Joe Weider

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Joe Weider
Joe Weider
Born	Josef Weider November 29, 1919 (1919-11-29) (age 90) Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Other names	The Master Blaster
Occupation	Trainer
Height	5 ft. 08 in.
Weight	200 lb.
Known for	Creating: The Mr. Olympia Contest & The IFBB
Relatives	Ben Weider (brother)
Website www.weider.com

Josef E. "Joe" Weider (born November 29, 1919 ^[1]) is the Canadian co-founder of the International Federation of BodyBuilders (IFBB) along with brother Ben Weider and creator of the Mr. Olympia, the Ms. Olympia, and the now-defunct Masters Olympia bodybuilding contests. He is the publisher of several bodybuilding and fitness-related magazines, most notably Muscle & Fitness, Flex, Men's Fitness and Shape, and is the manufacturer of a line of fitness equipment and fitness supplements.

Contents 1 Biography 2 Settlements related to advertising and marketing claims 3 Weider Training Principles 4 See also 5 References 6 External links

[edit] Biography

Born in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, before founding the IFBB, Weider published the first issue of Your Physique magazine in 1936, when he was 17 years old. Thirty years later, in 1966, the publication was renamed Muscle Builder magazine. The name changed again to Muscle & Fitness in 1980. Other magazines published by Weider's publishing empire include "Mr America", "Muscle Power", Shape, Men's Fitness, Living Fit, Prime Health and Fitness, Fit Pregnancy, Cooks, Senior Golfer, and Flex. He also authored numerous training courses beginning in the 1950s and developed the Weider System of Bodybuilding course. In addition, he penned numerous books beginning with The Weider System of Bodybuilding (1981) and co-wrote the 2006 biography Brothers Of Iron with Ben Weider. In 1983, Weider was named "Publisher of the Year" by The Periodical and Book Association.

Weider, the scrawny, poor Jewish boy with a 7th-grade education, began his bodybuilding and publishing empire with $7 at age 17 after building his own barbells out of junked car wheels and axles. In the 1950s he met Betty Brosmer, who was then the highest-paid pinup model in the U.S.^[2]

In the late 1990s his publication company, Weider Publications, was sold to American Media.

On Labor Day 2006, California governor and several-time Mr. Olympia winner Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Weider protege, presented him with the Venice Muscle Beach Hall of Fame's Lifetime Achievement award. During Weider's introduction, Schwarzenegger credited Weider with inspiring him and bringing him to the United States.^[3]

[edit] Settlements related to advertising and marketing claims

In 1972 Weider and his brother Ben found themselves a target of an investigation led by U.S. Postal inspectors. The investigation involved the claims regarding their nutritional supplement Weider Formula No. 7. The product was a weight gainer that featured a young Arnold Schwarzenegger on the label. The actual claim centered on consumers' being able to "gain a pound per day" in mass. Following an appeal wherein Schwarzenegger testified, Weider was forced to alter his marketing and claims.^[4][5]

Weider was ordered to offer a refund to 100,000 customers of a "five-minute body shaper" that was claimed to offer significant weight loss after just minutes a day of use. The claims, along with misleading "before and after" photographs, were deemed false advertising by a Superior Court Judge in 1976.^[6]

In the 1980s Weider found himself answering charges levied by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). In 1984, the FTC charged that ads for Weider's Anabolic Mega-Pak (containing amino acids, minerals, vitamins, and herbs) and Dynamic Life Essence (an amino acid product) had been misleading. The FTC complaint was settled in 1985 when Weider and his company agreed not to falsely claim that the products could help build muscles or be effective substitutes for anabolic steroids. They also agreed to pay a minimum of $400,000 in refunds or, if refunds did not reach this figure, to fund research on the relationship of nutrition to muscle development.^[7]

In 2000, Weider Nutritional International settled another FTC complaint involving false claims made for alleged weight loss products. The settlement agreement called for $400,000 to be paid to the FTC and for a ban on making any unsubstantiated claims for any food, drug, dietary supplement, or program.^[8]

[edit] Weider Training Principles

Contrary to popular belief, Joe Weider did not invent the Weider Training Principles^{[citation needed]}. These principles were well-known, tried-and-proven methods of weight training. Weider's contribution to these principles, however, was to catalog them and provide definitions for each. By systematizing these principles, he provided bodybuilders with training methodologies that would otherwise have taken more time to learn from diverse sources. The principles have grown over the years as training routines have evolved. Currently they are:

The letters in parentheses after each principle represent the levels of training to which the principle applies: (B) for beginner, (I) for intermediate, and (A) for advanced.

• Muscle Priority Training (I & A) - Training your most underdeveloped muscles first so as to subject them to the maximum possible effort. If you have a weak body-part you want to improve, train it first in your workout before you begin to fatigue.

• Pyramiding (B, I, & A) - When using multiple sets for a given exercise, doing your first set with less weight for more reps, gradually increasing the weight and decreasing the reps over the remainder of your sets. This allows you to gradually warm up a muscle group, preparing it for the resistance to come in the next set.

