[quote]SteelyD wrote:
I wonder if this myth is perpetuated these days with what seems to be an increase in abz-boyz who weigh in at all of 140# who say they’re “bodybuilders”. ?
I blame the bow-flex commercials. Sheeple consider those guys huge. Mind you they look better than me but perceptions changed of what is considered big and strong when they started to show those ads imo.
[quote]Professor X wrote:
[quote]DJS wrote:
I’m pretty sure this started with bodybuilding mags shockingly… When I was a kid and I read all the mags, they never ever stressed progression. It was always stressed that the wieght on the bar didn’t matter. What mattered was straight sets, perfect form, slow reps, hold the stretch, squeeze the muscle hard at the contraction. Basically… if you get a burn and a pump your doing it right. They never said anything like "If you do the same weight… session after session, week after week, month after month, you won’t grow. You get a little stronger but progression is very slow when you train like that. So after a while you switch to the next program they give you. Which is all the same as above with different exercises and/or order.
It started like that and then was taken way too far buy certain authors. Authors are under pressure to come up with something new everytime they come out with an article. It’s like a huge game of telephone. The years go by and there is so much BS intertwined with common knowledge on training its shocking.[/quote]
I have muscle mags going all of the way back to 1987 and I never got that impression from them. I ALWAYS understood that the goal was to get stronger. I wasn’t even aware people actually thought you got muscles that big by NOT getting stronger or NOT gaining a hell of a lot of muscular body weight.
You would have to have grown up around NO athletes at all (especially no football players) to think something like that as well as have no basic understanding of how muscles get bigger and stronger to start with.
I have also seen the concept of pyramiding in mags that old along with the fact that no big guy I ever saw in the gym used the same weight for every set and every exercise. They largely trained like powerlifters only with more sets and reps.
If people were really missing the basics like that, their first stop should have been a biology book.[/quote]
I have to wonder if greater adoption of this myth didn’t come around at the same time as the Weider bodybuilding books no longer being the main weight-training books that were bought.
There is no way from the Weider books that anyone could have gotten either the idea that progressing up in weight to quite heavy weights isn’t necessary for a bb’er, or that successful bb’ers were anything remotely like weak.
I know there is fair criticism that these books had over-self-promotion of Weider and to a casual reader could easily give the impression that Weider invented things he did not (this in fact was never claimed though and was many times explicitly explained as not being so) but overall my opinion is that those books were a lot better than most of the modern crap that has replaced them.
I think a lot of it just has to do with looks. A leaner BBer with good aesthetics (broader shoulders, narrow waist, good bicep peaks, est) looks heavier than they are. I think people look at someone like ronnie and comparitively think he is bigger than a Phil Phister or even an Andy Bolton which is simply not true.
You combine that with the training and structure differences that yield a lower 1RM strength on specific lifts and presto BBers become weak in comparison in the mind of the general public.
[quote]Bill Roberts wrote:
[quote]Professor X wrote:
[quote]DJS wrote:
I’m pretty sure this started with bodybuilding mags shockingly… When I was a kid and I read all the mags, they never ever stressed progression. It was always stressed that the wieght on the bar didn’t matter. What mattered was straight sets, perfect form, slow reps, hold the stretch, squeeze the muscle hard at the contraction. Basically… if you get a burn and a pump your doing it right. They never said anything like "If you do the same weight… session after session, week after week, month after month, you won’t grow. You get a little stronger but progression is very slow when you train like that. So after a while you switch to the next program they give you. Which is all the same as above with different exercises and/or order.
It started like that and then was taken way too far buy certain authors. Authors are under pressure to come up with something new everytime they come out with an article. It’s like a huge game of telephone. The years go by and there is so much BS intertwined with common knowledge on training its shocking.[/quote]
I have muscle mags going all of the way back to 1987 and I never got that impression from them. I ALWAYS understood that the goal was to get stronger. I wasn’t even aware people actually thought you got muscles that big by NOT getting stronger or NOT gaining a hell of a lot of muscular body weight.
You would have to have grown up around NO athletes at all (especially no football players) to think something like that as well as have no basic understanding of how muscles get bigger and stronger to start with.
