Heavy Athletics Olympic Weightlifting Club

Thanks to Bob Takano for taking the time to write this relevant article. Well done HOW WEIGHTLIFTING AUDIENCES HAVE CHANGED

I spent the last Sunday coaching at the Team SoCal Summer Open. We had 10 lifters entered in the two day event and 7 of them lifted on Sunday. Having been in the sport for decades I am conscious of all the aspects involved in the sport and Sunday was no exception. The audience was a realization for me, however. I am somewhat embarrassed that it took me so long to get to this point.
It has become obvious that the priorities for the audience as envisioned by the meet directors of late have changed. They are in order festivity, sociality and profitability, all of which can be addressed by anyone with just a passing interest in the sport. The meaning of the weights being lifted is of lesser importance. The lifting of any given weight is without perspective. As long as a large number of people can gather, cheer on someone they know, enjoy each other’s company and the vendors make sales the event can be deemed a success.
With all the technology currently available and yet very very few in the audience are aware of the WSO records, the national records or the qualifying totals for major events. The actual weightlifting is just an excuse to gather, but the interest in the sport stops there. I don’t state these things as an indictment of the meet director (Chris Amenta, a former athlete of mine and a friend), but just to reflect on a paradigm shift.
This is expected as local events are often just a microcosm of national events. At national events large numbers of people attend, the festivity is brisk, sociality is paramount and vendors make money. While this addresses the business aspect of weightlifting, the mission is being underplayed.
In the all too distant past, the audiences were smaller and more knowledgeable. Programs with the current record lists were available. Most audience members showed up because a top lifter might be lifting or a close duel might emerge. The numbers (national, local, personal records and national qualifying totals) were important, but not so much anymore. We have numbers in our sport which would lead to great talking points and audience interest. This is largely ignored.
The sport in the U.S. has three ongoing issues related to international success. They are talent identification, talent development and ongoing coaching education. USAW has infrequently stood up to push forward these issues. The growing membership and organizational coffers have obscured these matters.
The top lifters we have developed of late have largely been the product of random benevolence (as they’ve always been). That and more stringent enforcement of the anti-doping protocols on the international stage.
So my concern is what direction will the USAW BOD take as we hire a new CEO, and there is turnover of half the seats on the board. A great deal has been accomplished in terms of the business of weightlifting but not so much in the mission of the organization. All of this might just result in idle chatter if the sport is no longer a part of the Olympic programme.

While this advice is given for another sport, it is certainly applicable for many endeavors. Use it for weightlifting. John Danaher is a special coach.

Observation: There is only so much hard physical training you can do in a day before you break yourself. If you want to increase your training time without adding to your physical load - TRAIN YOUR MIND THROUGH OBSERVATION. You can train your mind for many hours a day with no danger of over training or injury. It is the perfect addition to your physical training and a fine replacement for physical training if you are injured or sick. Train yourself to watch matches and learn. Most people watch only for entertainment. They watch to see who wins. This is unimportant. What is important is not WHO wins but HOW they won and lost. Train yourself to look for THIS and you can double or triple your training time in a day by adding a non physical element. As the old saying goes - the hardest work is hard thinking. Thinking can’t be a substitute for hard physical work - but it is a very fine addition to it. Don’t just watch - WATCH FOR A PURPOSE - learn to see why some win and some lose and take those mental lessons to your next physical training session - you’ll be surprised how much they can add to your progress.

Thanks to Bill Pearl for putting this together. Lots of work there. Bob Hoffman was quite a character good and odd. But he sure cared about lifting and put his money and effort behind the sport. Many owe him a debt of gratitude. I was lucky enuf to have been around him some. Good times.

BOB HOFFMAN ... FOUNDER OF YORK BARBELL COMPANY

Bob Hoffman was born in 1898 into a healthy German/French family, with a father who stood five-feet, ten-inches in height and weighed a solid 200 pounds.

Bob's early childhood ventures included rising at 5 a.m., to clean public streets, haul trash to the dump, deliver spring water, sell newspapers, clean fish, and peddle peanuts at Forbes Field in Pittsburgh.

Bob claimed to have a retentive memory and professed to have read two books per day during summer school vacations. He also stated he graduated from high school and went to college, however, his older brother confirmed, "Bob quit school in the tenth grade, because he wasn't learning a great deal and wanted to taste the real world."

