© Arthur Drechsler – 2024
Many people played important roles in bringing about the birth of weightlifting as an organized sport in the United States. But clearly one-man, above all others, was responsible for the raising the fragile child that was American weightlifting in early part of the 20th century to an adult that by the middle of that century dominated world weightlifting. And in so doing, he contributed mightily to the widespread use of weights by men and women for bodybuilding, powerlifting, the strength training of athletes in most sports, in rehabilitation and for general fitness. That man’s name was Bob Hoffman.
Robert Collins Hoffman was born on November 9, 1898 in Tifton, GA. His family relocated to Wilkinsburg, PA (near Pittsburgh) in 1905. Although he was to leave Wilkinsburg in adulthood, Bob remained in his adopted state of Pennsylvania for the rest of his life.
He became interested in athletics at an early age, an interest he was to maintain for the rest of his days. As a teenager he joined the Pittsburgh Aquatic Club. At the age of 18, Bob competed in a regatta sponsored by the Pittsburgh Press. His overall performance in the event was so outstanding that he earned the headline “Bob Hoffman Stars” in the sponsoring newspaper. By the end of the season, he had acquired a reputation as Pittsburgh’s aquatic “Ironman”. He soon found that resistance training improved his performance as an athlete, and so he carried that training on with considerable discipline. He also developed into an excellent boxer.
Hoffman’s athletic career was interrupted in 1917 when he enlisted in the U.S. Army to serve in World War I. He had a distinguished service career in the Army, earning recognition for his valor in battle from France and Belgium, as well the US military. By the end of the war, he had moved up from the rank of Private to Second Lieutenant.
While he’d made his living at a variety of jobs, including that of a salesman, before the war, soon after returning home, he began to seriously pursue a career in sales and moved to York, PA at the urging of his brother Chuck. Not long after relocating to York, Hoffman went into business with Ed Kraber, a plumber who had designed one of the earliest automatic oil burners. Hoffman served as chief salesman for the company while Kraber stuck to manufacturing. Their business became quite successful during the 1920s and by the time Bob married Rosetta Snell in 1928 he was well established.
During this same period, Hoffman continued to be involved in aquatics. But he became ever more interested in weight training. He purchased a 225 lb. Milo barbell set and placed it in the York YMCA, where he received instruction in his training from the Y’s physical director – Doc Bleeker. While relatively weak and light in bodyweight at the start of his training (approximately 140 lb.), Hoffman’s bodyweight exceeded 200 lb. by 1927 (by 1933 it had reached a relatively muscular 240 lb.).
Hoffman took an interest in the business of physical culture as well as its practice, noting that the major “muscle” magazine of the 1920s “Strength” could seemingly make a person famous overnight. The magazine gave much coverage to the benefits of weight training and to the use of Milo Barbells in particular. Both Strength and the Milo Barbell Co, were owned by one of the early promoters of the organized sport of weightlifting in the US, Alan Calvert.
George Jowett was one of the most prolific writers for Strength magazine and a respected strongman in his own right. During the 1920s he was perhaps the most vocal and influential advocate for organized weightlifting in the US. Jowett, along with several others, started the American Continental Weight-Lifters Association. The ACWLA became the leading governing body for weightlifting in the US during the 1920s, until it was challenged by the Association of Bar Bell Men, which was founded by another promoter of the use of weights, Mark Berry.
Hoffman became involved in organizing and officiating weightlifting competitions during the mid-1920s and by the late 1920s had started his own barbell club. During this same period, in part due to the sales related travel his occupation afforded him, he became acquainted with Jowett, Berry and Calvert, along with other influential figures in the emerging “Iron Game’ in the US. They would all be of great help to Bob in his next undertaking, which was building his weightlifting team and a barbell company.
In 1928, Hoffman began to seriously recruit weightlifters for his York Oil Burner Athletic Club, which soon began competing at the newly launched National Weightlifting Championships (in addition to countless local events).
Bob also developed his own barbell training courses and barbell designs. By 1929 he and his oil-burner partner Kraber had purchased a building on 51 North Broad Street, where both barbells and oil burners would be manufactured.
By 1931 he was building a large home which would soon become the temporary quarters for many great weightlifters and a place where those lifters could train, compete and relax.
In 1932, barbell sales really took off, despite the poor economy in the US and much of the Western world. In addition, Bob’s weightlifting team was rising to national dominance, winning the National championships for the first time (something the club was to do for all but one of the next 50 years).