I have also seen the concept of pyramiding in mags that old along with the fact that no big guy I ever saw in the gym used the same weight for every set and every exercise. They largely trained like powerlifters only with more sets and reps.
If people were really missing the basics like that, their first stop should have been a biology book.[/quote]
I have to wonder if greater adoption of this myth didn’t come around at the same time as the Weider bodybuilding books no longer being the main weight-training books that were bought.
There is no way from the Weider books that anyone could have gotten either the idea that progressing up in weight to quite heavy weights isn’t necessary for a bb’er, or that successful bb’ers were anything remotely like weak.
I know there is fair criticism that these books had over-self-promotion of Weider and to a casual reader could easily give the impression that Weider invented things he did not (this in fact was never claimed though and was many times explicitly explained as not being so) but overall my opinion is that those books were a lot better than most of the modern crap that has replaced them.[/quote]
No doubt. The fitness market is growing and many of these personal trainers are trying to make a name for themselves…thus all of the complete and utter BULLSHIT that some of these guys like Poliquin state on a regular basis.
Couple that with the thousands of newbs who would rather read than work hard and you end up with people who think the books they read take the place of experience.
The internet-warriors who spend more time pretending they lift on line than they ever have in a real gym have to be the only reason these bullshit concepts ever gain any legs at all.
I have never seen anyone my size or bigger who couldn’t bench 315lbs for reps. If they exist, they are pretty damn unlikely to be in the fucking OLYMPIA contest which houses some of the most rare genetic freaks on the planet in terms of strength and size.
It is a matter of disrespect, however, and the personal trainers on this very site who literally hate bodybuilding show their own shortcomings every time they participate in it.
Weider condensed all of the random ideas about training, and whether you give him credit for it or not, you saw NONE of this utter confusion before people who hate bodybuilding tried to make a name for themselves by targeting that open market.
I am still amazed that PYRAMIDING is still such a foreign concept to people when everyone I knew who lifted growing up understood that concept. It means people are now missing the most basic concepts…only so they can pretend to be well informed…even though their bodies don’t seem to show any of this “intellectual superiority”.
[quote]DoubleDuce wrote:
I think a lot of it just has to do with looks. A leaner BBer with good aesthetics (broader shoulders, narrow waist, good bicep peaks, est) looks heavier than they are. I think people look at someone like ronnie and comparitively think he is bigger than a Phil Phister or even an Andy Bolton which is simply not true.
You combine that with the training and structure differences that yield a lower 1RM strength on specific lifts and presto BBers become weak in comparison in the mind of the general public.[/quote]
I don’t believe it has anything to do with looks either. It takes someone HOPING they can find some negative about a group of people to believe that you build muscles that big by being weak. It is nothing more than a defense mechanism. No one who actually worked hard to gain 50lbs of muscle would believe such bullshit…which I guess is why so many of these guys look so weak themselves as they falsely claim HUGE pro bodybuilders are.
Look at who is making claims like this. They are either personal trainers out to make money or little guys who lack the genetics or the drive to stand out at all.
This shit doesn’t come from people who stand out and work their asses off.
[quote]Professor X wrote:
[quote]DoubleDuce wrote:
I think a lot of it just has to do with looks. A leaner BBer with good aesthetics (broader shoulders, narrow waist, good bicep peaks, est) looks heavier than they are. I think people look at someone like ronnie and comparitively think he is bigger than a Phil Phister or even an Andy Bolton which is simply not true.
You combine that with the training and structure differences that yield a lower 1RM strength on specific lifts and presto BBers become weak in comparison in the mind of the general public.[/quote]
I don’t believe it has anything to do with looks either. It takes someone HOPING they can find some negative about a group of people to believe that you build muscles that big by being weak. It is nothing more than a defense mechanism. No one who actually worked hard to gain 50lbs of muscle would believe such bullshit…which I guess is why so many of these guys look so weak themselves as they falsely claim HUGE pro bodybuilders are.
Look at who is making claims like this. They are either personal trainers out to make money or little guys who lack the genetics or the drive to stand out at all.
