Gyms

Where the training actually happened. Muscle Beach in Santa Monica, which was a 1934 WPA New Deal installation and not a private venture, and its Venice successor; Gold's Gym; the York Barbell club and Bob Hoffman's operation, which was a magazine, a barbell company and a team at once. Also the equipment itself, the ordinary commercial gym as it spread worldwide, and the training culture of the 1960s and 1970s that the Weider magazines packaged and sold.

Part of Bodybuilding

101 moments in this segment.

  1. - Muscle Beach (Joseph Strick, 1948). Joseph Strick's 1948 short film Muscle Beach, presented by the Academy. Muscle Beach at Santa Monica was a 1934 WPA New Deal installation rather than private enterprise, and this is the earliest substantial film of it.
  2. - Cecil Phillips. An American physique competitor of the immediate postwar years, the period when the AAU still controlled amateur competition in the United States and the Weiders' IFBB was newly formed.
  3. - Bill Pearl, Mr America. Bill Pearl won the AAU Mr America in 1953. He lived to 91, one of several counterweights to the sport's record of early deaths, which cluster heavily in the post-1980 mass era.
  4. - Bob Delmonteque. A Muscle Beach-era physique man. The scene's figures moved fluidly between competing, training others and selling equipment or courses.
  5. - Vic Tanny at his gym. Vic Tanny pioneered the mass-market gym chain and the membership contract. The commercial fitness industry is bodybuilding's largest and least acknowledged export.
  6. - Parry O'Brien and Vic Tanny. Tanny with the Olympic shot putter Parry O'Brien. Weight training entered mainstream athletics through exactly these connections.
  7. - Bill Pearl Posing 1955, Mr America 1953, Mr. Universe 1953, 56, 61, 67, 71 Vintage Bodybuilding 8mm. Bill Pearl posing in 1955. Pearl was Mr America 1953 and took Universe titles in 1953, 1956, 1961 and 1971, was vegetarian for most of his life and lived to 91.
  8. - Bill Pearl and Paulette Nelson. Photographed 16 April 1956. Muscle Beach culture was mixed-sex from its beginning in 1934, with women physically central to the acrobatic and adagio work.
  9. - Art Field at Muscle Beach. The original Muscle Beach at Santa Monica. The City of Santa Monica closed the weight pen in the late 1950s; the date and the reasons are contested and should not be asserted without a contemporaneous citation.
  10. - Jack LaLanne, studio portrait. LaLanne took the Muscle Beach programme onto American television and into a chain of gyms. He lived to 96.
  11. - Larry Scott. 1965 and 1966. Joe Weider founded the contest to give Mr Universe winners somewhere to keep competing and to earn money; first prize was 1,000 dollars.
  12. - 1967 Mr. Universe: Arnold and Bill Pearl. The 1967 Mr Universe, where Bill Pearl beat Arnold Schwarzenegger. Pearl is the competitor Schwarzenegger has said he could not beat.
  13. - Arnold Schwarzenegger Wins Mr. Universe Bodybuilding Contest (1969) | British Pathé. British Pathe newsreel of Arnold Schwarzenegger winning a Mr Universe contest in 1969.
  14. - Arnold Schwarzenegger Wins Mr World (1970) - Full Clip From ABC Wide World Of Sports. Arnold Schwarzenegger winning the 1970 Mr World, from ABC's Wide World of Sports. Network sports coverage of a physique contest is itself unusual and dates the moment the sport reached American television.
  15. - Arnold Schwarzenegger Wins 1970 AAU Pro Mr. World in Columbus, Ohio. Schwarzenegger winning the 1970 AAU Pro Mr World in Columbus, Ohio, the city that would later host the Arnold Classic.
  16. - Ted Herbert. An autographed physique photograph, the standard promotional artefact of the era before television and video.
  17. - RARE INTERVIEW OF ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER IN 1975 TALKING ABOUT BODYBUILDING!! BEFORE PUMPING IRON!. A 1975 interview with Schwarzenegger about bodybuilding, recorded before Pumping Iron was released.
