On Screen and In Print

How the sport reached people who never entered a gym. The Weider magazines, which are simultaneously the best-documented and least neutral source in this field. Pumping Iron in 1977, which made Arnold famous and which its own director described as partly constructed. Hercules and the peplum cycle, Conan, talk-show appearances, the home-video market where retired competitors made a living, and the internet era that replaced all of it.

Part of Bodybuilding

103 moments in this segment.

1. 1901 - Hugh McAllum. Published in the May 1901 issue of a physical culture magazine. New Zealand and Australia had their own strongman circuits connected to the British one by touring.
2. 1902 - Cartoon: Sandow in the Days of Their Youth. A comic strip by Tom Browne published in The Sketch on 29 January 1902, imagining Sandow's childhood. He was famous enough by then to be a newspaper joke.
3. 1904 - Sandow in the French magazine La Culture Physique. A page of new Sandow poses in La Culture Physique, showing how quickly the physical culture press spread across Europe.
4. 1904 - La Culture Physique. Edmond Desbonnet's Paris magazine La Culture Physique carried the French wing of the physical culture movement. Physique publishing was international from the outset and was never only an Anglo-American business.
5. 1904 - La Culture Physique, cover. The magazine's covers used the same classical-statuary grammar Sandow had established with his photographers.
6. 1904 - La Regeneration du Snob, a satire. A satire published in La Culture Physique. The movement attracted mockery in its own press almost immediately, which is a useful corrective to reading it as uncomplicated enthusiasm.
7. 1904 - Max Unger in classical pose. The classical pose is the movement's central visual claim: that the developed modern body is a recovery of an antique ideal.
8. 1904 - Georg Hackenschmidt in La Culture Physique. Hackenschmidt was a wrestler as much as a strongman, and the two categories were not yet separate in the way they later became.
9. 1904 - The Desbonnet school. Edmond Desbonnet ran a physical culture school in Paris and photographed its pupils extensively. His archive is one of the largest surviving bodies of early physique photography.
10. 1904 - Poses from La Culture Physique. The compulsory poses used in contests a century later are recognisably these.
11. 1904 - La beaute moderne. The magazine argued the developed body as modern beauty, an aesthetic claim rather than an athletic one.
12. 1904 - Pose de l'Hercule moderne. The modern Hercules pose. Hercules would return as the sport's screen vehicle fifty years later through Steve Reeves and the Italian peplum films.
13. 1904 - Alexandre Maspoli on the cover. Maspoli was one of the French school's regular cover subjects. Edmond Desbonnet's magazine sold the apparatus and the courses in its own pages, so the conflict of interest that would define Weider publishing was structural from the start.
14. 1906 - Maurice Deriaz. One of the Deriaz brothers, Swiss strongmen who worked the French circuit as wrestlers and physique performers.
15. 1906 - Lindinger and Maurice Deriaz. Physique performance was a paid stage act. The idea of a contest judged purely on the built body would take another half century to become the sport's centre.
16. 1906 - Maurice Deriaz, wrestler. Photographed for the French press. Deriaz is catalogued as a wrestler, which is how physique men earned a living before physique itself was a paying category.
17. 1906 - The Three Roeder. A hand balancing act. The acrobatic tradition would resurface at Muscle Beach in the 1930s, where tumbling and adagio came before physique.
18. 1908 - Louis Cyr on the cover of La Culture Physique. The cover of La Culture Physique for 15 February 1908, showing Cyr in a gymnast's costume embroidered with the word Canada.
19. 1908 - Ecole Desbonnet. The Desbonnet school's own advertising. The commercial gym as an institution begins here and in Sandow's institutes, decades before Vic Tanny industrialised it.
20. 1908 - La Culture Physique, 15 August 1908. Physique magazines were the sport's only distribution channel for most of the twentieth century, and their publishers were also its promoters and its equipment sellers.
21. 1908 - Advertisement in La Culture Physique. The magazine sold apparatus and courses in its own pages. The conflict of interest that would define Weider publishing was structural from the start.
