I Ain't Sweet Like That- Dieting and Training in Lockup, Part 3

By this point, I'm sure a lot of you are thinking "FUCK THIS BODYWEIGHT SHIT, BRING THE WEIGHTS", which I'll have to admit I was thinking a hell of a lot during my interviews.  No matter how vehemently people insist they get huge off bodyweight exercises, I have never found that I can get serious gains with bodyweight-only work.  Perhaps it's that my diet won't support growth during those ventures, the fact that I would probably be walking around at 145 lbs if I wasn't diligently out-eating my appetite multiple times a day and supplementing with protein while lifting far more poundage than my tiny frame was ever designed to handle, or simply the fact that high rep work with or without weights has never served to do more than add conditioning and definition to my body, but I harbor more skepticism for light rep work than Flat Earthers have for any sentence that might issue forth from Neil DeGrasse Tyson's mouth at any given moment.  Nevertheless, inmates definitely swear by it... though they were more than happy to tell me about their forays (and subsequent massive gains) from the wacky odd-object lifting they get up to in lockup.

It's working for former-NFL-badass-and-almost-future-Hall-of-Famer-but-serial-rapist--is-going-to-die-in-jail Darren Sharper, it seems.  Perhaps he'll avoid getting diabetes for a few extra years, bu with any luck he'll die slowly of AIDs

ODD OBJECT LIFTING IN LOCKUP

"I would walk the length of the 50-foot cell and back and do 25 push-ups. I would do it for one hour, I would do it for two hours. I would get a minimum of 500 push-ups—regular, elevated, diamond push-ups. I would also do dips on a half-wall—kind of like you’re climbing over a fence.

Another day I would do pull-ups. They had a stairway and there was no backing to it. It was metal and it was grated—you couldn’t just grab the stairway. You had to take toilet paper and roll it up and put it over the grate so it wouldn’t hurt your hands. I would do five pull-ups then walk back and forth and then another five pull-ups.

They would bring in coffee at five o’clock in the morning in this round jug. It was quite large—it probably held four gallons, five gallons—and we would wrap the laundry bag through the handles and we would do curls with that"

- Ryan Fergueson, author of Stronger, Faster, Smarter, which chronicles the author's ten year stint in jail (in which he was in the best shape of his life) for being accused of a crime by a friend who had dreamt it.

Laundry Bag Lunacy

The first method, which I like to call "Laundry Bag Lunacy", is not terribly dissimilar to Arthur Saxon's old school sandbag lifts, albeit with much lighter weights, as it's not common to find hundred of pounds of flour, iron blocks, buckshot, and sand laying around a jail cell or common area.  Inmates will use their laundry bags (or in California, where inmates are allowed pillowcases), which are bags made of nylon netting and apparently so flimsy and torn that they put one in mind of a clapboard shanty in some third world shithole like Eritrea.  The way the inmates with whom I spoke described the state of their laundry bags in county jail made it sound like all they needed was a mournful Sarah McLachlan song and some sad-eyed puppies in them for a commercial to spawn the greatest crowdfunding campaign in history.  In any event, these battered and torn sacks are called into action daily in lockup as they're filled with whatever is handy until they reach the desired weight... which is not to say, however, that they have any idea what it weighs.  Instead, they pick a weight that's challenging for everyone who's going to be involved in the group circuit of the exercise and go ham like they're Road Warriors during a particularly heavy coke and D-bol binge.

"Strength is Life, Weakness is Death"
- Swami Vivekananda

No one cared what Stallone actually weighed in Rambo because his forearms were so fucking big it looked like Sly could snap an assault rifle in half with his bare hands and stuff it up the collective ass of every combatant in Burma.

Typically, inmates will use bottles of water, books, magazines, blankets, food, and whatever else they can pile into their bags... making it a veritable smorgasbord of odd items to add to their buffet of muscular brutality, if you will.  Using these bags, they'll do bicep curls, tricep extensions, lateral raises,upright rows, and unilateral overhead presses.  While this method might seem cruder than Uncle Eddie in the National Lampoon's Vacation movies, it's as effective as lifting steel and places even more strain on the hand, wrist, forearm, and stabilizers than iron... so we all might think about adding daily sandbag work to our regular training.  After all, rare is the man who is mocked for his oversized forearms... frankly, if Sylvester Stallone teaches us anything, it's that massive, vascular forearms make a decently muscular build look positively fucking murderous.

