What is special about Venice Beach and Muscle Beach?
Muscle Beach Venice is the “Home of Bodybuilding”, nestled right in the heart of Venice Beach since 1963. Some of the biggest names in bodybuilding and film including Franco Columbu, Lou Ferrigno, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Frank Zane have all called Muscle Beach Venice home.
Muscle Beach had long been considered by the puritanical an “immoral place” and “a favorite haven of the sexual athletes and queers of Southern California.” This was in part due to their striking physicality, and because many bodybuilders and weightlifters posed in beefcake magazine for a few extra bucks.
By the 1950s, Muscle Beach established worldwide fame and helped to popularize and bring legitimacy to physical culture with acrobatics and bodybuilding. Today it is an open playground with a gated area that encloses weightlifting equipment.
Firstly there's Muscle Beach Gym, which has the only outdoor gym around. Visitors can pay $10 for a day pass, or $50 for a week, gaining access to multiple weights, machines, power racks, power lifting bumpers and top of the range equipment.
Venice's famous Muscle Beach has officially reopened after being closed for nearly three years due to renovations, and there's a lot of new additions to check out.
Day pass or membership required. NO free entry. T-shirt or towels and closed toe shoes required to workout. No pets or bicycles permitted in or around weight pen.
Owned and operated by the city of Los Angeles, “The Pen”, as it was known in the 1950s and 1960s, was the natural heir to the weightlifting and physique-development activities that had discontinued at the actual Muscle Beach in Santa Monica.
Almost anyone can sign up for a fee (less than you might think) and get a year long pass to use the place. The body building championships are great and a must-see experience. Muscle Beach is historic and it's in Venice Beach.
Muscle Beach is not just a piece of beach near the Santa Monica Pier. Muscle Beach is the first popular outdoor theatre of gymnastics, athletics, fitness and, later, bodybuilding for all.
However “The O.M.B.,” Original Muscle Beach, was located in Santa Monica. Female weight lifting was introduced and popularized by Pudgy Stockton, the Queen of Muscle Beach. Muscle Beach started in the 1930s, when the City of Santa Monica built a playground on the beach for children during the Depression.
What are beach muscles?
But everyone knows what we mean by "beach muscles": a strong chest, abs and arms as you're strutting up and down the sand.
Muscles are soft tissues. Many stretchy fibers make up your muscles. You have more than 600 muscles in your body. Different types of muscles have different jobs. Some muscles help you run, jump or perform delicate tasks like threading a needle.
Once a fishing and farming community, this city in the heart of Sarasota County has blossomed into a vacation destination, where families play in the surf, hunt for prehistoric shark teeth, shop through downtown, bike around the Venetian Waterway Trail and "catch the big one" at the Venice Pier.
Venice Fishing Pier
The beach around the pier still has fossils from the offshore formation washing up. You will notice the sand has many black granules in it. This is phosphate grains from the formation, shark teeth are found where you see these little black grains.