Today some might find it hard to understand how one person could bring a weightlifting team to national prominence so quickly. There are at least three factors that played a major role. First, Bob was great motivator who treated his team members as the heroes they were. A second factor was the economic times of the late 1920s and early 1930s. This period marked the height of the Great Depression. Jobs were scarce and most barbell makers were experiencing tough times. So hiring employees who were also lifters was relatively easy. Finally, York Oil Burner and York Barbell were building capital and growing rapidly, which gave them the financial wherewithal to build their businesses.
As a result of these conditions, Hoffman was able to recruit many of the top lifters in the country to his team by simply offering them jobs at the York Oil Burner or York Barbell Company. The opportunity to hold a stable job, as well as to train along with other top weightlifters proved to be an irresistible one for many lifters of the day and many of those who were invited to York accepted the invitation. Those that didn’t live in York often traveled there just to train with the team.
As just one example, two-time world weightlifting champion, John Terpak told me the story of his earliest association with Hoffman. John won the Jr. Nationals in 1935 and was immediately approached by Hoffman. Bob discussed the possibility of Terpak’s coming to York, joining Bob’s team and working for Bob’s company. Terpak, who was unemployed at the time (not uncommon for a young man during that era), expressed an interest in Bob’s offer, at which point Hoffman said he would write Terpak soon.
John returned to his home in Mayfield, PA, thinking that Hoffman’s offer was not serious one. However, within weeks, Terpak received a letter from Hoffman and a $5 bill. The letter reiterated Hoffman’s job offer to and instructed John to use the money to purchase a ticket on a particular bus that would stop in York on a particular day. Team members then met Terpak at the bus station. John soon went to work in Hoffman’s company, and would eventually become CEO not long after Bob’s passing 50 years later. Such was the potential of a Hoffman offer.
While attending the 1932 Olympic Games in Los Angeles as a team manager, Hoffman observed how easily the Americans were defeated by the European lifters. He was chagrined to see that those European lifters regarded the Americans as something of a joke. It was at this point that Hoffman resolved to raise American weightlifting to the pinnacle of world weightlifting.
In what was to become perhaps the most important step in that effort, Hoffman launched Strength & Health magazine late in 1932. That magazine became the dominant “muscle magazine” in the US for the next several decades and the foundation of the marketing engine that was to raise weightlifting, weight training and dietary supplementation (which the company was soon to become involved in) to prominence throughout the US. The magazine began as a partnership between Hoffman and Jowett, with Jowett serving as publisher and Hoffman as editor. Strength & Health featured articles by both Jowett and Hoffman, as well as other well known Iron Game personalities, and focused on the benefits of physical training, particularly with weights, for all Americans.
Jowett and Hoffman soon became immersed in a power struggle with Dietrich Wortmann, AAU Weightlifting Chairman (the AAU had become the national governing body for amateur weightlifting in the US in 1927). Wortmann saw Hoffman as something of an interloper who was buying up all the weightlifting talent around the country. He harassed Hoffman at AAU competitions, or at least constrained him, and Hoffman bridled at this. Hoffman and Jowett responded by using their magazine to revive the ACWLA and to create the American Strength and Health League (a membership organization for weight trainers).
The ACWLA presented a sort of political challenge to Wortmann’s control of weightlifting. Friction between the Hoffman/Jowett and Wortman grew during 1933, but Hoffman gave up his attacks on Wortmann when the latter agreed to give Hoffman a position within the AAU committee that governed weightlifting. Wortmann would remain the titular head of the AAU weightlifting committee for years, but Hoffman’s influence on the sport would grow ever stronger over those same years.
Not long after his compromise with Wortmann, Hoffman began to change the shape of the magazine, altering its subtitle from “A Man’s Magazine for the Real Man” to the “Family Health Magazine”.
He began to clash with Jowett and Jowett eventually left the publication, with Hoffman assuming full control. Hoffman’s power further increased in 1935, when Strength magazine and the Milo Barbell Co, filed for bankruptcy. Hoffman bought the company to further solidify his dominance of the fitness publishing and barbell scenes.
Hoffman’s initial 1932 printing of Strength and Health magazine was reportedly 2500 copies. But by 1936 he was printing more than 50,000 copies per month.
The magazine was used to promote an ever growing variety of York products including barbells, various other kinds of exercise equipment, as well as books and courses authored by Hoffman.
His magazine showered its readers with the success stories of weight trainers – people who had changed their appearances and strength levels through progressive resistance training -the “York” way.
Among the stories that were of greatest interest were those stories of York’s champion weightlifters and bodybuilders (sometimes one and the same). These were men who had often risen from modest beginnings, or had overcome great obstacles, to become champions.
