Long before "wellness" was a word resorts used, one family was already living by physical culture — strength, movement, and the disciplined care of the body. For the Krausers, it goes back to the man who helped give the world's first superhero his shape.
The grandfather who helped shape Superman
In 1939 and 1940, a Polish-American wrestler named Karol Krauser — billed in the ring as the “Polish Apollo” — posed in Florida as one of the real-life physical models for Fleischer Studios' classic Superman animated films. Those shorts, first released in 1941, defined how Superman moved on screen, and the Fleischer animators worked from living athletes to make the figure believable.
Krauser was a fixture of the mid-century wrestling world — later one half of the famous "Kalmikoff brothers" tag team — and a genuine showman; the comedian Stan Laurel, of Laurel and Hardy, was the best man at his wedding. But beneath the spectacle was a serious devotion to conditioning and the trained body that he would pass down through the family.
"The body has always been the family trade — only the era changes."
A trade passed down three generations
That respect for physical culture didn't end in the ring. It became a thread running through the family, and three generations later it lives on in his grandson, Karol Krauser Hasegawa — known professionally as Karol Krauser III. Where the grandfather built a body for the screen, the grandson has spent more than three decades studying how to keep real bodies strong, mobile, and free of pain.
The disciplines have broadened far beyond the iron and the wrestling mat: NASM-certified personal training, clinical and medical massage therapy, yoga therapy, Filipino martial arts, and mindfulness and breathwork. But the underlying conviction is the same one the name has always carried — that the trained, well-cared-for body is the foundation of a good life.
The same name, a new arena
Today that legacy plays out a long way from a 1940s animation studio. Karol works as a visiting wellness practitioner at Forbes Five-Star and MICHELIN Key resorts — among them JOALI BEING, Jumeirah, and Amilla in the Maldives — and works with clients around the world online. Over the years his hands-on work has reached an unusually wide range of people, from touring musicians (he served as Mick Fleetwood's massage therapist on a Fleetwood Mac world tour) to executives and physicians.
It's a fitting next chapter. The first Krauser lent his physique to an icon of strength; the latest helps others rebuild their own. The arena changed from celluloid to the world's most beautiful retreats — but the family trade, the care of the human body, runs straight through.
STRENGTH • MOVEMENT • LONGEVITY
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