And by 1980, the health club menu had undergone a radical overhaul. Until then, the standards for American gyms were set by the country’s best-conditioned athletes: boxers. Fighting is the art of perpetual motion—“Move or die,” as mixed martial artists like to say—so old-time trainers kept you on the hop with true functional movement. If you went to, say, Wood’s Gymnasium on East Twenty-eighth Street in Manhattan, the way young Teddy Roosevelt did, you were trained by prizefighters. When Teddy first came through Wood’s door, he was a wheezing, short-sighted teenager who was constantly getting roughed up by other kids. His father sat him down and explained that without arete, there is no paideia. “Theodore, you have the mind but not the body,” his father said. “And without the help of the body the mind cannot go as far as it should. You have to make your body.”
So Teddy got to work. “Professor” John Wood didn’t stick him on a padded seat and tell him to push a bar back and forth fifteen times, or plunk him on a stationary bike to crank the pedals. Wood partnered Teddy up with pro fighter John Long, and together they attacked Wood’s “beautiful and effective combined exercises”: skipping rope, swinging on parallel bars, vaulting over gymnastics horses, shuttle running with a medicine ball, hitting the heavy bag, shadow sparring with Indian clubs. One of Wood’s specialties was the lost art of strength rings: two circles of steel that a pair of partners grip between them, each grabbing an end in their hands. Then they go at it, pulling and resisting, each trying to make the other lose his grip or footing. The rings were a combat art as intricate as fencing; John Wood could diagram at least thirty-eight combinations of lunges, thrusts, and body twists.
“These certainly may be classed among the movements that are most generally useful,” one of Wood’s protégés remarked, “for they bring into play every joint and muscle of the body, secure geniality and generous emulation, and afford a great deal of exercise in a brief space of time.” Proficiency and power—paideia and arete.
But at the end of the 1970s, the curtain suddenly dropped on fight training. Ordinarily, it’s rare to pinpoint the Patient Zero who starts an epidemic, but in this case, it happened right on camera. In 1977, a womanizing, pot-smoking, cigar-puffing, steroid-injecting, gay-magazine pinup model suddenly became the poster boy for American fitness. Pumping Iron was released and, thanks to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s swaggering charisma and chemically-enhanced physique, bodybuilding was transformed from underground entertainment into a worldwide phenomenon. Arnold would become Hollywood’s most bankable star, and bodybuilding—a form of male modeling that has nothing to do with agility, endurance, range of motion, or functional skill—became the new gold standard for gym training. Just like that, the best-conditioned athletes in the world were being replaced by some of the worst.
From a fitness standpoint, it was a step backwards. But economically, it was genius. Fight training takes up lots of room, but bodybuilding is about staying in one spot. It requires remarkably little floor space; if you’re not sitting or lying down, you’re standing or squatting. The idea is to isolate one muscle group at a time and blast it to the point of tearing, repeating the same movement over and over until you approach muscle failure. Like any other damaged tissue, the stressed spot will swell. That’s an emergency reaction, blood rushing in to immobilize the area and initiate healing. Oddly, that discomfort became a selling point: because bodybuilding is about appearance, not skill, sore and swollen muscles began taking over as a sign of strength.
And just as bodybuilding was becoming the new fitness model, a new device came along that made it as tidy and efficient as an assembly line. In 1970, a bizarre character from Florida showed up at the Mr. America competition with a product to sell. Arthur Jones was a chain-smoking high school dropout turned big-game hunter whose hobby was trying to overfeed his fourteen-foot alligator to Guinness World Record size. He was also a self-taught mechanic who’d built an exercise machine he called the Blue Monster. Jones’s brainstorm was a kidney-shaped cam that evenly distributed resistance as the weight was pushed higher. Because the gear also resembled a seashell, Jones renamed his creation the Nautilus.
Finally, gym owners could offer one thing your basement bench press couldn’t: a specialty machine that made you feel like a pro. Nautilus was compact and quiet and safe, allowing gyms to herd many more customers through much less space. Even during the New Year’s rush, you didn’t have to worry about members smacking one another with medicine balls or turning the joint into a full-combat mosh pit as they careened around with strength rings and Indian clubs. There were no dumbbells to rack or techniques to teach; no spotters were even needed for the bench press. Expertise wasn’t required, so neither was an expert staff: you only had to look pretty, take money, and wipe down the equipment.
“The idea of a health club really changed. It became big business. It was Arthur Jones that started that,” one of Jones’s designers would later tell the New York Times. “Mr. Jones’ invention led to the ‘machine environment’ that is prevalent today in health clubs,” the Times article continued. “The machines helped to transform dank gyms filled with free weights and hulking men into fashionable fitness clubs popular with recreational athletes.”
But the Rise of the Machines came at a cost. The goal became to create bodies that looked as much alike as possible, and you accomplish that by insisting on exact repetitions of the same motion, over and over. Even the vocabulary changed to fit the factory-floor mentality: our parents exercised, but we “work out.” And like any other factory, progress isn’t measured by whether you mastered a new skill; it’s measured by whether you hit your numbers—in this case, pounds and inches. The Greek ideal of a supple, balanced, useful physique was out. Massive McBodies were in.
And why? Because along with the Rise of the Machines came the Dawn of the Super-Males.
“With the advent of anabolic steroids in the last 30 to 40 years, it has become possible for men to become much more muscular than is possible by natural means,” notes Dr. Harrison Pope, M.D., a psychiatry professor at Harvard, who coined the term “bigorexia nervosa” to describe our dangerously misguided idea that bigger = sexier. Pope knows plenty about fitness; at age sixty-six, he could still shuck his suit jacket and tear off a half-dozen one-armed pull-ups on his office door. He can glance at a magazine cover or a movie trailer and instantly spot who’s juiced; sadly, more of those famous bodies are syringe-pumped than you’d think. But then again, was anyone really surprised when Sylvester Stallone was caught in Australia with nearly fifty vials of human growth hormone in his baggage?
Even kids’ toys and comic books were infected; action figures soon became as artificially overmuscled as the Italian Stallion. Take Star Wars: do you remember spotting any tank-tread abs or veiny biceps among the Rebel Alliance? Luke Skywalker and Han Solo barely take off their shirts in the films, and when they do, they’re amazingly … average. Just a couple of skinny guys who get by on dexterity, not Dianabol. But over the past thirty years, their plastic doppelgängers have gotten crazy huge. Same with G.I. Joe and Batman: their toy biceps have nearly tripled in size.
“Our grandfathers were rarely, if ever, exposed to the ‘super-male’ images,” Pope notes. “They didn’t do bench presses or abdominal exercises three days a week.” Their grandkids, however, are caught in an endless self-image onslaught. “A young man is subjected to thousands and thousands of these super-male images,” Pope complains. “Each image links appearance to success—social, financial, and sexual. But these images have steadily grown leaner and more muscular, and thus more and more remote from what any ordinary man can actually attain.” The payoff from all those gym reps is supposed to be a Hollywood bod, but once you discover that the road from Rambo I to Rambo II is paved with injectables, you face the same deflating choice pro cyclists had when they sniffed out Lance Armstrong’s secret: go dirty or go home.