Download or read book A Genealogy of Male Bodybuilding written by Dimitris Liokaftos and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2017-02-03 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bodybuilding has become an increasingly dominant part of popular gym culture within the last century. Developing muscles is now seen as essential for both general health and high performance sport. At the more extreme end, the monstrous built body has become a pop icon that continues to provoke fascination. This original and engaging study explores the development of male bodybuilding culture from the nineteenth century to the present day, tracing its transformations and offering a new perspective on its current extreme direction. Drawing on archival research, interviews, participant observation, and discourse analysis, this book presents a critical mapping of bodybuilding’s trajectory. Following this trajectory through the wider sociocultural changes it has been a part of, a unique combination of historical and empirical data is used to investigate the aesthetics of bodybuilding and the shifting notions of the good body and human nature they reflect. This book will be fascinating reading for all those interested in the history and culture of bodybuilding, as well as for students and researchers of the sociology of sport, gender and the body.
Download or read book Mr America written by John D. Fair and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2015-01-05 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Map[s] the shifting definitions of gender and masculinity . . . provides the rare insight into the world of bodybuilding that only an insider could offer.” —Sport in American History For most of the twentieth century, the “Mr. America” image epitomized muscular manhood. From humble beginnings in 1939 at a small gym in Schenectady, New York, the Mr. America Contest became the world’s premier bodybuilding event over the next thirty years. Rooted in ancient Greek virtues of health, fitness, beauty, and athleticism, it showcased some of the finest specimens of American masculinity. Interviewing nearly one hundred major figures in the physical culture movement (including twenty-five Mr. Americas) and incorporating copious printed and manuscript sources, John D. Fair has created the definitive study of this iconic phenomenon. Revealing the ways in which the contest provided a model of functional and fit manhood, Mr. America captures the event’s path to idealism and its slow descent into obscurity. As the 1960s marked a turbulent transition in American society—from the civil rights movement to the rise of feminism and increasing acceptance of homosexuality—Mr. America changed as well. Exploring the influence of other bodily displays, such as the Mr. Universe and Mr. Olympia contests and the Miss America Pageant, Fair focuses on commercialism, size obsession, and drugs that corrupted the competition’s original intent. Accessible and engaging, Mr. America is a compelling portrayal of the glory days of American muscle. “An entertaining narrative of the bodybuilding subculture in America.” —Kirkus Reviews “Deftly written and superbly researched.” —Journal of Sport History
Download or read book Mr America written by John D. Fair and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2015-01-05 with total page 474 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For most of the twentieth century, the “Mr. America” image epitomized muscular manhood. From humble beginnings in 1939 at a small gym in Schenectady, New York, the Mr. America Contest became the world’s premier bodybuilding event over the next thirty years. Rooted in ancient Greek virtues of health, fitness, beauty, and athleticism, it showcased some of the finest specimens of American masculinity. Interviewing nearly one hundred major figures in the physical culture movement (including twenty-five Mr. Americas) and incorporating copious printed and manuscript sources, John D. Fair has created the definitive study of this iconic phenomenon. Revealing the ways in which the contest provided a model of functional and fit manhood, Mr. America captures the event’s path to idealism and its slow descent into obscurity. As the 1960s marked a turbulent transition in American society—from the civil rights movement to the rise of feminism and increasing acceptance of homosexuality—Mr. America changed as well. Exploring the influence of other bodily displays, such as the Mr. Universe and Mr. Olympia contests and the Miss America Pageant, Fair focuses on commercialism, size obsession, and drugs that corrupted the competition’s original intent. Accessible and engaging, Mr. America is a compelling portrayal of the glory days of American muscle.