Frankly, inmates are pretty fucking crafty, because when they hook their bags to a mop handle, their lifts start to resemble those done with an earthquake/bamboo bar.

Another mode of use for the laundry bag is to tie them to a mop handle and then mimic any exercise one might do with a barbell and added chain weight.  That is to say, nothing explosive enough to send a length of chain or an abrasive bag filled with odd, often hard and pointy objects, flying into the lifter's eye.  No matter what the lift, however, the goal of each set and rep was the same- to make the absolute fucking MOST of every possible advantage in an effort to move forward.  To wit:

"Prisoners also fill pillowcases with sand to use as dumbbells. In cells people fill trash bags with water and placed inside a bucket with a handle for shoulder shrugs and lateral raises.  [One inmate]’s favorite solution is to stack 40 or 50 National Geographic magazines in a laundry bag for bicep curls and tricep extensions" (Wade).

... in other words, no one cares how you do it, so long as you get it done.

Apparently, Marcus Mariota is a fan of partner-assisted rope work as well.  If it works for soy-filled inmates and hyper-rich NFL players, it could probably work for you as well.

Partner-Assisted Pandemonium

If you've got a partner, this shit is awesome for getting in a workout, or getting a pump on before hitting the bar or the beach (don't act like you've never done it, fuckface.  I know more than one guy that has or does travel with dumbbells in his truck for that reason).  These types of exercises are best done with a towel folded lengthwise in fourths or twisted to make it rope-like, and is best used for exercises like pushdowns and curls, wherein the partners work opposing muscle groups.  To do that joint exercise, partners stand facing one another, and one grabs the towel at the ends overhand, while the other grabs the towels with the same grip in the center, keeping his hands one fist width apart.  Then, one does curls against the other's effort to extend his arms to a full tricep contraction with their elbows pinned in at their sides.

Other variations include upright rows vs. pushdowns, reverse curls vs. pushdowns, and laterals vs unilateral (one handed) pushdowns.  If you hadn't noticed already, PRISONERS ARE ALL ABOUT THEIR TRICEPS (or "back arms", to use their vernacular).

Little -know superhuman Mac Batchelor was a massive fan of barrel lifting, so he'd approve of the water filled trashcans inmates use for big weights.  If he his corpse wasn't writhing with maggots and generally succumbing to putrefaction, that is.

Water Weight Chaos
Serious water weight resistance is damn near as ingenious as the invention of velcro.  Forget the 20 oz water bottles we previously covered- this is real weight.  The preferred method for using water weight in jail is to fill a 55 gallon garbage can with water, then bear hug it and use it as a sort of stone lift / partial deadlift, shrug, or for tandem shoulder work with a partner doing unilateral shrugs, overhead press, or laterals (with a lighter weight).

Another method is to knot the partially filled liner around a plunger handle and use that for a barbell for curls, overhead lockouts and overhead squats, and anything else they one might think up.  Similarly, the liner could be put into an office-sized trashcan, then put into a laundry bag and used in a workout like the following suggested circuit:

• Bicep Curl x 5 sets to failure
• Overhead Extensions x 5 sets to failure
• Upright Rows x 5 sets to failure

If you need some extra motivation, just watch Lock Up or Tango and Cash for a little Stallone-style jailhouse shenanigans. 

Add to that ten sets of pullups, pushups, and dips for as many reps as possible and 400 yards of lunges a day, six days a week, and you've got a program that put 60 lbs of Prime, Grade A beef on on inmate I interviewed in a mere eight months.  I know that seems like an outlandish claim, but you have to consider the fact that most inmates arrive in jail underweight, underfed, strung out on drugs, and under-rested.  Thus, having such normalcies as regular meals, no- or limited-access to the chemicals to which they were previously addicted, and near-constant training can have a profound effect on their physique.  That, topped with the inmates' additional food choices/calorie bombs from commissary, should allay the bulk of your incredulity.  As you'll see in upcoming articles, these guys eat as crazily and intensely as they train.

"Man's spiritual nature is the cause of his material personality- his objective universal form is a crystalized idea."

- Manley Hall

In other words, motherfuckers, if you truly believe it and strive for it, you can achieve it.  Drive all doubt from your mind and allow your indomitable will to direct your hypertrophy, fat loss, massive strength gains, and increased muscular endurance.  Let none escape.