This shit doesn’t come from people who stand out and work their asses off.[/quote]
I’ve only read a few pieces of this post and think it’s pretty hilarious. I was just trying to figure out why someone would start such a horrible rumor about people that are huge from bodybuilding and that they are weak and it just it me in the head. Think about this. What if is this is just one of the greatest bs marketing tools to get more clients? I mean most people want a easy way out and if you say hey guess what, you can look like a bodybuilder by only putting up 225 in your core lifts then people will jump all over those package deals for personal training because there must be some super secret. I think that notion is right up there with functional training. I mean seriously, if i train hardcore all the time you think i can’t take out my garbage without losing my breathe? I truly think that is a scam to tell people that bodybuilders are weak just to bring in some keyboard warriors to the gym so they can get robbed.
[quote]redkevin79 wrote:
I ask this seriously, where did this idea/notion/rumor start? And if it was started, with what evidence/proof was it backed up with. Was there a point in bodybuilding’s history that all of a sudden its top competitors achieved their physique devoid of any respectable strength?
Who was the weak ass bodybuilder that perpetuated this myth?[/quote]
It can be traced back further than most people think, to the 1940s and '50s with Bob Hoffman, founder of York Barbell Company and magazines such as Strength & Health, coach of the American Olympic weightlifting team, one of the first entrepreneurs into the sports supplement industry, and the primary rival of the Weider brothers in modern bodybuilding’s earliest years.
Without getting too bogged down in the details and complicated backstory, when competitive bodybuilding was just getting up and running, it was judged by the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU). Bob Hoffman eventually used his influence, and bias towards weightlifters, to alter the official AAU judging criteria to require bodybuilding competitors to also complete the three Olympic lifts (at that time, the overhead press was also an Olympic lift) before winning the title.
This gave “weightlifters” a recognized but unspoken advantage and lead “pure” bodybuilders, who didn’t regularly train those lifts, to migrate towards the Weider’s recently-developed IFBB and avoid the tests of strength. This, of course, added fuel to Hoffman’s idea that building muscle just for show was useless, because “they couldn’t handle the lifts in competition.”
So the pot-shots at “strict bodybuilders” have always been a part of the lifting game. In more recent years, I’d say the last 10 years or so, I’d have to credit the “functional training” fad with doing more damage and inciting more negative looks towards bodybuilders.
Guys like J.C. Santana, who popularized Swiss ball and resistance band-focused training for the average gym dude, played a part in perpetuating the image of the “inflexible, musclebound, behemoth bodybuilder with terrible cardio and even worse relative strength.”
The rise in kettlebell training, with Pavel T leading the charge, was also to blame. In his 2001 interview here on TMuscle, Pavel said, “The stuff they do today in the gyms is more cosmetic surgery than strength training. The emphasis is on the hypertrophy of everything but contractile proteins. A typical dude with eighteen-inch pipes is a big joke on an arm-wrestling table.
…
These guys walking around the Arnold Classic may be able to bench press 400 pounds, but most can’t tackle a hundred pound metal ball, like one of my kettlebells. Some can’t even clean it to their shoulders and most can’t press it overhead, at least not without horrendous back bending. They just don’t have the core strength and they can’t integrate their whole body in the act.”
It’s the same attitude and disdain for bodybuilding that Pavel shared in his books, articles, and videos at the time, and it just caught on and spread.
But then again, in that same 2001 interview, Pavel also said, “The best bodybuilders, when you think of Ronnie Coleman, Dorian Yates, or Arnold, they’re very strong. Even if you don’t feel like getting strong for the hell of it, you do not get the muscle density and muscle tone without heavy training. Besides, when you are stronger you are able to use more weight in your bodybuilding exercises. Will you make better gains curling 95 ten times or 115 ten times? It’s a no-brainer.”
Maybe it’s residual Chernobyl radiation leading to his confusion.
So, yeah. That’s my two cents on where this whole thing started.
Its the market place. People these days are lazy and nobody wants to work hard. So if you’re in a business where clients have to work hard to see results, are you going to promote hard work or easy to do.
Of course you’re promoting easy to do. So you see these people balancing themselves on little blue balls lifting tiny weights until they get little blue balls themselves and you call it “core work”
Think about this - How many times do you go to the gym and you see a trainer who actually looks like they can lift their own bodyweight? Its never at the 24 hour in Katy Tx.
How can you be a teacher if you’re not a student?
