How a 19th-Century Bodybuilder Became the Original Fitness Influencer

Long before Jane Fonda’s workout videos, Goop or FitTok, there was Eugen Sandow. In an era of dumbbells and medicine balls, the 19th-century strongman built not only muscle but a fitness empire rivaling that of any modern-day “wellness influencer.”

The world-famous Sandow endorsed nutritional supplements, sold exercise equipment and dispensed “lifestyle content” in books and magazines while amassing a global following that any algorithm-chasing social media personality would envy.

Born Friedrich-Wilhelm Müller in 1867, the “father of bodybuilding” grew up a scrawny boy in Prussia until taking a life-changing trip to Italy at age 10. Dazzled by the flawless forms of ancient Greek and Roman sculptures in the galleries of Rome and Florence, young Friedrich resolved to sculpt himself. “I scarcely knew what strength was. Then it happened that I saw it in bronze and stone,” he later wrote.

Dashing his parents’ plans for him to become a Lutheran minister, the teenage Friedrich chose a less pious path, first as an acrobat in a traveling circus, then as the protégé of German strongman Professor Louis Attila. After adopting the stage name Eugen Sandow, he challenged Charles Sampson, the self-proclaimed “Strongest Man on Earth,” in an 1889 strongman competition on a London stage.

Chuckles fluttered through the audience. One newspaper noted the five-foot, nine-inch Sandow looked “like an ordinary person—short, quiet, good tempered.” The laughter stopped, though, when Sandow stripped and revealed his chiseled physique. His handlebar mustache and mop of curly blond hair may have deviated from the classical ideal, but his rippling muscles and washboard abs resembled those of a chiseled Greek god. Sandow surpassed Sampson’s feats of strength and catapulted to fame as the World’s Strongest Man.

Touring England’s music halls, Sandow performed traditional strongman stunts, such as lifting heavy objects, bending iron bars and even supporting a horse and rider walking on a plank across his chest. Touring the United States in 1893, he teamed up with marketing whiz and future vaudeville impresario Florenz Ziegfeld Jr., who would later stage the Ziegfeld Follies.

Born just days before Sandow, Ziegfeld transformed the strongman’s act, emphasizing artistry over brute strength. Combining both flex and sex appeal, Sandow appeared nearly nude atop a revolving pedestal, bathed in brilliant calcium lights.

“They created a special way to light him on stage so you can see his muscles, and they coated him in white powder so he would look like classical statuary,” says Jan Todd, director of the H.J. Lutcher Stark Center for Physical Culture and Sports and chair of the kinesiology and health education department at the University of Texas at Austin.

Like a living sculpture, Sandow re-created famous poses of Achilles, Hercules and the Dying Gaul while flexing different muscle groups and sharing his knowledge of human anatomy. “His physical beauty, his attractiveness, his symmetry becomes a big part of the act and why people go to see him,” Todd says.

Even in the Victorian era, sex sold—and Ziegfeld allowed Sandow’s high-society admirers to do more than just ogle. For a sizable charitable donation, audience members could touch Sandow’s muscles in backstage private viewings. The excitement proved too much for one woman, who fainted after delicately running her gloved hand across his body.

Sandow leveraged new mass media to further spread his celebrity. Cabinet cards depicting the bodybuilder in various classical poses—and various states of undress—spread around the globe like viral Instagram posts. He became a movie star after being filmed at Thomas Edison’s Black Maria studio in 1894. Customers in newly opened kinetoscope parlors plunked down 5 cents to peep at a bare-chested Sandow as he posed his muscular form for 40 seconds.

Displaying an entrepreneurial bent, Sandow monetized his fame as a “content creator.” His first book, Sandow on Physical Training, was published in 1894, and the title of his 1904 book, Body-Building, helped popularize the term.

Launched in 1898, what became known as Sandow’s Magazine of Physical Culture is considered by some to be bodybuilding’s first periodical. Like those lining supermarket checkout aisles today, the illustrated magazine dispensed fitness and nutrition advice and depicted exercise routines and weightlifting techniques.

The publications touted Sandow’s System of Physical Training, which promoted isometric exercises and regular variations of weights and reps. Presaging the gym selfie by a century, Sandow encouraged exercise in front of a mirror to watch muscles at work and mark their development.

Boasting over 300,000 followers of his system, Sandow also launched a mail-order course that he marketed with personal testimonials and now-familiar before-and-after photographs. He promised that anyone who sent in their occupation and measurements would be prescribed a specific home exercise regimen to “prepare the business man or woman for their work.”

Sandow sold patented spring-gripped dumbbells, ointments, corsets and even cigars. He peddled Sandow’s Health and Strength Cocoa and a weightlifting supplement called Plasmon. Above all, though, he was selling hope. If a scrawny kid like Sandow could become an Adonis, anyone could.

In 1897, Sandow opened the first in a chain of “institutes of physical culture” across London in which he offered personal fitness coaching. Matching the opulence of the nearby royal palaces, the upper-crust health club on St. James’s Street was decorated with a life-sized statue of Sandow and an oil painting of its founder posing as an ancient gladiator. Prototypes of modern health clubs, they featured fancy changing and bathing rooms and dedicated areas for men and women. Wall charts allowed members to record their expanding chest, arm and leg measurements and slimming waistlines.

Sandow marketed his fitness system as a cure for ailments including constipation, gout and insomnia and even claimed his health clubs could eradicate serious diseases through exercise and diet alone. One newspaper reported that Sandow’s “treatment had only failed entirely in less than 1 percent of these cases.” His grandiose assertions ran afoul of the country’s medical authorities, who disciplined some of his physicians.

War with Germany further crippled Sandow’s business ventures. Although a naturalized British citizen, his thick German accent—and allegations that his cocoa was manufactured behind enemy lines—aroused suspicions in London after the outbreak of World War I. Newspapers even printed rumors that he was shot in the Tower of London for being a German spy.

As the war’s horrific death toll decimated a generation of young Londoners who frequented his health clubs, Sandow faded from public view. In 1925, he died at age 58 of an aortic aneurysm, which, according to some accounts, resulted from an injury after lifting his automobile out of a ditch following an accident.

Sandow remains a bodybuilding icon—a gilded statuette of his likeness is given to the winner of the annual Mr. Olympia contest—and his legacy endures more subtly as well. “Sandow never had a real job,” Todd says. “What he had was his body and his ability to promote himself, and that’s exactly what influencers are doing all across the world these days.”