Leanest Natural Bodybuilder
Tiana Dubree
To be fair, bodybuilding is not the only sport with rampant steroid use. Elite athletes in every major sport, including weightlifting, tennis, cycling, football, running, boxing, wrestling, and golf, have been caught using gear.
However, the IFBB Pro League, the premiere professional bodybuilding organization, is one of the few pro sporting institutions that does not test its athletes for steroids. Although the IFBB Pro League cannot understandingly introduce doping tests, the unregulated gear use has tuned pro bodybuilding into one of the most dangerous sports.
Level Up Your Fitness: Join our ? strong community in Fitness Volt Newsletter. Get daily inspiration, expert-backed workouts, nutrition tips, the latest in strength sports, and the support you need to reach your goals. Subscribe for free!
Confirming if a bodybuilder is a natty without regular doping tests and governing body oversight is tough. Furthermore, it is even more difficult in the case of social media celebrities that claim a lifelong natty status but would never take a doping test.
Paul Krueger shook the bodybuilding world by winning the 2021 Natural Olympia just weeks after earning his Pro card. He has become a force to be reckoned with in the industry after winning a pro bodybuilding competition on his debut.
Do not let the first few sentences fool you, though. Paul Krueger was an amateur bodybuilder for 25 years before earning his pro card. His second-most-recent show was the 2021 INBF Phoenician Classic, where he jumped on stage after a 16-year hiatus.
Brandon Lirio is a 3X Mr. Natural Olympia and 2X Mr. Universe champion. He is also a PNBA Pro Hall of Famer. Brandon started lifting to fight his anxiety disorder after he joined the military in 2006.
Ron Williams is one of the most decorated natural bodybuilders in history. He has won 250 natural bodybuilding competitions, including Mr. Natural World, Mr. Natural Olympia, and Mr. Natural Universe.
Ron has built several successful carriers since retiring from bodybuilding. He is a leading life and fitness coach, an expert in physiology, diet and nutrition, and fat loss, and a pastor of a non-denominational Christian church in Salt Lake City, Utah.
Hansen is among the most popular natural bodybuilders of all time. To this day, he appears on several bodybuilding podcasts with IFBB Pro League bodybuilders and 1983 Mr. Olympia winner Samir Bannout.
Hansen won the inaugural Natural Olympia in 1998 and the Natural Universe title thrice, setting the standards for other natural bodybuilders. His full and round muscle bellies and perfect proportions helped him conquer every competition he entered.
He writes for several bodybuilding publications and published his book Natural Bodybuilding in 2005, where he preaches building muscle mass while staying natty. Besides drug-tested bodybuilding federations, Hansen is one of the most respected voices in the IFBB Pro League.
Arnawa is one of those bodybuilders that compels you to do a double-take. He is the second bodybuilder of Asian descent to win the Natural Mr. Olympia title, after Danny Chau, who earned the bragging rights in 2004. Arnawa won his last six competitions and became one of the youngest-ever Pro World Champions.
The Balinese bodybuilder is popular for his incredible size, symmetry, muscle fullness, and conditioning. Although Arnawa won the Natural Mr. Olympia title in 2005, he is still in incredible shape and could give many competitive bodybuilders a run for their money.
Ricardo Jr. is a four-time Natural Olympia champion, winning the title in 2007, 2008, 2015, and 2019. By winning the Natural Olympia title after a six-year gap, he proved that natural bodybuilders have much better longevity than their enhanced counterparts. Winning the Mr. Olympia title six years after losing it is beyond imagination for bodybuilders competing in the IFBB Pro League.
Rocardo Jr. created history by becoming the first bodybuilder to win back the Natural Olympia title after surrendering it. He started his competitive bodybuilding journey after joining the Marine Corps.
Moody is the most dominant Natural Olympia champion of all time. He won the coveted title for six consecutive years, from 2009 to 2014. He was inducted into the PNBA Hall of Fame in the class of 2013.
Notably, Terry had his kidney removed at the age of eight because of hydronephrosis. The 6-foot-5 bodybuilder is one of the largest and most successful natural bodybuilders of all time. He weighed a monstrous 300 pounds at the peak of his bodybuilding career.