Hoffman enlisted in the United States Army in 1917, to fight his way from private to second lieutenant during his two-year enlistment. An outstanding soldier, he was awarded three Croix de Guerres from France; the Belgian Order of Leopold; the Italian War Cross; and a Purple Heart. Upon leaving the Army in 1920, he settled in York, Pennsylvania, to begin an oil burner firm.

In the early 1920's, Bob began his weight-training career. Standing six-feet, three-inches tall, he was slender, but through hard training he soon weighed between 230 and 250 pounds. In 1927, he won the U S Heavyweight Championship, however, he was the only competitor in his weight class.

Hoffman was well known for tooting his own horn, and with characteristic lack of humility, he declared himself the Healthiest Man in the World. He was likewise frank about his private life, stating, "A strongman can take more than anyone else, but there are limits. He can smoke, or drink, or make love to the ladies. Please note: I neither smoke nor drink!"

For years, Bob was open regarding his appetite for women and was looked down on by York society because of his lifestyle. However, he was proud of his virility and believed it was one more aspect of his strength and vigor. He declared lack of sleep as, "one of the most detrimental of all vices," yet, he rarely slept over five hours a night.

Hoffman also did not admit he ever became ill. When an associate heard him sneeze and said, "Bob, you're stuffed up with a head cold," Bob replied, "I've never had a cold. It's a slight nasal condition."

In 1929, Hoffman purchased a building at 51 North Broad Street in York. By then, weight-training had become the centerpiece for the conditioning done by his employees, who in time established themselves as the York Oil Burner Athletic Club, which later became the York Barbell Club.

Encouraged by the successes of his workers in weightlifting championships, Hoffman bought the assets of the defunct Milo Bar-Bell Company and, in 1932, he began publishing Strength & Health magazine. In 1935, he liquidated his oil burner business and concentrated on manufacturing exercise equipment under the banner of the York Barbell Company. By the late 1940's York, Pennsylvania, was becoming known as Muscletown, USA.

Of York Barbell's early employees, 25 were champion weightlifters or bodybuilders. Gordon Venables, Steve Stanko, and John Grimek became editors of Strength & Health magazine; Jules Bacon managed the York foundry; Emerick Ishikawa and Stan Stanczyk ran the shipping department; Mike Dietz served as treasurer; and Jonn Terpak acted as general manager.

Each afternoon at 4:30, most of the staff headed for the weight room for a two-hour session of grunting, groaning, and straining. A sign posted above the entrance forbade profanity, loafing, or smoking.

The 1930's and 1940's were Bob Hoffman's most fruitful years as editor of Strength & Health magazine and as the author of books. His first volume, How to Be Strong, Healthy and Happy, published in 1938, contained a wealth of useful information in 400 pages; all of which Bob claimed to have written in ten days.

Between 1938 and 1941, Bob's incredible output included the authoring of ten books. Among them were: Big Arms, Secrets of Strength & Development, Weightlifting, and Big Chest.

In 1946, the United States weightlifting team captured its first World Championships, and four of the six lifters were employed by the York Barbell Company.

The following year, the World Championships and the first International Weightlifting Federation (I.W.F.) Mr. Universe competition were held in concert at Philadelphia's 15,000-seat Municipal Auditorium. Hoffman financed the event, paying $10,000 in travel expenses for foreign competitors and donated $25,000 to conduct the event.

The United States, led by Hoffman's lifters, won six weight classes. Steve Stanko, a former national weightlifting champion, captured the "Universe" title.

Hoffman coached the United States weightlifting team at the 1948 Olympics and spent $20,000 to support the group, which captured four individual gold medals and the team championship.

He essentially ran the United States weightlifting for the next two decades, and was the coach of the Olympic weightlifting teams in 1948, 1952, 1956, 1960 and 1964.

His York Barbell Club won an incredible 49 national team titles in weightlifting, and it's success was mostly the result of the money, time, and magazine exposure Hoffman lavished on the sport he loved.

Another of Hoffman's contributions to the fitness world was the lead role he played, from the 1930s onward, to discredit the myth that heavy weight-training made an individual muscle bound, slow, stiff, and awkward.

Month after month, in the pages of Strength and Health, Bob published articles profiling sports champions who used weight-training in their conditioning programs. This was part of Hoffman's crusade, and he did not miss a chance to say progressive resistance "made anyone better at their chosen sport."

By the late 1940s, York Barbell Company was a very successful enterprise, which enabled Hoffman, in the early 1950s, to launch a line of nutritional supplements over the objection of John Terpak, York Barbell's general manager, and Mike Dietz, it's treasurer. In time, the growing line of supplements made Hoffman even wealthier.

