BEHIND THE SCENES
by Harry B. Paschal
We like to look backward from time to time just to check up on where we have been as well as where we are going. This applies as well to the World of Weights as to the Workaday World. The scene is ever changing, yet, as any student of history will affirm, the more it changes, the more it is the same. We have lived through an era of great changes, and every decade of our life has seemed to have different standards and values by which most of us live, and sometimes we can look back and give a loud horse laugh to certain ideas that were considered extremely copasetic at the time but which, viewed in the practical light of experience, turned out to be as false as Judas and as synthetic as the ruptured tissue in a boobybuilder’s 19-inch arm.
Happily, although we have seen many queer standards unfurled during the years, we have always found that right thinking eventually triumphs, and that sound, basic principles are bound to be generally accepted over the long pull. The crackpots are only Kings for a Day.
Sometimes, however, we have discovered with dismay that the Day of the Crackpot extends for years, and a whole generation becomes infected with the bitter serum of a false conception of human values. This has recently happened in the weightlifting world. Probably the guy who first thought of staging physique contests and giving prizes for the most lumps, no matter how they were manufactured, was a man of purity and high principles, but in the light of subsequent developments, perhaps we would have been years ahead in the physical culture field had this well-intentioned promoter stayed in bed on that particular morning.
The Mr. Contests started out on a high plane but have descended from the sublime to the ridiculous. Today many lads are spending hours of valuable time lying on benches developing lumps which are
no more use to them than four-wheel brakes on a kiddie car. The true idea of physical fitness and self improvement has been forgotten. The shrinking violet type of kid seemed, during the past decade, to be taking up weight-training not to develop strength and health but to become a ham-acting show-off. If this is good, brother, we'll stick to Calvert!
Yet, like all bad dreams, this nightmare is coming to a happy end. The trend is once again to strength and fitness, and after the long detour, weight-training is once again back on the highway to popular
public acceptance.
We think the mistake made some years back was the divorcement of weight-training from the field of physical culture, where one was fairly certain of finding some ideals of a clean life with a three-fold
significance: Spirit, Mind and Body. When the first two ideals were scrapped, and the body itself became the be-all and end-all of existence, something fine went out of the field of weight-training.
The foregoing may sound like we are against bodybuilders as a group, but such a thought is farthest from our actual intentions. We have always been on the side of bodybuilding, just as we are firmly
on the side of weightlifting as a sport, but watching the antics of some of the super-lumped boobybuilders has cured us completely of our early reverence for Mr. Americas. Perhaps we should explain what we mean by boobybuilder, in order to clear the issue.
A boobybuilder is usually a young man who has nothing better to do with his time than to spend four or five hours a day in a smelly gym doing bench pushes and curls and squats and lat pulley exercises.
He usually wears his hair long and frequently gilds the lily by having it waved. He is supremely concerned with big lats, big pex, big traps, big delts, and flapping triceps. His ideal is the V shape preferably one like the emblem on the rear-end of a Cadillac. He lives for his one big moment, when he can strut and posture under the glare of a spot-light before an audience of several hundred followers of his peculiar cult. Athletic fitness and muscular coordination and superb health are
completely meaningless to him.
The boobybuilder has done more harm to the Iron Game than all the popular prejudices against muscle-men in the past 50 years. Why? Because he exemplifies in his person and actions the various claims made against weight-trainers by the medical profession and the man on the street - the idea of muscle-bound over-development, the lack of proportionate strength to size, the absence of athletic ability and muscular coordination, the show-off tendencies that alienate friends and convince the public that muscle-men are in some way freakish.
The genuine bodybuilder is a horse of a different color. He has been the backbone of the Iron Game since the days of Sandow and Saxon. Certainly there is nothing wrong with the idea that one should
devote considerable time and effort to self-improvement. As a matter of fact, everyone male or female - should devote some time to physical training in order to reach his or her full potential. Development of the body is just as important (if not more so) as development of the mind.
Long ago, when we first became a physical culturist, the usual public reaction to bodybuilders was the well-deserved epithet “bedroom athlete.” There were practically no barbell gyms in that era, and we began our own training in a space about 6 by 8 feet square in one corner of our bedroom, and rolled the barbell under the bed when we finished with it. We have often thought we would like to go back to our early home sometime and see if the scratches are still on the closet door where we dropped the bar while trying to do the intricate bent press from our mail order instruction sheet.
What happened to us also happened to many another "bedroom" athlete of that early day. We later joined the local YMCA and turned out for gym and basketball classes and our success in these fields caused many of the local yokels to inquire where we had gotten both our muscles and our athletic ability, and so many a local youth turned to barbell exercises because of our example.
All over America the same thing occurred. We were able to break through the barrier that up to that time had existed in public gymnasia, and finally got the Physical Director at the Y to allow us to install our barbells in a corner of the gym. Others did likewise from New York to Los Angeles. The wedding of barbells and athletics had begun.
