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History of Bodybuilding Supplements
The History Of Bodybuilding Supplements, The Good, The Bad and The Ugly!
The history of bodybuilding supplements starts with a culture dedicated to achieving the peak performance from the human body and this goes back before supplements as we know them today. We need to venture back some one hundred years to a man named Eugen Sandow.
Eugen Sandow is called the first modern bodybuilder; he was an advocate of the importance of diet as well as the consumption of certain things to help build his muscles faster. His friend, Earle Liederman, advocated the use of "beef juice" or "beef extracts" as a way to help muscles recover rapidly from strenuous activities or workouts. These may be the first bodybuilding supplements in modern times.
In the late 1930’s, one man began making supplements when he processed whey from milk for human consumption. This was almost 50 years before bodybuilding supplements really came onto the market in the way we know them now. He also experimented with different sources of vitamins and minerals in powdered forms.
Then in the 1950’s, Irvin Johnson, also known as Rheo H. Blair made some of the first powders designed specifically for athletes. His product was high quality protein from milk and eggs. Bob Hoffman and Joe Weider decided to jump and the bandwagon and created there own protein powders but theses were made from cheaper ingredients such as soy beans, wheat germ, kelp, dextrose and various types of dehydrated plants.
In the 1980's bodybuilding supplements started becoming very big business and the greed really started to show, so many useless products were sold to unsuspecting bodybuilders who believed the false claims made in the ads.
Such products include Boron (rhymes with moron). Because an isolated study showed that boron can slightly raise the testosterone levels in post-menopausal females, some supplement companies claimed that boron can greatly increase testosterone levels in young healthy males. Of course this was total B.S.!
Another big money maker at the time was Smilax, or sarsaparilla root. Smilax was another bodybuilding supplement that was supposed to increase your testosterone levels. Most people, who tried it, agreed it didn't do a thing and was a big waste of money. Yet many supplement companies got rich selling that junk.
In more recent years, Dr. Scott Connelly, who is considered to be a leader in the field of human nutrition, has spent considerable time in the creation of products to prevent muscle loss. His success came with the MET-Rx formula after twenty long years of testing and development. MET-Rx supplements are regarded as some of the best on the market. But there is still a lot of controversy about MET-Rx, some feel the first batch had a "secret ingredient" that made people burn off fat like crazy, and that later batches didn't have the same effects.
Another well-known name in bodybuilding supplement history is Bill Phillips. Bill made creatine popular as a supplement for bodybuilders. Bill claimed creatine gave steroid like pumps, and many found that creatine did in fact work. However, not all supplements are as effective as the creators suggest. Mr. Phillips pushed the greatness of a supplement called HMB out of greed to make more money. Complaints that HMB was generally worthless circulated through the bodybuilding community and still do to this day.
As in anything else, there is the good and the bad. There are some good supplements that actually work but there are many more bad supplements, which do not deliver the results they promise. The history of bodybuilding supplements has really just begun.
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