Even though these bodybuilders compete in drug-tested bodybuilding federations, it is no guarantee that they have never taken steroids. Most natural bodybuilding federations require bodybuilders to be clean of steroids for the last 10 years.
Although many bodybuilders have started going public about their steroid use, some still want to hold onto their natty status. Many bodybuilders and social media celebrities claim to be natties but avoid doping tests like the plague.
Nonetheless, most of their followers are convinced that they do not use gear and that their superhero-like physiques are the result of their Greek god genetics, hard work, and discipline. Since these bodybuilders have never failed a drug test, we must give them the benefit of the doubt.
Here are some popular bodybuilders that claim to be natural. Their linear physique progress, absence of discernible signs of steroid usage, and overall physique aesthetics earn them a spot on this list.
If I had to take a wild guess, I would say Mike Thurston is the athlete with the highest number of female followers on the best natural bodybuilders list. He is the kind of guy you find on the cover of magazines and TV shows. Thurston claims to be a lifelong natty bodybuilder.
The fitness sensation played numerous sports during high school, like rugby, football, and cricket, and was part of many athletics teams. By the time Mike joined college, he was fully committed to realizing his ambition and left rugby to focus on bodybuilding.
Anabolic steroids were developed in 1935 by a German scientist, Adolf Butenandt. But they only gained traction in the 1950s when the Soviet athletes started using them to improve their powerlifting performance.
Sandow emphasized muscle proportions and developed the Grecian Ideal to establish benchmarks for building a flowing and balanced physique. Besides bodybuilding, Sandow was a powerlifter and Strongman.
Reeves started lifting weights in high school after losing an arm wrestling match to a much smaller boy. However, his lifting journey was cut short as he was enrolled for WW2 and stationed in the Philippines and later Japan.
Reeves started weight training after returning to the States in 1946. He won the Mr. America contest within one year and hung up his posing trunks a couple of years later to pursue films. There have been several allegations accusing Reeve of drug use. However, the bodybuilder-turned-actor has repeatedly denied these accusations.
Not much is known about Wladyslaw Kurcharczyk, aka Bobby Pandour, except that he had one of the best physiques of his era. He was born sometime in the late 1870s to early 1880s in Poland. The French magazine La Cultur Physique was his shot to fame.
Interestingly, Pandour was not a fan of weight training and relied on gymnastics to build and carve his muscles. However, he would occasionally go up and down the stairs with his brother, Ludwig, on his shoulder to develop his legs.
Born in 1902, Siegmund Klein was a German-American strongman, bodybuilder, and magazine publisher. He started weight training at the age of 12 and opened his own gym in New York in 1924. Klein was inducted into the IFBB Hall of Fame in 2006.
That said, site-enhancement oils (SEO) such as Synthol are heavily discouraged in competitive bodybuilding. SEOs can temporarily inflate a muscle, enhancing its size and aesthetics. However, most athletes take it too far, and their injected muscles stick out like a sore thumb, which gets them scored down. Bodybuilders that show up to a contest with oils injected into their muscles are penalized and ultimately find themselves at the bottom of the rankings.
Natural bodybuilders are generally smaller than their enhanced counterparts that use steroids or SARMS (Selective Androgen Receptor Modulators), as these can lead to significant structural changes in the human body.
Natural bodybuilding has witnessed tremendous growth over the last couple of decades. Several natty bodybuilding organizations promote multiple drug-tested competitions throughout the year. The most popular natural bodybuilding organizations include:
Most natural bodybuilding organizations comply with the WADA (World Anti-Doping Agency) guidelines. It includes 10 years clean of prescription/pharmaceutical hormones on the WADA-banned substance list and two years free of over-the-counter hormones, pro-hormones, or banned substances listed or their chemical counterparts.
Natural bodybuilding federation can use blood, urine, and polygraph tests to check its athletes for drug use. These tests are done randomly throughout the year, and the organizations can take the blood samples of bodybuilders before a competition.
Most people start lifting weights to improve their overall health and well-being. However, using steroids significantly hampers your longevity. Using PEDs and diuretics can lead to several health issues. Plus, most of these damages are irreversible. You must deal with them even if you stop using gear.
c80f0f1006