Sources:
Moxley, Mitch.  I got in peak shape while I was in jail(and wrongly convicted of murder).  GQ.  14 May 2015.  Web.  8 Oct 2016.  http://www.gq.com/story/fitness-in-jail-prisoner

Wade, Jonathan P.  Prisoners talk about strength training.  Motley Health.  Web.  8 Oct 2016.  http://www.motleyhealth.com/strength/prisoners-talk-strength-training

Arnold Is About As Much "The Best Bodybuilder Of All Time" As Danica Patrick is "The Best NASCAR Driver Of All Time"

Though I am hardly one to start some shit on the internet or raise the slightest fuss about anything whatsoever, having been surprised to read a report on the 2016 Olympia on the Bleacher Report last month, I feel compelled to chime in about claims to the effect that Arnold was one of the greatest bodybuilders in the history of that competitive sport.  Like the persistent ignorance regarding the history and ridiculously insane fallacy of body structure phenotypes, virulent, fervent, and borderline psychosis regarding Arnold Schwarzenegger's competitive dominance and his potential placings in fantasy matchups with other bodybuilding superstars is as endless as it is as retarded... and we're talking low-functioning handypotato deep in a K-Hole after a three week bath salt binge retarded, not the potato from The Ringer retarded.

Tards is about ta get feisty.

I'm certain this will cause a great many of you no little amount of consternation, given the fact that Arnold was likely involved, at least in some small way, in your participation in physical culture/weightlifting/powerlifting/whatever the fuck you want to call it, but bear with me- the proof behind my statement lies in plain sight.  Though Arnold was without question the greatest representative of weight training that the world has seen in the last 60 or so years, his greatness in competition was largely manufactured, and his fellow competitors were often few in number and usually both inexperienced and naive.  Arnold, then, was a Mensa member picking on kids in the Special Olympics... if the Special Olympics were to fracture into half a dozen organizations with different rules and a palpable hatred for one another.

Not only did Bernarr never commission a statue of himself using someone else's physique (Weider used Robby Robinson's), but he was essentially cooler in every way (O'Connell).

When Arnold entered the bodybuilding scene, Joe Weider's empire was in its infancy, often fighting dirty against its competition, in a half-hearted effort to pick up where the consummate marketer and showman Bernarr MacFadden had left off.  Like MacFadden before him, Weider dabbled in publishing soft-core gay porn to pay the bills while battling for supremacy in the burgeoning American physical culture fad, and he struggled to really find his niche until the Austrian Oak arrived on the bodybuilding scene.  Built like a Greek god, dripping with machismo, and so tall and jacked he was like Hitler's wet dream (Hitler had an obsession bordering on sexual with men over six feet tall), Arnold was the only person who could have breathed life into a bodybuilding federation that was international only in name, screwed over competitors and promoters, and was basically run like an elementary school bake sale staffed by child molestors, organized by embezzlers, and which served only weed-infused edibles.

Sidebar: In case you've forgotten, Bernarr MacFadden was a harder motherfucker than you will probably ever be at the incredibly young age 12.  Having grown up in an environment wherein he was constantly being reminded that his death from tuberculosis or some other horrible and now easily curable disease was eminent, Bernarr decided to get hard.  Essentially an orphan he had no money to join a gym at 12, so he did what he could- he bought a set of dumbbells he used religiously every morning until he couldn't lift them, replacing them with heavier dumbbells when he needed a bigger challenge. He idolized the badass motherfuckers he saw coming out of mines and loathed the bitches he saw in banks, so he started carrying a lead ingot everywhere he went at age 15 so he wouldn't go soft (though he worked in an incredibly white collar company that would eventually became Dunn and Bradstreet.  As he grew older and got more wealthy, his penchant for experimentation expanded, and he became a renowned wrestler and strongman weighting only about 150 lbs due to a fanatical, round the clock lifting program and in spite of a near vegetarian diet... all the while running massive capitalist empire ranging from mail-order weightlifting programs to the first modern bodybuilding contest (and with the biggest cash prize ever awarded), sanitariums, multiple magazines, and a variety of other wacky shit .  In other words, BERNARR MACFADDEN WAS EVERYTHING JOE WEIDER FUCKING WISHED HE COULD HAVE BEEN AND NEVER EVEN GOT CLOSE.  

NABBA Mr Universe Earl Maynard.  At 5'10" and 220 lbs, this was one of a handful of people "competing" against "The Myth" Sergio Oliva... who then was one of a couple of people to compete against Arnold.  