Strength & Health influenced readers in a multitude of ways, through articles ranging across subjects such as training, nutrition, the avoidance of bad habits such as smoking, the development of a tranquil mind and moral philosophy.
Hoffman often used himself as an example of what could be accomplished through proper training and diet, although with his busy business schedule he was not always able to maintain the level of training that he might have liked. However, weight training had generated a profound effect on his physical development and strength.
By 1936, nearly every member of the US Olympic Weightlifting Team was a York Barbell member. Hoffman served as head coach of the team (the first of five times he was to serve the US in that capacity). And while no American had been able to do better than a bronze medal at the 1932 Games in Los Angeles, the US had a Gold Medal winner in Berlin (Tony Terlazzo in the 60 kg. bodyweight category), marking the first time since 1904 (when the Olympics were held in the US) that a US lifter had won such a medal in weightlifting. Moreover, the US team was only outscored by the German and Egyptian teams in terms of overall medals. What an amazing change in four years! And the best was yet to come.
In 1938, at the World Championships, the US team took a close second to the German team. Due to the outbreak of the war in Europe, that was the last pre-WWII World Championships in Weightlifting. However, arguably, by the time WW II commenced, the US had the strongest team in the world.
Due to the war, there were no World or Olympic championships held in weightlifting until 1946, when a World Championships was rather hastily organized in Paris. The USSR sent a serious team to the World Championships for the first time, but the US won a conclusive victory.
York Barbell was largely responsible for hosting the World Championships in the US for the first time in 1947. A number of important countries did not come to the US, so the US team completely dominated the competition.
But in 1948, the US team continued its victory string at the Olympic Games. The team took second to the Egyptians at the 1949 World Championships, but then went on to win the World Championships in 1950 through 1952, until it was defeated by a team from the USSR for the first time in 1953.
The US lost again to the Russians in 1954 but then picked up wins in the 1955 World Championships and the 1956 Olympic Games. The US team did not mount a credible threat to the USSR in 1957, but in the 1958 World Championships managed one last team victory, before the Russians began to dominate the sport for nearly two decades thereafter.
Hoffman’s achievement in building and sustaining the US team is a truly remarkable one, an achievement that has been glossed over by some writers. There are those who have argued that the only reason America had the dominant team during this period was the devastation of Europe during and immediately following WW II. But these writers overlook the fact that the US team had already become a major player in world weightlifting by the outbreak of WW II.
It ultimately took the USSR, with its massive and government sponsored sports machine, to defeat the US team. And the Russian athletes were professionals, while the US team was largely amateurs, athletes who worked for a living on a full-time basis and trained during their leisure time. Even the weightlifters who lived in York and worked at York Barbell generally worked a full day.
For a man to nearly single-handedly develop and sustain the weightlifting program of an entire country is an amazing undertaking. Truly extraordinary intelligence, drive and focus was required. And perhaps most of all, it took energy – which Hoffman had in abundance.
In reflecting on what drove that energy, in an article in the November 1946 issue of Strength and Health magazine, he said that he conceived of creating S&H after his experience at the 1932 as a manager of the US Olympic Weightlifting team.
“I had enough experience at this stage in my career to prove that weight training was the best way, the quickest way, a method that brought superior results in a short time.
For long I had been dissatisfied with the articles I read in other magazines, it was very evident that you the train you by mail physical directors are not on as, they were interested in pupils for financial reasons only, so they are in California, we talked the matter over and decided that upon our return we would start a small magazine, endeavoring to do better than had ever been done before. We determined to be sincere, honest, helpful, to work for the good of our country and our fellow men, to defend weight training and weight lifting against all knockers and scoffers, to work intensively and incessantly to show the advantages of our preferred form of training to the world.
We were ideally suited for the work we planned to do. We had a great group of young men who were sincere and thoroughly interested in weight training and right living. Although there have been changes in our organization during these years, it is evident to any who investigate that we have worked hard to carry out our plans. We have not deviated as much as seven-twelfths of one ten thousandth of an inch from our policy in the beginning, we are unchanged in our desire to spread the gospel of the Strength & Health system of living and weight training. We are far more enthusiastic with each passing day, far more convinced that we are right, that we are preaching the best system of living and training.”
Upon his return, rarely sleeping for more than a few hours per night, Hoffman oversaw a manufacturing business, churned out more than 40 books and published the magazine he’d conceived of in 1932. Then he spent his weekends promoting weightlifting meets, officiating and coaching at them. He also spent countless hours promoting weightlifting and weight training throughout the US through lectures, exhibitions and competitions designed to showcase weightlifting and weight training.
