Bob Hoffman

9 November 1898 – 18 July 1985 · Tifton, Georgia → York, Pennsylvania

Bob Hoffman was the proprietor of York Barbell, the publisher of Strength & Health, and for over three decades the coach and patron of American Olympic weightlifting. From the 1930s into the 1960s he was the most powerful single figure in American strength sport. Almost everything he did was contested by somebody, and almost nothing in mid-century American lifting happened without him.

At a glance

• Born Robert Collins Hoffman in Tifton, Georgia, on 9 November 1898; died in York, Pennsylvania, on 18 July 1985, aged eighty-six, after years of heart trouble that had led to bypass surgery in 1977.
• Stood 6 ft 2 in, according to his 1917 enlistment papers.
• Children: none of his own. He married Rosetta Snell, who had a child from a previous marriage, in 1928; they divorced in 1944. His last partner, Alda Ketterman, is regarded as his common-law wife.

Origins

Hoffman was born in Tifton, where his father, an engineer, was working on a nearby dam; both parents were Pennsylvanians, and from 1903 he grew up in Wilkinsburg, a suburb of Pittsburgh. In April 1917 he enlisted in the Pennsylvania National Guard and served in France in 1918 with the 111th Infantry Regiment of the 28th Division, seeing action in the Champagne-Marne, Aisne-Marne, Oise-Aisne and Meuse-Argonne campaigns; he was decorated for bravery, including the French Croix de Guerre. In 1919 he moved to York, Pennsylvania, where he co-founded the York Oil Burner Corporation. He was an oarsman before he was a weightlifter.

The work

In 1923 Hoffman started an athletic club among the oil-burner company's employees, and in the early 1930s he took a leading role in weightlifting within the Amateur Athletic Union. In 1932 he co-founded the Strength and Health Publishing Company and launched Strength & Health, which he used as a relentless promotional vehicle for York equipment, York lifters and the Olympic lifts. He acquired the bankrupt Milo Barbell Company, founded by Alan Calvert, in the early-to-mid 1930s (sources give 1932 or 1935), and in 1938 sold his oil-burner interest and formed the York Barbell Company.

Hoffman coached the American Olympic weightlifting team from 1936 to 1968, and York became the centre of American lifting: John Davis, John Grimek, Steve Stanko, Tony Terlazzo, Norbert Schemansky and Tommy Kono were among the lifters who competed for the York club or were supported by Hoffman's business. In 1964 he launched Muscular Development as he turned increasingly towards bodybuilding, and he was a founding member of the President's Council on Physical Fitness.

Notable feats

Hoffman claimed more than six hundred trophies and awards as an oarsman and weightlifter, but he was never an elite competitive lifter. The achievements that bear his name are organisational:

• Strength & Health magazine, 1932.
• York Barbell Company, 1938 — for decades the dominant American manufacturer of training equipment.
• Coach of the U.S. Olympic weightlifting team, 1936–1968.
• Muscular Development magazine, 1964.

Method

Hoffman's training writing, in Strength & Health and in books such as How to Be Strong, Healthy and Happy, was eclectic, often self-contradictory, and at times openly promotional. His enduring contribution to method is structural: he aligned American training behind the Olympic lifts — then the press, snatch, and clean and jerk.

In the early 1960s he promoted "functional isometric contraction", building on the West German research of Hettinger and Müller, and attributed the rapid progress of some York lifters to it. Later research, notably John Fair's, showed that those lifters were also taking the anabolic steroid Dianabol, supplied through the physician John Ziegler, a fact not disclosed at the time.

Hoffman also sold protein and other supplements with health claims that medical critics called false and misleading. The Food and Drug Administration seized his company's products on several occasions between 1960 and 1974, and in a 1968 consent decree he agreed to stop a long list of claims.

Legacy

Hoffman institutionalised American weightlifting. Strength & Health was for several decades the leading lifting magazine in the United States, and the York gymnasium was the closest thing American lifting had to a national centre. His relations with the rival Weider organisation were openly hostile: Hoffman's publications subordinated bodybuilding to lifting, the Weiders did the reverse, and by the 1970s the Weiders had largely won that argument in the public mind. The Hoffman Foundation brought him some philanthropic recognition in his last years.

Disputed and unresolved

How much Hoffman knew about steroid use among York lifters in the early 1960s, and when, is set out in detail in John Fair's Muscletown USA; the broad picture of isometrics being publicly credited for gains partly due to Dianabol is well established, but the exact chronology is debated. The date of his purchase of the Milo company is given differently in different sources.