  18. - Arnold & Franco Visit Terminal Island Prison - 1975 Extended Footage #bodybuilding #health. Extended 1975 footage of Schwarzenegger and Franco Columbu at Terminal Island prison, an exhibition of the kind the sport used to reach audiences outside the gym.
  19. - THE GOLDEN ERA OF BODYBUILDING TAPE 01 | FOREVER MASSIVE. A compilation tape of golden era training footage.
  20. - Schwarzenegger filmed for Pumping Iron. Photographed by Harry Chase for the Los Angeles Times. George Butler lit Ferrigno dim and Schwarzenegger bright to cast a villain and an underdog. The film is a constructed work, not a record of events.
  21. - Pumping Iron (1977) Trailer HD | Documentary | Arnold Schwarzenegger | Lou Ferrigno. The 1977 trailer for Pumping Iron. The film is the most important single artefact in the sport's public history and it is partly constructed: Butler lit Ferrigno dim and Schwarzenegger bright to cast a villain and an underdog.
  22. - ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER TALKS ABOUT THE LIFE OF A BODYBUILDER IN 1977 INTERVIEW!. A 1977 interview in which Schwarzenegger describes the life of a competitive bodybuilder.
  23. - October 2, 1977: Arnold - 70's-style. CBS 60 Minutes on Schwarzenegger, broadcast 2 October 1977, the year Pumping Iron was released.
  24. - Franco Columbu Rare 1979 Bodybuilding Interview. A 1979 interview with Franco Columbu, the Sardinian who won Mr. Olympia in 1976 and 1981 and remains the only Italian to do so.
  25. - Mike Mentzer's Heavy Duty Training Rare Footage. Rare footage of Mike Mentzer training in his Heavy Duty method. Mentzer's system was few sets taken beyond failure, against the high volume orthodoxy of the era.
  26. - MIKE MENTZER: THE COMPLETE HEAVY DUTY SEMINAR (1981) - Part 1. The first part of Mike Mentzer's complete 1981 Heavy Duty seminar, recorded the year after he stopped competing.
  27. - Golds In The Early 80s. Footage inside Gold's Gym in the early 1980s.
  28. - Shape Up With Arnold Schwarzenegger (1982). Shape Up With Arnold Schwarzenegger, a 1982 home exercise programme. The home video market is where the sport's public image was formed for people who never watched a contest.
  29. - Sergio Oliva "The Myth" 🇨🇺 As A Cop (Profile From 1984). A 1984 profile of Sergio Oliva working as a Chicago police officer. Oliva held the job through and after his competitive career, which is the ordinary economics of the sport in that era.
  30. - Danny Trejo on Muscle Beach 1986. Danny Trejo at Muscle Beach in 1986, before his acting career. Muscle Beach's crowd was never only competitors.
  31. - Gold's Gym Reseda - A Visit Back to 1986. A visit to Gold's Gym Reseda in 1986, one of the early franchised locations away from Venice.
  32. - Dave Draper - Drug Use, Why He Quit Bodybuilding & Show Biz 1987 Interview. Dave Draper in a 1987 interview discussing his own drug use, why he left competition and the show business side of the sport. This is an athlete's own account of his own history.
  33. - Donald Liggett. Los Angeles officially dedicated Muscle Beach Venice in 1987, the year of this photograph, formalising a scene that had moved south from Santa Monica decades earlier.
  34. - Bodybuilding documentary Battle For Gold 1988. Battle For Gold, a 1988 bodybuilding documentary.
  35. - Bodybuilder Tonya Knight Tours Muscle Beach and World Gym in Venice, California in 1987. Competitor Tonya Knight touring Muscle Beach and World Gym in Venice around 1990.
  36. - MIKE MENTZER: THE COMPLETE INTERVIEW (1991). A complete 1991 interview with Mike Mentzer. Mentzer placed fourth at the disputed 1980 Mr. Olympia, tied with Boyer Coe, and never competed again. He died in 2001 of heart complications, and his brother Ray died two days later.