Download or read book Muscle Works written by Broderick D.V. Chow and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2024-07-15 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Men’s fitness as a performance—from nineteenth-century theatrical exhibitions to health and wellness practices today This book recounts the story of fitness culture from its beginnings as spectacles of strongmen, weightlifters, acrobats, and wrestlers to its legitimization in the twentieth-century in the form of competitive sports and health and wellness practices. Broderick D. V. Chow shows how these modes of display contribute to the construction and deconstruction of definitions of masculinity. Attending to its theatrical origins, Chow argues for a more nuanced understanding of fitness culture, one informed by the legacies of self-described Strongest Man in the World Eugen Sandow and the history of fakery in strongman performance; the philosophy of weightlifter George Hackenschmidt and the performances of martial artist Bruce Lee; and the intersections of fatigue, resistance training, and whiteness. Muscle Works: Physical Culture and the Performance of Masculinity moves beyond the gym and across the archive, working out techniques, poses, and performances to consider how, as gendered subjects, we inhabit and make worlds through our bodies.
Download or read book Bodybuilding written by Gordon LaVelle and published by . This book was released on 2011-05-01 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Sandow the Magnificent written by David L. Chapman and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Before Arnold Schwarzenegger, Steve Reeves, or Charles Atlas, there was Eugen Sandow, a muscular vaudeville strongman who used his good looks, intelligence, and business savvy to forge a fitness empire. The German-born Sandow (1867-1925) established a worldwide string of gyms, published a popular magazine, sold exercise equipment, and pioneered the use of food supplements. He even marketed a patented health corset for his female followers. Among the colorful figures who played a part in Sandow's life are Bernarr Macfadden, Florenz Ziegfeld, Lillian Russell, and others in sports and the theater. Sandow the Magnificent is the story of this first showman to emphasize physique display rather than lifting prowess. Sandow's is also the story of the earliest days of the fitness movement, and Chapman explains the popularity of physical culture in terms of its wider social implications. Sandow was a proponent of exercise to alleviate physical ailments, anticipating the field of physical therapy. By making exercise fashionable, he encouraged the fitness craze that still endures. As the first superstar in his field, Sandow also pried open some surprising cracks in the Victorian wall of prudery. His nude photographs, a kind of soft-core pornography, were anxiously sought by both male and female admirers, and after many of his major public events he gave private "receptions" wearing little more than a G-string.
Download or read book Xcon to Icon written by Kali Muscle and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2015-03-09 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kali Muscle is a young man that has had a roller coaster life and ended up being a Hollywood actor and a servant to the youth of the world. He tried his hand in every illegal and legal hustle imaginable: robbery, home invasions, hired gun, drug dealing, stripping, pimping, personal-training, barbering, and acting. He is the epitome of a bad guy turned good guy to do the work of God.
Download or read book Arnold s Bodybuilding for Men written by Arnold Schwarzenegger and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 1984-10-12 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents a three-level program of body-building using exercises and progressive resistance training.
Download or read book The History of Physical Culture in Ireland written by Conor Heffernan and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-01-24 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is the first to deal with physical culture in an Irish context, covering educational, martial and recreational histories. Deemed by many to be a precursor to the modern interest in health and gym cultures, physical culture was a late nineteenth and early twentieth century interest in personal health which spanned national and transnational histories. It encompassed gymnasiums, homes, classrooms, depots and military barracks. Prior to this work, physical culture’s emergence in Ireland has not received thorough academic attention. Addressing issues of gender, childhood, nationalism, and commerce, this book is unique within an Irish context in studying an Irish manifestation of a global phenomenon. Tracing four decades of Irish history, the work also examines the influence of foreign fitness entrepreneurs in Ireland and contrasts them with their Irish counterparts.
Download or read book Little Big Men written by Alan M. Klein and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 1993-08-24 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Little Big Men is a study of competitive bodybuilders on the West Coast that examines the subculture from the perspective of bodybuilders' everyday activities. It offers fascinating descriptions and insightful analogies of an important and understudied subculture that has risen to widespread popularity in today's mass culture. Alan Klein conducted his field study of bodybuilding in some of the world's best-known gyms. In studying the social and political relations of bodybuilding competitors, Klein explores not only gym dynamics but also the internal and external pressures bodybuilders face. Central to his examination is the critique of masculinity. Through his study of "hustling" among bodybuilders, Klein is able to construct a social-psychological male configuration that includes narcissism, homophobia, hypermasculinity, and fascism. Because they exist as exaggerations, these bodybuilder traits come to represent one end of the continuum of modern masculinity, what Klein terms comic-book masculinity. This study is a rare foray into the critique of contemporary American macho.