Arnold's "Competition" History

Yes, yes, we've all heard that Arnold's seven Olympia wins makes him the benchmark for true greatness in the bodybuilding scene, though no one seems (much like the massive ignorance surrounding body phenotypes) to be willing to do an iota of research to determine who it was that Arnold beat.  SPOILER ALERT- it was occasionally nobody or next to nobody, and the rest of the time it was either a bunch of nobodies or the game was rigged to ensure that Weider's prodigy (and his prodigy's best friend, Franco).  And before the Arnold marks start screaming about my lack of qualifications to make such a statement, the fact that Arnold's steroid reign was vastly smaller than modern athletes, or any of the other half a million excuses and justifications they could make on the Oak's behalf, let's all bear in mind that at best, the lot of you likely have only read about the controversial 1980 Olympia, wherein  Arnold was allegedly handed a victory by the judges.  As you'll see in what follows, Arnold was pretty much handed every victory he achieved with the Weiders, and competing in a sport wherein the professional ranks were fledgling in all federations and the IFBB was one of the youngest and least entrenched, Arnold's victories over a couple of other physiques nearly impressive enough to make them bodybuilding versions of Annika Sorenstam... in a sport so subjective it makes open ended questions posed by drunk college girls at bars seem like objective-based interrogations.

Larry Scott, a man whose physique seems to have been the sole inspiration for ever superhero ever drawn by Art Adams- massive forearms, arms, and calves, and just the barest demon's whisper in a church nursery of definition in the legs.

In case you didn't know, the Olympia in Arnold's day is hardly what it is now- it was barely a pimple on the ass of the "sport" of bodybuilding, and apparently the weightlifting world gave less than two shits about determining who was champion amongst what was then considered a complete sidebar to Olympic weightlifting and the emerging sport of powerlifting.  If that seems odd to you, consider that Bernarr MacFadden's bodybuilding competition, held in 1903, had cash prizes of $500 (~$13k in 2016) for both the male and female winners... whereas the Olympia's prize in early years, despite being subsidized by the Weider publishing empire, was only $1000 ($7.6k in 2016 dollars) sixty years later.    Arnold was the third Mr. Olympia in what was essentially a brand-new organization promoting professional bodybuilding in what was almost entirely an amateur sport, competing for small crowds, small prizes, and against very few people.  Although all of the big names in bodybuilding were invited to the 1963 inaugural Mr. O, only three dudes showed up- Larry Scott, the youngest competitor in Olympia history, Harry Poole, and the above-pictured professional wrestler Earl Maynard.  It was, as such, hardly a barn-burner of a competition.  As the Olympia grew into the next decade, the size of its competitive pool was nearly as tiny, though it perceived importance was far greater as Weider's magazine empire ground out its compeition in a variety of sheisty, duplicitous, and shrewd (if horrendously shitty) legal and PR maneuvers.

Sergio looked so good in 1973 that Weider pulled Arnold from the competition and arranged to have Sergio suspended from IFBB competition to ensure no one would make his golden boy look like shit onstage.

 As the field had hardly grown, Arnold faced very little true competition when he "competed" for the Olympia crown because the reigning Mr. Olympia was a black Cuban ex-pat, which made him about as appealing to your average white American in the late 1960s as quick-onset hemorrhagic fever in a community of hemophiliacs.  With his only real competition coming from a man who "would run into ... problems" because "his cultural background wasn't in sync with [American] ideals" (Roach, Vol 1 367), Arnold's SS-Obersturmbannführer-good-looks made him the perfect golden boy for Weider, and if he failed, insanely photogenic Dave Draper (who took fourth out of four against Harold Poole, the amazingly brutal, always-zero-fucks-given, superhuman lumberjack Chuck Sipes, and the melanin-rich, precontest hamburger munching, genetic freak of a political refugee Sergio Oliva) could have stepped in without missing a single beat.  Without missing a single beat, you say?  Yeah- Sergio won UNCONTESTED in 1969 and lost in a two man field with Arnold in 1970.

YOU READ THAT RIGHT.  

ARNOLD'S FIRST OLYMPIA WIN WAS AGAINST ONE PERSON.

One person, I might add, who was fucked over and over by Joe Weider until the man resembled a gibbering lunatic because he couldn't stop carrying on about what a shitlord Weider was.