Led by "Hoffman's Hi-Proteen," based on a protein supplement developed by the self-proclaimed nutritionist Irvin Johnson (Rheo H. Blair), Hoffman developed additional food supplements and earned a head start on his major competitor, Joe Weider.

Soon, Strength & Health was filled with articles regarding the depletion of the earth's soil of vitamins and minerals, and why food supplements made up for the nutrients we weren't getting from the weakened planet.

(In response to the advice of Dr. Frederick Tilney, on supplement sales, Hoffman quickly learned a valuable truth: barbells and dumbbells are essentially indestructible and seldom need to be replaced, while food supplements are ingested, requiring more to be produced if those backing them want to "get bigger and stronger.")

An additional aspect of the Iron Game influenced by Hoffman was the explosive growth of anabolic steroid use that began in the early 1960s. This came about primarily due to Hoffman's relationship with Dr. John Ziegler; a surgeon and general practitioner from Olney, Maryland.

Ziegler's interest in weight-training had grown by the mid 1940s, as he attempted to recuperate from World War II injuries. He had made a pilgrimage to the York Barbell Company, met Hoffman and members of the York gang, and volunteered to serve as team doctor for the American weightlifters at the 1954 World Championship, held in Vienna, Ausrtia.

There, Ziegler befriended a doctor from the Soviet Union who admitted, after a few beers, that the Russian team was using the male hormone testosterone to enhance their lifting capabilities.

Armed with this knowledge, Dr. Ziegler returned home and began taking testosterone himself and offered it to his training partners. He also gave injections of the drug to members of the York Barbell Club. However, because the results were mixed and Ziegler worried about poor side-effects, he stopped giving injections.

Ziegler then learned CIBA Pharmaceutical Company was developing a synthetic male hormone that retained the bodybuilding affect, but eliminated many of the undesirable side-affects.

In 1959, CIBA began distributing the first anabolic steroid, and marketed it under the name Dianabol. Ziegler began administering the pills to two York lifters, Bill March and Tony Garcy, and to one older lifter from New Orleans, Lou Rieke.

Dr. Ziegler also convinced the three to try a new training protocol using isometric contraction, which consisted of pushing and pulling on an immovable bar in various ways and positions. Ziegler informed Hoffman on the new training regime and the anabolic drug, and Hoffman supported the idea by paying for the pills to be used by the United States Weightlifting team, his hope being, it would enable them to take back the lead from Soviet teams.

Hoffman attempted to convince his readers the phenomenal success of these three York lifters was due to their use of isometric contraction; but soon the secret of the little pink pills was out.

Isometric contraction training was abandoned, but the use of anabolic steriods spread throughout the Iron Game. By 1967, Track and Field News was calling anabolic steroids, the "Breakfast of Champions."

Few early users realized the potentially dangerous side-effects of Dianabol and related substances, and those who did, simply ignored them. By the early 1970s, a test was developed that detected significant use of most anabolic steroids. This test was administered to competitors at the 1976 Olympic Games; however, only 277 among the thousands of Olympic athletes present were actually checked for anabolic steroid use.

Although neither Ziegler nor Hoffman for-saw the harm that would come from their early advocacy of anabolic steroids, the dramatic increase in the three lifters whose rise to the top of their sport made other lifters and bodybuilders anxious to take the drugs.

In November of 1983, Dr. John Ziegler lay dying from a damaged heart he claimed was caused by his abuse of the drug. He warned everyone in a tape-recorded message by saying, "I wish I never heard of anabolic steroids. These kids don't realize the terrible price they are going to pay!"

Hoffman remained a complicated, ego driven, whirlwind of energy whose marketing and promotional genius allowed him to remain at the apex of the Iron Game for four decades. He was often high-handed and unethical in the ways he advertised his products and himself; but for more than 60 years, he lived a purpose-driven life that contributed significantly to the advancement of progressive resistance and athletic training around the world.

Despite his lesser qualities, Hoffman was a generous man in many ways, and supported dozens of lifters while they trained and went to college. Late in life, he began to spread his wealth in and around South Central Pennsylvania, By the time he died, he had become a beloved citizen.

Bob Hoffman, the "Father of World Weightlifting" and self-proclaimed "World's Healthiest Man" failed to realize his dream of living in three different centuries. He died of heart disease in 1985, at age 86.