Table of Contents Copyright Notice Dedication Acknowledgments Epigraph An Introduction to Anti-Programming A Revolt is in Order Assume Formlessness Here’s How You Use This Book Structuring Your Workouts As such, here are the standard setups for training: The manner in which I typically structure my workouts: Do It. Don’t Talk About It. Rite of Passage Workouts The Baby Steps Workout Murph DT Grace Linda aka "3 Bars of Death" The Horrifically Painful 30 Minute Overhead Anyhow Challenge Chef Rush and the White House Bicep Routine from Hell Steve Michalik’s Intensity and Insanity for Chest, Shoulders, Arms Chest Shoulders Triceps Biceps Abs Marvin Eder- A Festival of Pain… Er, I Mean Dips Bodybuilders Lee Priest: Demigod-Level Arm Training Upper Arms Freddy Ortiz: Add a Couple Reps? How About You Add Some Sets to Grow. Chest
Arms Brutally In-Depth: John DeFendis’ Intensity or Insanity Routine Intensity or Insanity Training Day One Day Two Diet Bob Birdsong- If Overtraining Was a Legitimate Concern, His Corpse Would Extra Dead… and His Forearms Would be Tiny (But He’s Alive and Well) Bob Birdsong’s Six Day a Week Forearm Routine Monday / Wednesday / Friday Tuesday / Thursday Rob Colacino: Psycho-Burst Training Chest Back Shoulders Arms Legs Harold Poole: The Full Body Bloodbath of the First Black Mr. America Full Body Routine, Done 3-4x a Week Dorian Yates: Blood and Guts Day 1- Delts, Traps, Triceps, Abs Day 2- Back, Rear Delts Day 4- Chest and Biceps Day 6- Legs Jeff King: Train Legs Twice a Week and Get Twice the Gainz Off Season Leg Training “Powerlifting” Squat Routine Leo Stern: An Old School Two Day Split for Strength and Mass Days 1, 3, and 5 Days 2,4, and 6 Scott Wilson Back Routine 2-3x a Week John McWilliams: 20” Muscular Arms in the Pre-Steroid Era Prove it is Possible to Do Without Gear
Arms Program Armand Tanny: Old School Superset Madness The Supersets Brutal Bertil Fox: The Strongest Bodybuilder of the 1980s and His Gnarly Strip Sets of Death His Training Split Abs Monday: Shoulders and Arms Tuesday: Back and Chest Wednesday: Legs and Arms Bertil's Beginner's Routine Strongmen Zydrunas Savickas- It’s Hard to Out-Great the GOAT Strongman Monday- Legs Tuesday- Chest and Triceps Wednesday- Back Thursday- Overhead Friday- Conditioning Saturday- Farmer’s Walk Manfred Hoeberl- 26” Arms are Useful in Strongman Hoeberl’s Once Per Week Arm Workout Jesse Marunde: Training Like a Strongman Phenom Morning: Light-to-Moderate Workout (6AM) Basic Warmup Monday- Weightlifting and Sandbags Tuesday- Snatches, Squats, and Sled Wednesday- Light Back and Grip Thursday- Heavy Back and Shoulders Friday- Light Weightlifting and Back Squat to Push Press Saturday- Events (no AM Workout) Sunday- Conditioning Magnus Samuelsson- Legendary Grip Strength Biceps Grip Training Program 1 Grip Training Program 2 Hybrid Athletes Brutally In Depth: Pillow- The Insanely Shredded She-Beast
of Bodybuilding and Nerdlesque Jon Cole- King of the Supertotal and the First Collegiate Strength Coach in History Week One Day 1 Day 2 Day 3 Week Two Day 4 Day 5 Day 6 Brutally In Depth: Chuck Sipes- the Natty AF Bodybuilding Paratrooper With a Bench That Shocked the World Vital Stats Contest History Best Lifts Monday/Thursday Tuesday/Friday Power Arm Routine Monday/Thursday Superset One Superset Two Shape and Size Arm Routine Monday/Thursday Tuesday/Friday Forearm Routine Chet Yorton- the Father of Natural Bodybuilding (And the Only Guy to Beat Arnold) Day 1: Chest, Shoulders and Triceps Day 2: Back, Biceps and Legs Brutally In Depth: Ivan Putski, Overhead Presser Extraordinaire Monday: Chest and Shoulders Tuesday: Legs Wednesday: Arms and Deads Mariusz Pudzianowski- Too Sexy for This Planet Day 1 AM: Legs and Lats Day 1 PM: Events Day 2 AM: Legs and Shoulders
Day 2 PM: Events Day 3 AM: Chest and Tris Day 3 PM: Events Paul Anderson- When You’re This Strong, You Can Pretty Much Do Whatever You Want Powerlifting Routine Mon, Weds, Fri: Shoulders and Chest Tues, Thurs, Sat: Squat and Deadlift Olympic Weightlifting Routine Mon, Weds, and Fri: Everything But the Squat Tues, Thurs, Sat: Squat Svend Karlsen- Viking Power Like What Day 1: Events and Triceps Day 2: Squatting Day 3: Cardio Day 4: More Events Day 5: Deadlifts Day 6: Cardio Day 7: More Deadlifts Day 8: Rest Brutally In Depth: John Grimek- People Take This Programming Shit WAY Too Seriously Vital Statistics Training Outlined Steve Merjanian- I’ve Got 500lb Incline and a Pair of Speedos... Let’s Party Monday / Wednesday / Friday Tuesday / Thursday / Saturday / Sunday Pat Neve- Bench Specialist Turned Bodybuilder Turned Rich Motherfucker Tuesday and Saturday: Bench Training Eddie Robinson- Essentially the WSM of the 1980s Bodybuilding Scene Monday: Abdominals, Chest, Triceps Tuesday: Abdominals, Back, Biceps Wednesday: Off Thursday: Abdominals, Quads, Hamstrings Friday: Abdominals, Shoulders, Calves
Saturday and Sunday: Off Doug Furnas- You Thought Jim Brown and Donald Dinnie had Best All-Round Athlete on Lock? Monday: Legs Tuesday: Off Wednesday: Chest Thursday: Shoulders Friday: Back Saturday: Light Chest and Arms Powerlifters Brutally in Depth: The Compiled Methods of the Original Culver City Westside Barbell Club The Culver City Westside Barbell Crew Bill West's Original Training Methods The Basic Westside Routine Tuesday Wednesday Saturday Sunday The Add-Ons The Rack Pull / Box Deadlift Snatch Grip Deadlift Day Deficit Deadlifts Tuesday Saturday High Pulls / Power Clean Good Mornings Box Squat in the Power Rack Tuesday Bill West's Balls Out Bench Press Routine The Heavy Days The Lighter Day The Westside Triceps Slaughterhouse Tuesday/Friday The Touch System Tuesday Workout Saturday Workout Incline Power Rack Presses Stefi Cohen- The Deadlifting GOAT’s Squat Training
A Squat Session with Stefi Cohen Doug Young- The Bench Press Badass the Internet Loves as a Muscle Bear Legendary 8 Month Bench Specialization Routine Roger Estep- If You’re Gonna Lift Big Weights, You Might as Well Look Good Doing It Monday Wednesday Jeremy Hoornstra- Sometimes Benching More Than You Squat is Cool as Shit Brutally In Depth: Terrible Ted Arcidi, Bench Beast and Utter Maniac Vital Statistics The Various Victuals of Terrible Ted Terrible Ted’s Bench-Tastic Training Cycle Off Season Training Framework Monday: Tuesday: Wednesday: Thursday: Friday: Saturday: 11 Week Contest Cycle Monday (Day 1) Thursday (Day 2) Saturday (Day 3) Jennifer Thompson- Natty Superwoman Speed Week Chest Shoulders and Tris Heavy Week Chest Shoulders and Tris Vince Anello and Larry Pacifico- Bodybuilders and World Champion Powerlifters Flying (and Winning) By the Seats of Their Goddamn Pants Day 1: Deadlift Isometrics Day 2: Light Back Day 3: Heavy Squat and Bench
Day 4: OFF Day 5: Deadlift Day 6: More Light Back Day 7: Squat and Bench Brutally In Depth: Pat Casey Outworks Everyone in History Monday: Tuesday Friday Saturday: Monday Wednesday Friday Pat Casey’s Shoulder and Arm Specialization Monday Wednesday Friday Weightlifters Dmitriy Klokov- If Jesus Had Been a Russian Weightlifter, His Name Would Have Been Klokov, Because This Motherfucker Walks on Water Monday Tuesday Wednesday Friday Saturday Russ Knipp- He Strict Pressed Your Best Bench… Weighing Only 165lbs Mon, Wed, Fri Tues and Thurs Saturday Brutally In Depth: Ike Berger- The Odd Lift Virtuoso and Beast-Mode, Pocket-Sized Weightlifter Contest Prep Routine Monday (Medium-Heavy) Wednesday (Medium) Friday (Heavy as Hell) Monday (Medium-Heavy) Wednesday (Medium) Friday (Heavy as Hell)
Brutally In Depth: Coach Fang, Tian Tao, and Squatting Like a Fucking Monster with the Chinese Weightlifting Method Tian Tao, the Squatting Machine Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday Some of the Assistance Work Bob Bednarski- 100% American Built Muscle Monday Morning: Monday Evening Wednesday Morning Wednesday Evening Saturday Sunday Wrestlers / Fighters / Arm Wrestlers / Random Weirdos Brutally In Depth: Bruno Sammartino- From War Refugee to World Champion Elias: Badass Active Recovery on a Rest Day George Irving Nathanson: Rest Pause Insanity for One Lift Specialization Isaac Nesser: Probable Bullshit Artist, But Interesting Nonetheless Monday: Heavy Day (Legs) Tuesday: Light Day (Arms and Shoulders) Wednesday: Heavy Day (Back) Thursday: Light Day (Shoulders and Arms) Friday: Heavy Day (Chest) Saturday: Light Day (Speed Training) Sunday: Heavy Day (Legs) Braun Strowman: Simulating Strongman Events to Trash Guys Who Have Real Implements Use A Squat Rack To Simulate A Car Deadlift Seated Military Press on a Flat Bench For The Log Clean and Press Squat Rack Isometrics as a Substitute for the Yoke
Use a bucket of sand for the Farmer's Walk. Rob Vigant Jr’s Forearms of Doom Brutally In Depth: The Ultimate Warrior, The Ultimate Warrior’s Vital Stats The Warrior's Mass Split Monday / Thursday: Squats and Deadlifts Tuesdays / Friday: Chest and Back Weekend: Shoulders and Arms The Warrior's Routine on the Road Goldberg: Train Like an Athlete and You’ll Perform Like One Monday- Cleans and Squats Tuesday- Snatches and Incline Bench Thursday- Overhead and Back Friday- More Overhead and High Pulls Diet: This Shit Ain’t That Hard Unless You’re Already a Disgusting Landbeast (and I Mean Landbeast, not “Could Be Leaner”), Bulk, then Cut Randall's First Routine, Aka the "Curls for the Girls" Routine The Basis of Bruce Randall's Second Routine Randall's Best Lifts (after 2 years of training, at 335-410lbs) Randall's "Reduction" Routine Breakfast Lunch Dinner Bruce Randall's Competition History Another Case for Bulking First- The Story of 1980s Powerlifting Monster George Hechter The Hepburn Routine A Month of Meals for Assholes A Word on Eating Red Meat The Basics Better Brisket Than Most Restaurants (Without Using Brisket or a Smoker) Mamma Chaos’ Meatballs Tara’s Oven Roasted Chicken
Mamma Chaos (Almost) Competition Winning Chili Tara’s Tacos (without the Envelope) The Easiest Portable Gainz in History- Mexican Beef, Beans, and Rice The Fat Kid Meals Jamie’s Butter Chicken Sausage Gravy That Will Get You Laid Tara’s more Bacon than Potato Soup Baked Mac and Cheese Hypertrophic Coney Island Hot Dogs The Greek Sauce Isocaloric (If you want) Spaghetti Pie Lazy ass meal prep, Keto(ish) Keto Chicken Tenders Tara’s Bone Broth Tara’s Lazyass Crockpot Buffalo Chicken One Pan Oh Fuck! Keto Chicken and Sausage Bake Jamie’s Go To: Steak and Chimi The Chimi The Steak Crockpot Carnitas Chicken Asparagus Packages Egg Cupcakes “Everyone Loves Bacon” Wrapped Chicken Parmesan Crunchies Lazy ass meal prep, Marinades LT's Easy Ass Marinade Drunk Limey Bastard Jamie’s Go To Garlic - Parm Marinade Basic Garlic Herb Butter Use Everywhere Marinade Lazy ass meal prep, Rotisserie Chicken Meals Chicken-Broccoli Alfredo Chicken Tortilla Soup Italian Wedding Soup Spicy Baked Broccoli & chicken Before You Buy a Weight Gainer, Behold the Bulking Shakes of the
Golden Age of Bodybuilding Blair's Creamy Delicious Blair's Light Creamy Blair's Yogurt Delight Blair's California Coconut Delight Vince Gironda's Hormone Precursor Shake Bob Hoffman's Hi-Proteen Shake McCallum's Get Big Drink
365 Days of Brutality An Anti - Programming Manifesto
By Jamie Lewis Edited By Tara Chaos Cover Image by Brigitte Werner (pixabay.com/werner22brigitte) Cover Art By Tara Chaos First Edition – July 2019
Copyright Notice
365 Days of Brutality by Jamie Lewis Published by Plague of Strength, LTD. Roebling, NJ 08554 www.plagueofstrength.com © 2019 Jamie Lewis
All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law. For permissions contact: [emailprotected]
Cover by Tara Chaos Cover Art By Brigitte Werner Ebook ASIN: B07RRR7J7J Amazon ISBN: 9781098582784
Dedication
This is for all those who supported the old Chaos and Pain blog, Chaos and Pain supplements, and now Plague of Strength, You rule. Thanks for supporting the strength sports underground. And to all of those who said I couldn't, shouldn't and wouldn't ? Suck it.
Acknowledgments Plague of Strength would like to acknowledge the following people, because without you guys the book wouldn’t have gotten done: Cali Sean… Thank you for all the pizzas, friendly ears, and chances to shoot shit. And the help with the AC unit, cause we would have killed each other long before the book was done without AC. All of badass donors at Plague of Strength… without your help, none of this would be possible. To the people who have supported Chaos and Pain over the years- thanks for betting on the only person in the industry who was willing to tell it like it is and actually help people get stronger, rather than just pretend to be a bro, steal money for shit information, and generally fuck up the lifting scene. And finally…we would like to offer a special thank you to both of our families for making us the adorable, stubborn badasses we are today. Mama & Pops Chaos, Mr. and Mrs. Lewis - w ithout you pushing us and putting up with us and pushing us to be the best uses possible, none of this would have come to fruition . You were pivotal in us turning out to be the orkish, hardworking, ironlus t-having maniacs we have come to be.
Epigraph
“Work hard, play hard. And whatever you do, do it with the volume turned up.” Nolan Bushnell, genius founder of Atari and Chuck E. Cheese, and arguably the best employer in the history of commerce
An Introduction to AntiProgramming
Over the course of the last ten years, it seems, lifting has gone from a pastime for athletic misfits who wanted an outlet for their aggression and testosterone to a milquetoast, mainstream pastime that most people view as work, and one that most lifters treat like they’re punching a clock on an assembly line. Gone is the artistry, inventiveness, and camaraderie, replaced by a bunch of dickheads in pastel velour and lame ass Gymshark shirts bearing spiritless programs created by soulless, thieving, snake oil salesmen with no respect for the culture they’re actively destroying. What you will find in these pages are a hazy outline of success, not a step-bystep guide to physical greatness. There is no step-by-step roadmap to strength sports success , and anyone who says otherwise is selling you a goddamn lie. Champions are forged, not formulated, and it is the fire of their will that shapes them, not the byzantine mathematical process by which some long-dead Russian prescribed training methods for a pack of half-starved peasants, poisoned by their environment, living under a brutal, despotic regime (I’m talking about periodization, for those of you who don’t get the reference). That’s right- this is an anti-programming manifesto . If you shelve this book next to a copy of Zatsiorsky’s text or Siff’s bland bullshit, there is a very real chance those other books will screech and burn and run flaming into the night. Nevermind the ethereal, spidery arms of doom projecting from this book’s cover when that happens- they’re just here to keep you safe from the spate of knownothing charlatans who consider Henry Ford to be the godfather of modern bodybuilding. “We’re the anti-influencer influencers,” said badass gourmet ice cream truck owner Joe Nicci. “It’s weird … but I think it’s really fun. I hope it inspires [people] to hold their own and tell [influencers] to fuck off.” No matter what 150lb “gurus” on Instagram might assert, programming is, by and large, utter bullshit. It’s unnecessary and counterproductive for most people, and has been sold to people who don’t know any better because it takes thought out of the equation and allows lifters to blame other people when their progress stalls or the program fails. And even when it succeeds, what assures the lifter that they could not have matched the results they achieved, or exceeded them, simply on the merits of their own hard work? Nothing. That’s what.
Maybe you drive the speed limit on a deserted highway in the middle of the night, when there’s no traffic. You could get where you’re going a hell of a lot faster, but you’re of the opinion that slow and steady wins the race, and you’re gonna follow the directions of a person you’ve never met to get the most people to a destination in a reasonable period of time, not the people who blazed new trails, tried alternative routes and different means of travel. Well, if you are that kind of slow-and-steady wins the race type, put this book down and walk away, and enjoy your lifetime of drudgery and mediocrity. Lifting weights and dieting is just as much a method of self-expression as painting or acting. There’s a reason that certain actors take such pride in the physical transformations they pull off- for guys like Tom Hardy, looking like Bane was just as important as acting like a homicidal maniac. It’s not supposed to be some sort of shake and bake, four month transformation that you post about on Instagram and then abandon. Lifting, real lifting , is gritty, dirty, sweaty battle between you and gravity. It’s about relentless self improvement in the face of any and all adversity. About overcoming obstacles and destroying them to get what you want. Yeah, this book flies in the face of just about every goddamned thing you read on the internet these days. For instance, there’s no talk of RPEs because RPEs are a stupid metric for weak people who don’t work hard. I’ve been training for over 25 years, set a world record in powerlifting without even training two of the lifts (I never trained the reverse grip I used on the bench, and hadn’t deadlifted once in the gym for at least two years prior to breaking the total and tying the squat records), and know a lot of elite lifters and world record holders- there is not a single one of them who uses that dumbass goddamn metric . And before you kvetch and whine and wring your hands about magical steroids enabling people to do anything they want, take note of the fact that I’ve included plenty of pre-steroid era lifters in here. This obviates the need for calling bullshit on their natty status, though I know the internet seems to think the use of fake plates was in vogue back in those days for some reason (that’s really an internet age thing unless you were doing a photo shoot for a magazine or in a film- fake plates were not easy to come by).
A Revolt is in Order What I am suggesting here is a full blown revolt against the current status quo in the lifting world. It is full to bursting with bullshit artists and charlatans of every kind, fake coaches, imaginary gurus, and an untold number of people who are looking to make a quick buck off kids who don’t know any better. Revolt, not reform, allows one to transcend the present and perfect the future. It is proactive, while the latter is reactive- it is destruction for its own sake, with little regard for what replaces the present state. It is revolt, then, that must save us, because we are creatures teetering on the brink of extinction. Efficiency shall not play a role in this revolt, because efficiency and mediocrity are shacked up together having the lamest, one pile of laundry atop another pile of laundry uninspired sex you wish you hadn’t tried to imagine. Consider the application of efficiency to nearly anything that requires passion- in literature, efficient writing is often dull to the point of being unreadable; in sex, efficiency is not going to have your partner bragging on Insta about how you blew out her back or he or she yours, because efficient sex is just enough to get the job done; efficient fighters win by decision, balancing their strengths against those of their opponent to win Mayweather-style snoozefests; efficient design and architecture is always spartan and ultimately forgettable; and efficient warfighting is often indecisive and protracted. Passionate people go all in to win it all, and hold nothing in reserve. Anything less than total victory or total effort is complete defeat and a waste of goddamned time. "Enemies are the price of success." True strength is feared, reviled, marginalized, and demonized. Self-reliance is lambasted as exclusionary and sociopathy. Self improvement in the modern era has become the disgusting field of "self help", which is naught but excusemaking and pseudoscience. True self improvement is considered at best to be self-indulgent and at worst to be self-destructive solipsism, when it is in fact neither.
This book is not designed for me to “help me, help you”- this book is designed for you to grab your balls or ovaries, head to the gym, and smash some iron in a manner inspired by the greats. In a way that allows you to look at the dickheads in your gym who are punching a clock like Soviet factory workers while utilizing some garbage program created for long dead, half starved Russian field hands and laugh, because you will succeed where they failed on your own merit. And you will do so by training hard, enjoying it as you do so, and doing it with the goddamn volume turned up to 11 .
Assume Formlessness A wise man once said, “Seek change within yourself and find out what is permanent.” That is great advice throughout life, but even more so inside the gym. Don’t just pick a sport because you think it’s cool and do that to the exclusion of all of the other cool shit out there. When you do that, you end up the powerlifter with a shit overhead press, or the weightlifter who can’t bench your bodyweight, or a strongman competitor who’s so broken from only training events they can’t just smash through a hammer strength workout and enjoy the massive pump they get. You don’t want to end up in a situation in any gym where someone can chump you on their pet lift when you’re in a new environment. Yeah, they might edge you out, but you at least want to be in the conversation, right? By the same token, you don’t want to be the slob who’s the strongest person in the gym but afraid to hit the beach and strip to their swimsuit. Damn that “Doughnuts and deadlifts” horseshit- the goal of lifting has always been to look good, feel like a demigod, and throw around serious weight. Keep your competition and yourself off-balance. Challenge yourself. Doing the same boring bullshit day in and day out does neither. Continue to re-form yourself according to what you want to achieve. Yeah, the Redditors in your gym will accuse you of “program hopping,” because they are weak people with no goals who want others to be the same lame sonsabitches that they are. Call it periodization if you want, but periodically switching your focus from one discipline to another, or to a grab bag of all of them, will keep you from getting stale, and that is the key to longevity in training. Additionally, those bare bones
programs neglect every cool little muscle that prevents injury when you jack something up during a lift- they’re the precious little unnameable muscles that you need to work with the weird stuff to ensure your physique is as wellbalanced as you think it is with a bare bones routine. “No phenomenon exhibits “being.” All phenomena consist of ongoing processes; they consist of various doings.” That means you are not a powerlifter. You are not a bodybuilder. You are not a weightlifter. You are not a strongman. You are a lifter. The sport in which you compete doesn’t define you- the weight you move and the force of will you exert against it does. Whatever sport you pick isn’t gonna make you “cool.” By and large, those people in the gym who define themselves by the sport about which almost no one in the world gives a flying rat’s ass are the least likeable, most unjustifiably pompous shitbirds across which you’ll runif you hadn’t noticed, powerlifters are about as low on the public’s watchlist for sports as it could be, beaten easily by weightlifting and strongman simply because they’re on TV. Nevertheless, the average person doesn’t give a single wet shit about any of them, because they have no metric by which they can compare your pet lift with the weight and strain of a daily activity. Before you run off screaming about the hypocrisy inherent in the above statement given the various sections of this book, calm your tits. The sections are divided as such to give you an idea of the workouts contained therein. As a general rule, I chose athletes who were both strong and well built, so that none of them could be pigeonholed at a glance as one thing or another. As you’ll see with the hybrid athletes in particular, but throughout the book, is that from the Chinese weightlifting team using bodybuilding exercises to bodybuilders who bench 500 for reps, blending your methodologies and lifting disciplines yields far more results than dogmatically repeating the performance of a few lifts. And more than that- restricting yourself to a single discipline is painfully boring and belies a lack of imagination and true appreciation for lifting that would indicate that you should probably just take up knitting and stop taking up space in our gyms.
