Joe Weider, in many ways a mythical father figure in the world of bodybuilding, passed away at the age of 93 on 3/23 from heart failure.
A former competition bodybuilder from Montreal, Weider and younger brother Ben used were pioneers in using bodybuilding magazines for multi-level marketing.
The magazines, largely featuring photos of the top bodybuilders explaining how they got to look the way they did. The stories would include secret exercise routines, who very often were nothing like what the bodybuilder really did. Often they would use offbeat “secret” equipment, sold by Weider’s gym manufacturing company, like the super arm blaster to create biceps like Arnold Schwarzenegger (which he likely rarely if ever used) and secret food supplements, sold by Weider’s company, when the impressive physiques were usually built by steroids.
But all the bodybuilders would talk about Joe Weider as their mentor, the venerable “Master Blaster,” the older bodybuilding sage. He would teach them the little tricks that changed their physiques, changing their routines, teaching them how to pose. For decades, readers of the magazine would believe Joe Weider was at Gold’s Gym in Santa Monica in overseeing the workouts of the big name bodybuilders, when really the only time he was there was to do photo shoots with them for the magazines. Every magazine had literally hundreds of mentions of the name Joe Weider, all in positive and often reverent tones, as this renaissance man, learned well beyond bodybuilding and business, talking history, philosophy and being an early motivationalist. They would be accompanied by a famous shot of Weider, which his arms folded, which was actually his face superimposed on the upper torso of Robby Robinson, one of the top bodybuilders of the 70s.
Weider had some minor connections to pro wrestling, more than just that a large percentage of the pro wrestlers from the 1960s to the present read Weider’s various magazines and probably in some form picked up training ideas from reading the pages.
In the 1950s, Joe Weider and brother Ben published a pro wrestling magazine. They were already publishing a bodybuilding magazine at the time, and they used the same writing staff for both magazines. When their wrestling magazine folded, both Weider brothers for a short time became writers for Stanley Weston’s Boxing and Wrestling magazine, doing stories on both genres. This was before Weston started doing boxing and wrestling specific magazines like Boxing Illustrated and The Wrestler, Inside Wrestling and Pro Wrestling Illustrated.
In later years when his Muscle Builder and later Muscle & Fitness became the best selling magazines of their kind on the back of stars like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Frank Zane, Mike Mentzer and Robby Robinson, they never acknowledged any past involvement with pro wrestling.
In a sense, it can be said Joe Weider was one of the few people who badly kicked Vince McMahon’s ass in business, but the reality is more that McMahon’s World Bodybuilding Federation concept wasn’t going to work on the scale he expected. It wasn’t so much the Weider Brothers winning the war in the early 90s as much as McMahon losing it, in a war that was far less WWF vs. WCW and more like UFC vs. Affliction.
Into the 70s, Weider was a major advertiser in wrestling magazines, for his bodybuilding courses, protein supplements and even self defense and street fighting technique manuals.
But he largely was responsible for whatever popularity bodybuilding had since his magazines created the stars before other competitors, copying his marketing approach using the magazines the way an old wrestling promoter would use his television show, as a marketing tool for supplements and sometimes equipment and other products. Weider promoted bodybuilding as a healthy ultra-heterosexual endeavor, with the idea of marketing to teenagers and young men that getting the physique of their dreams will result in getting the kind of bikini models that were always in the photo spreads on the beach with his bodybuilders. The reality in the 60s and 70s, is that one of the major backbones of the bodybuilding business, based largely in Southern California, were rich homosexuals, often doctors, who would sponsor the bodybuilders and be their connection to the needed steroids that they really used to build their physiques. That was diametrically opposed to how the magazines portrayed it, that it was the unique training ideas of Weider and his supplements. That marketing concept was the backbone of what hundreds and hundreds of companies that came along over the ensuing generations used in a booming industry, that really took off when governmental agencies stopped regulating it.
In the days when the FDA was vigilant, the Weider empire was hit with several claims regarding false advertising of those products. In 1972, Weider was forced to stop marketing “Weider Formula No. 7,” which was marketed around photos of Schwarzenegger and claimed it would help aspiring bodybuilders gain a pound of muscle per day. He also was forced out of selling the self defense manuals, “Be a Destructive Self-Defense Fighter in Just 12 short lessons,” by the early 70s by a U.S. Postal Inspectors investigation of deceptive mail-order products.
He was also forced to drop his “Five Minute Body Shaper” product aimed at women, with claims the product was actually worthless as opposed to leading to significant weight loss, and also claimed his advertising featured misleading “before” and “after” photos.
In the 80s, the Federal Trade Commission on several occasions came after him for false advertising the benefits of various supplements like “Joe Weider’s Anabolic Mega-Pak,” where he was forced to stop advertising various products were effective muscle building alternatives that would give similar effects of steroids.
Like McMahon got in on the ground floor of Dwayne Johnson, Weider had a similar association with Schwarzenegger, who he brought over from Austria in the late 1960s to replace Dave Draper as his magazine golden boy, and replace the less marketable but physically freakish Sergio Oliva as Mr. Olympia, the world’s greatest bodybuilder. While many bodybuilders of he 60s and 70s privately hated Weider, claiming he used them, paid them little, Schwarzenegger, as big as he became, remained close to him and always would publicly call him his mentor, not just in bodybuilding, but in business. Weider was not only responsible in making Schwarzenegger the biggest star in bodybuilding, teaching him to market his own bodybuilding courses that made up much of his income in the early 70s, but got him his first movie roles.
Weider, then 41, married Betty Brosmer, 26, in 1961. She was actually his second wife. His first wife was never talked about. Brosmer, with her unusually small waist and big boobs in the days before cosmetic surgery actually made such a thing more possible, was perhaps the biggest pin-up model of her time. As Betty Weider, during the 60s, she would don her bikini for photos with Schwarzenegger on Venice Beach and market their products to women, eventually doing advice column, adorned by the photos of her in her youth.
The Weider empire, which spawned the IFBB, the International Federation of Bodybuilders, which ran the biggest worldwide pro and amateur contests, and its U.S. affiliate, the NPC (National Physique Committee) made Joe into a successful multimillionaire.
In many ways, Joe Weider was the bodybuilding equivalent of Vince McMahon. But like McMahon, as successful as he was within his world, never truly achieved his biggest goals. With McMahon, it was going beyond pro wrestling and being a success as a mainstream entertainment producer. The Weiders also never achieved their ultimate goal, making bodybuilding a major mainstream sport, and in particular, getting it in the Olympics. The closest they came was in the early 1980s, when the World Games debuted as a mini-version of the Olympics, with worldwide competition in a number of sports that were vying to get into the Olympics.
The first World Games were held in 1981 in San Jose, CA, and bodybuilding was actually the hottest ticket. But due to concerns of rampant steroid use, their sport lost popularity with organizers and was dropped.
Weider cashed out in 2003, selling his magazine empire to American Media, but as part of the deal, the magazines continued to market the Weider name, both Joe and Betty, and its mythology, as being the grand sages of men’s and women’s fitness. But he had established himself as an iconic figure for decades of teenagers who wanted to improve their physiques to live the idealized lifestyle purported in the magazine, whether to help them in sports or to get girls,