22. 1908 - Emile Royer. A studio physique photograph from the French school. Desbonnet's Paris archive is one of the largest surviving bodies of early physique photography anywhere.
23. 1908 - Eugene Rapin from behind. The rear double biceps became a compulsory pose and remains one. The pose vocabulary photographed in Paris around 1908 is substantially the one judged today.
24. 1908 - Professor Desbonnet. Desbonnet styled himself professor, as did most physical culture proprietors of the period. The title was commercial, not academic.
25. 1908 - Edwardian women in exercise tunics. Published in a physical culture magazine. Women's exercise was presented in terms of posture, health and figure rather than development, and that framing lasted into the 1970s.
26. 1908 - Edwardian women in corsets. The corset and the exercise programme were sold side by side. Roxey Ann Caplin had argued against exactly that pairing in 1854.
27. 1908 - Article contrasting the clothed and unclothed body. Physical culture publishing argued constantly about how much of the body could be shown, an argument that produced Bernarr Macfadden's obscenity arrests in the 1900s.
28. 1908 - Splendid physical types. A magazine spread of physique studies. Physique photography's later entanglement with early gay visual culture, and with obscenity prosecutions, runs directly back to this publishing tradition.
29. 1908 - Bodybuilders with their trainer. A trainer with his pupils. The coach as a distinct paid role is as old as the commercial gymnasium.
30. 1913 - Wrestlers at the Nouveau Cirque. The circus and the music hall were the physique performer's employers. The sport's economics have never fully escaped the entertainment model.
31. 1918 - Macfadden advertisement, Are You in the Grip of Glasses?. An advertisement for Macfadden's eyesight course. His publishing empire extended the physical culture promise well beyond muscle.
32. 1924 - Macfadden and family demonstrating fitness at the US Capitol. Macfadden brought his family to the Capitol to demonstrate keeping fit to legislators. He courted political influence throughout his career.
33. 1924 - United States senators taking a physical culture lesson. Macfadden instructing senators including Arthur Capper, C. C. Dill and Magnus Johnson. Physical culture reached the centre of American public life.
34. 1924 - Macfadden and Senator Brookhart stage a boxing match. Macfadden and Senator Smith W. Brookhart of Iowa staged a boxing match outside the Senate office building. Macfadden understood publicity as well as any showman of the era.
35. 1926 - La Culture Physique, 1926. The magazine survived into the interwar period, by which point the physical culture movement had spread into state programmes across Europe.
36. 1930 - Charles Atlas enrolment letter, The World's Most Perfectly Developed Man. An enrolment letter using the billing The World's Most Perfectly Developed Man. Atlas never won a title of that name; the contest he won in 1922 was America's Most Perfectly Developed Man.
37. 1931 - Franklin Roosevelt and Bernarr Macfadden at Warm Springs. Macfadden with Franklin D. Roosevelt at Warm Springs, Georgia. Held by the US National Archives.
38. 1932 - Charles Atlas Dynamic Tension course application form. An application form for the Atlas mail-order course. Dynamic Tension was an isometric self-resistance method; the phrase was coined by the advertising man Charles P. Roman.
39. 1932 - Crowd outside a Macfadden penny restaurant. A queue outside a one-cent restaurant run by the Bernarr Macfadden Foundation for unemployment relief during the Depression.
40. 1935 - Dear Mr Atlas. Charles Atlas mail-order material. Atlas never won a title using the word World's, despite the persistent claim, and the Dynamic Tension course was the business rather than the competition.
41. 1935 - Don't waste your time or money on ROT. Atlas advertising attacking apparatus-based competitors. The physical culture market was already crowded and litigious by the 1930s.
42. 1935 - Analysis and enrolment form. An enrolment form for a mail-order physical culture course. The measurement chart was both a sales device and the origin of the sport's obsession with numbers.
43. 1940 - Joe Weider, The Master Blaster's first magazine, Your Physique Aug 1940. Joe Weider's first magazine, Your Physique, from August 1940, examined issue by issue. Weider launched it at 19 in Montreal, and the magazine business preceded the supplements and the federation.
