seem so with his tireless self-promotion of his brand and products.

That was how a lot of people got around to thinking that they had to take a certain supplement if they wanted any gains at all — rather than that the exercises themselves had this transformative power. Many articles on bodybuilding will even claim that bodybuilding is 90% diet and nutrition — and only 10% exercise — or what one is actually doing. And then when people are at the gym, believe that all the resting, talking on their phone, loading and unloading plates, getting the right equipment in preparation for their exercise, takes up another 90% of that time — and wonder why they get zero results, and even putting on more excess weight despite taking so many supplements and drinking so much water — that leads them to believe that “exercise” doesn’t work.

The fact of the matter is that they aren’t exercising — if they actually run the tape of them actually exercising — or what they think they are doing — or are focused on all the wrong things — like weight and reps — rather than the proper form in any movement, and before that, understanding why they are doing what they are doing. The value of exercise is that one is optimizing the respiration and circulation that provides for optimal health and functioning — which is not automatic, but has to be cultivated by understanding, practice, and exercise. Then one inevitably and invariably gets results — and not just does the same thing over and over again with no or little results, and thinks that is the best that can be hoped for — in a life of futility and disappointment.

As soon as one makes any effort, the respiration and circulation will go up — because the body is hardwired to support it. That is the constant; the variable is what one does to change it — which in this case is the exercise. But one does not change the constant — which is the fallacious understanding of that process and relationship. What one has in lung capacity and heart functioning, is what one has to learn to work with and optimize — rather than desiring it is otherwise.

For most people, what they have is underutilized — because it is improperly understood. With such a simple thing as breathing, it is generally thought that that is effected by the action of the diaphragm — which by itself has little impact — compared to the much larger impact of varying the chest volume deliberately and directly — which is what the exercise of the pullover does better than any others — either straight-arm or bent-arm with a light weight that enables the maximum articulation of its greatest extremes. That would be the greatest expansion alternated with its greatest compression of the chest volume — that houses the lungs, because that is breathing, or the exchange of the air within the lungs with the air in the environment — under atmospheric pressure.

Once that exchange is optimized, than the resulting circulation by the heart will have a life and health enhancing effect with all the other organs, tissues, and cells of the body — as much as possible. The most basic understanding of this process is what is achieved in CPR (cardiopulmonary resuscitation). If breathing is caused by the diaphragm, then the obvious approach would be to press on the stomach — affecting the diaphragm more than the chest — but that is not what is done. Instead, we alter the volume of the chest by compressions — and then let the atmospheric pressure refill that void.

No other movement (exercise) does that as dramatically and effectively as the pullover — because that is what it is focused on doing — and every other movement and activity — does it much less directly and deliberately — mainly as an afterthought when the breathing is struggling to catch up with the effort. The far easier thing to do is to adjust all one’s activities to the breathing, and in doing so, the breathing rhythm and efficiency will just effortlessly increase — so that one can continue all day if required to. That is the nature of work for most of human existence — that kind of persistence over time — rather than the one and done of single attempts. That is the classic lesson of the turtle and the hare — or the person still living healthily — as opposed to the reckless young person going out in a blaze of glory — or so they think.

Lots of young people are very competitive — but much fewer are competitive or even viable at an older age — and so the question even the older bodybuilders ask, is how they can still remain at their peak as long as they live, and not just relive their glory years in their memories and fading thoughts? A common report by older bodybuilders that no longer show responsiveness even while exercising as much as they did when they were young, is that they no longer experience “the pump” — and it was the pump that was responsible for their muscle growth during their most productive periods in bodybuilding.

That is largely because over the years, their heads have been crammed so full of extraneous thoughts that they lose the connection to the simple and obvious. It wasn’t the equipment, supplements, or sophisticated explanations or even drugs that produced that effectiveness — but that simple naivety they had as young adolescents picking up a magazine and wondering if it was really true that such simple and basic exercises could actually make such a difference. If it did, they would do it religiously — but then, over the course of the years, it all became more complicated, and many lost their way — in everything marketed to them — the treadmills, the machines, the heart monitors, the supplements, the glamour and of course, the drugs.

But as my friend and mentor Arthur Jones claimed in 1970, you only need two exercises to work most of the major muscles of the body (shoulder and hip girdle) — the Pullover and the Hip and Back machine, but where most people got it wrong using them, was to think that its primary purpose was for lifting as much weight as possible — rather than in circumscribing the positions in which the muscle could be fully contracted and fully relaxed — and that created the greatest pump, or flow — as the objective in itself — and that is what keeps the body at maximal health throughout life. To which I observed, the most important places that one should maintain that optimal flow is to the head, hands and feet — where the human body breaks down first because of this lack of circulatory effect. That is the work not of the heart, but of the muscles at the extremity to clear space for the heart to do its work — easily and effortlessly — in contracting (compressing) the residual fluids (edema, lymphedema, lipedema), out of it. But as he dismissed, you don’t need to build a machine to exercise the head, hands and feet. They already rotate around a single axis.