Need more convincing? ● CrossFit champ Tia-Clair Tommy has no program of any kind, and she actively avoids falling into a routine with their training. Toomey, weighing 125, pulled 415, strict pressed 130, and squatted 330 in the CrossFit total, doing nine max effort attempts in 12 minutes (4 minutes for 3 attempts at each lift). That puts her in the top 15 squats at that weight in 2018 and top 3 deadlifts, and she both loaded her own weights and did all of her attempts for each lift within four goddamned minutes. And if that wasn’t enough, she also pulled down a gold medal in weightlifting in the Commonwealth Games that same year. ● 63 year old armwrestling monster Richard Lupkes, who also wrestled for about a decade in the WCW, has only ever seen an arm wrestling table in tournaments. For his training he just lifts as heavy as humanly possible, 23 hours a day, 5-6 days a week. ● The Chinese Olympic weightlifting team is required to do bodybuilding exercises at the end of every workout to improve their overhead strength, and they all look like bodybuilders as a result. ● Chen Wei-ling, a Taiwanese weightlifter who snagged Olympic gold in her weightclass in 2008 has parlayed her insane abilities into a number of all time records in powerlifting as well. ● Practically every useful wrestler you can name from the 70s, 80s, and 90s had a bench of between 500 and 700 pounds, and they almost all came from a background in bodybuilding, not powerlifting.
Here’s How You Use This Book This is clearly not a book for beginners . There are plenty out there if you want one, but if you’re new to the game, you can always just on into the more difficult shit- I’d just cut the number of sets per exercise in half, at least until you build a baseline level of physical fitness. If you want a beginner oriented book, I recommend Dinosaur Training by Brooks Kubik. It’s not technically a beginner book, but hopefully you’re the sort who’s chewing nails and shitting lightning rather than slumping their way through the gym, which would mean you’re not someone who thinks they need training wheels. And that’s good, because you don’t.
Structuring Your Workouts Because everyone is so hell bent on paying for their gains and begging strangers for their useless, uninformed, and counterproductive opinions rather than experimenting themselves and seeing what works for them, no one seems to know what the fuck they’re doing in the gym anymore. Without some vaunted program, they’re just wandering around the gym like brainless assholes, never actually committing to an exercise and ultimately getting nothing done. You have to commit . Not to a program, or even a workout. Gains are made by committing yourself fully to the task at hand, no matter how goddamned stupid, and bending the very laws of gravity to your inexorable will. This means that when you choose to do something in the gym, that set is all you are- you have to tune out all of the bullshit around you, ignore everyone and everything and throw yourself into that set, and that rep. Stop texting and filming and all of that shit. Throw on some music that wills your eyes with blood and your heart with hate and attack the weights like they committed an unspeakable act. That is how you make gains- not by entering numbers into a
spreadsheet and blindly following some dumbshit program like a lemming off a cliff. I realize you’re still going to want some structure, because for whatever reason, people deny the efficacy of my grab bag approach. The only rule here is that you should avoid doing the same thing today that you did yesterday. That doesn’t mean exercises or bodyparts- all of that nonsense about making no gains if you train the same lifts daily runs counter to the entirety of human existence. If you can’t build muscle training the same muscle groups daily, how are the Chinese Olympic weightlifters so jacked? Why are gymnasts the most muscular people under 5’ you ever saw? Why do cyclists have such crazy quad and calf development? Like I said, it’s time to forget most of what you know, because if you think about it, most of what you know could be disproven by a middle school kid who’s become “the jacked kid” in school by doing pushups all summer, Herschell Walker style.
As such, here are the standard setups for training: ● Push/Pull/Squat . Pretty straightforward. Day 1 you do upper body pushing movements, Day 2 is pulling, Day 3 you train your legs. Then you either rest, or repeat once and then rest. ● Bodypart - Train a major bodypart a day. This isn’t rocket surgery. A lot of people run these two days on, one off. You can experiment with the off days, or just take them as you need them, which seems to be a bit less rigid (and far more intelligent). ● Movement- Train a movement a day, like the clean, or the squat, etc. Those are pretty fun to do, and one set/rep scheme I like for this is 10,8,6,4,2,2,4,6,8,10. Each set gets progressively heavier, after you warmup. The second double is heavier than the first, and then the sets thereafter are all heavier than your initial set with that rep count. This is awesome for just about any movement you pick. Rest days work the same as bodypart routines.
● Full Body - Pretty simple- train the full body every day. Olympic lifters love doing this, and old school guys like Harold Poole, as you’ll see, built the basis for their physiques with them. So when you happen upon something you want to try in these pages, just grab it and mash it into your week. Find a way to wedge it in. Get creative- it’ll fit. And if it doesn’t fit, make it fit.
The manner in which I typically structure my workouts: I truly despise writing about myself, but I am invariably and incessantly asked. As such, here we go. Pick an exercise or a bodypart. My choice varies from day to day. If I were to pick military press, I would do that first, for singles, doubles, and triples. Then, I would backload a ton of volume into the rest of the workout with machines and cables, hitting the main muscle group and some of the supporting muscle groups. So, my workout would look like this: Standing Military Press - 3 x 3; 5 x 2; 3 x 1 Hammer Strength Shoulder Press - 6 x 4-15 Cable Lateral Raises - 4 x 15 Rear Lateral Raises - 4 x 16 Straight Bar Pushdowns - 4 x 12 As a general rule, I throw rear delts and triceps in with as much frequency as possible, because they can handle a ton of volume and there has never in history been a person with either of those muscle groups so overdeveloped they looked grotesque. Be a size queen - bigger is indeed better.
Last, but not least, unless otherwise indicated, the sets listed throughout this book are work sets, not work sets + warmups . It’s always a good idea to throw in some warmup sets, because few of us can jump into work weights without getting our head into the game a bit. Plus, it’ll keep you from having your limbs just rip right off and spine crumble like an old cookie for piling weight on them without priming the pump first, so to speak.
Do It. Don’t Talk About It. Rocky Marciano once said, “Do it. Don’t talk about it.” The man was the only undefeated heavyweight champion ever and was so undersized he’d even be a small cruiserweight today. In spite of being pocket-sized and not particularly quick or skilled, he out-worked everyone and went on to win 43 fights by knockout. This beast never talked about being the champ outside of the ring- the neighborhood kids were amazed that he’d come home from fights and toss the football around with them in the street like regular-old Joe Blow. Did he ever bore them to death with talk of his workouts, or his diet, or any other of the lifting-related minutia people endlessly discuss as if it matters in the slightest? No- he was too busy training, or reading books, or playing football with neighborhood kids, or practicing his Italian. There’s a great big wide world out there, assholes. So shut the hell up about training and your diet and learn about it. What matters is exactly what most people lack: effort. Execution. And the reason? They spend so much energy boring everyone to death with talk of what they’re doing or going to do that they siphon valuable energy from what they should be doing- training. When you do that, you’re an energy leech off yourself and others and you’re preventing yourself from being anything than what the hideously vast majority of people are- pathetically average or below average. While we’re at it, stop telling people your training and physique goals. Holy shit. Years ago, I thought I had driven this goddamned point home harder than Paul Walker drove his into a lamp post, but here’s a refresher- if you tell people your goals, you’re less likely to achieve them than Paul Walker and Ryan Dunn are to star in the next Fast and the Furious. It’s science– people who do that create something called a social reality in which their brain thinks its achieved the goal already, and the social recognition everyone seems to crave so much
makes them so absurdly happy inside that they just throw up your hands and say to hell with it, I’m close enough... and then proceed to bore us all with endless posts of spiritless gym drudgery replete with a litany of excuses for poor performance. To Wrap Things Up… This is not your sport. It’s the sport of the people who came before you. People who didn’t define themselves by a particular weightlifting discipline, but instead just lifted and busted their asses and had fun doing it. People who were perfectly happy to hear your training maxes because they only competed to prove they were the best, rather than get some worthless trophy or medal to validate their existence. The sport of people who would all show up to a competition if someone from their gym was competing, because it meant that person had a legit shot at winning– and even if they didn’t we’d descend on a pizza place in a mob after screaming ourselves hoarse in support of our friends, and bullshit about just about anything but training while we stuffed ourselves with food. This is the sport of the dudes who trained outside at Muscle Beach in the 1960s. This is the sport of Saxon and Goerner and the dudes who trained in their gyms and trained like goddamn lunatics. If you don’t want to be awesome, if you don’t want to exhibit the modicum of personal pride that should prevent you from posting lackluster videos on the internet and endlessly discussing training minutiae online while skipping workouts or meals, if you need Fitspo to get into the gym or not fall down weeping when someone doesn’t tell you how pretty you are in the office one day, then GET THE FUCK OUT. We don’t want you. We don’t need you. We don’t like you. We absolutely hate you. We want the goddamn weight stack to fall on your weepy little head every time we see you in the gym. Now get out there. I want you to change the world. Don’t think it’ll change peacefully or you can do it alone. You need to eat the weak. You use the contents of this book to rip weight rooms apart. You hunt down the armchair internet form critics, the Fitspo dickheads on Instagram, the fitness models, the scumbags with GoFundMe pages for
competitions, and the loudmouth natty pussies, the unqualified coaches, the people who won’t shut up about their goddamn macros, the sensitive. Because they’re all the same. And you… you rip their fucking guts out. Drape them on your Christmas tree. Make a mountain of their skulls in the foyer of your local gym. We need a cleanse, people. We need a reboot. We need a new chance for all of us. But I cannot do this work alone. I need you not to suck. Or I will have to break into your goddamn house and eat you.
Rite of Passage Workouts Most of the cooler societies in the pre-Christian West and the rest of the premodern world had numerous rituals known as initiation rites, or rite of passage. These rituals were designed to create a boundary in a person's life between one stage and another. A trial by fire, as it were, though instead of a Christian witch hunt, this separated men and women from boys and girls, the married from the unmarried, the marriageable from the unmarriageable. For the Taiwanese aborigines, this meant they had to kill a member of a neighboring tribe and bring back their head. Once the headhunter had returned successfully, he was able to have his face tattooed, and was then able to get married. To be a part of the Zaporozhian Cossacks, the Ukraine’s maniacal mercenary cowboy/Hun mashup, recruits had to prove their horsemanship, fighting skills, their ability to shoot and fight from horseback, and had to swim… in addition to prove their ability to hold their liquor. One of the craziest initiation rituals is the one the Mawe have for their warriors. The Mawe engage in little agriculture, so their warriors must be excellent hunters as well as stone age badasses defending their tribal lands against any and all comers, including dickheads with guns. Thus, these men must be truly hard motherfuckers. To confirm these dudes are harder than nails made from Wolverine’s claws after getting on the wrong side of Dark Phoenix, they have to undergo an ordeal 20 times beginning when they’re 12. The ordeal? They have to weak a pair of gloves for five full minutes. No bigs, right? Yeah, except that the gloves have dozens of bullet ants sewn into them. Bullet ants are inch long harbingers of jungle doom- the types of ants set on that poor asshole in the Green Inferno after he has all of his limbs smashed to bits with that massive stone club.
The bite of a single bullet ant can cause hours of pain, paralysis, and hallucinations, and these kids have to endure five full minutes of repeated bites by these things… 20 times until they’re considered warriors. You might think this to be barbarism, but it’s actual evil genius at work. Studies have shown that when they’re trying to conform to gender stereotypes, pain thresholds increase concurrently with aggression levels. Thus, when the guys are expected to endure the pain with the same snarky badassery or Jason Statham, and they do so, they become more aggressive as a result, and their pain threshold increases. What’s that mean for you? Put yourself through hell in the weight room on occasion and you’ll find you’re that much more a badass in daily life as a result. Well, provided you’re a guy who conforms to the idea that guys should be jacked versions of Otis Firefly meets Clint Eastwood meets Ryan Gosling in Driver . If you’re a woman or an effeminate guy, surround yourself with people who expect you to be a badass and then be one- you’ll benefit from the experience. You’ll notice a bunch of these are CrossFit workouts, because they’re the closest thing I could find to the workouts I remember tearing me up in high school and college.
The Baby Steps Workout This was Tara Chaos’ introductory workout the first day she joined a CrossFit gym. You’ve gotta crawl before you can walk, and if you’re not elite level fit or haven’t been a high school wrestler, played varsity football in high school or college, rowed, boxed, or played another hyper-intense sport that involved insane levels of muscular endurance and pain tolerance, this might be an excellent way for you to start. * Editor’s Note: The Baby Steps Workout sucks no matter WHAT level you are. Why? Because the more fit you are, the faster you are supposed to make it through a round. Which means what took me a minute a round (I don’t remember
how many rounds I did, that was an example) should only take you as an advanced athlete 45 seconds or 30 seconds. AMRAP in 15 min 5 Pushups 10 Situps 15 Air Squats
Murph This is a classic CrossFit workout that will test your conditioning on the same level your missionary skills would get tested at a Christian orgy. Even conducted without the weight vest, this workout will break your ass if you go balls out. For Time 1 mile Run 100 Pullups 200 Pushups 300 Air Squats 1 mile Run All with a Weight Vest (20/14 lb) Good time to beat for unpartitioned Murph (athletes typically break up the exercises into increments of 5, 10, and 15, respectively): 70 min 07 sec – Fitness Level 0 – Beginner athlete 63 min 45 sec – Fitness Level 25 – Beginner athlete 57 min 17 sec – Fitness Level 50 – Average athlete 47 min 01 sec – Fitness Level 75 – Average athlete
40 min 37 sec – Fitness Level 90 – Advanced athlete 36 min 45 sec – Fitness Level 95 – Advanced athlete 32 min 34 sec – Fitness Level 98 – Elite athlete 28 min 35 sec – Fitness Level 100 – Regional athlete
DT Five rounds for time of: Deadlift - 12 x 155lbs (Same weight men and women) Hang Power Clean - 9 x 155lbs Push Jerk - 6 x 155lbs For this one, a good time to beat is 8 minutes with good time cap of 13 minutes.
Grace This one looks easy as shit but is fucking gnarly. And if you just feel like going heavy but don’t have a lot of time, male CrossFitters have gone up to 315 for this, and Sarah Sigmudsdottir has done Grace with 220. This one is scalable, so you can basically set yourself on fire like goddamned Buddhist monk in the Vietnam war with this workout if you want to, and you’ll be out of the gym in a half hour. For Time- 30 Clean-and-Jerks (135/95 lb) Good time to beat for Grace: 6 min 40 sec – Fitness Level 0 – Beginner athlete 06 min 00 sec – Fitness Level 25 – Beginner athlete 05 min 14 sec – Fitness Level 50 – Average athlete
04 min 05 sec – Fitness Level 75 – Average athlete 03 min 24 sec – Fitness Level 90 – Advanced athlete 03 min 00 sec – Fitness Level 95 – Advanced athlete 02 min 34 sec – Fitness Level 98 – Elite athlete 02 min 11 sec – Fitness Level 100 – Regional athlete
L inda aka "3 Bars of Death" If you are ever short on time and want to get in a quick workout, you’d be hard pressed to top this. Hell, if you did nothing but this workout every day for a week, you’d almost definitely look better at the end of the week than you did at the beginning. The weights are pretty light for an elite lifter, but if you jump on YouTube, you’ll see powerlifters in great shape getting wrecked by the listed weights. 10-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1 Reps, For Time Deadlift (1.5 bodyweight) Bench Press (bodyweight) Clean (3/4 bodyweight) Good time to beat Linda: 32 min 03 sec – Fitness Level 0 – Beginner athlete 28 min 34 sec – Fitness Level 25 – Beginner athlete 25 min 07 sec – Fitness Level 50 – Average athlete 19 min 53 sec – Fitness Level 75 – Average athlete 16 min 42 sec – Fitness Level 90 – Advanced athlete 14 min 50 sec – Fitness Level 95 – Advanced athlete 12 min 51 sec – Fitness Level 98 – Elite athlete 11 min 00 sec – Fitness Level 100 – Regional athlete
Th e Horrifically Painful 30 Minute Overhead Anyhow Challenge If memory serves correctly, this was a CrossFit Challenge from around 2008, but I’ve not been able to find any corroborating source for that claim. Wherever it came from, this workout left me so goddamned sore that walking was painful for a week, because the arches of my feet and toes were killing me. Nothing I’ve done before or since, from high school to college wrestling to insane BUDsinspired workouts led by a former SEAL was even half as brutal as this workout. This is definitely something that you do once in your life and check it off the list, because even though I’m certain it forces growth and burns fat like crazy, it’s just too goddamned unpleasant to do on a regular basis. The Challenge : Get the bar from your shoulders to lockout overhead as many times as possible in 30 minutes. Jerk it, push jerk it, press it, from the front or back, for AMRAP in a half hour. 85% of bodyweight for men; 65% for women. As I recall, I hit 227 reps with 165 when I weighed 180.
Chef Rush and the White House Bicep Routine from Hell
For those of you who are unaware, a chef who has worked in the White House since George W. Bush rocks 24” biceps at 45 years of age, and his bicep workout
is the kind of insanity you would expect for that sort of measurement. In addition to the 2,222 pushups he does every single morning, Chef Andre Rush trains biceps every 72 hours to ensure that his arms are stretching the tape at the two foot mark year round. Before you embark upon this workout, know that even I would approach this thing with trepidation. If you’re planning on doing it once, make sure you’re not going to help someone move or a body for a couple of days, because you might find yourself incapable of lifting whomever has been “disappeared.” If you’re planning on doing it with regularity, I’d start with two sets of each and work my way up to the prescribed number of sets. That’s a hell of a lot of bicep work. Seated Alternating Dumbbell Curl - 5 x 25 Seated Dumbbell Curl (both arms)- 5 x 25 (these are typically done with a shorter range of motion, quickly, for pump) Wrist Roller - 5 sets Standing Cambered Bar Curl (close grip)- 4 x 25 Standing Cambered Bar Curl (wide grip)- 4 x 25 Standing Tri-Set - 4 x 12 reps (do all three exercises with no rest and same weight) Alternating Dumbbell Curl. Crossover Curl (curl each weight up towards your opposite shoulder). Hammer Curl Preacher Curl - 4 x 15 Single Arm Cable Cur - Drop set starting at 72lbs and going to the last weight (you should go lighter)
Steve Michalik’s Intensity and Insanity for Chest, Shoulders, Arms
While the above pic certainly isn’t the best picture of Michalik I could find, it is the most hilarious. What you’re seeing is a record album cover for a record in which Steve Michalik narrates a workout to you, as you do it. On vinyl, because he even predated cassette tapes. With that bizarre bit of bodybuilding nostalgia out of the way, Steve Michalik was a bonafide manic in an era jam-packed to bursting with utter psychopaths. His gym boasted a front window forever being replaced because he would throw members who pissed him off through it. He’s chase down people on the highway in a fit of road rage and beat them and their passengers in the street. This man was such a maniac that if he was around today he’d have 5150 tattooed across his face, because he and his lifting partners would get so hyped up that one of them stood in the street convinced he could stop a moving truck with the power of his physique.
That man did not walk again, as I recall, so let’s avoid hitting those levels of alternative consciousness, eh? Nevertheless, Michalik was a man genetics his parents fished out of a Taco Bell dumpster, who built a brutal physique out of nothing but insane levels of hard work… and although he did use a boatload of steroids later in his career, began it competing in the first natty bodybuilding organization on the planet, which had multiple layers of testing to confirm competitors’ nattiness (in a bygone era, nattiness actually described a welldressed man, but we’ll ignore that so the Redditors feel less illiterate). What follows is not three workouts, nor is it a workout done once a week. This bugfuck crazy list of exercises was done three times a week, alternated with a legs and back workout. Prepare for pain.
Chest Barbell Pullover - 4 x 15 (same weight on each set) Bench Press - 6 x 10-16 (worked up to 405, and last set is a drop set with three drops, each one removing 10-15% of the total weight for an AMRAP set) Decline Press - 6 x 10-16 (worked up to 345, then the drop set) Incline Press - 6 x 10-16 (worked up to 300, then the drop set)
Shoulders
Seated Press (on machine) - 5 x 10-16 (worked up to 205, then the drop set) Seated Behind the Neck Press (on machine) - 5 x 10-16 (worked up to 175, then the drop set) Lateral Raises - 4 x 10-16 (worked up to 45, then the drop set)
Shrugs - 4 x 10-16 (only worked up to 300, for some reason, then the drop set)
Triceps
Skullcrushers - 6 x 10-16 (worked up to 345, then the drop set) Seated Cambered Bar Overhead Extensions - 6 x 10-16 (worked up to 150, then the drop set) Decline Skullcrushers - 6 x 10-16 (worked up to 150, then the drop set)
Biceps Single Arm Preacher Curl - 4 x 6 x 10-16 (worked up to 75, then the drop set) Incline Curl - 4 x 6 x 10-16 (worked up to 85, then the drop set) Standing Curl - 4 x 6 x 10-16 (all with 120lbs) supersetted with Preacher Curl - 4 x 6 x 10-16 (all with 110lbs) . Calves - 15 x 20
Abs Decline Situps - He did an insane amount of decline situps, starting at the highest incline, doing as many situps as possible, then lowering it one setting
and repeating until he’s repped out at the lowest setting. Hanging Leg Raises - 4 x 15-20 supersetted with Side Bends (with light dumbbell)- 4 x 15-20
Marvin Eder- A Festival of Pain… Er, I Mean Dips Marvin Eder is one of those old school guys who seems about as much like Paul Bunyan as a guy into whom you might run in the gym. His lifts were crazy for a 190lb guy- a 515lb flat packed bench press (after having the weight handed to him), a Steinborn Squat of 550 lbs for 10, 12 one-arm chins, a 337lb competition overhead clean and press (not a jerk, but a strict press), and a 365lb overhead press out of the rack, all at a bodyweight of around 190. Eder’s lifts all predated the influx of steroids into the lifting scene, and Eder’s disillusionment with the AAU kept him from competing after steroids hit the scene. Thus, he was a natty bro who could move absolutely insane weights and recover from crazy intense workouts. One of Eder’s favorite exercises was the dip- he did them both for reps and weight, and he did them for insane volumes of work- we’re talking training sessions that occasionally stretched to seven hours. Even when he was in his seventies, Eder was still doing dips like a maniac- sets of 5 with 70lbs and sets of 50 unweighted. So, it shouldn’t come as a shock to see that this is one of
Eder’s workouts:
1000 dips, for time. Eder managed this in 17 minutes, breaking Jack LaLanne’s record of 20 minutes, using this method- he and his partner alternated sets of ten dips each until they had hit a thousand. Whatchu got?