44. 1941 - Charles Atlas advertisement in Weird Tales. An advertisement for Dynamic Tension in the September 1941 issue of the pulp magazine Weird Tales. The campaign ran for decades and sold physical training through shame and bullying rather than sport.
45. 1944 - Joe Weider's Your Physique magazine 1944 Oct/Nov, with Eugene Sandow!. The October and November 1944 issue of Your Physique, featuring Eugen Sandow, who had died in 1925. The sport was already citing its own origin myth within four years of Weider's first issue.
46. 1947 - Joe Weider: Gain 36 pounds in a few months!! Your Physique 1947 June. A June 1947 Your Physique advertisement promising 36 pounds of gain in a few months. Weider settled with the Federal Trade Commission in 1985 for a minimum of 400,000 dollars over claims made for a supplement, which is a regulator's finding rather than an accusation.
47. 1947 - John Farbotnik's amazing story! Joe Weider's Your Physique magazine May 1947. A May 1947 Your Physique feature on John Farbotnik. The magazine's method was to make its readers into characters, which is how the sport built an audience.
48. 1950 - The Beautiful Val Njord! The First Full Colour Female Cover on a Weider Mag! Your Physique Oct 1949. The first full colour female cover on a Weider magazine, featuring Val Njord. Women appeared on the covers decades before women's bodybuilding existed as a contested sport, and in a very different role.
49. 1950 - Joe Weider's first magazines, Rare IronMan mags, Muscle Power and Muscle Builder!. Early Weider magazines alongside rare IronMan issues, Muscle Power and Muscle Builder. Your Physique was renamed Muscle Builder in 1953.
50. 1953 - Wally Wright, Mr East Midlands. A British regional physique title from 1953. NABBA had begun the Universe contest in London in 1948, and a dense network of regional titles fed it.
51. 1958 - Steve Reeves in Le fatiche di Ercole. Hercules, 1958, made Steve Reeves an international star and launched the Italian peplum cycle. This is how the bodybuilder became a screen archetype before he was a sports figure.
52. 1959 - Steve Reeves as Hercules. Reeves had won the AAU Mr America in 1947 and the NABBA Mr Universe in 1950 before the films. The physique title was the audition.
53. 1959 - Hercules in the magazines. The peplum cycle exported the physique globally through cinema, reaching audiences no physique magazine could.
54. 1959 - Steve Reeves in The Last Days of Pompeii. Reeves made a run of Italian historical adventures through the late 1950s and early 1960s.
55. 1959 - Goliath and the Barbarians. A poster for one of the cycle's English-language releases. The films were cheap, numerous and internationally distributed.
56. 1959 - Chelo Alonso and Steve Reeves. Reeves with Chelo Alonso. Schwarzenegger has named Reeves as his stated idol, which places this cycle directly upstream of the sport's most famous career.
57. 1960 - Goliath and the Dragon. The genre's American distribution retitled and recut freely. What travelled was the body, not the film.
58. 1961 - Reg Park as Hercules. Reg Park also played Hercules in the Italian cycle. Park settled in Johannesburg and built the South African scene.
59. 1961 - Virna Lisi and Steve Reeves. Reeves at the height of the peplum cycle. He died in 2000, and the physique career had been over for a decade by the time of this photograph.
60. 1970 - Hercules in New York (1969). Footage from Hercules in New York, Schwarzenegger's first film. His accent was dubbed over by another actor for the original release, and the film was made while he was still competing.
61. 1970 - Hercules in New York (1970) OFFICIAL TRAILER [HD]. The trailer for Hercules in New York, in which Schwarzenegger was credited as Arnold Strong.
62. 1970 - Hercules in New York | Arnold Schwarzenegger | ACTION, FANTASY | Full Movie in English. Hercules in New York in full, the 1970 film that began Schwarzenegger's crossover from the physique circuit into cinema.