Download or read book Fitness Doping written by Jesper Andreasson and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-06-25 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book compiles several years of multi-faceted qualitative research on fitness doping to provide a fresh insight into how the growing phenomenon intersects with issues of gender, body and health in contemporary society. Drawing on biographical interviews, as well as online and offline ethnography, Andreasson and Johansson analyse how, in the context of the global development of gym and fitness culture, particular doping trajectories are formulated, and users come into contact with doping. They also explore users’ internalisation of particular values, practices and communications and analyse how this influences understandings of the self, health, gender and the body, as well as tying this into wider beliefs regarding individual freedom and the law. This insight into doping goes beyond elite and organised sports, and will be of interest to students and scholars across the sociology of sport, leisure studies, and gender and body politics.
Download or read book Gym Culture Identity and Performance Enhancing Drugs written by Ask Vest Christiansen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-05-27 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is about gym culture, the pursuit of fit, muscular bodies and the use of drugs as a means to get there. Building on the international research literature and in-depth interviews with men who have experience of image and performance enhancing drugs (IPEDs), the book explores the fascination with muscles, motivations for using drugs to enhance them, assessments of risks, and experience of side effects. The book examines what the altered body does to the men’s identity, self-image and relationships with peers and partners. Taking an evolutionary psychological approach, it also investigates the biological and psychological foundations of the fascination with the muscular body and discusses the notion of precarious manhood. Building on these analyses the book considers the political and regulatory initiatives in place to prevent the use of IPEDs and assesses those strategies’ potential to reach their aims. This is essential reading for anybody with an interest in the issue of drugs in sport, the ethics of sport, sociology of sport, sociology of the body, masculinity or public health.
Download or read book Venus with Biceps written by David Chapman and published by arsenal pulp press. This book was released on 2010-12-01 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A visual history of female bodybuilders and other muscular women from the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries.
Download or read book Gym Bodies written by James Brighton and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-10-16 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on empirical research, this fascinating new book explores the embodied experiences of ‘gym goers’ and the fitness cultures that are constructed within gyms and fitness spaces. Gym Bodies offers a personal, interactive, ethnographic account of the multiplicity of contemporary gym practices, spaces and cultures, including bodybuilding, CrossFit and Spinning. It argues that gym bodies are historically constructed, social, sensual, emotional and political; that experience intersects with multiple embodied identities; and that fitness cultures are profoundly important in shaping the body in wider contemporary culture. This is important reading for students, tutors and researchers working in sport and exercise studies, sociology of the body, health studies, leisure, cultural studies, gender and education. It is also a valuable resource for policy makers and practitioners within the fields of sport, leisure, health and education.
Download or read book Men s Health Natural Bodybuilding Bible written by Tyler English and published by Rodale Books. This book was released on 2013-06-04 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It takes guts and dedication to meticulously sculpt an extremely lean and cut physique. If you are ready to build a competition-worthy body or just want to look like a pro, there is no better program than the total-body diet and workout plan revealed in Men's Health Natural Bodybuilding Bible. It is THE how-to manual for anyone who wants to win his first bodybuilding competition the right way—purely, naturally, on guts, grit, and extreme dedication to diet and muscle craft. Or even just look like you did without stepping foot on a stage! Developed by professional Natural Bodybuilding Champion Tyler English, this plan will show you how to pack on pounds of MUSCLE with the workouts that helped him take first place in competition. Get the best intense workouts for each muscle and the right form so you reap maximum results.
Download or read book Women of Steel written by Maria R. Lowe and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An inside look at the fascinating and largely unknown world of women's bodybuilding. Slice-of-life observer Maria R. Lowe introduces us to a world where size and strength must be balanced with a nod toward grace and femininity. For WOMEN OF STEEL, Lowe interviewed more than 100 individuals, from the bodybuilders themselves to trainers, family members, spouses, judges, and sponsors. 20 photos.
Download or read book Universal Hunks written by David L. and published by arsenal pulp press. This book was released on 2013-11-15 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A lively, wide-ranging pictorial history of muscular men around the world from the nineteenth century to the 1970s.
