There was a time – now long ago – when bodybuilding focused on three major components. These were DIET, TRAINING, and POSING. As the old wisdom went, great physiques are made in the kitchen. For those of you who think that’s a term that was coined in the social media age, you’re sadly mistaken. Food was always key. The greats of the 50’s, 60’s, and 70’s swore by clean eating. They ate for the muscle, not for taste. They also didn’t fantasize about cheat meals, cheat days, or much less binge eating. The old school cats saw junk food as trash. Why would they eat something that would sabotage their gains? To them, food was a necessary building block for packing on QUALITY MUSCLE.
In addition to diet, training was what was done at the gym. There weren’t goon lights, cell phones, or posing endlessly in mirrors. There was posing – lots of posing – but that posing took place in studios. The posing those guys did wasn’t for social media or to look cool among a bunch of meatheads for bizarre sense of validation. The goal of training was to build muscle; the goal of posing was to excel on stage. The goal of eating, was to build the best body to win shows. The diet, the training, and the posing was all for the stage. That’s what bodybuilding was all about – THEN.
The drugs started to come into play by the late 60’s and early 70’s, but nothing like today. Back in the old days, the guys only got on gear for contests and the dosages DRAMATICALLY paled in comparison to those of today. Nowadays, guys never come off. And if you check out the YouTube Short included with this article, you can hear GREGG and BIG FRANK talk about how bodybuilders aren’t just using performance enhancing drugs, or P.E.D.’s, just to build muscle, but they’re even using them to get better tans!! Bodybuilding has become inundated with every substance known to man. This includes what we often refer to as exotics, which sometimes are even labeled “NOT FOR HUMAN CONSUMPTION.” This version of bodybuilding would shock the conscience of guys from Dave Draper, Frank Zane, and Bob Paris’s day.
Can bodybuilding ever find its way again? You decide!