  37. - MIKE MENTZER: HEAVY DUTY TRAINING SEMINAR (1996) UNCUT #mikementzer #fitness #motivation #gym. Mike Mentzer's 1996 Heavy Duty training seminar, uncut.
  38. - MIKE MENTZER HIT UNDERGROUND SEMINAR (1998) pt 1 & 2 - complete movie upload.. Mike Mentzer's 1998 underground seminar on high intensity training, both parts.
  39. - Muscle Beach, Santa Monica. The original Muscle Beach was a 1934 Works Progress Administration installation on the sand south of the Santa Monica Pier. American bodybuilding's cradle was a federal jobs programme, not a private gym.
  40. - The Venice weight pen. 1950s. The exact date and the reasons remain contested in the sources.
  41. - Muscle Beach regulars. Muscle Beach culture was acrobatic and gymnastic first and physique second: hand balancing, adagio, tumbling and pyramids, with women participating from the outset.
  42. - Muscle Beach Venice, California. In 1985 Weider settled with the Federal Trade Commission over misleading muscle-building claims for products including Anabolic Mega-Pak, agreeing to pay a minimum of 400,000 dollars in refunds.
  43. - The site of the original Muscle Beach. The Santa Monica site, south of the pier, where the Works Progress Administration installed exercise equipment on the sand in 1934.
  44. - Jack LaLanne at Venice. LaLanne was one of the central Muscle Beach figures and the one who carried its programme furthest into mainstream American life, through television and a chain of gyms.
  45. - Venice weight pen. The outdoor weight pen is the form the sport took before the commercial gym. Vic Tanny, a Muscle Beach figure, pioneered the mass-market chain and the membership contract.
  46. - Bodybuilding at Muscle Beach. Joe Gold, another Muscle Beach regular, opened Gold's Gym in Venice around 1965 and later founded World Gym.
  47. - Muscle Beach workout centre. The modern commercial gym chain descends directly from bodybuilding, through Tanny and later Gold's and World. The fitness industry is the sport's largest and least acknowledged export.
  48. - Muscle Beach memorabilia. Gold's Venice became known as the Mecca largely because Pumping Iron filmed there in the mid 1970s.
  49. - Muscle Beach, Venice. Venice absorbed the scene that Santa Monica had shed, and the boardwalk pen became the sport's most photographed single location.
  50. - Muscle Beach Fitness. By the 2000s the site functioned as much as a tourist attraction as a training facility, a shift that had begun with the film.
  51. - Venice Muscle Beach, morning. The Venice pen operates as a paid-entry public facility run by the City of Los Angeles.
  52. - Training at Venice. Steve Reeves and Armand Tanny were among the Santa Monica generation whose look defined the physique standard through the 1950s.
  53. - Venice boardwalk pen. Pudgy and Les Stockton were among the couple acts that made Muscle Beach a mixed-sex scene decades before women's bodybuilding contests existed.
  54. - Muscle Beach Venice, the pen. The scene's continuity from 1934 to the present runs through two sites and one culture of public, outdoor, unpaid training.
  55. - Muscle Beach gym. The enclosed Muscle Beach gym adjoining the outdoor pen at Venice. Joe Gold opened Gold's Gym in the same neighbourhood around 1965, sold it in 1970 and later founded World Gym.
  56. - Competition at Muscle Beach Venice. Contests are still staged on the Venice site. Harold Zinkin, a Muscle Beach regular, invented the Universal gym machine, one of the sport's few durable equipment contributions.
  57. - Muscle Beach Venice from the boardwalk. Photographs of the pen from the boardwalk side. The site remains open-air and public, which is what distinguished the Muscle Beach model from the enclosed gym.
  58. - At the old Muscle Beach. The Santa Monica site retains rings, bars and a platform, the acrobatic apparatus that came first.
  59. - Venice Muscle Beach, boardwalk side. Joe Weider brought Arnold Schwarzenegger to California in 1968, and the Venice scene became the centre of the sport in the decade that followed.