How can you be a Dentist if you don’t take care of your teeth?
How can you be a Financial Advisor if your finances are messed up?
How can you be a truck driver if you can’t drive?
-you get the point!!
This would apply more to the golden era. I don’t think guys like frank zane were benching 400 plus pds for reps.
[quote]Onslaught2099 wrote:
[quote]Professor X wrote:
[quote]DoubleDuce wrote:
I think a lot of it just has to do with looks. A leaner BBer with good aesthetics (broader shoulders, narrow waist, good bicep peaks, est) looks heavier than they are. I think people look at someone like ronnie and comparitively think he is bigger than a Phil Phister or even an Andy Bolton which is simply not true.
You combine that with the training and structure differences that yield a lower 1RM strength on specific lifts and presto BBers become weak in comparison in the mind of the general public.[/quote]
I don’t believe it has anything to do with looks either. It takes someone HOPING they can find some negative about a group of people to believe that you build muscles that big by being weak. It is nothing more than a defense mechanism. No one who actually worked hard to gain 50lbs of muscle would believe such bullshit…which I guess is why so many of these guys look so weak themselves as they falsely claim HUGE pro bodybuilders are.
Look at who is making claims like this. They are either personal trainers out to make money or little guys who lack the genetics or the drive to stand out at all.
This shit doesn’t come from people who stand out and work their asses off.[/quote]
I’ve only read a few pieces of this post and think it’s pretty hilarious. I was just trying to figure out why someone would start such a horrible rumor about people that are huge from bodybuilding and that they are weak and it just it me in the head. Think about this. What if is this is just one of the greatest bs marketing tools to get more clients? I mean most people want a easy way out and if you say hey guess what, you can look like a bodybuilder by only putting up 225 in your core lifts then people will jump all over those package deals for personal training because there must be some super secret. I think that notion is right up there with functional training. I mean seriously, if i train hardcore all the time you think i can’t take out my garbage without losing my breathe? I truly think that is a scam to tell people that bodybuilders are weak just to bring in some keyboard warriors to the gym so they can get robbed.
[/quote]
I agree, but I always tended to think it was more sinister than that. By making bodybuilders out to be weak morons who ONLY look the way they do because of steroids and freak genetics, you erase the desire for newbs to go to those people for advice.
How many times do we here some rank newb criticizing how some gigantic pro bodybuilder is lifting? It happens so much that I tend to think some of these people must ether be borderline retarded, or they have been brainwashed.
By making it seem like NO ONE has the genetics to get really big aside from the one in a million genetic freak, you also erase the expectation to actually make much progress at all.
I mean, if your goal is now only “165lbs” because you heard this was “functional” and that weighing over 200lbs simply means you are fat (like Shugart often eludes to), you no longer truly expect to make much progress.
Hell, some of these guys seem to literally think making big gains is a fucking NEGATIVE to their health and their look…because some trainer said so.
You can sell millions of books if you can convince newbs that going anywhere else for info will leave them “bloated, weak and ready to die from not being able to breath while walking up stairs”.
Nice post Chris
When I used to train in commercial gyms I got the impression that all bodybuilders are relatively weak, because I would see other guys in the gym who looked big and puffy but couldn’t lift shit.
I would see straps used for sub-bodyweight pulldowns; I would see them doing leg extensions and calf raises but never any squats; and anything these guys (who were bigger than I was) could do, I could easily out lift them. From that experience I drew the conclusion that anyone who lifts only for show is big and puffy but useless.
Since then I have obviously learned differently, but it took me a while to overcome my initial bias.
[quote]aeyogi wrote:
When I used to train in commercial gyms I got the impression that all bodybuilders are relatively weak, because I would see other guys in the gym who looked big and puffy but couldn’t lift shit. I would see straps used for sub-bodyweight pulldowns; I would see them doing leg extensions and calf raises but never any squats; and anything these guys (who were bigger than I was) could do, I could easily out lift them. From that experience I drew the conclusion that anyone who lifts only for show is big and puffy but useless.
Since then I have obviously learned differently, but it took me a while to overcome my initial bias.[/quote]
Guy, if you were 160lbs looking up to people who weighed all of 180, then the fault is all your own.