So, Arnold's first win came in a racially-, politically-, and marketing-motivated judging climate against a single competitor.  His second was hardly more impressive, as he beat a 50 year old Reg Lewis and Oliva, and his third win was a complete joke- in a field of four, three of the competitors were disqualified before the show (Sergio Oliva and Franco Columbo), and the third was perhaps the most insanely hard-training motherfucker in history, Roy Callender, but the guy was just an unknown former bodybuilder who retired from pro wrestling and loved lifting.  The next year he beat Franco again, along with winner of the Most-Fucked-Over-Bodybuilder-in-History Serge Nubret. His fifth, you think might have been better, but nooooooo... Arnold beat 23 year old Lou Ferrigno, the midget Franco, and a half-starved zen monk named Frank Zane like a drunk xenophobes who had stumbled into Bruce Lee's dojo screaming sinophobic slurs.  Yes, in a field of four totally outmatched humans, Arnold reigned supreme in his fourth win. Thereafter, he retired from competition, likely since there was no point to even showing up if he was declared victory, and only reacquired the interest in competing after training for Conan and getting back into decent bodybuilding shape for the first time in a couple of years.  With only seven weeks of contest prep, Arnold won his seventh and final gift from the Weiders, setting a ridiculous and pointless benchmark for the title that people only respect because they are ignorant fucking handytards without an iota of curiosity or drive to do any semblance of research.

Arnold's Pro "Highlights"

• 1970 NABBA Mr. Universe - professional in London, England.  Who cares?
• 1970 AAU Pro Mr. World in Columbus, Ohio.  Sergio entered the competition after showing up only to watch Vasily Alexeev clean and jerk 500 in an exhibition, so Arnold walked away with an easy victory against one day-of entry Oliva and perrenial bridesmaid-in-competitions Dave Draper.
• 1970 IFBB Mr. Olympia in New York.  Beat one guy who previously won uncontested.
• 1971 IFBB Mr. Olympia in Paris, France.  Beat two guys, one of whom was 50.
• 1972 IFBB Mr. Olympia in Essen, Germany.  Beat three disqualified opponents.
• 1973 IFBB Mr. Olympia in New York.  Beat a guy he outweighed by 50 lbs and the sliced and diced but totally outmassed Serge Nubret, because Sergio was so pissed at Weider's shenanigans, tomfoolery, and balderdash to bother showing up.
• 1974 IFBB Mr. Olympia in New York.  Beat one unseasoned competitor and two guys he outweighed by 50 lbs.
• 1975 IFBB Mr. Olympia in Pretoria, South Africa.  In his final lackluster Olympia victory before retiring, Arnold again defeated the Hulk, Serge Nubret, and a handful of guys who weighed what Arnold weighed in high school, all while competing light and having only trained a couple of months for the event.
• 1980 IFBB Mr. Olympia in Sydney, Australia.   Arnold is handed a victory in what is widely considered a fixed competition against decent competition, though seven of them would be considered "manlets" under today's standards because they weighed less than most novice lifters can bench.  

I hope I'm in better shape when I'm 70 than I was when I was 35.

A healthy degree of skepticism can be useful when investigating what appears to be a conspiracy theory, and I will freely admit that much of what I've related here might smack a bit of a David Icke-style, the-reptilian-aliens-are-our-overlords, tinfoil hat lunacy, but consider the following:

1. According to Rick Wayne, professional bodybuilder and longtime Weider magazine editor, "It was no secret around the Weider headquarters that whenever the publisher featured a black champion on the cover of Muscle Builder, sales plummeted.  Surely a champion who couldn't sell magazines was a close to useless as an endorser of food supplements and gym equipment" (Roach Vol II 35).
2. Sergio's 1970 Mr. Olympia loss was engineered.  Wieder and Arnold were known to be close and had entered into several joint business ventures by 1970, and Weider's fate was increasingly tied to Arnold's.  As such, Weider and Arnold convinced Sergio that Arnold was not competing at the 1970 Mr. World (though Weider had arranged private transportation to the event for Arnold), which precipitated Sergio's naive entry into the contest the day of the event and subsequent loss.  This loss destroyed his confidence and interrupted his preparation for the Olympia, which was held two weeks later. 
3. Due to the deception, Arnold was crowned Mr. World, run by Jim Lorimer, both of whom began co-promoting the Night of Champions a few years later in the same venue.
4. Onstage at the 1970 Mr. Olympia, Arnold tricked Oliva into leaving the stage as if he'd lost as Arnold kept posing.  According to a variety of sources, this had a measurable effect on the judges in Arnold's favor, and guaranteed that Weider would have his fair-haired Mr. Olympia for Magazine covers.
5. Weider quickly passed rules banning IFBB competitors from competing in other organizations, which prevented any real competition from entering the Olympia and kept Arnold out of any competitions that would jeopardize Weider's investment, including an exhibition in 1972 in which both Arnold and Sergio would have been paid $2500 each to compete... at a time when only Mr. Olympia received prize money in that competition and the prize was less than half of Lurie's.