Bodybuilders Bodybuilders often get short shrift from strength athletes, who for some reason think they’re of a better sort, and a different breed. For elite strength athletes, that is usually a very stupid distinction, however- most of the top bodybuilders are strong as hell, and there are bodybuilders who have done incredibly well in strength sports without any sport-specific training, simply because they’re used to moving a ton of weight over a lot of different planes of movement. Don’t believe me? Watch some Strength Wars on YouTube- the bodybuilders routinely wreck shop against powerlifters and strongmen. In short- all that shit you’ve talked about bodybuilders in the past? Time to put it to bed. Hell, Chris Bumstead, runner up to the Physique Olympia, likely benches more than you- in one random video he benches 315 with insanely strict form for 16 reps on his fourth set. So stuff that shit and keep an open mind.
Lee Priest: Demigod-Level Arm Training Lee Priest is one of the greatest bodybuilders never crowned Mr. Olympia- he had the misfortune to compete under the reigns of Dorian Yates and Ronnie Coleman, neither of whom could be unseated in their prime. Standing at 5’4” and 235lbs, he carried far more muscle on his frame per inch than any other competitors of the time, but even in his insane condition and the density of a black hole, it was not enough to unseat Yates.
Regardless, Priest’s arms stand as one of the most impressive pairs to ever have taken the Olympia stage, from both a mass and shape perspective. From his wrists to his musclebound armpits, Priest was absolutely untouchable. To hit the
stage that way, Priest trained his arms once a week, on the last training day of the week- Friday, though tis canned-ham forearms were trained with back, on Tuesday. With that setup, Priest hit his least taxing bodypart the day before a weekend layoff, and his ridiculously large appendages were able to recover sufficiently for heavy back, chest, and shoulder work the following week .
Upper Arms
Dumbbell Concentration Curl - 5 x 6-8 Barbell Curl - 7 x 6-8 Alternate Dumbbell Curl - 5 x 6-8 Cambered-Bar Preacher Curl - 5 x 6-8 superset with Underhand Pullups - 5 x AMRAP Dumbbell Preacher Curl - 5 x 6-8 Close-Grip Bench Presses - 7 x 6-8 Two-Arm Dumbbell Extensions- 5 x 6-8
Skullcrushers - 5 x 6-8 V-Bar Cable Pushdowns - 5 x 6-8 superset with Dips - 5 x AMRAP Seated French Presses - 5 6-8 One-Arm Dumbbell Extensions - 3 x 6-8 Forearms Alternate Dumbbell Hammer Curl - 5 x 8-10 Barbell Wrist Curl - 5 x 25+ Dumbbell Wrist Curl - 5 x 25+ Cambered-Bar Reverse Curl - 5 x 25
Freddy Ortiz: Add a Couple Reps? How About You Add Some Sets to Grow. Freddy Ortiz was the first of the bodybuilding “giant killers.” At only 5’5” 193lbs and arms a hair under 21 inches when pumped, Ortiz was truly a goddamned beast onstage in the late 1950s. And possibly a slightly drunken beast, at that, as he was known for pouring shots of whiskey like a goddamned baller backstage at shows. Ortiz’s methods for training were high volume and unique in that he was not obsessed with putting more weight on the bar at each workout. Instead, he tried to keep the same workout every time, using the same weight. When he could, he’d increase the number of sets from five to six, and only when he could get all the reps in his sixth set would he increase the poundage. And lest you think Ortiz only trained for reps and never maxed out, think again- guys in the preinternet era were constantly competing with one another, and no one was so wedded to a stupid program that they refused to test their maxes on a regular basis.
Ortiz’s best bodyparts were, by far and away, his chest and his arms. Though he trained chest three times a week, he figured the ancillary work his arms got training the rest of his upper body were sufficient to keep them huge, especially since he trained all of his upper body three times a week. All the sets listed below are done with roughly 75% of his 1RM, putting him at failure around the last couple of reps of his last set.
Chest
Bench Press- 5 x 10 Incline Dumbbell Bench Press - 5 x 10 Flat Bench Flyes - 5 x 10 Straight-Arm Pullover - 5 x 10 Dips - 5 x AMRAP
Arms
Barbell Curl - 5 x 10 Seated Alternate Dumbbell Curl - 5 x 10 Close Grip Barbell Curl - 5 x 10 Concentration Pulley Curl - 5 x 10 Barbell Overhead Extensions - 4 x 8 Standing Triceps Extension (Close Grip)- 4 x 8 Pushdowns - 4 x 8 Overhead Tricep Extensions - 4 x 8
Brutally In-Depth: John DeFendis’ Intensity or Insanity Routine When people think old-school training, this is the guy they're thinking about. "Oh, 5x5"" You ask?" Hell no, not even Reg Park himself trained like that- that was a goddamned beginner's workout. That full-body three days a week horseshit you've been peddled was even more fanciful than Saddam's WMDs, Justin Bieber's impression of his own fighting prowess, and the belief that
female ejaculate is just piss (pro tip, no one's piss tastes that bitter)- the badasses of yore trained hard, heavy, and often.
John DeFendis came up in the 1970s, when training was all about crushing weights for endless sets, running around screaming like and asshole and bitchslapping anyone dumb enough to get in their goddamn way. The entire concept of abbreviated training was as foreign to them as a clitoris to a male Redditorthey figured since some was good and more was better, a hell of a lot would yield insane results... and results they got. Contrary to the speculation of endless droves of weak-willed internet pussies, this was not a mindset created by drugs, and a workout only survived through the consumption of copious amounts of anabolics- this was the way everyone trained, because they didn't suck at life. Yeah, drugs played a role- the gym in which DeFendis trained had a massive sign over the door that read, "Message of the Day: Up the Dosage!" Nevertheless, people in the 70s trained like this irrespective of their anabolic and amphetamine regimen- it was just the way physiques were forged, rather than tailored. This is why people at that time who lifted weights never had to answer the question of whether or not they lifted, because the answer was pretty goddamn obvious. Vital Stats
Born : 1958 Height : 5'8" Weight : 225 lbs-245lbs. (though he weighs a lean 260 these days)
Titles Won ● 1977 AAU Mr. New York City ● 1978 AAU Mr. Atlantic USA (Teen) ● 1979 NPC Mr. North Eastern America ● 1980 NPC USA Runner Up ● 1980 NPC Eastern America ● 1983 NPC Western America Championships ● 1988 NPC Eastern America
1988 NPC USA ChampionshipsPerhaps the best part about his story is that DeFendis wasn't jacked at 16 like Dorian or Arnold- he was 5' and 100lbs at the age of 13. His brother, as brothers will do, spent his free time kicking the shit out of DeFendis and forcing John to spend his allowance on ice cream as a bribe to stave off more ass kickings. After picking up a bodybuilding magazine featuring Dave Draper, DeFendis started going ham in the gym in an effort to build a physique that would make his brother think twice. Six years later, after busting his ass working 60 hours a week in his brother's deli and slaughtering upper body day after day, DeFendis stepped onstage at 168lbs... and came in dead last. According to DeFendis, not even board shorts would have helped him- he'd have had to have competed in jeans to have been anything other than a complete laughingstock. After losing his first few contests, DeFendis decided to train with Steve Michalik, the local bodybuilding guru and lunatic, and found himself in the
hospital within a week. "Steve put me on a very vigorous training program. I had let myself run down and I contracted a very bad strep/tonsillitis infection. I've had problems with this in the past, but this time my throat closed completely. I was running a 104 degree temperature, and was hospitalized for two weeks in mid-December. I went into the hospital at 204 pounds, looking pretty decent. I got out two days before Christmas at 184, smooth, and looking like 'poppin fresh dough.' I figured my chances were over. "I went back to training in my basement. I had eight weeks for the Mets, but there was also another contest at the end of January - the Teenage Suburban. I wanted to enter it, but 10 days before the contest my temperature shot up, my throat closed, and I was back in the hospital. Taking these contests meant a lot to me and I did not want to blow them. I called up Tony Pandolfo and he told me to keep pumping and flexing all my bodyparts whenever I could to keep up the muscle tone. I was doing 500 situps a day with the intravenous needle still in my arm. It popped out two or three times and the nurses had to re-jab me. It was painful but I wanted to win. The doctors thought I was crazy, but they helped me as best as they could.”
Though he managed a decent showing at the Juniors show on which he'd had his sights set, he continued to get his ass kicked inside out at every other show he entered, at least until he re-enlisted the help of the king of the assholes, Steve Michalik. Though Michalik was renowned for throwing dudes through the front
window of his own gym, chasing down motorists and beating them down in the street, and other assorted violent insanity, DeFendis fully credits Michalik with his success onstage. "My whole body was smooth and small when I returned to training, but in one month's time it began to change. I was getting bigger and more muscular. The change was incredible. Each day I trained under Steve I learned something new. In fact, I am still learning. Just a turn of the wrist, or bending your knees a little can make a big difference and give a different tension and movement . "I believe that Steve Michalik is the greatest person to train under because he is a perfectionist, like me. I'm never entirely happy with myself, and I guess that's what leads you to greatness. It's the guys that are too happy or contented with themselves that stop growing." And lest you fall into the trap of thinking that what you're about to read held back DeFendis' progress, as the wunderkinds on Getbig and Bodybuilding.com seem to think, think again. DeFendis had at this point tried three days a week, five, and six, going up to a completely reasonable 18-20 sets per bodypart, but he was not seeing the success he wanted. The hyper-extreme methods of Michalik were exactly what DeFendis' body needed. "I had next planned to enter the AAU Apollo in October and had begun training intensively eight weeks earlier. I was doing 40-60 sets per bodypart, training 6 days a week, maintaining a strict diet, and taking in plenty of vitamin and mineral supplements. I was really looking good within three weeks, so I decided to enter the AAU Gotham on September 16th. If all went well it was my plan to hit the AAU Region 1 the next day. Steve drove me into the ground. I'd train at seven in the morning (for about three hours), go home, and then be in a coma for the next six hours. After that there was work. It was very tough. I would do arms, then legs. He would rush me to the nearby track where he'd start screaming at me until I completed my laps. There was no way I was going to slow down because he's a madman, but also I knew he was busting his ass for me."
To DeFendis, winning was all, and he didn't care what the cost was. Like Ted Arcidi, when he was training to utterly mangle the world record in the bench press, training was the end all, be all, and DeFendis let nothing whatsoever stand in his goddamn path. "I lived to train, eat and sleep and I worked enough to afford all of life’s luxuries which consisted of a 1972 Chevy Vega with no front end, an endless supply of chicken, a basement apartment with a mattress on the floor, and a cupboard full of vitamins. But looking back now, I realize the meaning of the phrase, “Happier than a pig in shit.” My lifestyle would have been misery to most, but to me, I was on top of the world. I was doing what I wanted to do and I was skyrocketing towards my goal. It didn’t matter to me that I was waking up at 5:00 in the morning to eat egg whites so that I could be at the gym by 6:30, and it didn’t matter that I was dragged through the last half of the workout like the gladiator in the chariot scene from “Ben Hur.” What did matter was the fact that I was training with Mr. America and that even though he was mentally and physically beating the living sh*t out of me day after day, I was improving dramatically. My 18″ biceps were now well over 20″ and the peaks were getting higher by the hour. Dumbbells that I had once used for heavy incline presses were now my warm-up weights for exercises like dumbbell Curl and lateral rises. “Intensity or Insanity Training” was as routine, like breakfast in the morning. Every time someone said that we couldn’t do something, it inspired us to try it anyway. 50 sets of heavy barbell Curl? Been there. 30 sets of squats. 500 pound inclines. 100 pound dumbbell Curl. 90 pound dumbbell laterals. 60 set back workouts."
Intensity or Insanity Training It was in Michalik's gym that he and Defendis put the finishing touches on what has since been regarded as the benchmark for weight room lunacy. Like most people who actually enjoy training and don't regard it with the modern enthusiasm of a Soviet factory worker, they had no set program: split the routine into two parts- legs and back the first day and chest, shoulders, and arms on the next day. Calves and abs are worked at every training session. Train two days in a row and rest the third day, though abs and calves are done six days a week. Though his workouts were never the same week to week, DeFendis' training looked something like this- a two day split of chest/back/biceps on day one and delts/legs/triceps on the second. Every single set was done to failure and beyondthough they're out of vogue these days, DeFendis and Michalik used a combination of forced reps, supersets, negatives, drop sets, and rest-pause in order to increase the intensity and force greater growth. "Our lives could have been characterized by the quote made famous by Walter Gagehot, 'A great pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do'" D ay One
Chest - 45 sets total, 5 sets per exercise. Increase weight on each set, starting with 15-20 and ending at 4-6.
Cable Crossover Dumbbell Flyes Pec Deck Incline Bench Press Flat Bench to Neck Decline Bench Press Single Arm Alternate Cable Pullover Dumbbell Pullover Dumbbell Incline Flyes
Back - 55 sets total, 5 sets per exercise.
Cable Pulldown to Front on Angle Cable Pulldown to Back Cable Pulldown to Chest Seated Cable Row (straps) Reverse Grip Pulldown Seated Cable Row (different handle) Standing Straight Arm Pulldown (close grip) Pulldown Machine (wide grip bar)
Nautilus Pullover Cable Rear Laterals (bent over) Bent Over Barbell Row
Biceps- 40 sets total, 5 per exercise.
Single Arm DB Preacher Curl superset with One Arm Dumbbell Curl Standing Barbell Curl superset with Barbell Concentration Curl Cable Curl (seated on floor) Machine Preacher Curl superset with Nautilus Machine Curl Lying Down Pulley Concentration Curl
Day Two Shoulders- 55 sets total, 5 per exercise. Increase weight on each set, starting with 15-20 and ending at 4-6.
Nautilus Lateral Raise Machine Dumbbell Lateral Pulley Laterals on Cable Crossover Barbell Behind the Neck Press (pyramid up to 150 lbs.)
Barbell Behind the Neck Press (150 x 5 sets) Nautilus Behind the Neck Press Nautilus Rear Deltoid Dumbbell Rear Lateral (flat bench) Pulley Rear Lateral Shrugs (in front) Shrugs (behind body)
Triceps- 45 sets, 5 per exercise
Triceps Pushdowns (angle bar) Triceps Pushdowns (straight bar) Triceps Pushdowns (Nautilus Close Grip) Cable French Press Single Arm Cable Pushdown (top setting of crossover machine) Cable Kickback (bottom of crossover machine) Close Grip Dips Wide Grip Dips Reverse Grip Cable Tricep Dip
Legs - 45 sets, 5 per exercise
Leg Curl
Leg Extensions (Nautilus Multi-Leg) Leg Extensions (Nautilus Extension) Leg Extensions (Leg Extension Table) Leg Press (toes straight) Leg Press (toes pointing out) Paused Smith Machine Squat (2 second pause at bottom) Machine Hack squats Regular Squats Run - total of 1.5 miles, within 15 minutes after squatting. Jog 2 laps, sprint 1 lap, rest 30 seconds, repeat 3 times.
Michalik and Defendis became famous for ultra-heavy training filled with insane amounts of intensity multipliers that involved 40, 50, and even 75 set-perbodypart workouts. They would rope off their area in the gym, scream at anyone who came near, and wreak havoc therein. "Michalik struts across the gym floor with a set of 60 pounders for incline Flyes. I know the routine. Three benches, three exercises, all sets to failure. Nonstop ass-kicking supersets. Steve begins with almost 300 pounds on the incline Smith machine. He then proceeds to the second bench to complete a set of incline Flyes, and finally, pullovers across the last bench with a 100 pound dumbbell." Between them, Michalik and DeFendis sent more people to the hospital than AIDS and cancer combined. DeFendis himself spent a weekend in the hospital after his first week of training with Michalik, and they felt that it was a measure of a true man to cowboy up and return to Michalik's den of pain for a second go at greatness after a quick trip to the ER with rhabdo. Shitting blood didn't stop these maniacs- they were hardcore to a level of extremity that only the desperately mentally ill and the insanely driven reach. The best part about it? They laughed at the guys in the hospital and went around telling other gym
members that the dude they just hospitalized was mentally weak, and might as well take up badminton or croquet.
Diet DeFendis' diet was just as extreme as his training, and frankly it astonishes me that he was able to train on it. Or eat all of it. Designed by a trainer and physician named Bob Guskin, who also trained 1984 Mr. Universe John Hnatyschak (trainers at that time were hardly the celebrities they are now, so it was a goddamn miracle I could dig this up from a 35 year old Ukrainian newspaper), DeFendis' diet consisted of "Eight pounds of chicken a day. I wish I had Frank Purdue as a relative! Six weeks on broiled chicken breasts with diet soda and supplements, and then two more on boiled chicken and supplements, this time minus everything but water. My only consumption was one-half cantaloupe after training. My energy was low, but this program did the trick. Like Vince Lombardi said, Winning isn't everything- it's the only thing. If you can shrug off a loss, you can never be a winner."
Since retiring, DeFendis has trained everyone from pro baseball star Mike Piazza to politicians like Newt Gingrich, pro boxer Andrew "I will punch you dead in
the nuts repeatedly" Golata, and clothing designer Calvin Klein., in addition to countless regular people, many of whom he's helped lose over 100 pounds and build respectable physiques out of what began as a pile of curdled mayo. He's also a WBBG Hall of Fame inductee, an International Fitness Hall of Fame inductee along with fitness superstars Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jack Lalanne, and was “Trainer of the Year” for nine consecutive years for the state of Florida. And if you think he uses a different method with then, think again- he trains them just as balls out as he trains himself. "Intensity or Insanity Training is great for everyone if they wish to eat perfectly, train hard and get enough rest and recovery. It just has to be applied correctly with each individual's condition and goals in mind. If one variable is off, then they will not succeed." In other words, if you want sick results fast, train as heavy as humanly possible, moving as fast as possible through your workouts. Heavy supersets and drop sets should be the name of the game. The fact that Michalik and DeFendis lived through these projectile-vomit inducing workouts, much less thrived and grew on them is a testament to the human spirit and the ability of the human physical form to adapt to any and all stress and thrive. After reading about these workouts, I'm embarrassed at the way I half-ass it through the gym, because if DeFendis' story tells us one thing, it's that we could all be going far harder in the gym.
Bob Birdsong- If Overtraining Was a Legitimate Concern, His Corpse Would Extra Dead… and His Forearms Would be Tiny (But He’s Alive and Well)
An adage coined by the Barbarian Brothers but apparently held to be true by everyone in the 1980s was that “there is no such thing as overtraining- just undereating and undersleeping.” No one seems to have believed this more than Bob Birdsong, who trained like his perpetual motion and gym presence would prevent the Christian Armageddon he was endlessly yammering on about. Seriously, Bob Birdsong trained more than most teenagers in an empty house masturbate, and was forever looking for ways to increase his training volume. At 5’8” and 215lbs in the pre-GH and insulin era he wasn’t a mass monster, but he was certainly no Frank Zane, either, and he stayed in contest ready condition year round. Nor was he weak- when you trained at Gold’s Venice in those days, you had to look the part and be able to move serious weight. So whatever you think about this routine, don’t bother thinking it won’t work, because that wasn’t an option for Bob Birdsong.
Bob Birdsong’s Six Day a Week Forearm Routine This was done after his upper arm workouts, which were done six days a week, with very, very short rests and tons of forced reps.
Monday / Wednesday / Friday
Barbell Wrist Curl - 5 x 15 Reverse Wrist Curl - 5 x 15 One Arm Dumbbell Wrist Curl - 5 x 15
Tuesday / Thursday
Barbell Wrist Curl - 5 x 15 Behind the Back Standing Barbell Wrist Curl - 5 x 15
Rob Colacino: Psycho-Burst Training Rob Colacino might stand as the greatest monument to Generation X the world has ever seen. Standing 5’9” and 245lbs, this man was a favorite of Ironman magazine in the 1990’s for his insanely abbreviated, and incredibly painful, training style. You might think, in the modern era, that something with a name as hyperbolic as “Psycho-Burst Training” would be a bunch of bullshit. In many cases, you’re likely right, but every now and again something lives up to its hype. Whether or not Colacino was simply a “juice monkey” as the internet likes to posit, his training style does illustrate how many different ways there are to skin a cat, Colacino took the Arthur Jones’ Heavy Duty System and chopped it down even further, to the point that he didn’t train more than about two hours a week, going until he practically dropped dead on each set, and pointing to the definite utility of ultra-slow training, even if it is not considered to be the ultimate in training that it used to be.
He trained trained one of two ways- either each bodypart once a week on its own day, or the entire body in one workout, using only incline bench press to cover both shoulders and chest instead of laterals and flat bench, every other day. Either way, he did each set to total failure, which meant that if he couldn’t get a full rep, he would have his partner assist him with the concentric portion and do ultra-slow negatives, then do tiny partial reps until he could not budge the bar an inch. Like I said, sometimes the product lives up to its ridiculously hyperbolic name, and this is one of those times.
