The Conversion of Dr. Peter Karpovic – Iron Game History – March, 2005

One of the great tasks that faces Springfield College,” Professor Peter Karpovich told a reporter in February of 1940, “is to fight these muscle builders.” The men who promoted lifting, Karpovich explained, were no better than “quacks” and “faddists,” and some of them, he continued, believed that heavy training could do “anything—just develop big muscles and . . . (even) all your illness will go (away).”1 But just two months later, face-to-face with America’s foremost “faddist”— Bob Hoffman, founder of the York Barbell Company—Karpovich had an epiphany.