  60. - Weights at Venice. Weider published Your Physique from 1940, renamed Muscle Builder in 1953 and Muscle and Fitness in 1980, the magazines that made the Venice scene famous.
  61. - Venice Beach. The boardwalk around the weight pen. The sport's public face for four decades has been this half mile of Los Angeles coastline.
  62. - Swinging rings, Santa Monica. The rings are the surviving apparatus of the acrobatic tradition that came first at Muscle Beach, before physique display.
  63. - Backstage at a natural contest. Backstage pump-up before going on. Natural contests, meaning drug-tested ones, run in parallel with the untested federations.
  64. - US Forces Europe championships, Wiesbaden. A military contest in Germany, 23 September 2009. Base welfare programmes have run physique contests worldwide for decades.
  65. - The Weider Brothers: Men of Iron (Part 1 of 5). The first part of a series on the Weider brothers. Joe ran the magazines, the supplements and the star making; Ben ran the federation and the project to get bodybuilding into the Olympics. Weider publications are simultaneously the best documented and the least neutral source in this field.
  66. - Muscle Beach and Chess Beach. The Santa Monica beachfront. Municipal hostility to the crowd, alongside a scandal whose details remain contested, ended the original installation.
  67. - Gym. The commercial gym descends directly from bodybuilding through Vic Tanny's chains and then Gold's and World.
  68. - The Joe Weider Story. 's own channel. Promotional in origin, which is the point: the Weider account of the Weider empire is a primary document of how the sport sold itself.
  69. - Joe Weider mural, Venice Beach. Joe Weider, 1919 to 2013, ran the magazines, the supplements and the star-making while his brother Ben ran the federation. There was no independent bodybuilding press.
  70. - Venice Muscle Beach Contests now compared to back in the day. Ric Drasin, who trained in the era, comparing the Venice Muscle Beach contests of his day with the present ones.
  71. - Origins Of Iron: Podcast with the legend, Frank Zane "The Chemist". A podcast interview with Frank Zane. Zane held a degree in chemistry and taught school, which is where the nickname came from.
  72. - Original Muscle Beach, Santa Monica. The Santa Monica site is now marked and maintained as a public facility. The physique scene moved south to Venice after the closure.
  73. - Rings at Santa Monica. Hand balancing, adagio, tumbling and pyramids were the beach's original vocabulary. Physique came second.
  74. - Air Force competitors. Photographed 8 May 2015. The military circuit is one of the few in which contests, coaching and facilities are provided rather than paid for.
  75. - Origins Of Iron: Podcast with the legend, Robby Robinson "The Black Prince". A podcast interview with Robby Robinson, the Black Prince, who competed from the 1970s into the masters divisions.
  76. - The Blonde Bomber.. On Dave Draper, the Blond Bomber, a Weider era figure of the 1960s.
  77. - Stories of the Iron Age: Bill Pearl. Bill Pearl telling stories from the iron age of the 1950s and 1960s, an era with far less filmed record than the 1970s.
  78. - Legend, Dr Franco Columbu's Office Bodybuilding Champion. Franco Columbu interviewed at his chiropractic office. Columbu qualified as a chiropractor and practised for decades alongside the bodybuilding career.
  79. - Bodybuilding Legends Podcast #132 - Frank Zane. A long podcast interview with Frank Zane, three times Mr. Olympia from 1977 to 1979. Zane is the counter argument inside the sport's own history: he won on proportion and condition rather than mass.
  80. - The History of Santa Monica's Muscle Beach. The Santa Monica History Museum on the history of Muscle Beach. The original site was in Santa Monica; the Venice site took the name Muscle Beach Venice in 1987.
  81. - DAVE DRAPER: MEMOIRS OF A GOLDEN ERA BODYBUILDING CHAMPION!! A GLIMPSE INTO THE REAR VIEW, NEW BOOK!. Dave Draper's memoirs of the golden era read aloud.
  82. - FRANK ZANE'S FOUNDATION TO SYMMETRY! FRANK ZANE INTERVIEW ON HOW HE BUILT HIS AESTHETIC PHYSIQUE!. Frank Zane on how he built the proportions he became known for.