But a serpent invaded our Eden. A certain reckless youth-about-town, who had been something of a juvenile delinquent, invaded our first class at the Y, and began to do boobybuilding instead of weight-training, and in a short time had brought in a group of his nefarious playmates to build bigger and prettier muscles with which to slay the maidens of the town. And at just that time we left the city to take a job elsewhere, leaving the barbell room to the tender mercies of this group of no-goodniks.
When we returned, some years later, we found that the barbells had been jerked out of the gym and were gathering dust in the basement behind the furnace. The booby builders had made themselves so
obnoxious around the Y that their privileges had been cancelled. It took us a long time to reargue the Physical Director in rehabilitating the weight room - but we did it finally. Little incidents like this have been instrumental in forming our current state of mind, and many happenings more recently have confirmed it.
We are convinced by long experience (since 1914) that the healthiest stimulation for any weight-training group is actual weight-lifting competition as opposed to “Mr.” contests. The one requires self-sacrifice and competitive athletic ability and the other caters almost entirely to the Ego. When we had a good WL Team at the Columbus YMCA our classes of bodybuilders were much larger than they are today. It was not the fact that everybody who turned to barbell exercise wanted to become weightlifters, but the stimulation of seeing strong men actually perform feats of genuine strength that exerted the influence. Many of our lifters - in fact, almost all - were bodybuilders too. This, to us, has been the healthy thing about weight-training through the years.
When we used to visit York 20 years ago all the lifters there were also bodybuilders. It was a happy time, and we feel that it will be happy again - because weightlifting MUST be mixed with bodybuilding if we are to have BETTER weightlifters. Unless you do heavy squats and high-pulls and deadlifts you will not reach your full potential as a lifter, and what are these movements except bodybuilders?
We realize as well as anyone that a full 90% of the men who use barbells are not lifters and probably never will be, yet the practice of the standard body building movements will make them stronger, better built - and most of all, healthier individuals than they would have been ordinarily. Men want to be stronger, to look better, to feel better - and the barbell gives you these three desirable qualities faster than any other type of training.
Many young men are interested in athletics, and they practice weight-training to help them become better athletes. Such men are not apt to fit in a boobybuilding atmosphere. So the private gym owners have a very serious responsibility to be careful in their training methods. It is better to train a dozen average citizens than one Mr. So-and-so. And the writing on the wall is plain enough at this time
for anyone to read who desires to be of true service to the Iron Game.
It would be nice if every operator of a barbell gym in America would put up a sign (preferably right over the bench) saying: “No Boobybuilding Allowed in Here!”
by Harry B. Paschal
We like to look backward from time to time just to check up on where we have been as well as where we are going. This applies as well to the World of Weights as to the Workaday World. The scene is ever changing, yet, as any student of history will affirm, the more it changes, the more it is the same. We have lived through an era of great changes, and every decade of our life has seemed to have different standards and values by which most of us live, and sometimes we can look back and give a loud horse laugh to certain ideas that were considered extremely copasetic at the time but which, viewed in the practical light of experience, turned out to be as false as Judas and as synthetic as the ruptured tissue in a boobybuilder’s 19-inch arm.
Happily, although we have seen many queer standards unfurled during the years, we have always found that right thinking eventually triumphs, and that sound, basic principles are bound to be generally accepted over the long pull. The crackpots are only Kings for a Day.
Sometimes, however, we have discovered with dismay that the Day of the Crackpot extends for years, and a whole generation becomes infected with the bitter serum of a false conception of human values. This has recently happened in the weightlifting world. Probably the guy who first thought of staging physique contests and giving prizes for the most lumps, no matter how they were manufactured, was a man of purity and high principles, but in the light of subsequent developments, perhaps we would have been years ahead in the physical culture field had this well-intentioned promoter stayed in bed on that particular morning.
The Mr. Contests started out on a high plane but have descended from the sublime to the ridiculous. Today many lads are spending hours of valuable time lying on benches developing lumps which are
no more use to them than four-wheel brakes on a kiddie car. The true idea of physical fitness and self improvement has been forgotten. The shrinking violet type of kid seemed, during the past decade, to be taking up weight-training not to develop strength and health but to become a ham-acting show-off. If this is good, brother, we'll stick to Calvert!
Yet, like all bad dreams, this nightmare is coming to a happy end. The trend is once again to strength and fitness, and after the long detour, weight-training is once again back on the highway to popular
public acceptance.
We think the mistake made some years back was the divorcement of weight-training from the field of physical culture, where one was fairly certain of finding some ideals of a clean life with a three-fold
significance: Spirit, Mind and Body. When the first two ideals were scrapped, and the body itself became the be-all and end-all of existence, something fine went out of the field of weight-training.
The foregoing may sound like we are against bodybuilders as a group, but such a thought is farthest from our actual intentions. We have always been on the side of bodybuilding, just as we are firmly
on the side of weightlifting as a sport, but watching the antics of some of the super-lumped boobybuilders has cured us completely of our early reverence for Mr. Americas. Perhaps we should explain what we mean by boobybuilder, in order to clear the issue.