Chest Partner Assisted Bench Press - Warmup, then 1 x 1 Colacino did these fairly heavy, with perhaps 80% of his one rep max. The performance of this rep is best described by the Psycho-In-Chief himself:
‘Grab the weight bring it down on the negative part of the exercise very slow. Touch the chest, bring it up. Stop ¾ of the way up hold it there. I count to 50 in my head. Not a normal 50, but a fast 50. I might go more or less than that, it depends on how you feel that day. Bring it up slowly after you do the ¾ rep holding it. Bring it up slow, slow, inch it up until you are contracted all the way. Hold it there locked out for as long as you can, then lower it back down on the negative part of it. Stop ¾ of the way, hold it there. Again count to 50 in your head (more than that or less than that, just do your best to hold it there). Bring it down slowly, slowly, slowly. To about ½ way maybe less than ½ way. Stop there. This is where it really gets tough. You hold it there for as long as you can, then it lower it slowly, slowly, slowly down too touch your chest. Now this is where it gets very important. From there, you try to bring the bar back up. You tell the spotters to leave you alone. Make sure they know before the set to leave you alone. You tell them when you are dead – when to take the bar from you. You push the weight off your chest. I don’t care if it doesn’t even go off your chest just contract, contract, contract, you push, you push. Your try to get another rep as hard as you can. You don’t stop until you feel you are dead. And then you say ‘Take that damn weight away from me.’” Incline Bench Press - Warmup very well, then 1 x 1 with the same method as the flat bench.
Back Barbell Rows supersetted with Chins - 4 x 6 For Barbell Rows : With regular rep pace, bring the bar to sternum and then descend halfway. At the halfway point, hold it as long as possible, then lower the bar as slowly as possible. Immediately repeat. On the 5th and 6th reps, you can rest at full extension for 2 seconds before beginning the next set.
For Chins : Hold at the ½ point and the ¾ point for as long as possible for the first four reps. On the last two reps, hold at the top as long as possible, then lower to the ½ and ¾. On the fourth set, add in as many bottom position quarter reps as possible, going to complete failure. Yeah, you might look like a fish being electrrocuted while hanging from the bar, but you’re forcing growth.
Shoulders Dumbbell Laterals - Warmup, 1 x 6 Static holds at the top and halfway point on all six reps, then as many of the tiny partials at the bottom as you can get. Shrug Machine - 4 x 6 Hold the last rep at the top as long as humanly possible on each set.
Arms Standing Alternating Dumbbell Curl - Warmup, 1 x 6 Normal pace concentric rep to the top, lower to halfway, hold as long as possible, then slow to the bottom. Seated Alternating Dumbbell Curl - Warmup, 1 x 6 (same form as standing) Nautilus Mutli-Bicep Machine - Warmup, then 1 x 1 Normal speed rep to the top, hold as long as possible, lower to the halfway point, hold as long as possible, then finish with tiny reps at full extension. This rep should take about two minutes if done correctly. Rope Pushdown - Warmup, 1 x 6 Normal pace concentric rep to the bottom, lower to halfway, hold as long as
possible, then slow to the top. On the last rep, do as many tiny bouncing reps as possible. Overhead Rope Extension - Warmup, 1 x 6 Normal pace concentric rep to the top, lower to halfway, hold as long as possible, then slow to the bottom. On the last rep, do as many tiny bouncing reps as possible. Nautilus Multi-Tricep - Warmup, then 1 x 1 Same method as the biceps.
Legs Hack squats - 1-10 method (you’ll have to experiment with this to find the appropriate weight, but 40-50% 1RM should be doable). Do a couple of warmup sets and prepare for pain- bar stays on your back the entire time… no reracking, bro. With working weight: Do 1 rep, rest 5 seconds Do 2 reps, rest 5 seconds Do 3 reps, rest 5 seconds Do 4 reps, rest 5 seconds Do 5 reps, rest 5 seconds Do 6 reps, rest 5 seconds Do 7 reps, rest 5 seconds Do 8 reps, rest 5 seconds
Do 9 reps, rest 5 seconds Do 10 reps, rest 5 seconds
Then quarter reps from the bottom until you cannot move the weight (and are likely considering calling 911). Leg Curl - 1 x 6 Hold at the ½ point and the ¾ point for as long as possible for the first four reps. On the last two reps, hold at the top as long as possible, then lower to the ½ and ¾. When you can’t do another full rep, do "little rocking reps" of an inch or two at full extension until you literally cannot move the weight (up to 100, bro- don’t quit at ten) Donkey Calf Raise - Run the stack. This is just insane. Start at the heaviest weight, do as many reps as possible, drop one plate, and repeat. Until you’ve done the stack, and do bouncing reps on the last plate to scorch whatever is left of your calves. Forget walking home.
Harold Poole: The Full Body Bloodbath of the First Black Mr. America Few people today mention the name Harold Poole when discussing the greats in bodybuilding, but they should, Boasting some of the biggest traps the bodybuilding world had ever seen, Poole was a party animal who bounced and sold a bit of weed at night and trained during the day, becoming the first black (although he was actually German, black, and Native American) Mr. America. To give you some conception of how prestigious that was, the Mr. America was the longest running bodybuilding title at the time and was held in the same esteem the Mr. O is now. Though Poole, who was known for having a thick and brutal physique with some of the biggest shoulders ever seen onstage, eventually switched to a bodypart system, his original program was a three to four times a week full body program. The following is the program that allowed him to become the first ever black Mr. America, which at the time was the most prestigious bodybuilding title in the world.
When Poole first began lifting at age 12, he did this routine with five sets of fifteen reps on each exercise. As he grew older, he increased the weights and decreased the reps. As with most of these guys, their workouts varied on how they were feeling, the people with whom they were training, and the time they had to devote to training, so don’t feel like the number of sets or reps is absolutely set in stone.
Full Body Routine, Done 3-4x a Week
Barbell Behind the Neck Press - 2 x 4-6; 1 x 2-4 Barbell Bench Press (Wide grip) - 3 x 4-6 Barbell Row - 3 x 6 Behind Neck Pullups - 3 x AMRAP Cheating Barbell Curl - 3 x 4-6 Triceps Kickbacks - 5 x 6 Front Squat - 3 x 4-6 Donkey Calf Raise - 6 x 6 Situps to failure
Lifting is not just about counting reps or seconds, timing micros, taking pills. Lifting is about being the best you can be, and savoring your road to the goal. - Harold Poole
Dorian Yates: Blood and Guts Dorian Yates revolutionized the bodybuilding physique, putting a hard line between the bodybuilders of yore and the modern era. Whereas all of the previous champions had been able to be compared to one another more or less equally, Yates changed the look of bodybuilding and really defined the line between the old and the new. At 5’10” 267lbs, Yates was fully 20 pounds heavier than his predecessor at roughly the same height, and his conditioning was so much more intense, his skin so much thinner, and his body so much harder, that Dorian literally looked like he was chiseled out of goddamn stone.
More than anything, however, his training set him apart from everyone else. Where bodybuilders before him had trained as much as twice a day, six days a week, Yates’ method was intended to compress all of that work into four short workouts. Yates used intensity multipliers- shit like drop sets, forced reps, slow negatives with an assist back to the start of the movement and partials to ensure he squeezed every last bit of muscular effort out of his muscles that he possibly
could. Clearly, you should all know what drop sets and forced reps are, and if you don’t, google them. The TLDR is that he did as much as possible to make as little apparent work hit his musculature like it was a hell of a lot of volume, and that forced serious growth.
Day 1- Delts, Traps, Triceps, Abs
Smith Machine Overhead Press -1 x 12-15*, 1 x 8-10 Seated Lateral Raise - 1 x 10*; 1 x 6-8 Unilateral Cable Lateral Raise - 1 x 8-10 Dumbbell Shrug - 1 x 12*; 1 x 8-10 Tricep Pushdowns - 2 x 10-12*; 1 x 6-8 Crunches - 3 x 20-25 Reverse Crunches - 3 x 12-15 * Indicates warmup set
Day 2- Back, Rear Delts
Dumbbell Pullover - *2 x 10-12; 1 x 8-10 Hammer Pulldowns - *2 x 10-12; 1 x 8-10 Reverse-Grip Hammer Pulldown - *1 x 10-12; 1 x 8-10 One-Arm Dumbbell Row - *1 x 10-12; 1 x 8-10
Wide-Grip Seated Cable Row - *1 x 10-12; 1 x 8-10 Barbell Deadlift - *1 x 10-12; 1 x 8-10 Hyperextension - 1 x 8-10
Day 4- Chest and Biceps
Incline Barbell Bench Press - *2 x 10-12; 1 x 8-10 Machine Chest Press - *2 x 10-12; 1 x 8-10 Decline Bench Press - *2 x 10-12; 1 x 8-10 Incline Dumbbell Flyes (45 degrees) - *2 x 10-12; 1 x 8-10 Flat Bench Dumbbell Flyes - *2 x 10-12; 1 x 8-10 Cable Crossover - *2 x 10-12; 1 x 8-10 Incline Dumbbell Biceps Curl - *2 x 10-12; 1 x 8-10 Standing EZ Bar Biceps Curl - *2 x 10-12; 1 x 8-10 Machine Preacher Curl - *1 x 10-12; 1 x 8-10
Day 6- Legs
Leg Extensions - *2 x 12-14; 1 x 10-12
Leg Press - *2 x 12-14; 1 x 10-12 Hack squats - *2 x 12-14; 1 x 10-12 Seated Hamstring Curl - *2 x 12-14; 1 x 10-12 5-minute break Stiff-Legged Deadlift - *1 x 10-12; 1 x 10-12 Calf Press - *1 x 10-12; 1 x 10-12 Seated Calf Raise - *1 x 10-12; 1 x 6-8 (Done in rest-pause fashion, with three rests until complete failure)
Jeff King: Train Legs Twice a Week and Get Twice the Gainz Meet Jeff King, a bodybuilder who was, in his prime, considered to be an uncrowned Mr. Olympia even as an amateur. He had quads as big and detailed as
Tom Platz with an upper body to match, and the biggest, most vascular neck
anyone’s ever seen. He apparently dropped out of bodybuilding due to the politics of the sport, and as such we never got to see the best of him. That’s pretty horrifying, given the fact that Jeff King would likely have produced a physique that would never be replicated, and might have rivalled Ronnie Coleman for strength at his peak. In the picture above, for instance, King is only 22 years old and 230lbs.- as such, he'd have another 20 years to pack on mass and gain muscle maturity if his career lasted as long as Ronnie Coleman. In the off-season, King’s training differed somewhat from in-season, though he’d stick with the same basic exercises and just not push as hard. His split was a pretty basic three days on, one day off split that was repeated ad infinitum or until he just got bored and did something else. Day One - Chest, Back, Abs, and Neck Day Two - Legs, Calves Day Three - Shoulders, Biceps, Triceps, Abs, and Neck Day Four - Off
Off Season Leg Training
Front Squat - 3 x 8 Duck Leg Press (popular in the 80s, you’d place your feet so your heels were nearly touching and your toes pointed out at roughly 45 degrees)- 4 x 8 Hack squats - 3 x 8 Leg Curl - 4 x 10 Standing Leg Curl - 2 x 10 Standing Calf Raise - 3-4 x 15-20 Calf Press - 3 x 12-15
“Powerlifting” Squat Routine
Back Squats - Warmups: 1 x 12; 1 x 12; 1 x 10; 1 x 8; 405 x 6, 495 x 4, 495 x 4 Duck Leg Press - 1 x 10; 1 x 8; 1 x 6; 1 x 4 (Drastically increase the weight on every set) Leg Curl - 3 x 10
Leo Stern: An Old School Two Day Split for Strength and Mass The bodybuilding purists among you will recognize the name Leo Stern, of the famous old school destination gym Stern’s Gym in San Diego, CA. If you’ve not been and want to see a piece of bodybuilding history, I highly recommend itI trained there on and off when I lived in San Diego in 2001. It’s a no frills place that was owned during his life by Leo Stern, a bodybuilder and odd lifter who was a seminal thinker and trainer in the first half of the 20th century who competed yearly in the Mr. America but was always edged out by big names like John Grimek and George Eiferman.
Leo Stern was also impressive for having benched 371lbs in an odd lifts competition around 1950 but was disqualified for having a slight back arch (at that point a legal bench press could only be done with a completely flat back). His competition bonafides aside, Stern’s real claim to fame was having coached the guy pictured above, Bill Pearl, to greatness. Though Bill Pearl likely would have risen to greatness no matter what, Stern’s tutelage definitely benefited Pearl in his formative years, and Stern’s workout created the base from which Bill
Pearl went on to be named the Best Built Man of the century and five time Mr. Universe, beating luminaries like Frank Zane, Sergio Oliva, Reg Park, and a young Sean Connery (yeah, 007 was a bodybuilder back in the day).
Days 1, 3, and 5
Behind the Neck Pullup - 4 x 15 Dumbbell Pullover - 2 x 10 Bench Press - 3 x 10 (increasing the weight on the third set) One Arm Row - 3 x 10 Dumbbell Pullover - 1 x 10 Rear Laterals - 3 x 10 (increase the weight each set) Laterals - 2 x 10 Dumbbell Flyes - 2 x 10 Military Press - 2 x 10 Triceps Kickbacks - 3 x 10 Dumbbell Curl to Press -3 x 10 Triceps Extensions -3 x 10 Situps - 300 reps Leg Raises - 300 reps
Days 2,4, and 6
Dumbbell Swings - 1 x 10 (for a warmup) Bent Over Row - 3 x 10 Pulldowns - 3 x 10 Dumbbell Pullover - 1 x 10 Behind the Neck Press - 3 x 10 Breathing Squat - 1 x 15 Straight Arm Pullover - 1 x 10 Breathing Squat - 1 x 15 (ten pounds heavier than the first set) Straight Arm Pullover - 1 x 10 Breathing Squat - 1 x 15 (ten pounds heavier than the last set) Straight Arm Pullover - 1 x 10 Hack squats Machine - 3 x 10 Leg curl three sets 20 reps. 70 pounds Leg Extensions five sets 12 reps 15 pounds Rise-on-toes, standing three sets 30 reps. 200 pounds Rise-on-toes, seated three sets 30 reps 245 pounds Situps 300 reps. Leg raises 300 reps.
Breathing Squat - Load the bar, get under it, and walk out with it. Take a few deep breaths (really deep), then squat to parallel. Return to the start position and
take another few deep breaths before doing another rep. The reason for this is that it causes your upper body to work hard as hell to take those huge breaths, which in turn adds muscularity to your physique. Old school lifters swore by these, but they've fallen out of fashion because we're all pussies and these absolutely suck to do.
Scott Wilson
Given that Wilson's volume was likely triple or quintuple your own, you might be thinking he was weak as a kitten as a result. On the contrary, Wilson managed a near elite powerlifting total of 1760 with a 625 squat, 470 bench, and 665 deadlift (the AAU elite total was 1825) after doing a meet on a whim in his bodybuilding off-season (and I realize there are heavier totals attributed to Scott, but they were ridiculous poundages and utterly lacked citations). Thus, at 5'10", 215lbs, and rocking 20" arms and a 24" unpumped shoulder width measurement, Scott Wilson was officially a bad motherfucker in any gym or bodybuilding competition he entered.
Back Routine 2-3x a Week
Deadlift : 5 x 5 reps Bent Barbell Row : 5 x 6-8 reps T-Bar Row : 5 x 6-8 reps Behind the Neck Pulldown : 5 x 8 reps One Arm Dumbbell Row : 5 x 8 reps Barbell Shrug : 5 x 8 reps Upright Row : 5 x 8 reps
John McWilliams: 20” Muscular Arms in the PreSteroid Era Prove it is Possible to Do Without Gear John McWilliams rocked the first recorded cold-measured 20" muscular arms, which likely stretched to over 21” when he had a pump on. Though he would be a pariah in your local “hardcore” gym for skipping leg day, he was also one of the first people in history to bench press over 500 pounds, and he pulled 710 at a time when hardly anyone was hitting 700. He pulled that off at a bodyweight of 220 (which would have been 240 if he’d ever bothered to squat), and even rocked 19.25” arms when he dieted down to 186 for shits and giggles.
Not only was McWilliams more impressive in the gym and on the platform than a porn star who can take three fists in their ass, but he was one of the most prolific trainers of his era. At this point, NFL teams didn’t have their own gyms and players trained wherever they could. This meant that McWilliams ended up coaching most of the San Diego Chargers, including All-Pros Jack Kemp, Keith
Lincoln and Ron Mix, who led their team to the AFL championship game twice. McWilliams was just as legendary for his sick arms as he was for being an amazing trainer, and the arm program he devised was used by himself, bodybuilding luminary Gene Mozee, and dozens of trainees to put an average of 1.25" on their arms in six weeks. That’s right- after using it for a month and a half, this program put an over an inch on the arms of people who used it.
Arms Program * This program is done, true to bench and arm bro sensibilities, three times a week.
Superset Barbell Pullovers - 2 x 12 Close-Grip Bench Presses - 2 x 12 Superset Barbell Pullovers - 2 x 6 Close-Grip Bench Presses - 2 x 6 Superset Barbell Curl - 3 x 12 Overhead Tricep Extensions - 3 x 12 Superset Dumbbell Curl - 3 x 10 Dumbbell Triceps Presses - 3 x 10 Lying Barbell Triceps Extensions - 3 x 12 Close-Grip Bench Presses - 3 x 10* One-Arm Kickbacks - 2 x 20** *The second you're done the third set of bench, grab a db and start kickbacks. **Kickbacks get no rest between arms, but a 30 second rest between sets.
Armand Tanny: Old School Superset Madness Though his name isn’t well known today, Armand Tanny was the man back in the day. In the 60s, 70s, and 80s he was a well known author on bodybuilding and strength training, and prior to that he was an accomplished bodybuilder, male revue dancer, and admittedly godawful pro wrestler. In spite of a horrific knee injury that ended his wrestling career, he also managed to rack up a couple of wins in Olympic weightlifting and odd lifting competitions at 190lbs, which was incredibly light for a heavyweight. When he wasn’t trashing dudes in the one handed clean (see above), Tanny mostly just cared about looking good. To do that, Tanny believed that the best way to pull it off was to do a brutal superset workout with a partner designed to have both guys tight, thick, and solid, with good size, and ready for the beach in
under an hour.
Tanny’s program consisted of opposing muscle groups to be worked for as hard as possible for ten minutes, in sets of six to ten reps. Tanny would do a set of six to ten of each exercise, then his partner would do six to ten, over and over, until ten minutes was up. Then, they’d grab a drink of water and smash the next superset for ten minutes. And so it went until the workout was over and both
dudes looked like their pumps were about to split their skin as they went full Super Saiyan… at which point they’d waddle down to the beach and wait for the phone numbers to start floating their way.
The Supersets
Deadlifts / Leg Raises Military Press / Pullups Squat / Glute Ham Raise Bench Press / Bent Over Row Cambered Bar Curl / Overhead Tricep Extension
Brutal Bertil Fox: The Strongest Bodybuilder of the 1980s and His Gnarly Strip Sets of Death Calling Bertil Fox a mass monster is a lot like calling Big Ramy the same thingthey’re so far into a different universe with their physiques that it is difficult to compare them to mere mortals. Doing so is like comparing Chihuahuas to bobcats to determine the better pet. Or comparing a Fleshlight or a grapefruit to a vagina. It’s just goddamn ridiculous. Fox was the 1978 Mr. Universe, and at 5'8" and 245lbs, he dwarfed everyone onstage. The next biggest guy was Lee Haney, who was outweighed by Fox for most of his career in spite of the fact that Fox was three and a half inches shorter than that eight time Olympia winner. As to why Fox never won, the debate has raged for the better part of 35 years and the best anyone can guess is Fox had very little detail in his legs, though his calves were far bigger than just about anyone who’s ever stepped on that stage. And as to why you don’t hear about him now, he’s retired to a community in St. Kitts that doesn’t allow for a great deal of communication. After a bad breakup about ten years ago, Fox lived up to his name and caught two bodies (the 20 year old beauty pageant winner and her mom), so he’s spending his remaining days in the care of the government of St. Kitts.
And if that turns you off from utilizing his workout, I’ve no idea why you’re holding this book in the first place. In any event, just remember- shit happens when you party.
His Training Split
Monday: Shoulders and Arms Tuesday: Back and Chest Wednesday: Legs Thursday: Chest and back Friday: Shoulders and Arms
Abs Abs are done postworkout daily, unless it’s precontest, in which case they’re done in the morning and postworkout. Roman Chair Situps - 20 x AMRAP Parallel Bar Leg Raises - 20 x AMRAP Situps - 20 x AMRAP
Monday: Shoulders and Arms Per Bertil, here’s how this goes down: “I put two 50's, two 25's and two 15's on the bar. I do a set of about 10 reps. My training partner puts on another two 15's and I do another 8 to 10 reps. I then put another two 15's on and do as many reps as I can. For my last set I will probably have two 50's, two 25's, and six 15's. I then do what I call a staggered set. [Call it a drop set if you like but it's still a staggering piece of training!] I do about 6 reps with this weight, and then my training partner will take off two 15's and I carry on the set. When I can do no more my training partner takes off another two 15's and I continue until I can do more. That's MY system for training to failure.”
Seated Behind the Neck Press - 6 x 2-8 (The last set is a drop set) Dumbbell Seated Press - 6 x 6-15 (start off with a pair of 85's and then the 100's, 110's and so on) High pulls or Upright Rows - 6 x 5-8 Lateral Raise - 6 x 8-10 Cheat Curl (with cambered bar) - 6 x 6-8 Incline Dumbbell Curl - 6 x 6-8 Barbell Preacher Curl - 6 x 5-8 Skullcrusher - 6 x 5-8 Barbell Overhead Extensions - 6 x 5-8 Arms Tri-Set (Do one exercise after the other as one set. Rest, then repeat)
One Arm Dumbbell Spider Curl - 4 x 20 (reverse the preacher bench, to make it an ultra strict concentration curl) Bent Over V-Bar Pushdowns - 4 x 5-8 (he leans into the bar and pushes straight down from his shoulders Weighted Dip s- 4 x AMRAP (number of reps varies depending on how heavy he goes)
Tuesday: Back and Chest
One Arm Dumbbell Rows - 6 x 5-8 Behind the Neck Pulldowns - 5 x 5-8 Close Grip Underhand Pulldowns to the Waist - 5 x 8-10 Seated Cable Rows - 5 x 8-10 Weighted Pullups - 5 x 5-8 supersetted with Cross Bench Dumbbell Pullovers - 5 x 10 Dumbbell Bench Press - 5-6 x 10 Incline Bench Press - 6-8 x 4-15 (drop set like on shoulders) Incline Dumbbell Flyes - 6-8 x 5-8 supersetted with Weighted Dips - 6-8 x 5-8
Wednesday: Legs and Arms
Brutal Bertil lived and trained in St. Kitt’s, in a crazy old school gym without much in the way of machines. As such, you’re about to learn about some old school alternatives to machines, and the mentality at the time. As Fox said in an interview, “we don't have a hack squats machine at our gym but I doubt if I would use it if we did.