63. 1972 - Weider method advertisement. A back-cover advertisement in Inside Wrestling, March 1972. In the same year US postal inspectors investigated claims that Weider Formula No. 7 would let users gain a pound a day.
64. 1972 - How to build a strong, muscular body. Weider mail-order advertising. The shame-based sales pitch invented for Charles Atlas in the 1920s remained the dominant grammar of fitness marketing.
65. 1972 - Arnold Strong advertisement. Schwarzenegger advertised under the name Arnold Strong early in his American career. Weider had brought him to California in 1968.
66. 1974 - Trophy, Mr Norway. The trophy from the 1974 Mr Norway. National titles across Europe carried almost no prize money; the reward was the placing and the route upward.
67. 1976 - Stay Hungry Official Trailer #1 - Jeff Bridges Movie (1976) HD. The trailer for Stay Hungry, the 1976 Bob Rafelson film with Jeff Bridges and Sally Field in which Schwarzenegger plays a bodybuilder. It won him a Golden Globe for new star of the year.
68. 1977 - Bill Bixby and Lou Ferrigno, The Incredible Hulk. Ferrigno played the Hulk on American television from 1978 to 1982, the year after Pumping Iron cast him as the underdog to Schwarzenegger's villain.
69. 1978 - The Incredible Hulk (1978) Opening titles.. The opening titles of The Incredible Hulk, the CBS series that ran from 1978 to 1982 with Lou Ferrigno as the Hulk. It put a bodybuilder in millions of American living rooms weekly, which no contest ever did.
70. 1978 - The Incredible Hulk (1978) TV Series. A trailer for the 1978 Incredible Hulk television series.
71. 1979 - Hulk Enters A Body Building Contest! | The Incredible Hulk | Science Fiction Station. A sequence from The Incredible Hulk set at a bodybuilding contest. Television's idea of the sport, written by people outside it, reached a far larger audience than the sport's own media.
72. 1979 - The Hulk Stuns At A Bodybuilding Contest | The Incredible Hulk | Action Rewind. Another Incredible Hulk sequence set at a physique contest.
73. 1979 - Hulk Crashes Bodybuilding Contest! | The Incredible Hulk | Science Fiction Station. A further Incredible Hulk contest sequence.
74. 1980 - OLD BODYBUILDING LITERATURE: A DEEP DIVE INTO JOE WEIDER'S ULTIMATE BODYBUILDING FROM 1989. A close reading of Joe Weider's Ultimate Bodybuilding, one of the instructional books the empire produced alongside the magazines.
75. 1982 - Conan the Barbarian Original Trailer (John Milius, 1982). The original trailer for John Milius's Conan the Barbarian, 1982. Conan is where Schwarzenegger's physique became a film asset rather than a curiosity, and it is the hinge between the sport and his later career.
76. 1982 - The Making of Conan The Barbarian 1982 (1 of 3). The first part of a contemporaneous making of Conan the Barbarian.
77. 1982 - Conan Unchained - Making of Conan The Barbarian. Conan Unchained, the documentary made about the production of Conan the Barbarian.
78. 1982 - Arnold Schwarzenegger interview on Conan the Barbarian (1982). Schwarzenegger interviewed about Conan the Barbarian at the time of release.
79. 1982 - Sandahl Bergman on Conan the Barbarian (1982). Sandahl Bergman on making Conan the Barbarian.
80. 1985 - Joe Weider - Basic Bodybuilding Techniques. Joe Weider presenting basic bodybuilding techniques. Weider publications are simultaneously the best documented and the least neutral source in this field, and material like this is where the sport's vocabulary was standardised.
81. 1990 - OLD BODYBUILDING MAGAZINES: A deep dive into an issue of FLEX from 1990.. A close reading of a 1990 issue of Flex, the Weider title aimed at the hardcore end of the readership.
82. 1993 - OLD BODYBUILDING MAGAZINES : A DEEP DIVE INTO AN ISSUE OF FLEX FROM NOVEMBER 1993.. A close reading of the November 1993 issue of Flex.