Given today’s acceptance of weight training, it may be difficult for some readers to appreciate the challenges that Hoffman faced in organizing and advancing his business and his philosophy of progressive resistance for all.
In the early years of Hoffman’s work, the public and most health professionals were dubious, if not outright antagonistic to the value of exercise in general and weight training in particular. There were great fears of hernias, enlarged hearts and a host of other alleged ills brought on by lifting weights.
But perhaps the biggest fear was becoming “musclebound”. This dread (if completely mythical) condition supposedly led to a person’s becoming so constrained by his own muscular development that normal activities were precluded or impaired (few women were lifting in those days so they were not threatened by the same fate, but weight training and muscular development among women were unpopular at the time)
While those who posited the existence of this dread musclebound condition found it hard to point to specific examples, any well muscled person who was inflexible, uncoordinated or slow moving was immediately cited as an example of the condition (the accuser dismissing examples of people with little muscle or strength who had the same or worse inflexibilities, lack of coordination or slowness of movement).
While later research was to demonstrate that proper weight training increases range of motion and speed, rather than impairing them, the musclebound myth was a constant foe to Hoffman and others involved in weight training during its early years of popular development.
To counter this prejudice, Hoffman used a number of tactics. He offered prizes to other sports teams and organizations, regardless of their sport or nature, who could outperform his weightlifting team members in sports that neither group was familiar with.
He published articles on the growing number of athletes who did lift weights, reporting on the benefits that these athletes had gained from their training, whether they were golfers, runners, field athletes, boxers, wrestlers, football players or other sports.
He pointed to the famous John Grimek as a “poster boy” for the benefits of weight training. Possessed with the most outstanding physique of his day (he was never defeated in a bodybuilding competition from the 1940s through the 1950s), Grimek had been an outstanding weightlifter before he became focused on bodybuilding, winning the National Championships and earning a spot on the 1936 Olympic Team.
But at the same time he had remarkable flexibility, being able to perform a full split and touch his elbows to the floor with his legs straight at any time. Bob often used Grimek as his prime example of what a truly muscular man could look like and lift like, while being incredibly supple and athletic at the same time.
Hoffman worked tirelessly to put a barbell into every YMCA in the country and was largely successful This had a major effect on the access and acceptance of the sport of weightlifting in the US as the Ys were the premier physical training centers in the US during the middle of the 20th century. In addition, Bob was able to get centers that rehabilitated war veterans to use barbells and other forms of resistance training, and to get barbells accepted in schools and colleges.
But perhaps Hoffman’s biggest weapon for the acceptance of weightlifting was his team members. Without exception they had exceptional muscular development. Without exception they were fast, flexible and athletic.
As just one example, Stan Stancyzk, 1948 Olympic champion, was one of the athletes whose foot speed was measured at that Games. Scientists reported that Stancyzk was the fastest athlete at the Olympics. Such performance spoke volumes for the value of weight training.
Little by little, the public image of weightlifters began to change, and the value of weight training for athletes became widely accepted. Without the efforts of Bob Hoffman, it’s hard to see how that would have happened, certainly not as quickly and completely as it did.
As if Hoffman’s development of weightlifting and weight training would not itself amount to a monumental achievement for anyone across a lifetime, consider Bob’s general influence on the health industry.
Hoffman railed for decades against cigarettes, long before the Surgeon General of the US determined that they were a health risk.
He argued for the value of exercise of all kinds, not just weight training, long before that became popular. He advocated a sound diet and deplored the use of processed foods.
He spoke of the importance of fresh air and sunlight and was one of the first distributors of pure and clean bottled water. He promoted the development of a “tranquil mind” long before meditation became as popular as it is today. He was the first large scale distributor of power racks. And he led a near revolution in the use of isometrics as a strength builder.
Then there is Hoffman’s involvement in health food business. The protein supplements that are commonplace today were first brought into wide distribution through Hoffman’s efforts, first to promote, then to manufacture and distribute them. There are still those who argue against the use of such products but they are surely safe in comparison with the drugs that became so popular with athletes after supplements came into wide use.
While weightlifting legend Tommy Kono invented the use of neoprene knee and waist bands (keeping his aging body warm in key areas), it was Hoffman’s wide promotion of these items that led to their becoming an item in the gym bags of so many people today.
Perhaps most important of all, Bob Hoffman influenced countless people, young and old alike, in the US and abroad, to take up the habits of regular exercise and sound diet and to admire men and women who deserved to be admired for their health and strength. For that he should always be remembered and honored. His work definitely changed the world.