Squat - 8-10 x 8-15 (with that horrible drop set at the end of the last set) Dumbbell Leg Curl - 5-6 x 8-15 Seated Calf Raises (on a bench, with barbell across thighs) - 5-6 x 8-15
And for the new jacks out there who might not feel ready to do 100 reps of heavy squatting...
Bertil's Beginner's Routine This workout is done 3-4 times a week, and is what Fox credits with forming the strong base on which his physique was built. If you find you continually hit a wall in your training, it could be that your base sucks- it doesn’t matter how strong you build a house if you build it on quicksand. Thus, it could be time to go back to the basics for awhile and crush shit, then move onto a move complicated routine.
Bench Press - 5 x 5-10 (Increase weight each set to end up with a weight with which you'd fail on the sixth rep) Dumbbell Fly - 5 x 10 Barbell Row - 5 x 5-10 (Done with the same type of weight increases as the BP) Overhead Press - 5 x 5-10 (Done with the same type of weight increases as the BP) Side Laterals - 5 x 10
High Pull - 5 x 5-10 (Done with the same type of weight increases as the BP) Squat - 5 x 5* *supersetted with Straight Arm Pullover- 5 x 20
Strongmen Strongmen really need no introduction- they’re the burly, brobdingnagian badasses hoisting huge weights and weird implements for the entertainment of bigger crowds than any physical culture entertainment outside of CrossFit. These are often the most well-rounded strength athletes (though bodybuilders can give them fits in one-on-one competitions), as they have to combine serious statistics strength with speed and endurance.
Zydrunas Savickas- It’s Hard to Out-Great the GOAT Strongman
Big Z is one of the winningest strongmen in the history of the sport, and renown for insane physicality and ridiculous brute strength. Nine time winner of the
Arnold Strongman Classic, four time World Strongest Man winner (and six time runner up), and still world record holder in the log lift with a press of 222.5kg, Savickas is a goddamned beast . In truth, the closest thing the human race has to a real life Incredible Hulk is Zydrunas Savickas, because few can beat his insane levels of raw power and intestinal fortitude. If Gilgamesh and W onder Woman conceived a child while drunk as shit on vodka, it’d have po p ped out musclebound and hungry for bigass potato and pork dumplings, and its name would have been Zydrunas. And lest his cherubic face convince you otherwise, the man is anything but a big, dumb animal. He’s a thinking man, which means ● he trains without a training partner and without a coach . He prefers doing this shit alone. ● he develops form that suits his frame the best, no matter what anyone else says about it . What works for everyone else might not be the optimal form for him, so he experiments and doesn’t consult every stupid, faceless, anonymous 135lb dickhead on the internet when doing so. ● he changes his goals to suit his situation . When he got injured, he switched up his focus to more of a bodybuilding style training routine, going to higher reps (6) with a shorter, bodybuilding style pump type of rep (bodybuilding partials are short, fast, and for a pump, heavier than full ROM reps). o And in true “fuck what ya heard” fashion, Big Z loves the Smith Machine and uses it on the regular, especially for overhead press. To build his raw squat of 880 pounds, a 900-pound deadlift, a 629-pound bench, the strength to win everything, all the time, and put a nearly 500lb log overhead, Savickas obviously spent a shitload of time in the gym. Here’s the basis of it (because there is very little chance that’s the entirety of his lifting for the week. The TLDR : focus on doubles and triples (Big Z rarely does a single, unless he fails on a second rep in a double), adjust your training to suit your personal goal, and forge your own path.
Monday- Legs
Back Squat - 1 x 12; 1 x 8; 1 x 6; 1 x 4; 2 x 3 Front Squat - 1 x 8; 1 x 6; 2 x 4 Calves - 4 x 15
Tuesday- Chest and Triceps
Bench Press - 1 x 12; 1 x 8; 1 x 6; 2 x 4; 1 x 2 Incline Bench Press - 1 x 8; 1 x 6; 2 x 4 Close Grip Bench Press - 4 x 5 Tricep Pushdowns - 4 x 8
Wednesday- Back
Deadlift - 1 x 12; 1 x 8; 1 x 6; 3 x 3 (Add weight each set) Good Mornings - 3 x 6 Machine Pulldowns - 4 x 8 Cable Rows - 4 x 8
Thursday- Overhead
Apollon’s Axle - Training varied Seated Press (on floor, in the rack, unsupported) - 4 x 5 Shrugs - 4 x 6
Friday- Conditioning
Medicine Ball Throw for Height - 10 - 15 throws 30 minutes of cardio
Saturday- Farmer’s Walk Farmer's Wal k-150kg in each hand 40M, 2 RUNS .
Manfred Hoeberl- 26” Arms are Useful in Strongman Hailing from the same tiny hamlet that gave us Arnold, Manfred Hoerberl was the first man in history to have an upper arm girth three times the size of his wrist circumference and a rising star in strongman who had his career cut short by multiple car accidents. Two time Europe’s Strongest Man and runner up in the 1994 World’s Strongest Man while looking every bit of the next Mr. Olympia, Hoerberl was in the bodybuilding magazine more than most top-tier bodybuilders and a name on the lips of every dude who set foot in a gym with the intention of moving serious weight in the mid-1990’s.
Seriously, he was the ultimate strongman superstar of the 1990s- were he not one of the shittiest drivers in the history of the automobile, you would likely be saying, “he’s no goddamned Hoerberl” in every water fountain conversation about Hafthor. Though the 6’3”, 297lb Hoerberl boasted a 628lb raw bench, 724 raw squat, and 860lb raw pull, what really interested everyone was how the man
was able to close a #3 Captains of Crush and rock arms three times almost as big as his goddamned waist. As such, here’s the arm workout that led to him warming up with a 150lb dumbbell before exhibitions.
Hoeberl’s Once Per Week Arm Workout Stretch the biceps and triceps for 30 seconds Incline Dumbbell Curls - 2 x 10-12 (Rep Speed: Slow) Overhead Tricep Extensions with Cambered Bar - 2 x 10-12 (Rep Speed: Slow) Stretch for 30 seconds Close Grip Bench Press / Barbell Curl Superset - 3 x 8-10 (Rep Speed: Explosive) Stretch for 30 seconds V-Bar Pushdown / Dumbbell Curl Superset - 3 x 10-12 Stretch for 1 minute. Forearm exercises - Dealer's choice. Doesn’t matter how you do them, so long as they’re dead when it’s over. Stretch for another minute .
Jesse Marunde: Training Like a Strongman Phenom So American you’d swear he was born in Texas, Jesse Marunde was larger than life in just about every way. At 6’4” and 300lbs, he was taller and leaner than most strongmen, and a young-blood strongman phenom in the early oughts. After becoming the youngest person ever to close a Captains of Crush No. 3 gripper, Marunde won the Washington State Weightlifting Championships two years later, and the year after that became the youngest person to qualify for the World’s Strongest man Three years later, the “effervescent showman” Marunde became the first American to place in the top two in the World's Strongest Man
for fifteen years.
Tragically, Marunde was never able to grab the crown, as he died of a congenital heart defect after a brutal medley workout in 2007. Whether he was a victim of the trend in strongman to combine superhuman strength with Lance Armstrong levels of endurance, a congenital defect, PEDs (as pussies on the internet invariably posit), or a combination thereof is irrelevant- Marunde represented one of the most ludicrous combinations of brute strength and muscular endurance the world has ever seen.
Marunde’s schedule was as deranged as you’d expect for a guy who nearly won the World’s Strongest man at 24 (and close two #3 Captains of Crush grippers simultaneously). He trained twice a day, five days a week, and once on the sixth and seventh. The workouts changed constantly but the aim remained the samebecome the strongest human being on Earth. We can assume he took a day off here and there, but like any useful lifter (or any person who isn’t qualified to star in Simple Jack 2 without acting instruction), he didn’t plan rest days weeks in advance- he simply took them when he needed them .
Morning: Light-to-Moderate Workout (6AM) According to Marunde, the morning workouts get the blood flowing. They create more energy for the heavy evening workout, and its format changes constantly to keep it fresh.
Basic Warmup
Reverse Hypers - 3 sets Situps - 3 sets. Empty Bar Complex - 10 squats, deadlifts, military presses, snatches, jerks, good mornings, upright rows and bent-over rows Stretching With the Bar - Your basic shoulder flexibility stuff that CrossFitters typically do with PVC pipe Barbell Jumping Jacks - 1 x 20 x 30kg (Starting with a shoulder-width grip and a narrow stance, he jumps and kicks his feet out to the sides while he slides his hands to a wide grip position, in a movement that looks just like a regular jumping jack)
Power Clean + Military Press + Hang Clean + Push Press - Works up to 120kg in 10kg jumps Muscle Snatches + 2 Hang Snatches - Works up to 100kg Front Squat - Works up to a single with 160kg 30 Minutes of Kickboxing
Monday- Weightlifting and Sandbags
Drop Snatches (Warmup) Power Cleans - Work up to 160-170kg Light Front Squat - Work up to 180kg Sandbag Carry - 3 x 300ft, carried like a Husafell stone. Sandbag weighs around 300lb
Tuesday- Snatches, Squats, and Sled
Heavy Power Snatch - Working only doubles and singles up to 160kg Heavy Back Squat - 5 × 5 x 500lbs (works up to 700 in a squat suit Front Squat -2 x 15 x140kg Ab Wheel
Sled - 2 x 200ft drag (pulling while going backward, then facing forward using a hip belt) “My alternative to not doing it is to just do it light.” “I’m not afraid to lift light—not afraid to walk into a commercial gym and train light. I’ll never not train—I will just back off.”
Wednesday- Light Back and Grip
Light Snatch - Work up to 3 x 3 x 100kg Lat Work (variety of different grips, including pipes, softballs and a twoinch revolving bar) Chins - 8 x AMRAP (with four different grips) Grip Work
According to Marunde, “you have to have a great grip. You are only as strong as what you can hold on to, so having strong hands is the most important thing. It’s true in all sports.”
Thursday- Heavy Back and Shoulders
Heavy Power Clean - Work up to 3 x 2 x 160kg Deadlift - 462lb x 20 (I have no idea what he chose that weight) Kettlebell Medley (130lb) Clean and Press - 1 x 5 reps (each hand)
Bent Over Rows - 1 x 10 (each hand) High Pulls - 1 x 10 (each hand) Kettlebell Medley (130lb + 90 for swings + high pulls) Clean and Press - 1 x 5 reps (each hand) Bent Over Rows - 1 x 10 (each hand) Swings - 1 x 10 x 90lb (each hand) High Pulls - x 10 x 90lb (each hand) Seated Military Press - 3 x 2 x 315lb Sandbag Squat - 3 x 20
Friday- Light Weightlifting and Back Squat to Push Press
Light Snatch - Work up to 3 x 3 x 100kg Back Squat to Push Press - Work up to 190kg (this is an awesome movement, and the one that got me (the author) to quit doing a bodypart split. It is an explosive back squat after which you press the bar off your back) Light Power Hang Cleans - Work up to 1 x 3 x 130kg
Saturday- Events (no AM Workout) Stone events are all done without tacky- he only uses that in competition.
Farmer’s Walk - 150ft feet, starting with 200 pounds in each hand and working up to 313lbs Yoke - 4 x 100ft x 600lbs Viking Press - 3 x 10 x 330lbs Stones - Warmup set with five light rocks; 5 x 240lbs; 305; 325; 335; 355; 325 to a 54-inch box. Stones - 385lbs to 60-inch box; then 72-inch box Stones - 305, 325, 335, 240 (rest weight) and 325 pounds to 72-inch box Tire Flip - 900lbs x 20
Sunday- Conditioning Kickboxing - 1 1/2 hours
Magnus Samuelsson- Legendary Grip Strength Weighing 320lbs, Magnus Samuelsson has arms bigger and stronger than most men’s legs, which helped him qualify for the World’s Strongest Man ten times in thirteen years, and reach the podium in five of those. With enough arm and grip strength to snap Rictus Erectus’s arm in half like a bit of balsa wood during an arm wrestling match, Samuelsson’s arm strength can safely be described as superhuman.
Though you might think that it would have changed a bit over three decades, Samuelsson claims it’s essentially the same as it’s always been, and looking deeper into his history, it might even predate that era, because Samuelsson’s father was also an arm wrestling champion. Nevertheless, his arm work is fairly basic, because as a full time farmer, Samuelsson gets plenty of heavy, direct arm work in the course of the average day- there’s not much need to do curls when you’ve been hoisting cows out of the mud and shifting massive icelandic boulders all day.
Arms are trained every third day, and the two grip workouts are alternated.
Biceps Straight Bar Barbell Curl - 60kg x 15; 80kg x 15; 100kg x 15 (to give you some idea of the loading, he can do 140kg x 4); 60kg x 15 (let the bar roll as far down toward the fingertips as possible, before reverseing the entire movement)
Grip Training Program 1
Captains of Crush - 2 x10; 1-2 x AMRAP Wrist Roller - 3 x 100% of Max Wrist Curls - 2 x 10 Light Pinch Grip
Grip Training Program 2
Captains of Crush - 2 x 5; 2 x 1; 2 x overload (negatives) Wrist Roller - 2 x 80% of Max Wrist Curls - 2 x 10x Heavy Pinch Grip - 90% of max
Hybrid Athletes The term hybrid athletes should be self-explanatory, but if you forgot to take your nootropics this morning, this section covers the type of strength athlete that was most common prior to the internet era. Guys like bill Kazmaier reigned, crushing shit on the platform in powerlifting, filling the pages of bodybuilding magazines, and winning the World’s Strongest Man. There was Curtis Leffler, a bodybuilder who was begged to do the 1995 WSM, which occurred only two days after NPC Nationals. Leffler showed up half dead from dieting and competed in a sport for which he had never, ever trained. He didn’t win, but he gave it hell, and competed in the Hawaiian Strongman Championships later that year just to give a better fed account for himself… and though he didn’t win, beat WSM Hall of Famer Magnus Samuelsson. Those guys were legion, from ripped-and-ready Olympic weightlifters Russ Knipp and Tommy Kono to bodybuilder/strongman/bodybuilder Joe Ladnier, and they aptly demonstrated that restricting yourself to a single strength discipline isn’t just boring- it’s fucking stupid. Thus, here you have the hybrid athletes- the people who don’t care what the discipline is- they just want to move big weights and look awesome doing it.
Brutally In Depth: Pillow- The Insanely Shredded She-Beast of Bodybuilding and Nerdlesque As I mentioned previously, freaks and geeks are what built the world of strength sports. From Sandow, the epic male prostitute (and occasional bodybuilder), to weirdos like Gypsy Boots (who would piss on his feet in the shower to clean them because "urine is sterile"), to maniac biker neurology PhDs with a national
record in powerlifting like Oliver Sacks, to comic book nerds, the strength sports world is where the weirdest outcasts on the planet have collected for decades to surround themselves with like minded people... and look good doing it. You also had the straight up geeks, like Aaron Baker, the 90s bodybuilder who loved Batman so much he would do guest posing routines in a sort-of Batman costume; Kai Greene, the only nerd solipsistic enough to create a graphic novel starring himself as the protagonist; and an entire generation of kids who started lifting to look like the dudes on Dragonball Z. None of them, however, holds a fucking candle to Pillow, aka the She-Beast, who is perhaps the single coolest person of whom I've ever heard. Pro burlesque dancer, cosplayer, Renn Faire enthusiast, fluent speaker of Klingon, and one of the first successful women’s heavyweight bodybuilders, the She-Beast was the living embodiment of the “keep it fucking weird” ethos for which the lifting world was famous before rich suburbanites ruined the fuck out of the scene. The progenitor of “nerdlesque,” which is a badass mashup of anything Comic-Con with burlesque, Pillow was likely the source material for many a nerd’s wet dream long before she stepped onstage and became that source material for bodybuilding fans as well.
Though her name seems like one of those ironic nicknames given to guys who look like Bigfoot but get called “Tiny” in the bar, it was her original stage name as a dancer because her physique was apparently what Gabriel Iglesias would describe as “fluffy”. In her words, "Pillow was my stage name from a long time ago when I was doing rock and roll equipment handling and I looked like a great big squishy pillow, like the Michelin tire gal with a goose down jacket with feathers leaking out of it and duct tape patches.” Pillow’s physique after she started bodybuilding was anything but squishy. Renowned for conditioning that was crazier than a necrophiliac at a clothing optional zombie party, Pillow was featured in Pumping Iron 2 after winning the 1983 Gold’s Classic and coming in fifth at Nationals in a heavyweight class so insane that legendary Cory Everson took second. Though she quit competing, her physique remained utterly insane throughout her dancing career- video of her on YouTube ten years later shows her bone dry and jacked as hell as she danced to win Miss Exotic World 1995.
In 1997, she leveled up to “there is only one god, and her name is Pillow” as performed as a motherfucking Klingon, with two male Klingon escorts wielding
bat’leths. At this point, calling her an absolute legend as a bodybuilder or an exotic dancer would not do her justice, but there is no word in the human language that can accurately describe the level of awesome that this woman reached. As such, Klingon will have to suffice- qeylIS ta'be' (God Queen). Not only that, but she’s still dancing at 62 and looks better than 9/10 of the chicks at your local "hardcore" gym (I don’t know many chicks or 62-year-old men or women with visible vascularity on their biceps), so she’s clearly still smashing weights. This ravenous She-Beast got started on her path to her unique brand of awesomeness as any weirdo worthy of scamming on chickens at a bar with Gonzo does- by having no friends. Whereas I spent fifth grade reading the goddamn dictionary and doing wind sprints, she spent hers (being immeasurably cooler) watching Star Trek and reading Robert Heinlein. Fast forward to age 20, and she was working as a stage hand at a burlesque show when she discovered that the dancers were making $5 a night more than she was, so she ditched the backstage shit for the spotlight. A few years later, she started competing in bodybuilding and for a while was a superstar in bodybuilding, getting the cover of Muscle and Fitness and a couple of now-defunct mags, and was a favorite
face of Gold’s Gym while that badass maniac Pete Grymkowski was still
running things.
These days, she spends her time tearing up the parties at Renn Faire as a pirate lass, performing as a drag king, cosplaying like a motherfucker (sexy Master Chief, anyone?), and is a member of a "dry-docked" Klingon Assault Group, which is some kind of charitable club for people who cosplay as Klingons. Having grown up in a staunchly Star Wars household, I was surprised to find there is such a thing, since I always thought Trekkies were middle-aged shut-ins who spent their time practicing their makeout techniques on Worf masks. I stand corrected. Tragically, I could only locate her twice a week offseason leg workout, which is better than nothing given the paucity of information about her training online. Bear in mind that women's bodybuilding at the time was really more of a modern bikini competition, so Pillow was already off the upper end of acceptable
muscularity. Had she squatted, she'd likely have had muscularity that would make the modern physique chicks look sadly underdeveloped by comparison. Leg Press - 5 x 6-12 Leg Extension - 4-5 x 8-10 Lying Leg Curl - 5-8 x 8-10 Standing Leg Curl - 5-8 x 8-10 Cable Abduction - 4-5 x 8-10 Cable Adduction - 4-5 x 8-10
And as anyone who has been a fan of Plague of Strength / Chaos and Pain knows, I'm hardly the touchy feely type. That said, I realize my approach doesn't always reach everyone, and me telling people to grab their balls and listen to some beatdown hardcore, read Gates of Fire or some Joe Abercrombie, or watch the Devil’s Rejects doesn't always work. Thus, I figured I'd pass along a story Pillow related about being true to you and bucking the trends. Pillow was supposed to meet a friend at some kind of group therapy and accidentally walked into the wrong room. She realized too late that it was some kind of AA group for gay people, but before she could leave, they tagged her to speak. Having the type of massive brass bull balls that allowed her to do whatever the hell she wanted throughout her life, she stood up and spoke. "My name is Pillow. I walked into the wrong group. I'm not gay... I'm not an alcoholic, but I'm here for some fellowship. I train at a gym where all these people do steroids... I don't do steroids. I work at a strip joint where a lot of people do stuff I don't believe in... and I don't do them. And I feel like I don't fit in, anywhere.' At which point a gay dude who appeared to be in pretty rough shape (cancer or AIDs or somesuch), leaned over, put his hand on her knee and said,
"'Honey, if you don't fit in anywhere, YOU FIT IN EVERYWHERE!'" So, there you have it- Pillow, the She-Beast. Bodybuilder, cosplayer, burlesque dancer, innovator, and giver of so few fucks she'd have to get them financed if she was forced to give some. The strength game doesn't have to be one big inbred fuckfest, no matter how hard these milquetoast Instagram superstars and super srs "science" dickheads try to make it one. There's always room to do your own thing, buck the trends, and blaze your own trail. Life's too short to be boring.
Jon Cole- King of the Supertotal and the First Collegiate Strength Coach in History There are a lot of badasses in this book- dudes who have wrestled bears and fought in wars and done all kinds of bizarre, awesome things that can only be accomplished with a boatload of testosterone and a desire to be as odd as they want to be, but few people have the lifting chops that Jon Cole possessed. Cole was a collegiate national title holder in both powerlifting and track and field, setting records at his school in both sports. After college, Cole was hired as the first strength coach in US collegiate history for ASU after the coaching staff saw what his programs had done for their athletes. His programs for the ASU football team has a dramatic effect on their record, taking them from a 5-5 team in 1966 to a 20th in the country with an 8-2 record in 1967 and a repeat of that record in 1968. By 1973, they’d won the Fiesta Bowl, only lost a couple of games in a few years, and Jon Cole was one of the premier strength coaches and trainers in the country.
From there, he built the largest muscular rehab center in the world and coached multiple NBA, MLB, NFL, and other professional sports players to victory, which should have allowed him to retire comfortably shortly thereafter. Sadly for him, but luckily for the strength world, Arthur Jone and Nautilus completely destroyed his business and nearly bankrupted him, which rekindled his competitive spirit and led to huge numbers in powerlifting. Competing at 275, Jon Cole rocked a massive 23.5” upper arm, 16” forearms, and a 55”, with a ridiculously svelte 34”, so he looked like a goddamn superman when he stepped onto the platform. And he lifted like one too, posting a 2370 total at 283lbs (there was no 275 class at that time), which even using ACE bandages for wraps would earn him 14th all time in the 308 class. Had he a 275 to which he could have cut, this total would still have him at third all time, with little more than bandaids for knee wraps. What’s more, he could throw a baseball430 feet, pulled 900 twice in three minutes for an exhibition, and had badass weightlifting numbers- 430lb clean and press, 430lb clean and jerk, and a 340lb snatch in competition. In short, the man was a superhuman on a scale the world might never see again. Here is how he trained.
