When I was in high school, my mother came home one day furious that I turned down a job at the local retail store so I could lift weights instead. I told her that the job sucked and paid next to nothing. She called me lazy, and said I didn’t know the value of hard work. With protein shaker in hand, I declared that the work I did in the gym was harder and more valuable to me than any job.

My antipathy for paid labor and love of physically laboring with weights might seem idiosyncratic to some, but I wasn’t alone. Serious bodybuilders often put their personal pursuit of strength, size, and aesthetics above more material concerns like money.

This pursuit was on display this past weekend at one of the most popular events in bodybuilding: the Arnold Sports Weekend, a four-day event where bodybuilders from around the world come to train, pose, cheer each other on, and stuff their gym bags with free samples from the biggest supplement companies in the industry. The discourse of herculean labor at the Columbus Convention Center has died down and the bodybuilders have gone home, but it’s worth revisiting bodybuilding’s roots in widespread concerns over capitalist labor at the end of the nineteenth century and, more importantly, why these concerns matter today.