If this was my competition for anything at all, be it a math competition (he was a high school math teacher, but given that calc was so easy I taught it to myself while reading Michio Kaku) or bodybuilding, I'd not lose any sleep about whether or not I'd retain my crown.

In short, Arnold couldn't possibly be considered one of the greatest bodybuilders of all time- it could be argued that he was one of the top bodybuilders of his era, but that would still invite a tremendous amount of room in that conversation for other extremely overlooked bodybuilders from that time period, such as Robby Robinson (two-time Olympia Tall/Heavyweight Class), Sergio Oliva, and others.  Additionally, a conversation about the greatest bodybuilders in history would hardly include a man who only learned to train legs after he started winning bodybuilding competitions... no matter how sick his genetics.  I don't see Hany After all, when some of your chief competition comes from weirdly proportioned, smoother than a college freshman chick after a trip to Dairy Queen, and very likely autistic as fuck Mike Katz, it's pretty hard to drop the ball.  

This isn't to say I lament the sort of machinations that led to Arnold's rise to prominence as a foreigner who married into American aristocracy, one of the highest paid actors of all time, the prime motivator for most of our collective entry into the field of weight lifting, the man who paved the way for the inimitable and underrespected Dolph Lundgren (who punched Stallone so hard in Rocky IV he stopped the actor's heart), and generally one of the greatest public personalities of all time- Arnold is the unmitigated shit.  He simply wasn't the bodybuilder everyone thinks he was... unless recent Conan Jason Momoa should be included in a discussion of great bodybuilders, because Momoa's physique is not far off from Arnold in his prime, at this point.

Stop starfucking.  Start reading.  Dicks out for Harambe.  Lets all stop being fucking retarded, eh?  Jack off to pics of Ronnie or something- at least he was strong, for fuck's sake.

... and yeah, I'm aware that guys like Dallas McCarver are more jacked than I am.  I'm also aware of how the endocrine system works, and about the sad postscript that follows pretty much any negative response to this article.  If Arnold is the best of all time, I am a fucking Chinese jet pilot, and you're fucking retarded.
Sources:
Hansen, John.  Arnold vs Sergio- Bodybuilding's greatest rivalry.  John Hansen Fitness.  28 Apr 2013.  Web.  29 Sep 2016.  http://johnhansenfitness.com/2013/04/28/arnold-vs-sergio-bodybuildings-greatest-rivalry/

Hansen, John.  The most controversial Mr Olympia- 1980 r evisited- Part 2.  RX Muscle.  7 Dec 2011.  Web.  3 Oct 2016.  http://www.rxmuscle.com/articles/john-hansen/4672-the-most-controversial-mr-olympia-1980-revisited.html

Hansen, John.  The Tijuana incident.  RX Muscle.  9 Feb 2014.  Web.  29 Feb 2016.  http://www.rxmuscle.com/articles/john-hansen/10155-the-tijuana-incident.html

Heffernan, Conan.  1903 and the birth of American bodybuilding.  Physical Culture Study.  22 Oct 2015.  Web.  29 Sep 2016.  https://physicalculturestudy.com/2015/10/22/1903-and-the-birth-of-american-bodybuilding/

O'Connell, Jeff.  Joe Weider (1919-2013): Remembering The Father Of Bodybuilding.  Bodybuilding.com.  2 Apr 2013.  Web.  26 Sept 2016.  http://www.bodybuilding.com/fun/joe-weider-1919-2013-remembering-the-father-of-bodybuilding.html

Roach, Randy.  Muscle, Smoke, and Mirrors, Vol. I.  Bloomington: AuthorHouse, 2008.

Roach, Randy.  Muscle, Smoke, and Mirrors, Vol. II.  Bloomington: AuthorHouse, 2011.