  83. - Lou Ferrigno Separates Fact From Fiction: Behind The Scene Stories Of 'Pumping Iron' | GI Vault. Lou Ferrigno separating what happened from what was staged in Pumping Iron, in his own words.
  84. - FRANK ZANE: ARNOLD, CALIFORNIA AND THE MR UNIVERSES. THE FRANK ZANE INTERVIEWS!!. Frank Zane on Schwarzenegger, California and the Mr Universe contests.
  85. - GOLD'S GYM VENICE DOCUMENTARY! Marc Martinez Interview | History of Bodybuilding. A long documentary interview on the history of Gold's Gym Venice. Joe Gold opened the gym in Venice in 1965, sold it in 1970 and later founded World Gym. The Venice gym became known as the Mecca largely because Pumping Iron filmed there.
  86. - Muscle Beach Documentary circa 2003 Part One. The first part of a documentary on Muscle Beach made around 2003, with participants from the original era.
  87. - FRANK ZANE: THE OLYMPIAS! INTERVIEW WITH FRANK ZANE. Frank Zane on his three Olympia years.
  88. - Muscle Beach Documentary circa 2003 Part Two. The second part of the same 2003 Muscle Beach documentary.
  89. - Tony Atlas Gives History of Gold's Gym Venice and Arnold Schwarzenegger's Loyalty to Joe Gold. Wrestler Tony Atlas on the history of Gold's Gym Venice.
  90. - Pumping Iron: How Documentaries Lie. An argument about how Pumping Iron uses documentary form to construct a story. Butler called the sequel a semi documentary, and Matty Ferrigno was brought into the first film for dramatic purposes.
  91. - BILL PEARL INTERVIEW - LEGACY OF AN ICON! JOHN BALIK'S INTERVIEW WITH THE BODYBUILDING MASTER. A long interview with Bill Pearl conducted by John Balik.
  92. - The Legacy of Joe Weider. A long programme on Joe Weider's legacy from Olympia TV. Weider died in March 2013 aged 93. He settled with the Federal Trade Commission in 1985 for a minimum of 400,000 dollars over claims made for the Anabolic Mega-Pak, which is a regulator's finding rather than a competitor's accusation.
  93. - 3-Minute History: Muscle Beach. A short history of Muscle Beach from the Santa Monica Conservancy, the body that maintains the site's heritage record.
  94. - Raw Iron Making of Pumping Iron | 2002. Raw Iron, the 2002 documentary about the making of Pumping Iron, with the participants describing how scenes were built.
  95. - "The Only Man to Out Muscle Arnold Schwarzenegger" - Short Sergio Oliva Interview Clip. A short archival interview clip with Sergio Oliva. Schwarzenegger's 1971 title carries an asterisk larger than 1980's, because Oliva was banned that year for competing in a rival NABBA event.
  96. - Stand Tall. 1975 Mr. Olympia and went on to play the Hulk on television.
  97. - Interview with Master Olympia 1994 - Robby Robinson!. Robby Robinson, Masters Olympia champion in 1994, interviewed on his long career.
  98. - Ed Conners: Untold Stories From Inside Gold’s Gym Venice. Ed Conners, a Gold's Gym owner, on what went on inside the Venice gym. A first hand operator's account rather than a retrospective.
  99. - Pumping Iron (1977) – Behind the Scenes: Arnold Schwarzenegger & Lou Ferrigno. Behind the scenes on Pumping Iron, covering Schwarzenegger and Lou Ferrigno.
  100. - The Accidental Birthplace of Modern Bodybuilding | Gold's Gym. On how Gold's Gym became the centre of the sport more or less by accident. The modern commercial gym chain descends directly from bodybuilding, through Vic Tanny, who pioneered the mass market chain and the membership contract, and later Gold's and World.
  101. - Story Time Arnold / Golds Gym /World Gym /Venice Beach /Celebrities / 30 years ago /muscle Beach. A long recollection of Venice Beach, Gold's Gym and World Gym from thirty years earlier, told by someone who was there.
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