83. 1996 - OLD BODYBUILDING MAGAZINES : A DEEP DIVE INTO AN ISSUE OF FLEX MAGAZINE FROM AUGUST 1998.. A close reading of a 1996 issue of Flex magazine, examining the advertising as much as the editorial.
84. 1997 - OLD BODYBUILDING MAGAZINES: A deep dive into an issue of MUSCLE AND FITNESS from 1997.. A close reading of a 1997 issue of Muscle and Fitness, the Weider mass market title.
85. 2000 - OLD BODYBUILDING MAGAZINES : A DEEP DIVE INTO AN ISSUE OF MUSCULAR DEVELOPMENT FROM AUGUST 2004 (2). A close reading of an issue of Muscular Development, the Weider rival that competed on the hardcore end.
86. 2000 - RONNIE COLEMAN - THE UNBELIEVABLE MOVIE (2000) COMPLETE UPLOAD. The Unbelievable, the 2000 Ronnie Coleman release. Athlete video releases were the sport's own distribution channel before YouTube, sold through the magazines.
87. 2008 - Joe Weider at the Olympia. Weider at the contest he created in 1965. He sold his publications to American Media in 2003; American Media eventually took over promotion of the Mr Olympia in 2017.
88. 2010-04-14 - Joe Weider part 1.mov. Ric Drasin on Joe Weider, from someone who worked inside the operation.
89. 2017-12-22 - What it Was Like Working for Joe Weider | Tiger Fitness. A first hand account of what working for Joe Weider was like.
90. 2018-04-13 - Body Capital and Masculinity in Gym-Going Subcultures and Social Media. A sociologist on body capital and masculinity in gym going subcultures and on social media. Academic work on the sport is scarce and this is a researcher presenting his own fieldwork.
91. 2018-06-11 - The Fitness Subculture and Social Media Influence. On the fitness subculture and the influence of social media on it.
92. 2019-05-14 - Crazy land bodybuilding documentary featured on Netflix and discovery channel. A bodybuilding documentary that reached mainstream streaming distribution.
93. 2020-11-14 - Per Bernal:Why the 90s was my favorite era of bodybuilding | MD Global Muscle Clips E16 S3. Photographer Per Bernal on why the 1990s was his favourite era to shoot. The sport's visual record is largely the work of a small number of magazine photographers.
94. 2020-12-05 - Frank Zane Why I Retired in 1983 MD Global Muscle E18 S3. Frank Zane explaining why he retired in 1983.
95. 2021-09-17 - 20 Years of Busted Legal Muscle Part 1 with Rick Collins. Twenty years of the Legal Muscle column with lawyer Rick Collins, on how the sport's press covered the legal side of drugs.
96. 2022-02-03 - Bodybuilding - Subculture Analysis. A short subculture analysis of bodybuilding as a social formation.
97. 2023-01-25 - History of the Incredible Hulk TV Show. A history of the Incredible Hulk television series and how it was made.
98. 2023-04-25 - The GymBro 2.0: A New Subculture. On the gym subculture that formed on social media in the 2020s, and how it differs from the magazine era it replaced.
99. 2023-05-10 - Arnold | Official Trailer | Netflix. The trailer for Netflix's Arnold, the 2023 documentary series. It is authorised, which shapes what it covers.
100. 2023-08-28 - Understanding The Gym Culture In Germany. On gym culture in Germany and how it differs from the American model that exported it.
101. 2025-11-08 - Behind the Scenes: Conan the Barbarian (Milius, 1982) with Arnold Schwarzenegger. A behind the scenes account of the making of Conan the Barbarian.
102. 2026-02-18 - The Weider System: The definitive manual of the methodology that sculpted the greats.. On the Weider System, the branded methodology the magazines sold. The system was a marketing container for training principles of mixed origin, several of which predated Weider.
103. 2026-08-10 - Two Brothers Owned Every Gym, Magazine and Protein Tub in America. Then It Fell Apart.. On how the Weider brothers came to own the magazines, the supplements and the federation, and how that position was lost. Joe died in 2013 and Ben in 2008.