Bodybuilding and Glorified Joe Weider

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If bodybuilding is a city, a Weider monument will surely be a towering landmark. And, the name is in every nook and crevice of bodybuilding city – on gym equipment streets, on supplements avenues, in pageants and competitions buildings, in catalogs and magazines highways, and on endorsements halls. No one popularized bodybuilding more than Joe Weider.

The International Federation of Bodybuilders (IFBB) that brought bodybuilding competitions Master, Mr. and Ms. Olympia was co-founded by Joe Weider, together with his brother Ben. The Olympia pageants are the competitive stage for professional bodybuilders who want to make bodybuilding as their career – to become the ultimate spokespersons, models and endorsers of Weiders’ magazines, supplements, or equipment.

Bodybuilding forums which are not at all related to the Weider conglomerate have openly discussed the influence that Weider had on them. Joe Weider’s limitless imagination to popularize bodybuilding is so effective that a big number of bodybuilders started with reading a Weider bodybuilding and fitness magazine, seeing a Weider nutritional supplement advertisement, or idolizing a Weider muscle man endorser. Joe Weider’s humongous efforts has initiated them into bodybuilding. Sixty six years of Joe Weider’s 93 years were spent on the bodybuilding business where he got his reportedly net worth of $35M upon his death.

But his success in bodybuilding is littered in controversy, and most had been because of numerous consumer complaints which eventually led to investigations were false claims and misleading advertisements about his nutritional supplements. The “gain a pound per day” slogan for the Weider Formula No. 7 and his “Be a Destructive Self-Defense Fighter” booklet were investigated in 1972. In 1976, the court ruled that the Weider’s “five-minute body shaper” with the before-and-after photographs were misleading causing Weider to issue refunds to a hundred thousand customers. Four years later, the same charge of misleading advertisements were levied by the Federal Trade Commission for the Weider’s supplements called the Anabolic Mega-Pak and the Dynamic Life Essence which were falsely claiming that the products are muscle-building substitutes for anabolic steroids. The hundreds of thousands of dollars that Weider refunded during these legal squabbles seemingly did not make any dent to Weider’s reputation or resolve because he would once again be making another bodybuilding and weight loss product with a misleading stamp in 2000 where he  settled with the FTC for $400,000 along with the ban on making any unsubstantiated claims for any food, drug, dietary supplement, or program.

For these, quite a number of bodybuilders began to suspect that Weider were more on bodybuilding profits instead of the sports. There were rumors and controversies surrounding IFBB competitions that contests were rigged so that the winners were chosen based on marketability instead of muscularity.

Nonetheless, no one can deny that Joe Weider has a monumental influence in bodybuilding. Arnold Schwarzenegger, one of Joe Weider’s protege, during his first term as California governor honored Joe Weider’s bodybuilding contribution with a Venice Muscle Beach Hall of Fame’s Lifetime Achievement award during Labor Day in 2006.

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