• Supersets (I & A) - Alternating two exercises for the same muscle group, taking as little rest as possible between each set. Each same-body-part exercise fatigues the muscle involved in slightly different ways, so doing two exercises in a row with little rest in between achieves a deeper level of stimulation and muscle pump.

• Tri-Sets (A) - Doing three sets in a row for the same body part with as little rest as possible in between sets. Doing three exercises in a row more thoroughly exhausts the muscle. This training technique is so demanding that it should only be done on occasion and is more often used by bodybuilders in their precontest training. It is not optimal for muscle building.

• Set System Training (B, I, & A) - Simply doing more than one set for each exercise. This is the opposite of high-intensity training, which involves performing one set per exercise. Often, the first couple of sets aren't enough to fatigue a muscle.

• Split and Double Split Systems of Training (I & A) - While it wasn't invented by Joe Weider, more credit should be given to him for this principle. To explain this system, it must be said that bodybuilding throughout the 1930s through the 1950s relied on a typical weightlifting schedule of three workouts per week (Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, to be exact) and the whole body was to be worked out each session, with one to three sets of only one exercise per bodypart. While there were other muscle magazine publishers around, it was Weider who started publishing the need to break the whole body workout perception and urged bodybuilders to split the bodyparts into two or three sessions and workout two or three times per week. This radically changed one's workout routine to 4-6 workouts per week. A short time later, the "Double Split" principle was created, where the bodybuilder (before a major contest) would divide the bodyparts even further, and workout two times a day, leading to a volume of 9-12 workouts per week. This unheard-of concept stemmed from the theory that one can devote more exercises and sets to a bodypart, thereby creating better mass and shape since it's worked from many angles.

• Giant Sets (A) - Doing 4-6 exercises for the same body-part with as little rest between sets. Giant sets are used to create overwhelming stimulation to a body part and totally exhaust the muscles involved. This technique should only be used occasionally, as your body needs time to recover from this level of effort. This type of training is used more for muscular endurance and calorie burning than for increasing muscle size.

• Instinctive Training (A) - This involves experimenting with your workouts and paying attention to how your body reacts to certain types of training. The fundamentals of bodybuilding training are the same for everyone, but we are all unique. The further along you get in your training, the more you have to fine-tune your workouts to suit your needs. It takes time to develop this "feel" and have this type of knowledge. Whatever you are used to is going to feel best for you, but you have to figure out what really produces the best results for you and make adjustments accordingly.

• Compound Sets (I & A) - Working opposing muscle groups in back-to-back fashion, taking as little rest as possible in between sets. Alternating sets between opposing muscle groups - such as biceps and triceps/chest and back - greatly increases intensity. When you train one muscle group, the other is recovering (sometimes even being stretched) as you complete the set. With two muscles or muscle groups being worked, more blood is pumped into the area.

• Staggered Sets (I & A) - Training smaller, slower-developing body parts like calves or forearms in between all sets for your major body parts. Arnold Schwarzenegger relied on this principle early in his career to develop his calves. He would do a set for chest, back or shoulders and then do a set of calf raises while his major muscle group was recovering for the next set. He would then alternate sets for the working body part and calves. His calves got plenty of time to recover in between sets, and by the end of his workout he would have subjected them to as many as 15-20 total sets of various calf raises.

• Pre-Exhaustion Training (A) - Prefatiguing a larger muscle with an isolation, single-joint movement so it can be even more exhausted by the compound movements to follow, which Weider and/or his publications would adopt from the Nautilus founder, Arthur Jones, which is evidenced by Jones's writing in 1970 (and throughout the decade) in a rival magazine, Iron Man. When you do an exercise like the bench press that works not only the chest but also smaller muscles, one of the smaller muscles might fail before your chest is fully exhausted. By doing a chest isolation exercise beforehand, you can fatigue your chest so you can do bench presses to chest failure, which is what you want.

• Continuous Tension (I & A) - Performing each repetition of an exercise by never allow the weight to 'rest' which usually means not going to complete extension. This will cause lactic acid buildup.

• Peak Contraction (I & A) - Especially effective during isolation exercises such as leg extension, leg curl, and dumbbell concentration curl, this principle is based on squeezing and holding for a long pause at the 'top' or peak of the repetition, where the belly of the muscle is fully contracted (i.e., the muscle 'pops out'.

[edit] See also

• List of Montreal athletes
• List of famous Montrealers
• Ben Weider, brother and co-founder of the IFBB
• Tiger's Milk, possibly the first nutrition bar, introduced by Joe Weider over forty years ago and still widely distributed

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• Brothers of Iron: How the Weider Brothers Created the Fitness Movement and Built a Business Empire by Joe Weider and Ben Weider, with Mike Steere, published by Sports Publishing L.L.C., 2006
• Muscle Beach Venice
• Joe Weider: His Fitness Legacy Article on the history of Joe Weider and his impact on the fitness industry.
• Palmieri Bodybuilding article reference
• A photographic guide to Joe's most famous creation - The Mr. Olympia Contest
• United States Postal Service vs. Joe Weider, Respondent