A boobybuilder is usually a young man who has nothing better to do with his time than to spend four or five hours a day in a smelly gym doing bench pushes and curls and squats and lat pulley exercises.
He usually wears his hair long and frequently gilds the lily by having it waved. He is supremely concerned with big lats, big pex, big traps, big delts, and flapping triceps. His ideal is the V shape preferably one like the emblem on the rear-end of a Cadillac. He lives for his one big moment, when he can strut and posture under the glare of a spot-light before an audience of several hundred followers of his peculiar cult. Athletic fitness and muscular coordination and superb health are
completely meaningless to him.
The boobybuilder has done more harm to the Iron Game than all the popular prejudices against muscle-men in the past 50 years. Why? Because he exemplifies in his person and actions the various claims made against weight-trainers by the medical profession and the man on the street - the idea of muscle-bound over-development, the lack of proportionate strength to size, the absence of athletic ability and muscular coordination, the show-off tendencies that alienate friends and convince the public that muscle-men are in some way freakish.
The genuine bodybuilder is a horse of a different color. He has been the backbone of the Iron Game since the days of Sandow and Saxon. Certainly there is nothing wrong with the idea that one should
devote considerable time and effort to self-improvement. As a matter of fact, everyone male or female - should devote some time to physical training in order to reach his or her full potential. Development of the body is just as important (if not more so) as development of the mind.
Long ago, when we first became a physical culturist, the usual public reaction to bodybuilders was the well-deserved epithet “bedroom athlete.” There were practically no barbell gyms in that era, and we began our own training in a space about 6 by 8 feet square in one corner of our bedroom, and rolled the barbell under the bed when we finished with it. We have often thought we would like to go back to our early home sometime and see if the scratches are still on the closet door where we dropped the bar while trying to do the intricate bent press from our mail order instruction sheet.
What happened to us also happened to many another "bedroom" athlete of that early day. We later joined the local YMCA and turned out for gym and basketball classes and our success in these fields caused many of the local yokels to inquire where we had gotten both our muscles and our athletic ability, and so many a local youth turned to barbell exercises because of our example.
All over America the same thing occurred. We were able to break through the barrier that up to that time had existed in public gymnasia, and finally got the Physical Director at the Y to allow us to install our barbells in a corner of the gym. Others did likewise from New York to Los Angeles. The wedding of barbells and athletics had begun.
But a serpent invaded our Eden. A certain reckless youth-about-town, who had been something of a juvenile delinquent, invaded our first class at the Y, and began to do boobybuilding instead of weight-training, and in a short time had brought in a group of his nefarious playmates to build bigger and prettier muscles with which to slay the maidens of the town. And at just that time we left the city to take a job elsewhere, leaving the barbell room to the tender mercies of this group of no-goodniks.
When we returned, some years later, we found that the barbells had been jerked out of the gym and were gathering dust in the basement behind the furnace. The booby builders had made themselves so
obnoxious around the Y that their privileges had been cancelled. It took us a long time to reargue the Physical Director in rehabilitating the weight room - but we did it finally. Little incidents like this have been instrumental in forming our current state of mind, and many happenings more recently have confirmed it.
We are convinced by long experience (since 1914) that the healthiest stimulation for any weight-training group is actual weight-lifting competition as opposed to “Mr.” contests. The one requires self-sacrifice and competitive athletic ability and the other caters almost entirely to the Ego. When we had a good WL Team at the Columbus YMCA our classes of bodybuilders were much larger than they are today. It was not the fact that everybody who turned to barbell exercise wanted to become weightlifters, but the stimulation of seeing strong men actually perform feats of genuine strength that exerted the influence. Many of our lifters - in fact, almost all - were bodybuilders too. This, to us, has been the healthy thing about weight-training through the years.
When we used to visit York 20 years ago all the lifters there were also bodybuilders. It was a happy time, and we feel that it will be happy again - because weightlifting MUST be mixed with bodybuilding if we are to have BETTER weightlifters. Unless you do heavy squats and high-pulls and deadlifts you will not reach your full potential as a lifter, and what are these movements except bodybuilders?
We realize as well as anyone that a full 90% of the men who use barbells are not lifters and probably never will be, yet the practice of the standard body building movements will make them stronger, better built - and most of all, healthier individuals than they would have been ordinarily. Men want to be stronger, to look better, to feel better - and the barbell gives you these three desirable qualities faster than any other type of training.
Many young men are interested in athletics, and they practice weight-training to help them become better athletes. Such men are not apt to fit in a boobybuilding atmosphere. So the private gym owners have a very serious responsibility to be careful in their training methods. It is better to train a dozen average citizens than one Mr. So-and-so. And the writing on the wall is plain enough at this time
for anyone to read who desires to be of true service to the Iron Game.
It would be nice if every operator of a barbell gym in America would put up a sign (preferably right over the bench) saying: “No Boobybuilding Allowed in Here!”
