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Rich Piana was a Men's Open Bodybuilding competitor from the United States. Rich Piana has a verified height of 6'0" (183 cm) and a recorded contest weight of 280 lb (127 kg).
3 career wins
Rich Piana
CountryUnited States
GenderMale
DivisionMen's Open Bodybuilding
Born1970
DiedAugust 25, 2017, aged 46
StatusRetired
Rich Piana, a bodybuilder from the United States, stands 6'0" (183 cm) tall and competed at a contest weight of around 280 lb (127 kg). He was born on September 26, 1970 and died on August 25, 2017, aged 46.
Career Record
- Total Results
- 8
- Wins
- 3
- Win Rate
- 37.5%
- Career
- 1999–2010
- Height
- 6'0" (183 cm)
- Weight
- 280 lb (127 kg)
- Lifespan
- 1970-2017 (aged 46)
- Division
- Men's Open Bodybuilding
- Country
- United States
- Verified
- Sources
- 4
Rich Piana was one of the most watched people bodybuilding has produced and never turned professional. He competed in the NPC amateur ranks on and off between 1999 and 2010, then found an audience on YouTube far larger than the stage had ever offered him, talking about training, business and his own drug use with a bluntness the sport was not used to. He founded the supplement company 5% Nutrition and died in 2017 at 46.
Win rate here is first-place finishes as a share of all 8 recorded contest results. It is published only where a career holds at least five, because below that a single placing moves the figure by twenty points or more.
Every season on record
Peak Year 2009 (2 wins)
Measured against Rich Piana’s own seasons, not against the field.
Olympia
1st place
2nd place
3rd place
Other
- Pro Debut
- 1999
- First Win
- 2003
- Peak Year
- 2009
- Last Contest
- 2010
Known for
What made Piana was the candour. He described his own steroid use on camera, in detail and at length, while the standard position in bodybuilding was to deny everything and change the subject. Whatever else that did, it moved a conversation that had been conducted in code for thirty years into the open.
He was also physically unmistakable. Six foot, close to 280 pounds on stage, and a rotating set of hair extensions that made him recognisable across a car park. The size was the hook; the talking is what kept people watching.
5% Nutrition came out of that audience. The name was his own line about the five percent of people willing to do what everyone else will not, and the branding carried the same voice as the videos.
Early career
He first appears in our record in 1999, seventh in the super heavyweights at the USA Championships. He won the super heavyweight class at the 2003 Los Angeles Championships, finished eleventh at the USA Championships the same year, and took sixth at the 2004 Nationals, his best result at national level.
Then a five-year gap, and two more class wins in 2009 at the Border States Classic and the Sacramento Championships. He entered the Nationals once more in 2010 and that is where the competitive record stops.
Eight recorded contests across eleven years is thin for someone this well known, and the gap between the two is the whole story. Almost everything Piana is remembered for happened after he stopped caring about placings.
Training
His training advice ran against most of what coaching had settled on. He favoured very high volume, hit muscles more often than conventional splits allow, and popularised short extra sessions he called feeder workouts, done between main sessions to drive blood into a lagging body part. He ate to match and said so plainly.
Physique benchmark
How Rich Piana measures up
Fat-free mass index turns the height and weight on this profile into one number for how much muscle a frame carries, so a shorter competitor is not flattered by a bodyweight comparison. The normalised figure adjusts it again to a standard height, which is the version worth ranking. Both assume the 6% body fat a competitor steps on stage at, because that is the only condition the recorded weight was taken in.
35.6FFMI
35.5Normalised FFMI
38thOf 316 measured men
The closest Olympia champion on that measure is Dorian Yates, at 35.6.
What this rank is not. This database holds a height and a weight for just 463 athletes, and they are overwhelmingly the ones somebody bothered to measure: 73 of them hold an Olympia title. Almost every competitor on record carries no measurement at all. The pool also mixes every division and era together, from the lightweight women's classes to the open heavyweights, so it ranks size and nothing else. It says where Rich Piana sits among the athletes we hold measurements for, not among competitors.
All results
Every contest result on record for Rich Piana, 8 in all. Won by names the winner of the division Rich Piana competed in, and shows a dash where that winner cannot be pinned to one person in the database.
| Year | Contest | Division | Place | Won by |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2010 | Nationals | Men's Open Bodybuilding | Unplaced | Robert Burneika |
| 2009 | Border States Classic | Men's Open Bodybuilding | #1 | Winner |
| 2009 | Sacramento Championships | Men's Open Bodybuilding | #1 | Winner |
| 2004 | Nationals | Men's Open Bodybuilding | #6 | Chris Cook |
| 2003 | Los Angeles Championships | Men's Open Bodybuilding | #1 | Winner |
| 2003 | Nationals | Men's Open Bodybuilding | Unplaced | Mat DuVall |
| 2003 | USA Championships | Men's Open Bodybuilding | #11 | Chris Cook |
| 1999 | USA Championships | Men's Open Bodybuilding | #7 | Melvin Anthony |
Where these results come from. Each contest in the table was recorded from a named source, and for Rich Piana that source is MuscleMemory. Open any contest above and that page names its own source and links to it where the source is still reachable. That archive no longer answers at the addresses we hold, so it is credited by name here and not offered as a link.
More Men's Open Bodybuilding athletes Athletes from United States
Death
Piana collapsed at home on 7 August 2017 and was placed in a medically induced coma. He died on 25 August. He was 46.
He had spent years telling his audience what he took and what he believed it might cost him, which is why his death was argued over more openly than most. The medical findings that followed were reported in stages and were disputed in part. They are not reproduced here.
Legacy
5% Nutrition outlived him and still trades. So does the argument he started. He is cited as the man who made honest discussion of drug use possible in bodybuilding and as an illustration of where that use goes, frequently by the same people in the same sentence. The videos are still up and still watched.
None of that is visible in a contest record, which is exactly why a page built only from placings says almost nothing about him.
Sources
Competition placings on this page come from our own contest database and cover eight recorded contests between 1999 and 2010. His date of death is also held in our database.
The date he was hospitalised, and the biographical detail around it, come from contemporary reporting and from what Piana said publicly on his own channels. We have not traced those to a primary record.
Post-mortem findings are deliberately not reproduced. They were released in stages, parts of them were contested, and repeating them adds nothing a reader needs.
Most-met rivals
Compare any two athletes →Only 2 head-to-head meetings on record so far, with Omar Deckard ahead 2 to 0 - too thin to call a rivalry yet.
Opponents are ranked by how often they shared a stage and how big the stage was, not by reputation. A meeting is one contest where both competed in the same division and both were placed.
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