What is “big and puffy” to you in terms of body weight, height and muscular development?
On one hand, maybe I can understand if you literally grew up around nothing but weekend warriors who can’t bench their own body weight…but then that means you yourself must have been malnourished to look up to them.
[quote]Nards wrote:
It may just be me, but some ripped, overly-vascular behemoth (someone like Branch Warren) just doesn’t look as strong as Franco Columbu for example.[/quote]
ha, no offense, but it probably is just you. Franco Columbu looks strong as shit, no doubt. But Branch Warren looks like a fucking badass psycho ready to fuck up whatever he wants whenever he wants.
[quote]younggully wrote:
This would apply more to the golden era. I don’t think guys like frank zane were benching 400 plus pds for reps.[/quote]
Gee, maybe that is because Frank Zane wasn’t that big?
Why pick one of the smallest guys to ever be a pro bodybuilder to represent strength levels?
Franco Columbo competed in the same era and was stronger than most even bigger than he was…so why would someone take ONE guy and judge everyone else by him?
[quote]Professor X wrote:
[quote]aeyogi wrote:
When I used to train in commercial gyms I got the impression that all bodybuilders are relatively weak, because I would see other guys in the gym who looked big and puffy but couldn’t lift shit. I would see straps used for sub-bodyweight pulldowns; I would see them doing leg extensions and calf raises but never any squats; and anything these guys (who were bigger than I was) could do, I could easily out lift them. From that experience I drew the conclusion that anyone who lifts only for show is big and puffy but useless.
Since then I have obviously learned differently, but it took me a while to overcome my initial bias.[/quote]
Guy, if you were 160lbs looking up to people who weighed all of 180, then the fault is all your own.
What is “big and puffy” to you in terms of body weight, height and muscular development?
On one hand, maybe I can understand if you literally grew up around nothing but weekend warriors who can’t bench their own body weight…but then that means you yourself must have been malnourished to look up to them.[/quote]
My point was that inductive inference led me to draw the conclusion that if the guys who I had seen lifting only for show were weak than all bodybuilders are relatively weak. Once I had been exposed to better information, I changed that view.
I had seen plenty of athletes who were 250 on up, and who were strong as hell, but I did not think of them as bodybuilders. My guess from memory is that the biggest ‘puffy but useless’ bodybuilder I had seen was around 220.
Height: 5’9
Off Season Weight: 200 lbs.
Competition Weight: 185 lbs.
While respected across the board, Frank Zane wouldn’t even win a NPC contest today with those proportions, especially since he would likely weigh even less in that state today due to the competitive need to be way more dried out and lean than any of the guys were in the 60’s…which means he would likely weigh closer to 170-175lbs today at 5’9" in contest shape which doesn’t exactly stand out like it used to.
So, no, he likely was not benching 400lbs for reps…because he wasn’t carrying enough size.
You can’t compare Frank Zane to even Columbo…and damn sure not to guys like Heath, Greene and others today.
[quote]aeyogi wrote:
My point was that inductive inference led me to draw the conclusion that if the guys who I had seen lifting only for show were weak than all bodybuilders are relatively weak.[/quote]
It blows my mind that anyone would think like this.
Really.
I am glad you changed your thinking process, but I still don’t get how the hell someone could ever think that way.
Unless these guys were 220lbs IN CONTEST SHAPE, how small was the bubble you were living in?
[quote]aeyogi wrote:
My guess from memory is that the biggest ‘puffy but useless’ bodybuilder I had seen was around 220.[/quote]
I hate my gym’s member base.
Even if I grandfather in the two dudes who might be 5’6", but certainly 205-220lbs monsters, I can count on one hand the number of dudes who look like they lift that you would even believe look 220+.
There is like 6 of us making progress outside of a couple of Milf’s that make my pee pee go bah bong bong bong.
[quote]Bill Roberts wrote:
Many feel a psychological need, when seeing someone that they feel (but perhaps will not consciously admit) is superior to them in some quality, to denigrate the quality in question, or the person.[/quote]
Pretty much sums it up. Not just the losers, either. A lot of times people who have accomplished a lot in one area will have this attitude towards someone who has accomplished a lot in another area. It’s a very few people who don’t do this at all after a certain age.