Week One Day 1
Bench Press (medium heavy) – 10, 8, 6, 5 x 5 Squat (medium heavy) – 10, 8, 6, 5 x 5 Upright Rows – 5 x 8 (adding weight with each set) Standing Barbell Curls – 5 x 8 Calf Raises – 6 x 20 (2 sets with toes out, 2 in, 2 straight)
Day 2
Power Cleans – 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 Lying Triceps Presses – 5 x 8 Standing Barbell Curls – 5 x 8 Incline Presses (heavy) – 10, 8, 5 x 3
Day 3
Bench Press – same as Day 1 Squat (heavy) – 10, 8, 5 x 3 Arm Work – same as Day 1
Week Two Day 4
Front Squat (medium heavy) – 10, 8, 6, 5 x 3 Incline Bench (medium heavy) – 10, 8, 5 x 5 Curls – 5 x 8 Lying Triceps Presses – 5 x 8 Calf Raises – 6x20
Day 5
Deadlifts (heavy) – 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 Bench Press (heavy) – 10, 8, 5 x 3 Standing Triceps Presses – 5 x 8 Barbell Curls – 5 x 8
Day 6
Squat (heavy) – 10, 8, 6, 5 x 3 Incline Bench (medium) – 10, 8, 5 x 5 Barbell Curls – 5 x 8 Upright Rows – 5 x 8
Lying Triceps – 5 x 8 Calf Raises – 6 x 20
Brutally In Depth: Chuck Sipes- the Natty AF Bodybuilding Paratrooper With a Bench That Shocked the World The near-mythical badasses of the 1950s and 1960s, legion as they seem to have been and natty almost to a man, made insanely heavy lifts commonplace by taking every single modern truism about lifting, dumping it in the goddamn trash, and deciding that the solution to every problem in the weight room is more food and harder training. An anathema to the broke dick, science-tastic, weakas-hell "evidence based" lifters of the modern era who have deluded themselves into thinking that aping the methods of the successful is preposterous, the lifters of the mid-20th Century actually succeeded in the weight room by applying a little observation and introspection and a massive amount of effort.
One such lifter is Chuck "The Iron Warrior" Sipes, a paratrooper / lumberjack / powerlifter / bodybuilder / proto-Bear Grylls. More hardcore than one of the kill scenes in I Spit On Your Grave 3, Sipes managed to rock one of the top three physiques in the world while benching 570lbs and working 12 hours a day slaughtering trees like they were hymens after the prom. Though the Olympia title eluded him like he was an ICE agent chasing Dan Akroyd across the US in an eerily precognizant social commentary on American isolationism, Sipes managed to snag the 1959 IFBB Mr. America, the 1960 IFBB Mr. Universe, the 1967 NABBA Mr. World, and the 1968 IFBB Mr. World, while natty as hell and out-benching every single person on the planet not named Pat Casey (an OG Westside lifter who, incidentally, outweighed Sipes by 135 lbs). Chuck Sipes was apparently conceived with the grip strength that later served him so well as a strongman, and he literally just grabbed fistfuls of his mother's uterus and ripped her abdomen open, forcing himself into the world in a Chuck Norris-esque manner in late 1932. In spite of the brutal manner by which Sipes birthed himself, he grew up a somewhat scrawny kid. As he wanted to play high school football like any other red-blooded, commie-hating, steak-loving American boy, he enlisted the aid of his neighbor, weightlifting equipment luminary Chuck Coker (who later founded Universal Equipment Company). Utilizing the techniques he learned from Coker, Sipes became a beast on the football field and after graduation joined the US Army as a paratrooper. In a bizarre effort to demonstrate the fact that the only person who could kill Chuck Sipes was Chuck Sipes, he found himself tangled with another trooper during a practice drop when he’s chute didn't open, and then free-fell 70 feet to the ground. Though he steadfastly refused to die, Sipes was stuck in the hospital for four month recuperating from grievous head injuries. Upon receiving a medical discharge in 1952, Sipes went home with a headful of epilepsy and depression and the brass fucking balls of a man who could free fall out of an airplane without a parachute and not only live to tell the tale, but go onto be one of the greatest bodybuilders of the golden era and the greatest drug-free 220lb bencher of all time.
Vital Stats
Height : 5'9½" Weight : 220 lbs. Arms : 19 ½" (relaxed) Chest : 50" Waist : 32" Thighs : 25 ½" Calves : 18"
Forearms : 18" Because the concept of a "natural genetic limit" had not yet been set, Chuck Sipes went about his business in happy ignorance of the "facts" the evidencebased dickheads spreading their specious claims across the internet like cancer. Training with Mr. Universe Bill Pearl, Sipes set his sights on being the greatest bodybuilder to ever live, though he didn't give two shits about posing and spent the vast majority of his time heaving huge weights around like toddler throwing his toys during a tantrum. In spite of that fact, he racked up an impressive number of wins, including pulling down the “Mr. Pacific Coast” title at the ripe old age of 41. Unlike modern lifters, who possess all of the personality of a wax replica of Ben Stein, the depth of a spilled shot of vodka, and the varied interests of autistic trapped in a stairwell, Chuck Sipes didn't just lift weights and stare at himself in the mirror. He organized the American Bodybuilding Club in the 1960's, which was practically free to join, and gave exhibitions and lectures on the benefits of fitness and recreational sports. After he hung up his posing trunks, Chuck volunteered with crippled and retarded kids, which is impressive because he was not too far removed from a time when humanity either euthanized them or stuffed them in the basement of a mental institution until some shitbird doctor wanted to torture, lobotomize, or starve them to death.
As if that wasn't enough do-goodery and well-roundedness, Sipes also painted a shitload of Western landscapes and 19th century mountain men. He also took teenage criminals on week-long trips into the mountains to teach them to rely on teamwork for survival, presaging the spate of horrible reality television American women would come to watch 30 years later. In spite of all that and his misplaced faith in the Christians’ god (seems CTE isn’t an excuse for killing yourself, so he burns forever) Chuck Sipes apparently had enough of the seizures and depression stemming from his head injuries and hung it up on February 24, 1993, at the age of 61. Ever the badass, Sipes was buried in buckskins, just like Davy Crockett would have been if Mexican soldiers hadn't scattered and defiled his remains out of bitterness that they suck at war harder than channers suck at lifting. The best part? Chuck began his competitive bodybuilding career completely unwillingly. When he was lifting in junior college, his training partners filled out an entry form to the physique contest, then told Chuck that he had to get up on stage and pose. Though he initially refused, the dude knew he looked amazing, so he finally went onstage, totally unprepared, and start busting poses.
It's not every day you see the second biggest bencher on the planet bending rebar in half wearing nothing but an adult diaper and a peace medallion.
Contest History
1958 Mr. Northern California 1st 1958 Jr. Mr. America 3rd (Western section) 1958 Mr. America 9th 1959 IFBB Mr. America 1st 1960 IFBB Mr. Universe 1st 1966 Mr. Olympia 3rd (won by Larry Scott) 1967 Mr. Olympia 2nd (won by Sergio Oliva) 1967 NABBA World Championships 1st 1968 Mr. Northern California 1st 1968 IFBB Mr. World 1st (The Mr. Olympia was held the same day, and had also taken time to perform strongman stunts.) 1970 IFBB Mr. Universe 2nd medium class (Overall won by Arnold) 1974 Mr. Pacific Coast 1st (over-40 class)
Best Lifts Bench Press : 570 lbs. Squat : 600 lbs. Standing Barbell Curl : 250 lbs.
Yes, yes- get on with how this superhuman maniac trained, right? The man was a goddamn bulldozer, crushing weights all fucking day long, breaking hearts and spines all the live-long day. According to Dennis Weis, Sipes believed in training often, training heavy, and doing a shitload of supports and partials do build sick tendon and ligament strength. To determine the proper exercises and his set and rep range, Sipes treated lifting like a blind man does an orgy (he just feels it out) and examined the effect of the exercises in previous workouts to determine the best combination of movements to achieve his goals. Sipes believed that he could feel out a good workout, rather than following a set regime in which he followed a system of glacial, unrelentingly boring, counterintuitive, artificial, incremental progression based on the half cocked theories of geographically distant Communists. Additionally, like any rational, thinking person with a belief in biology, the theory of specialized adaptation, and a general belief in the theory of evolution, Sipes said, "whenever I specialize on a body part, my stamina and endurance improve remarkably. In this way, the muscle ache and tightness I spoke of subsides quickly and in this way, there is less rest between sets." This led Sipes, even while training for strength, to rest between sets "only momentarily, probably less than 10 seconds. On most regular type exercise schedules, my rest periods between sets are around 20 to 30 seconds and no more." Additionally, he followed a super-intense split, in which he trained two to three times a day, six days a week. There was no retarded Stuart McRobertloving whining about how he had bad genetics, or a Mentzer-esque love for abstaining from the gym in deference to the library and methamphetamines, wherein he would have spent countless hours misinterpreting an extremely simple subset of Russian philosophy, or an incessant screeching about the need for layoffs and deloads- it was simply complete dedication to busting his ass on the exercise on which he wanted to get very, very good.
In spite of his nearly psychotic dedication to training, Sipes wasn't above heading off into the woods with up-and-coming teenage criminals, with friends, or by himself for a week or more at a time. Giving exactly zero shits about his diet or how it would impact his latest round of a terrible cookie-cutter Russian routine, Chuck would just forge out into the woods and have a good time. According to his buddy Norm, on camping trips they used "workouts involving cables, which would be tied around trees and then stretched in various exercises. Their conversations around campfires on such outings were the underpinnings of a lifelong friendship, and now, when Norm speaks of Chuck, it is with warmth, love, respect, and bewilderment as to what changed Chuck’s outlook later in life. After a month in the woods, Chuck’s bodyweight often decreased by 15 to 20 pounds, and Norm remembers the amazing transformation Chuck could undergo in regaining the lost weight and muscle. He simply ate more and lifted. No drugs." If nothing else, Chuck Sipes should stand as an example of how to approach training- with an open mind and zero shits given. His method was essentially a weightlifting paean to Bruce Lee's philosophy of amalgamating the most effective fighting styles into his own, and a nod to everyone who’s ever thrown anything they could find in the fridge and cupboard into a pot and unwittingly
produced the best goddamn chili anyone ever ate. Additionally, it's not unlike the Paleo crossfitter who buys a burger and tosses the bun- there's something to be learned from just about everybody, and no one's above analyzing the greats from any sport to help propel themselves to a semblance of that greatness. That said, here are some of the methods Sipes employed over the course of his career (and those methods were legion).
Monday/Thursday
Back Squat – 2 x 6, 2 x 4, 2 x 2 Bench Press – 2 x 6, 2 x 4, 2 x 2 Conventional Deadlift – 2 x 6, 2 x 4, 2 x 2 Shrug – 4 x 8 Cheat Curl – 4 x 6 Preacher Curl – 5 x 10 Situp – 3 x 20 Leg Raise – 4 x 15 Overhead Press – 5 x 6 Incline DB Flye – 3 x 8 Calf Raise – 4 x 20
Tuesday/Friday
Heavy 1/4 Bench Press – 5 x 8 Heavy 1/4 Back Squat , (no lockout, 50-100lb over your max squat)– 5 x 8 Stiff Legged Deadlift off Bench or Box (bodybuilding-style deficits)– 5 x 4 Chins – 6 x 6 Dips – 5 x 8 Skullcrusher – 5 x 8 Abs
Power Arm Routine Monday/Thursday
Superset One Cheat Curls – 5 x 6 - 8 (explosive cheat on the concentric, extremely slow descent on the eccentric portion) Concentration Curls – 5 x 10 - 12 (Elbow braced on the thigh, one second peak contraction, one second pause fully relaxed at bottom)
Superset Two Alternating Dumbell Curls – 5 x 6 - 8 (ultra heavy with a slight cheat) Alternating Incline Curl – 5 x 8 (moderate weight, slow and controlled) Reverse Barbell Curl – 6 x 6 - 8
Shape and Size Arm Routine As with every other bodypart, Sipes had a lot of different methods for training his gigantic arms, each one crazier than a bunny in a blender on Easter morning. Interestingly, Chuck had extremely different methods for training his arms based on what he was doing- when it was for shape and size, he focused on biceps, but as you'll see in the power section, triceps were his focus in training for pressing power. In his own words: "Many bodybuilders say the triceps is first in arm importance, saying it is the largest muscle in the arm. I rank the triceps last on my list. Why? An unimpressive, large but droopy and poorly shaped arm is not what I want. Besides, the triceps are not as important in my strength feats. With the triceps last, next up the list with me is forearms. This muscular area of the arms is vital both to appearance - nothing is so unsightly as a big upper arm and a pair of sticks for forearms - and for gripping strength well developed forearms are essential. Every bodybuilder should work the forearms regularly as part of their workouts. I worked in sawmills and lumberjacking when I was younger, and this helped my development and strength quite a bit. But, at the top of the list is the biceps area. The better developed and stronger your biceps are, the better off you will be physically. They should be #1 on your arm training list. Therefore, this arm development article will concentrate on developing this area, the biceps."
Monday/Thursday Barbell Curl 21's 7 reps from bottom position to middle position, 7 reps from middle position to top of movement, 7 full-range reps 4 sets x 21 reps Cheat Barbell Curl : 16 x 4 (You read that right- sixteen sets of four) Alternate one set of 21's to each 4 sets of Cheat Curls.
Tuesday/Friday Skullcrusher 21's 7 reps from bottom position to middle position, 7 reps from middle position to top of movement, 7 full-range reps 4 sets x 21 reps Conventional Skullcrushers : 16 x 4 One set of 21's to each 4 sets of regular skullcrushers
Forearm Routine Guaranteed to turn your hands into immobile claws for a couple of weeks, this brutal routine is what resulted in Sipes' insane 18" forearms... along with a hell of a lot of chopping wood. How the man managed to do both is a mystery for
the ages, because a day of swinging an axe alone is enough to reduce most humans to a pile of blubbering bullshit, and this dude did both. Reverse Curl (slowly) – 4 x 8 DB Wrist Forearm Curl (off knee) – 4 × 15 Cable or Pulley Reverse Curl – 4 × 12 Rubber Ball Squeeze, Newspaper Roll-up, etc.
Chet Yorton- the Father of Natural Bodybuilding (And the Only Guy to Beat Arnold)
Chet Yorton is a fun example to jam in the face of the natty bros screeching about genetic limits, because he pretty much defied all of them. Rocking 19” ultra-lean arms on a 220lb competition body, Chet Yorton stood as a natty bulwark against the rising tide of gear users until he finally decided it wasn’t worth competing any longer. He handed Arnold the only loss of the young Austrian’s career in bodybuilding, posted a solid 600lb squat, 450 two second paused bench, and 600lb deadlift during the odd lift era (pre-standardized powerlifting), and recorded a solid Olympic weightlifting total to boot… all in spite of being in a car accident that would have left most people crippled for life. According to Earle Leiderman, "After he had somewhat recuperated from a total physical wreck of broken and also shattered bones, serious multiple lacerations, concussion, and also escaping by only one-eighth of an inch from death, he developed himself so rapidly despite such handicaps, that within two years of exercising he won the title of Mr. Wisconsin, and also in the same affair won an extra award for being the most muscular. Such seems to be somewhat of a record--
to become a prize winner within two years after a start from physical profundity." We’re talking about a man whose legs were so utterly mangled that he was halfway to being wolverine when the surgeons had finished with him who managed not only to walk again by training six days a week, but who managed to become the greatest bodybuilder on the planet, drug free. And simply saying the man trained six days a week is an insufficient description of what Chet Yorton did- he trained so hard, and with so much volume, six days a week, that you might get rhabdo reading his program… and so balls-out, diehard natty that he went on to form the first drug tested bodybuilding organization the world had ever seen. The following is Chet Yorton’s pre-contest program, which was done two days on, one day off.
Day 1: Chest, Shoulders and Triceps
Bench Press - As many sets as necessary until you reach 100 reps total, then 1 rep max. Chet usually did 5 sets of 22 with 315 and then a max single. On these and every other set, Chet went to failure. Lateral Raise - 5 x 8-10 Bent Over Lateral Raise - 5 x 8-10 Barbell Overhead Press - 5 x 8-10 Barbell Front Raise - 5 x 8-10 Triceps Pushdown - 5 x 8-10 Reverse Grip Dip - 5 x 8-10 Single Arm Overhead Extension - 5 x 8-10 Triceps Kickbacks - 5 x 8-10
Incline Crunches - 500 reps Leg Raise - 500 reps
Day 2: Back, Biceps and Legs
Behind the Neck Pulldown - 5 x 8-10 Wide-Grip Row - 5 x 8-10 Reverse-Grip Row - 5 x 8-10 One Arm Dumbbell Row - 5 x 8-10 Barbell Curl - 5 x 8-10 Concentration Curl - 5 x 8-10 Seated Alternating Dumbbell Curl - 5 x 8-10 Standing Dumbbell Curl - 5 x 8-10 Squat - 5 x 8-10 Hack Squat - 5 x 8-10 Leg Curl - 5 x 8-10 Leg Extension - 5 x 8-10 Standing Calf Raise (Toes pointed straight) - 5 x 40 Standing Calf Raise (Toes pointed out) - 5 x 40 Standing Calf Raise (Toes pointed in) - 5 x 40 Incline Crunches - 500 reps Leg Raise - 500 reps
Brutally In Depth: Ivan Putski, Overhead Presser Extraordinaire Poland is an interesting place. Wedged in between the titans of Europe, the Germans and the Russians, the Poles pretty much fought a two front war against both groups for centuries, and finally had their shit handed to them in the 18th Century when the Russians and Prussians basically just walked in and started pointing at random shit and yelling "Mine!" like a couple of fat, retarded girls in an ice cream shop. Thereafter, both countries started what pretty much amounted to the least fair campaign of discrimination and disinformation of all time, shouting to the mountaintops about how the Poles were a pack of ugly, stupid pack animals that you'd like in your kitchen less than an unwashed, rotting donkey's ass. For those of you who've never been to Poland, Poles are actually pretty goddamn awesome. In fact, you could throw a rock into a crowd in Poland and hit three chicks that look like models- there's a reason Hitler had the SS banging the ever-loving shit out of every broad in Poland.
There exists, however, a Pole who exists simply to disabuse you of the false notions you might hold about the Poles, and his name doesn't rhyme with "oodzianowski". Nope, before Marius could doff his fishnet tank top to hand you a beating, another badass Pole would rip off your arms and beat you to death with them were he to hear you spout off with some Polish jokes in his presence. That man was Ivan "The Polish Hammer" Putski. Putski, born Josef Bednarski, was born in Poland and immigrated shortly thereafter. You'll hear a lot of bullshit about how his English sucked, but that seems purely a gimmick- in the interview to which I listened, the dude sounded like he was speaking on the phone from horseback in West Texas with chaw in his mouth and bowl of beanfree chili in his lap. For those of you who are unaware, Putski was a professional wrestler in the early years of the WWF, in a time when WWF wrestlers looked much more like superheroes than men's board shorts models. He was one of the massive dudes in league with guys like the benching phenomenon Ted Arcidi, Olympic weightlifter and strongman Ken Patera, and overall beast and badass facial hair rocker "Superstar" Billy Graham. Throughout his career he mostly feuded with Billy Graham and the successor to Graham's original look, none other than Jesse "The Body" Ventura. At the time, because there were so many jacked-to-bits dudes dripping testosterone and chugging cans of whoop ass that they regularly had to dispense with the bullshit histrionics and just settle shit Over the Top-style
with arm wrestling matches. It was clearly a different time then, as the 180lb oily goofballs predominating the modern WWE would have been eaten alive in Putski's era.
Putski stood a mere 5'6", but his weight as a wrestler and strongman vacillated between 225 and 300 pounds. Most of the latter part of his career, in which he was more or less a bodybuilder, he was a lean 250 lbs, which is the same billed weight as Triple H, who's considered huge by modern wrestling standard in spite of the fact that he's almost a full foot taller than Putski. If you haven't yet caught on, Putski is and was not to be fucked with. Throughout his life, Putski was a professional football player (in the fledgling Continental League), a strongman who competed in the 1978 World's Strongest Man, and Tag Team World Champion with Tito Santana. Thus, he did more awesome shit in an average day than most of us will likely do in our lives, and thought nothing of it. I first read about Putski when researching Destroy the Opposition , and found him mentioned in a story about the barrel-chested bench press phenom Doug Young. As I detail in the powerlifter section of this book, Young was one of the greatest benchers in history, and an absolute muscular beast at 242. When Young was coming up in the scene, he happened to hit up the gym where Ivan Putski lifted. By any account I've been able to find, Putski gave exactly zero shits about programming- he just went in the gym, found someone doing something epic, and attempted to best them at their pet lift in marathon workouts
that left everyone covered in vomit while Putski happily munched on boiled eggs and patted them on the head like they were small, harmless children. According to lifting historian Terry Todd, here's what happened when these two lunatics met on the iron battlefield. "The word had gotten around to all the local horses, and so we had a big bunch at the T.A.C. when Doug began to train. No one, however, except Ivan Putski, the Polish pro-wrestler, seemed very interested in benching that day; and we suspect Putski didn’t know, or care, what was on the bar. The rest of us, though, surely knew – and cared. Doug took 135 for 100 reps as a warmup and then went to singles with 225, 315, 405, 485, 505, and 520. He then dropped back to 405 for 8 repetitions and 315 for 15. Not bad, seeing as how he had just lost weight down from 260 in an effort to stay somewhere near the 242-pound class limit." That, my friends, is how babies get made. Putski didn't give a shit that Doug Young was the greatest bencher in history at that point, that Young benched more in a week than most people do in a month, or that Young had benched 545 with three broken ribs in the past- he just nutted up and matched him rep for rep on anything like the beast that he was. From other anecdotal accounts about Putski, that seemed to be his M.O.- he'd just step up to keep his rep up, whether it was Ken Patera doing overhead presses or some goofball doing calf raises like he was training for the world championships of accessory movements. Lest you think I'm joking about the latter bit, I'm not. One account I found online was from a self-professed nobody who happened to work out at a World Gym frequented by a bunch of WWE wrestlers and a couple of East Coast bodybuilders, including Mike Katz of "Pumping Iron" fame. This guy recounted the following of Putski: "I remember I was working out my strongest body part "calves" when Ivan politely asked me if he could work in on the standing calf machine with me. I was thrilled to be working out with the man who patented the "Polish Hammer" as a finisher. I remember Ivan eating a couple of dozen hardboiled eggs during his workout. He would do a set then eat a couple of eggs, do another set eat a couple more eggs etc. Ivan's English was very broken back then, but when I was laughing at his eating so many eggs during his
workout he simply said ‘Putski eat, Putski push’ and push he did......an amazing powerhouse! We eventually had the calf machine maxed out with all the weight that it could handle. 1400 lbs, to be exact, we had the entire weight stack pegged plus hung and placed 100 lb dumbbells and plates anywhere on the machine that we could safely add to the resistance of that poor overloaded machine. We both did our last set with 1400 lbs for several reps when Ivan downed a couple more eggs, then came over and patted me on the shoulder, gave me a thumbs up, and a wink, as he grabbed his gym bag off a nearby bench and headed to the locker room." It becomes fairly apparent from those accounts that Putski didn't really stick rigidly to a set program- he just loved lifting. He did have a basic program he apparently stuck to rather loosely, just because he traveled so much for the WWE. According to the interview I heard with him, however, he still trained on the road, and ensured that he took the earliest flight possible so he could get in a morning lift and then wrestle in the evening. His brutal workouts, however, all took place in the beginning of the week, when he wasn't traveling. His main training days, then, were as follows:
Monday: Chest and Shoulders Bench Press - 225 x 10; 325 x 10; 425 x 8; 425 x 7; 425 x 8; 425 x 8; 425 x 7; 425 x 7; 425 x 8; 425 x 6; 425 x 7; 425 x 7; 425 x 6 ; 425 x 5; 425 x 4 Each set was taken to failure, and he continued doing sets until he noticed a significant drop-off in bar speed and strength. He called it "train yourself ‘til you strain yourself." Putski, incidentally, was reputed to have a 600+ pound bench. Push Press - 2 warmup sets; 13-15 x 6-15 with the same weight (he used 325 until his reps dropped to 6)
Tuesday: Legs Box Squats (to a high bench): 300 x 10; 500 x 10; 15 x 10 x 650 Stadium Stairs - He would run the stairs of a local high school football stadium for an hour if the weather allowed.
