Bodybuilding Greats

My Sports and Recreation Lenses

Sports and Recreation Lensography

The distinction between lifting weights purely for strength and training with weights to shape and proportion the body had been clearly made. ... However, bodybuilding still remained an obscure sport.

No champion was known to the general public--that is, until Steve Reeves came along. Reeves was the right man in the right place at the right time. He was handsome, personable, and had a magnificent physique.

Survivors from the Muscle Beach era recall how crowds used to follow Reeves when he walked along the beach, and how people who knew nothing about him would simply stop and stare, awestruck.

Jack LaLanne originally planned to enter the field of chiropractic health care to become a Doctor of Chiropractic, (D.C.) He attended Oakland Chiropractic College in San Francisco (which eventually merged with Los Angeles Chiropractic College), but in 1936 decided to open his own health spa (gym) in Oakland, California and encourage clients to better themselves through weight-training.

He designed the first leg extension machines, pulley machines using cables, and weight selectors which are now standard in the fitness industry. He was the original inventor of the Smith machine.

He also encouraged women to lift weights (in spite of the fact that at the time it was thought this would make women look masculine and unattractive, an idea many people still believe is true).

By the 1980s there were more than 200 health clubs bearing his name. LaLanne eventually licensed all his health clubs to the Bally company, and they became known as Bally Total Fitness. Today he is no longer associated with any gym but is still actively pumping iron.

In the early days, Draper says, "There wasn't a whole bunch of encouragement or inspiration from a society which considered you either stupid or egotistical and probably a sissy."

In California, Draper initially trained at a gym many called "The Dungeon", which he described as "a large, awful space dug out of the ground on the corner of 4th and Broadway, and later at the original Gold's Gym. Training partners included Frank Zane, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Franco Columbu, and Mike Katz.

Frank Zane is a three-time Mr. Olympia (1977 to 1979). His reign represented a shift of emphasis from mass to aesthetics.

Frank's proportionate physique featured the thinnest waistline of all the Mr. Olympias with his wide shoulders making for a distinctive V-taper. He stood at 5'9" and had a competition weight of 180 pounds. Zane is one of only three people who have beaten Arnold Schwarzenegger in a bodybuilding contest and one of the very few Mr. Olympias under 200 pounds.

He has written many books about bodybuilding. He received the Arnold Schwarzenegger lifetime achievement award at the 2003 Arnold Classic for his dedication and long-time support of the sport.

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Bodybuilding Greats by DMedley is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.