Wednesday: Arms and Deads Standing Barbell Curl or Seated Concentrated Curl - 15-20 x 10 Skullcrushers or Standing Triceps Extensions - 15-20 x 10 (he’d go until his form turned to shit) Deadlifts - Work up to a 5RM The rest of the week, he'd be traveling and wrestling at night, so he would get into the gym early and do smaller workouts. Frankly, the fact that he wasn't in a coma by Wednesday night is a testament to the type of beating you can put on your body and survive. By all accounts, Putski was the nicest goddamn guy on Earth, and was constantly smiling. He was one of the few wrestlers to remain a babyface his entire career, because he was just too nice to play a heel. This, I suppose is proof that you needn't be a total cock to be a badass, which is somewhat disappointing, as I like to think that channeling my inner Tommy Conlon spurs me on to victory. Instead of being fueled by hate, however, Putski was fueled by the produce of his massive appetite. Like most of the old-school, Putski ate more in a sitting than most of us eat in a day. When Putski was first starting out, he lacked the money to eat anything expensive, "so a usual evening meal would consist of a quart or two of raw oysters. a pound of cheese, some Polish sausage, and fresh fruit. As he began learning about U. S. cooking, he developed a taste for fried chicken and it’s not at all uncommon for him to eat 20 or 30 pieces after an evening bout." In case your math sucks, that's between two and a half and four WHOLE fried chickens in a single meal. As he gained prominence in wrestling and became a bigger earner, Putski started eating steak three times a day, in addition to what was reputedly an absurd amount of kielbasa. This then, lends a great
deal more support to the credo of "eat big to get big", because Putski was a gigantic sonofabitch. Thus, to bring it all home for you, the following can be gleaned from Putski's example: ● you can, and likely should, be doing far more volume than you are currently doing. ● you can pretty much eat whatever you want in whatever quantities you want if you train your ass off, provided that your diet is heavy as hell on proteins. ● you don't have to be an asshole to be a total badass. ● compared to Ivan Putski, we are all a bunch of pussies. Go eat something already.
Mariusz Pudzianowski- Too Sexy for This Planet There is almost no chance in hell that you’ve never heard of Pudz. Goat herders in Afghanistan chant his name when they have to summon the strength to throw a goat over their neighbor’s house to win his daughter’s hand in marriage, and the tribesmen of Papua New Guinea invoke his name whenever they begin to feast on the corpse of a loved one, left to rot in the sun for a full week before they begin their meal. The mere mention of Pudz’s name helps the putrefying human flesh slide down their gullets in all that much more satisfying a manner. Frankly, I would be unsurprised if upon our first contact with aliens, they don’t greet the human delegation in a fishnet half shirt, flipping over cars and fighting random passersby in what can only be described as the ultimate human activities.
Should you, however, lack access to the various and sundry forms of electronic communication that would enable you to know all there is to know about our lord and savior, Mariusz Pudzianowski, allow me to enlighten you, so as to save your immortal soul from an eternity of damnation to weakness and sadness. Pudz is a five time World’s Strongest Man and two time runner up, with 42 combined first place finishes in that sport; a green belt in kyokushin; an amateur rugby union player; the second place finisher in Poland’s Dancing With the Stars; co-star of a terrible music video with his brother, in which they dressed like the goofballs in Right Said Fred; a mixed martial artist with a 12-7 (his most recent loss the result of a bad knee injury, and one other loss was literally the result of exhaustion and his opponent smothering him with his fat); and a badass gym lifter with a 640lb raw bench, a 840lb wrapped squat, and a 915lb raw deadlift. To accomplish all of that, Mariusz has an intense and diverse training routine that is never exactly the same as the workout prior. He has three main workout formats through which he rotates and trains five to six days a week, depending on how much rest he requires and how he feels, and his rest days fall wherever he needs them.
Da y 1 AM: Legs and Lats
High Bar Back Squat - Warm-up- 8 sets, pyramiding from 60 to 160kg Work sets (wrapped)- pyramiding from 160 to 280kg, 2-6 reps Leg Curl - 6 x 20 Leg Extension - 6 x 20 Pullups - 6 x 15 Chinups - 6 x 10 Behind-the-Neck Pulldowns - 4 x 15 Barbell Rows - 4 x 15 Abs (hanging leg raise, bends, etc)- 6 x 30
Day 1 PM: Events
Sandbag Carry (130kg on back)- 3 x 170m Conan's Wheel (290kg)- 3 x 2.5 revolutions Tire Flip - 3 x 10 flips
Day 2 AM: Legs and Shoulders
Front Squats - work up to 250 Calf Work - 6 x 15 Standing Military PressWarm-up sets - 7 x 60-100kg Work sets - 6 x 4-5 x 110-40kg Deadlifts Warm-up sets - 6 x 200kg Work sets - work up to 300kg Good Mornings - 8 x 100kg
Day 2 PM: Events
Bushman's Walk - 3 x 15m x 300kg Presses with Machine Used in Competition - 3 x 10x 120kg Parallel Crucifix - 40kg x 30 sec
Day 3 AM: Chest and Tris
Bench Press - Warm-up sets - work up to 180kg in 8 sets Work sets - work up from 150kg to 220kg, going from 8 down to 2 reps Skullcrushers - 6 x 15 Overhead Triceps Extensions - 6 x 15
Day 3 PM: Events Same as Monday, plus powerstairs and so-called parallel stairs.
Paul Anderson- When You’re This Strong, You Can Pretty Much Do Whatever You Want Have you ever felt like just digging a hole in your backyard, then building a squat stand over it and loading a thousand pounds on it, then standing in the hole and doing partials with it? Me neither. Paul Anderson, however, thought about a lot of crazy shit like that. Paul Anderson, if you don't know already, was an American Olympic weightlifter, proto-powerlifter, and strongman who was well known for his weird-ass training style and his penchant for shattering world records. At 5’9” and the middle 300s, Paul Anderson was far further from weak than he was from lean, and the man’s strength was so prodigious he seemed to be as much a fairy tale as he was a real person. Not that he helped his case much in that regard. The aforementioned Jon Cole was having none of Anderson’s bullshit and repeatedly called him out to compete, to prove one and for all who the strongest person on the planet was. In Cole’s mind, anyone comfortable with the mantle “strongest man on Earth” better be ready to step up to keep his rep up and prove it in competition. Anderson, true to his bizarre form, made an endless series of excuses to avoid it, and the entire matter was dropped (much to Cole’s dissatisfaction).
For those of you who are unaware, Paul Anderson was a powerlifter before the sport really existed, and who out squatted everyone on the planet for decades. Due to his unspeakable strength, he was invited to the US Olympic trials, rightly believing that Anderson’s insane strength would be something the Russian heavyweights couldn’t match. Paul ended up training the quick lifts for a year, and in that time managed a gold in the US Nationals, World Championships, and the Olympics, after which time he went back to doing random shit like golf lifting (two power racks set up 400 yards apart that he’d hit a ball, walk to, squat, and repeat), a short lived boxing career, and running a Christian group home. As to his lifts, Anderson was a goddamned monster who had a 402.5lb clean and press, a 440lb clean and jerk, and a 347lb snatch, in addition to a raw 920lb squat, 1160lb silver dollar squat, a push press of 500lbs, and could squat 700 x 10 with no warmup whatsoever. Before we get into his training methods, it would only seem appropriate to outline the man himself, as although he's certainly every bit the strength sports badass who generally receives treatment on Plague of Strength, he is hardly the psychotic, misanthropic, purveyor of destruction some of the other maniacs in these pages are. Paul Anderson was none of those things- instead, he was a deeply religious Southern Baptist big softie who some might say squandered all of his talent performing exhibitions rather than actually competing to raise a youth home for disadvantaged kids. Nowhere will you find stories of Paul
Anderson, hard drinking, coke snorting, bulldozer of a man who once threw a boulder through the window of a McDonalds or smashed his face open by headbutting a pay phone off a wall, or holding people hostage for a ham sandwich. Instead, Paul Anderson was what can only be described as a really, really nice guy.
Powerlifting Routine Mon, Weds, Fri: Shoulders and Chest
Press Off Rack - 1 x 6 x 300, 1 x 2 x 400, 1 x 2 x 390, 1 x 2 x 370 Rack Press Outs (from sticking point to lockout)- 1 x 4 x 500 Press From the Shoulders To Top Of Head - 1x4x500 Push-Press Off Rack - 1x3x450 Bench Press - 1 x 6-8 x 400-450
Tues, Thurs, Sat: Squat and Deadlift
Full Squat - 2 x 10 x 600, 1 x 2 x 825, 1 x 2 x 845, 1 x 2 x 900 Half Squat - 1 x 2 x 1200 Quarter Squat - 1 x 2 x 1800
Deadlift (with hooks rather than straps)- 4 x 6-8 x 650His rest periods explain part of the reason he trained all day, too- he rested 10 to 15 minutes between sets and would sometimes take an hour break between exercises.
Olympic Weightlifting Routine Mon, Weds, and Fri: Everything But the Squat
Overhead Press - Lots of sets of 2x320 Dumbbell Press - 7 x 3 x 135 Press Behind Neck - High reps to pump up the shoulder area Snatch - Singles, working up from 225 to 300 pounds. Squat Clean - Singles up to 400 pounds. Deadlift - 2 x 3 x 690lbs High Pulls (to waist)- 4 x 3 x 500lbs
Tues, Thurs, Sat: Squat Full Squats - Doubles, working up to 780 pounds for 3 x 2
Svend Karlsen- Viking Power Like What A powerlifter and bodybuilder who is so inexpressibly superhuman that he only started competing in strongman as a retirement activity , Svend Karlsen is the guy you would recognize from the WSM for screaming “VIKING POWER” during each event. Though extremely light for a strongman at 287lbs, Karlsen has managed three top-three finishes in the World’s Strongest Man and won in 2001 and was the second person inducted into the Strongman Hall of Fame , in addition to half a million top three finishes in smaller shows.
As a sub 300lb WSM competitor, Karlsen needed to be strong as hell and faster than a fat kid chasing an ice cream truck, and his training definitely reflected those needs . His gym lifts were without question the former- he pulled a triple with 881 (without straps), busted a single on the wrapped squat with the same weight, and benched 573 in the gym, so all that was left was the events… and no one trained events more than Karlsen.
Day 1: Events and Triceps
Barbell Log Press - 2-3 x 6-12 (that’s 2 to 3 sets of 6 to 12 reps) Tire Flip - 3 x 6-8 flips Stones - 3 x 5 Close Grip Bench Press - 1 x 4-6; 1 x 10-14 Lying French Press - 2 x 8-12 Pushdowns - 2 x 8-12 Crunches - 3 x 12
Day 2: Squatting
Front Squat - 2 x 4-6 Karlsen Squats - 3 x 8-12 (on hack squat machine, facing into the machine rather than out) Leg Extension - 3 x 12 – 20 Calf Raise - 3 x 20 Concept 2 Rower - 3 x 500 meters
Day 3: Cardio
Fast Walking or Easy Swimming for 1 Hour
Day 4: More Events
Apollon’s Axle - 1 x 1 – 3; 1 x 6 – 10 Log Lift - 1 x 4 – 8; 1 x 8 – 12 Karlsen Crucifix Flyes - 2 x 8 Incline Log Press - 1 x 3 – 6, 1 x 12 Crossovers - 3 x 8 – 12
Day 5: Deadlifts
Deadlift - 2 x 3 – 6 Seated Rows - 3 x 8 – 12 Pulldowns - 3 x 8 – 12 Shrugs - 3 x 12 Bent Over Laterals - 3 x 8 – 12
Day 6: Cardio Fast walking or light swimming – 1 hour
Day 7: More Deadlifts
Super Yoke - 3 x 25 meters Farmers Walk ( outdoors, in the snow )- 2 x 2 x 35m Conan’s Wheel - 2 x 3 laps Truck Pull - 3 x 10 meters Keg Load- 3 x 5 kegs for 5 -10 meters
Day 8: Rest He gets a massage. Cue the Redditors whining, “MUST BE NIIIIICE!” That said, a meta-analysis of studies on the efficacy of massage for improving shoulder flexibility showed that massage definitely improves range of motion, and when range of motion is improved, the potential for greater hypertrophy
is definitely increased. Thus, getting monthly massages during really heavy training periods isn’t just suggested, it’s damn near required.
Brutally In Depth: John Grimek- People Take This Programming Shit WAY Too Seriously You ever think to yourself, "Maybe I should plan out my workouts?" or "Maybe I should pay some coach for a cookie-cutter routine that has nothing to do with my own individual strengths and weaknesses in the gym? That shit might work better... after all, that's what everyone else does." Well, here's a newsflash- everyone else sucks , and most of the programs you read about rigidly adhered to by the greats are likely fabrications or a basic summary of their training methods. I know, you might think you know someone who doesn't suck and rigidly adheres to a set routine. Consider this for a second, though: are they alive right now? If so, they likely suck. This includes me, because I'm aware that I'm alive and have not yet: ● attained the strength or muscularity of people of bygone eras, like the Viking at Stamford Bridge, who single-handedly fought off an entire army of Saxons for an hour until being stabbed in the cock by a treacherous Englishman. ● fucked my way through multi-thousands-broad harems, like Khosrau II had a harem of 3000 wives, in addition to 12,000 assorted broads. ● slain any dragons like Daniel, who killed off the last dinosaur by poisoning it in a temple of Marduk. According to other sources, it might have been Alexander the Great who killed it. Either way, it's brutal they went near a dinosaur and perverse that they killed it. ● carried a 1,100lb cannon off a field of battle single-handedly like Peter Francisco.
● or done any of the badass shit John C. Grimek did just because he was awake.
In short, a plan to become a badass is likely a plan designed to fail, because brass balls and steadfast will make winners, not spreadsheets.
Vital Statistics
Height : 5'8½"
Weight : 221 lbs. (giving him the biggest height to weight ratio of the entirety of the Mr. America contest, even well into the steroid era) Arms : 19+" Olympic Press (competition): 285lbs, straight backed, at 183 Olympic Press (exhibition): 364lbs, with a layback, at 221 Bench Press (training): 480lbs Squat (training, but these were asshole scraping the floor style): 700+lbs in his prime; 695 at 70 years of age Deadlift (training): 600lbs
An absolute who's who of badassery- Milo Steinborn (the Steinborn Squat guy), John Terpak, Mr. America Steve Stanko. 6'6", 265 lb Primo Carnera (the Bob Sapp of that era), Olympic weightlifting phenom Stan Stanczyk and John Grimek. In other words, he was jacked as hell and stronger than King Kong on steroids, pre-gear. Testosterone wasn't even synthesized until 1937, and steroids weren't even introduced in the Eastern bloc until the 40's, so it's fairly certain that
Grimek was drug free for most, if not all, of his career.
His career included the following highlights: ● 1939 York Perfect Man ● 1940 Mr. America ● 1941 Mr. America ● 1946 Most Muscular Man In America ● 1948 Mr. Universe Short & Overall 1949 Mr. USAIn addition to that, Grimek regularly outlifted all of the members of the Olympic weightlifting team and represented the US at the 1936 Olympics. His utter resistance to training the quick lifts hamstrung him, though, and his brute strength failed to give him enough poundage to put him higher in the total. Despite that, Grimek managed to rep American muscle hard for the Krauts on the world stage and let them know that if we lost the coming war, we'd at least look damn good doing it. And Bob Hoffman, while pissed Grimek didn't place better, had to give it to Grimek: “[His total] is a lot of weight for any man, especially one who drives a yellow roadster around and rarely trains [the Olympic lifts]. . . . the man’s just too strong for words. He handles poundages over 300 easier than most lifters handle a hundred pounds less.”
Basically, this man was the unadulterated shit. How'd he get there? Training way too goddamn much, by any modern natty bro's standard. Unlike the retarded three day a week bullshit you will forever seen bandied about as his program (which is frankly an affront to the man's memory), Grimek's training was never the same from day to day, week to week, or year to year.
Training Outlined ● he typically trained five days a week, but occasionally trained six. ● a normal day's workout was typically not more than two hours, but occasionally he'd train for four to five hours. ● he trained full body in each workout, because split systems didn't exist yet. ● he rarely did the same exercises two days in a row, which drove Bob Hoffman absolutely nuts. ● he loved odd lifts and would train everything from the Bavarian stone lift to the bent press (for which he used 400 the first time he attempted it). ● his squat routines typically involved a hundred reps or more. "That's the thing. If I felt I needed additional repetitions or additional exercises, I did it. But if I felt, "Oh, the hell with it! I've had enough of that," I would quit! See, there was no sense of a routine that was stringent in any way, something that I felt I had to do. The hell with it! I did what I wanted. If I started an exercise, and I found that I didn't like it or need it that day, I just bypassed it." When no one felt like lifting, they just made shit up like they were your average noob New Year's Eve Resolution goof at your local big box gym. ● They invented a weird dumbbell version of the leg extension purely out of boredom . "There were times when the lifters were not in a lifting mood, so we thought up odd ways of training so we could still get a good workout. One such way was to sit on a low bench, feet outstretched, and
lift up a dumbbell overhead that had been sitting between the legs. Sounds easy but it wasn’t." ● Brad Castleberry wasn't the first motherfucker to stack dumbbells . "My specialty was lifting two dumbbells with one hand. I gripped the handle of one dumbbell while holding the other dumbbell with the heel of my hand as it laid across the handle of the dumbbell I gripped. To do this you should have a fairly thick palm, otherwise you just cannot hold it securely. I must add that very few lifters were eager to try this stunt with the heavy dumbbells. Even light weights were tricky for them. Eventually, however, I managed a 90-pound dumbbell with an 85-pound dumbbell lying across and held by the thickness of my palm." ● The did straight up stupid shit - the type of shit that'd get you kicked out of these bitch-ass "hardcore" gyms that have proliferated although the people lifting there are yuppie pussies and weak as fucking kittens. o Shit like " dropping weights from an overhead position into the crook of my arms , which many old-timers used in their stage exhibitions. But if you caught it too far out on the forearms, it just straightened your arms and crashed to the floor. That happened to me at an exhibition. I jerked 305 pounds overhead and without much thought made an effort to catch it into my arms. Instead it landed slightly forward on my forearms, came down close on my thighs and chaffed the skin down to the knees. I was bleeding. It was embarrassing." o "Another stunt was to drop a weight from overhead onto the trapezius muscles behind the neck . If one’s timing is good, there’s no problem, but otherwise it can be a big problem. I was practicing this stunt with 245 pounds, lifting it overhead then dropping it onto the back to balance it. Somehow while explaining it to one of the visitors I bent forward a bit too much and the weight of the barbell sent me crashing down to the platform with such speed I really didn’t know what happened." In other words, he was an utter badass who knew nothing of overtraining- he just trained his ass off, and was a world champion as a result. Oh, well he must have
programmed, right? WRONG: "Instead of always taking an exercise and repeating it in sets four, five, six times, I often preferred, if I was working the arms, for example, to do five, six or seven exercises that were different. I felt that there were some deep-seated muscles that needed an extra jolt. And the only way to get that jolt was to either exercise it from another angle and see if you could make it function as fully as the other part of that muscle was working. And that's what I always tried to do. I did a lot of exercises for the same part of the body. And it worked! At least it felt like it was working. That's why, when people ask me how I trained, I can't think back right now and say, "Oh, yeah, that was the one exercise I did which promoted everything." No, I cannot say that, because I did a variety of movements even for the same part of the body. And I would also do what I felt like doing on that day." Though we have no idea what Grimek's regular routines might have looked like, we do know that the one set per exercise routine for arms he mentioned above was. After every workout (i.e. 5-6 times a week), Grimek did one set of each of these to failure in the range listed.
Two Hands Curl - 8-10 reps Two Hands Press - 8-10 Two Hands DB Lateral Raise - 10-12 Two Hands Alternate DB Curl - 8-10 Two Hands Alternate DB Press - 8-10 Two Hands Barbell Row - 8-10 Alternate DB Forward Raise - 10-12 Barbell Wrist Curl - 10-12 One Arm Concentration Curl - 6-8
Incline Bench Barbell Curl - 6-8 One Arm Press - 6-8 Wrist Roller - 3 times each way.
The point of lifting when Grimek was involved was to be jacked and compete with your friends. Gym lifts counted then, just as they do now- the difference then was that there were no Redditors and "lifting gurus" calling bullshit on gym lifts. As Grimek himself put it, "We had a large iron block around the gym in those days and lifting it with a pinch grip was quite a feat. Very few men in the gym could handle it. It was about a foot high, six-inches wide with one end slightly over three-inches thick and with the other side slightly less; gripping it on the tapering end was rough. “Da Greep” eventually could lift it and he began challenging anyone who was interested. Steve Stanko and I got so we could clean it from the floor to the shoulder. That stopped “Da Greep.” Later we even succeeded in curling it. One might ask, what’s so great about curling a 55-pound weight? Yes, a 53-pound dumbell cannot be considered any sort of feat, but curling a tapering iron block of that weight is quite another thing. Only those who have tried it know there is no comparison; and to my knowledge no one else who tried it ever succeeded. We only succeeded because we persisted in training to accomplish this feat. And Stanko was then the best pinch-gripping lifter in the gym. He would grasp a large 55-pound Olympic plate by the hub and lift it with as much as 35 more pounds on top of it." The kicker? What he was squatting at the age of 70: "I've done many possible stupid and strange things. One of which was squatting very heavy when I was between 74 and 75 (years of age) but I NEVER strained or fought going down, deep and struggling to raise up, never. In later years, say after the 30s (his age) when I squatted, I always did HIGH reps, and the last time was in my late
70s, I did squats, just simply because I wanted to do some training, but not the usual workout. One professional football player (Philadelphia Eagles) was visiting the gym and no one else wanted to train. He came up to see the guys train, but that I was the only one, none of the others wanted to do anything, but I needed a light workout, so I squatted. I began with 225 lb. and did about 28 consecutive reps. Then I added 90lb more and did another 18 to 20 reps and continued in that fashion, adding weight, while cutting the reps and always working up to where I would do only one to three reps with 645lb usually, but occasionally working up to 695lb [when he was over 70 years of age, remember] and by then I already completed 75 to 80 reps. But as mentioned, I never struggled, for some reason I felt that was straining, avoiding that because I felt it did nothing for except cause pain. The visitor looked at me when I was finished doing 20 reps with the second set of 315lb and asked, 'I thought you weren't in the mood to train hard?' I said I wasn't, but what the heck, squats are easy. He looked at me and said, 'I squat too, but on my best days I could never do that.'" John Grimek walked around at 195, not fat about it, at the age of 80 boast ing upper pecs big enough to warrant an unbuttoned shirt. At 80 he was still training an hour or two every other day, still squatting, and went out dancing late night with his wife Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights until 1AM. And for those of you who eat like a goddamned bird- he was eating three big chicken breasts every day at lunch. Don't skimp on the foot because you're afraid of getting fat. Fear profits man nothing
Steve Merjanian- I’ve Got 500lb Incline and a Pair of Speedos... Let’s Party Steve Merjanian is likely a name you have never heard, because the man didn’t really compete much. He trained with the guys at Westside and was a good friend of Bill West and was always found in LA gyms in the 1950s-1970s. A friend and training partner of the famed bodybuilder and Gold’s Gym manager Zabo Koszewski, Merjanian was a legend in the bodybuilding and powerlifting scene for his inhuman incline bench press of 500, as well as a 560 touch and go bench press. On top of that, Merjanian could do an unsupported behind the neck press with 405, and 335 for seven, which gave him the upper body size to have bit parts in movies ranging from Planet of the Apes to Muscle Beach Party.
Because Merjanian lifted in a time when it wasn’t fashionable to talk shit about a man who can bench more than you can squat about his unwillingness to train legs, Merjanian didn’t, and was frankly no worse for it. As such, he enjoyed every training session because he trained what he liked, and ignored what he didn’t, and trained often, quickly, with a ton of volume, and harder than a furry’s dick on the set of the Teletubbies.
Monday / Wednesday / Friday
Dumbbell Press- 5 x 7 Dumbbell Laterals - 5 x 7 Front Dumbbell Raise - 5 x 7 Pulley Rowing Motion - 5 x 7 Dumbbell Curl - 5 x 7 Dips - 5 x 7 Lying Triceps Extension - 5x7 60 Degree Incline Press – 10 x 7 ; then 7 x 1 using 20 lbs. less than max (Brace yourself for this news- his first warmup was 350 x 10) Bench Press - 5 x 7
Tuesday / Thursday / Saturday / Sunday
Calf Raise- 10-15 x 10 reps Pulley Forearm Curl- 10-15 x 10 Face Pulls – 10-15 x 10
Standing Triceps Extensions – 10-15 x 10 Run – approximately one mile in the sand
Pat Neve- Bench Specialist Turned Bodybuilder Turned Rich Motherfucker Though all he does today is drive supercars and insanely expensive custom hot rods, Arizona’s Pat Neve began his life as a bodybuilder with a badass, record setting bench press. At 5’5” and 181lbs, Neve was the first man under 200lbs to bench over 450lbs in competition. Under rules that required a two second pause and had no flight system, Neve benched 468 at 181, then later bested that with a gym lift of 490 while training for the Mr. America (which he won in 1975 and 1976). Though Neve had bones so fragile he might as well have played Mr. Glass in the M Night Shyamalan films, his training for powerlifting was incredibly heavy. Six months out of the year he focused on building tendon and ligament strength for powerlifting, then focused on hypertrophy and detail the other six for bodybuilding. The following is the bench routine he used in his powerlifting training to flirt with a 500 bench at 185lbs.
Tuesday and Saturday: Bench Training Paused Bench Press - 10-15 sets that would looks something like this: 135lbs x 10; 185 x 8; 225 x 8; 275 x 8; 335 x 6; 365 x 4; 405 x 4; 430 x 2 x 2 DB Bench Press - 180s x 4 x 6 Incline Bench Press - 225lbs x 10; 275 x 8; 315 x 6; 335 x 4; 335 x 2 x 2 Bench Press Lockouts - 540lbs x 4 x 6 (Neve's sticking point/fail point was 3/4 from lockout, rather than off his chest, so he used these to blast through that point) “That’s what life is. Life has its ups and downs. Life is not up all the time. Bad things are going to happen and you’ve got to fight through them.”- Pat Neve
Eddie Robinson- Essentially the WSM of the 1980s Bodybuilding Scene Known primarily as an IFBB pro bodybuilder, Robinson was also a powerlifter who benched 600 at 220 in what seems to have been an unsanctioned meet (though he competed against powerlifting badass Joe Ladnier), and a competitive arm wrestler. Say what you will about bodybuilders, but the builders in the 1990s were a pack of maniacs who were aggressive as rabid dogs and strong enough to rip your arm off and beat you to death with it if they wanted.
Eddie Robinson was that kind of bodybuilder- wilder than an entire hair metal band, stronger than most of the lifters on the planet, and ready to throw around weight at all times. His best competition bench was allegedly north of 600, but the only confirmed competition bench puts him at 560lbs at 220, which is an insanely good bench for a guy who was in no way, shape, or form a powerlifterhe was just a guy who was so goddamn jacked and tan he had a compulsion to show off at every opportunity.
And of note, Eddie did 45 to 60 minutes of some type of cardio prior to every workout, because the man has a mission and that mission is to look like a goddamn god when he pops his shirt off.
Monday: Abdominals, Chest, Triceps
Crunches - 4 x 25-30 Hanging Leg Raises - 4 x 25-30 Standing Bent Over Twists - 2 x 50 Bench Press (warmup) - 1 x 15 Superset Bench Press - 4 x 10, 8, 8, 6 Flyes - 4 x 10, 8, 8, 6 Incline Press - 4 x 10, 8, 8, 6 Incline Fly - 4 x 10, 8, 8, 6 Decline Bench Press - 4 x 10, 8, 8, 6 Decline Flyes - 4 x 10, 8, 8, 6 Machine Flyes -2 x 15-20 Dips - 5 x 10 Pushdowns - 4 x 8-10 Rope Extensions - 4 x 8-10 Skull Crushers - 3 x 10-12
Tuesday: Abdominals, Back, Biceps
Crunches - 4 x 25-30 Hanging Leg Raises - 4 x 25-30 Standing Bent Over Twists - 2 x 50 Deadlifts (warmup) - 1 x 15 Superset Deadlifts - 4 x 10, 8, 8, 6 Cable Rows - 4 x 10, 8, 8, 6 Front Pulldowns - 4 x 10, 8, 8, 6 T-bar Rows - 4 x 10, 8, 8, 6 T-bar Rows (negatives) - 4 x 10 Wide Grip Preacher Curls - 3 x 10, 8, 8 Close Grip Preacher Curls - 3 x 10, 8, 8 Incline Curls - 3 x 10, 8, 8 Concentration Curls - 2 x 10-12
Wednesday: Off
Thursday: Abdominals, Quads, Hamstrings
Crunches - 4 x 25-30 Hanging Leg Raises - 4 x 25-30 Standing Bent Over Twists - 2 x 50 Squats (warmup) - 1 x 15 Squats - 5 x 10, 8, 8, 6, 6 Leg Presses - 4 x 10, 8, 8, 6 Leg Extensions - 5 x 10, 8, 8, 6, 6 Leg Curls - 5 x 8, 8, 6, 6, 4 Barbell Lunges - 4 x 8, 8, 6, 6
Friday: Abdominals, Shoulders, Calves
Crunches - 4 x 25-30 Hanging Leg Raises - 4 x 25-30 Standing Bent Over Twists - 2 x 50 Military Press (warmup)- 1 x 15
Military Press- 4 x 10, 8, 8, 6 Barbell Upright Rows - 4 x 10, 8, 8, 6 Lateral Raises - 4 x 10, 8, 8, 6 Seated Bent Over Lateral Raises - 3 x 10, 8, 8 Standing Calf Raises (warmup) 1 x 15 Standing Calf Raises (toes in)- 3 x 10 Standing Calf Raises (toes out)- 3 x 10 Seated Calf Raises - 3 x 10, 8, 8
Saturday and Sunday: Off
Doug Furnas- You Thought Jim Brown and Donald Dinnie had Best All-Round Athlete on Lock? Tragically, the name Doug Furnas is not well known to aficionados of strength, though it seriously should be. Furnas was about as multi-sport as a person could get- the “strongman” wrestler in the WWE, ECW, and AJPW, a badass in the rodeo in high school and after retirement from wrestling; a seriously bruising fullback back for U Tennessee known for playing fullback the way most people played linebacker (and who in high school was the leading rusher in Oklahoma and an apparently sick field goal kicker); and one of the greatest 275lb powerlifters of all times (2412 single-ply total), who could also do a split or
backflip at and time, for any or no reason.
Monday: Legs
Squat - 7-10 x 2-8 Single Leg Press - 2 x 10-12 Single Leg Curl - 2 x 10-12 Leg Extensions - 2 x 10-12 Seated Calf Raise - 3 x 10-12 Abs - 3 x 20
Tuesday: Off Wednesday: Chest
Bench Press - 7-10 x 2-8 Close Grip Bench (paused)- 2 x 2-8 Incline Press - 2 x 2-8 Pushdowns - 2 x 2-8 Abs - 3 x 20
Thursday: Shoulders
Behind the Neck Press - 5 x 2-8
Front Dumbbell Laterals - 3 x 10-12 Seated Lateral Raises - 3 x 10-12
Friday: Back
Deadlifts - 8 x 2-8 Stiff Leg Deadlift - 2 x 8-10 Bent Over Rows - 2 x 8-10 T-Bar Rows - 2 x 8-10 Chinups - 2 x 8-10 Pulldowns - 2 x 8-10 Bent Over Dumbbell Laterals - 2 x 8-10 Seated Calf Raises - 1 x 20 Abs - 3 x 20
Saturday: Light Chest and Arms
Light Wide Grip Bench Press - 3 x 8-10 Dumbbell Flyes - 2 x 10-15 Weighted Dips - 1 x 15 Triceps Extensions - 2 x 2-8
Barbell Curls - 1 x 20
Powerlifters I like to think of powerlifting as a great idea gone horribly, horribly wrong, much like cloning dinosaurs was in Jurassic Park. The sad part is that powerlifting exists in the real world, and that no one has died as a result of those best laid plans going awry. You see, powerlifting exists because at the outset of strength sport in the early 20th Century, the French and English could not beat the Germans in competitions, so they outlawed the techniques the Germans used, like the “continental” and “pressing out” rather than jerking, and invented modern weightlifting. That left a massive array of casually contested strength events for “odd lifting” competitions, but those were so random and haphazardly judged and contested that people lacked a good barometer for comparison… because what’s the point if you can’t talk shit about your fellow man for their comparative weakness. Thus, powerlifting arose basically as an outlet for people to uncoordinated to master the quick lifts. Powerlifting, as it originated, was fun as hell- a room jam-packed with screaming, jacked weirdos trying to outdo each other on the simplest lifts the human mind could conceive- the abled version of the Special Olympics. Tragically, it’s gone a hell of a long way from that in an effort to imitate the sport to which it was originally created as an alternative, and is a solemn, pretentious sport bereft of the spirit in which it was originally intended. So when you’re reading this, bear in mind that these guys were absolute maniacs, virtually certifiable and utterly unlike the drudgery and absurd hyperseriousness exhibited by most powerlifters today. “I was handing off to Ted [Arcidi]when he was attempting to break Bill Kazmaier’s raw bench record (661) with a 666 attempt. He missed his first two when someone was giving him a snort of some unknown (probably highly questionable) substance. On his third attempt, I jammed a bottle of nose torque up his nose and he
smashed 666 breaking Bill’s record! Right after, he got up off the bench, threw a chair off the balcony of the 4th floor of the meet (landing in the middle of the highway below), then ran and put his head through the wall.”
Brutally in Depth: The Compiled Methods of the Original Culver City Westside Barbell Club When people think of the men and women behind the curtain in the world of powerlifting, names like Mark Rippetoe and Louie Simmons, Dave Tate and Jim Wendler likely spring to mind. This is because powerlifting is about the most fad-driven pastime this side of table-top gaming and 20-something women's fashion, and because powerlifters are generally about as well educated as your average Afghani herdsman. To say the majority of powerlifters are mentally defective lemmings is like saying NBA players are shitty at hand to hand combat, or that the average Redditor rates right around Hitler for value to collective humanity, or that left wingers who love Tumblr could stand to toughen the fuck up a little. You wouldn't know that speaking to one, however, because most powerlifters seem to think they're the most hyper-analytical and wellinformed people to touch a weight since Einstein tripped over a dumbbell one time in the dark. And this massive collective intellectual conceit, combined with the faddism of the lifting world, is the reason why the name Bill "Peanuts" West is not spoken in solemn tones in the hallowed halls of your local weight pit. Bill West’s creation, the Culver City Westside Barbell Club, was a amalgamation of the most interesting and diverse cast of characters in history, and their training methodology reflected that desire to reject normalcy and really embrace their inner Gonzo... though with less reported chicken fucking than that characterization might seem to indicate. This was possible because Bill West was like the Roger Bacon of powerlifting- though he is credited with inventing methods and practices that he had no part in creating, he was the one that brought those things to prominence by effectively combining them into a sort of system no one else perceived. And in doing so, West's work in powerlifting is very much like Roger Bacon's- wild-eyed enthusiasm for experimentation that just so happened to yield incredible fucking results.
The Culver City Westside Barbell Crew As has already been mentioned, the Westside Barbell Club was filled with a wide array of weirdos from every walk of life. They included such powerlifting luminaries as: ● Bill “Peanuts” West , hyper-dominant 198lb powerlifter and the driving force of the LA powerlifting scene. ● Joe DiMarco , the silent driving force behind the OG Westside Club. Though far from the strongest man in the club, he was the one to introduce shit like box squats to the crew and was an avid proponent of pad presses and the belly toss. Stuck between the superheavyweights (which at the time was everything over 198, and Bill West's domination of that class, DiMarco had trouble making room for himself in the limelight on such a stacked team. ● As everyone knows (or you will learn later in this chapter), Pat Casey was the first man to bench press 600; under Bill's tutelage Casey also went on to become the first man to squat 800 and total 2000. In spite of the fact Casey ran a health food store inside of the famed Bill Pearl's Gym, he did all of his training in West's gym. ● Bill Thurber , American record holder in the bench press and total in the 148s; under the steely eyed gaze of West, he went on to hold American records in the squat, bench press and total in two weight classes, and pulled 485 (and was apparently a beast at dips). ● Leonard Ingro , the first 181lber to to squat 500, and who pulled 540 in competition at 165... which was fucking bizarre because the guy was between 5'8 and 5'10". ● Superstar Billy Graham , jacked-as-hell 6’4” and 325lb pro wrestler, powerlifter, and possessor or massive 22” arms. Graham was benching 605 when his lifting partner, Pat Casey, held the world record with 616. ● Gay bodybuilding biker of a world-renown powerlifting neurologist Dr. Oliver Sacks , who pulled 620 in addition to a then record 600lb squat.
Sacks’ resume is beyond ridiculous- he has written a novel that was adapted into a film starring Robin Williams that was nominated for an Academy Award, has honorary doctorates from half of the universities on the goddamn plane (including Georgetown and Tufts), received an honorary JD in law from Oxford, and even has a minor planet named after him. ● Olympian, multi-record-setting powerlifter, rock star track and field athlete, and all around badass George Frenn , who organized the first international powerlifting meet in history. ● World record holder in the hammer throw Hal Connolly . Connolly was a better thrower than Frenn, so Frenn did everything he could to show up Connolly on the platform, which led to some insane competition in the gym, including Connolly hitting a 700 squat in training after hearing Frenn did, when his training max appeared to be 550. ● Dallas Long , who won gold in the shot put in the 1960 Olympics, trained with Bill exclusively and not with the rest of the crew, and as a result could incline press 430. ● Douglas Aircraft engineers Jim Hamilton and Howard Einstein , who pulled 550 and squatted 500, respectively. A Revenge of the Nerds-esque pocket protector rocking nerd, Hamilton was one of the mathematicians on the Apollo space mission and was at the time the youngest person ever to have an office at the Pentagon. ● Two-time gold medalist in the shot put, Parry O'Brien , who inclined 345lbs and still holds a master's division record for putting the six kilo shot. ● Olympian shot-putter Dave Davis , who was injured during the 1960 Olympics but who could incline 390. Though of no importance from a lifting perspective, he was a juror in the infamous Rodney King case. ● Dave Ashman , world record holder in the snatch and clean and jerk, was renowned for his front and back squat, and who could pull 730 with a competition grip and 790 with straps.
● Dave Sheppard , silver medalist in Olympic weightlifting (and one of the guys who got Muscle Beach shut down) who pulled 550 at 132 and could do a fucking ridiculous eight sets of 2 in the strict press with 200lbs. ● Incline bench press specialist and overall monster of a man Steve Merjanian , who inclined 500 and used 400 for behind the neck presses. ● A bodybuilder named Duke , who was a stand-in for Lou Ferrigno on the Incredible Hulk and stood 6'3" 240. Duke was apparently a pro boxer for a while, and though I have no information on his lifts, I can say that his one knockout in life came at the hands of a caged orangutan who'd stolen his sunglasses at a random hillbilly-owned gas station. Clearly, these men were utter maniacs. Though they likely didn't create any of these training methods themselves, they were the first to combine these methods into a cohesive system for use by competitive lifters. They also had the great good fortune, like the touch system (spotter assisted reps), the box squat, cheating skullcrushers, the various and sundry powerlifting aids they used, like wrapping themselves in sheets and constructing their own knee and wrist wraps like they were seamstresses in a Thai sweatshop, incline power rack bench presses, deficit deadlifts, lockouts, and rack/box pulls. With that list in mind, powerlifting would look about as different from its current incarnation without the Bill West and the OG Westside Club as skinny CGI Steve Rogers from the jacked Chris Evans version. Yeah, they're basically the same guy, but the performance difference between the two would have an alien thinking them to be two entirely different species of hominids.
Bill West's Original Training Methods Just like anyone else who was bitten by the iron bug early and whose enthusiasm and work ethic translated into serious gains, Bill West trained incessantly early on in his lifting career. He made massive gains training six to seven days a week, alternating upper and lower body days. His upper body workouts lasted as long as three hours, and his lower body workouts clocked in at an hour and a half. That method was actually wildly successful for West- so much so, in fact, that he
had to stop drinking milk during his workouts or he would have gained too much muscle and tipped over into the heavyweight class. Content with drinking water during his workouts as opposed to moo juice, West thought he had the perfect system. He would soon discover otherwise, however. Though that training style yielded massive gains on the platform, it fucked him royally at home- all of the guys found that when they spent that amount of time in the gym, they never heard the fucking end of it from their wives. As such, they eventually switched to the two day a week system you see repeated as though it is the Golden Ticket for strength- it was not his preference that led to that split, but his unwillingness to listen to his wife scream at him nightly about his incessant training. Keep that in mind the next time you see someone advocating for minimalist training- it might just be they have no goddamn idea what they're talking about.
The Basic Westside Routine After the wives stepped in, the Westside guys cut their training down to a mere 8-10 hours a week. Training (officially) twice a week in four to six hour sessions (along with two optional, shorter workouts), they basically blew the doors off every goddamn record they touched. Everyone who was anyone wanted to train there, and they came from all over to do so. As such, the gym was packed and
their workouts were longer than Avengers: Endgame every single time they touched a weight.
Tuesday Bench Press - Around 12 sets, working up to doubles and triples; then 2 x 10 for a pump Belly Toss Bench Press - 4-6 x 3 Incline Bench - 12 sets, reps from three to six for around half the sets, then singles for the rest High Box Squats - work up to a heavy set of singles, using 100lbs over your contest weight. George Frenn used 1000lbs for singles to set up for his record breaking 853lb squat Low Box Squats - 4-5 singles with 100lbs less than your contest squat Rack Pulls/Box Deadlifts - 5-6 singles Lat Pulldowns - 3 x 5 (seriously heavy) Tricep Pushdowns - 3 x 5 (as heavy as humanly possible) Overhead Work - Heavy triples, doubles and singles. Not everyone did these- it was mostly the Olympian throwers who did this. Cleans and High Pulls - these were usually done competitively between lifters, for a max effort Everyone added whatever they needed to onto this workout, as you'll see (and saw in the George Frenn articles). Whatever didn't get added here could also get pushed to the Wednesday and Sunday workouts.
Wednesday
Optional light day.
Saturday At least twice a month, everyone maxed out on the 3 lifts, then went home. This wasn't as easy as it sounds, though, because twenty to thirty guys would show up on any given Saturday. Problem was, 20-30 guys would show up, it would take from around noon until about 6PM. If the guys weren't having a full meet day, they'd work the three lifts using methods described below. Either way, once the lifting was done, they started drinking, likely at the restaurant with the all you can eat prime rib and cheep pitchers I mentioned earlier in the series.
Sunday Optional light work day.
The Add-Ons "The whole idea of assist movements is to search out weaknesses and destroy them. The power lifters of the Westside Barbell Club conduct a constant search to learn more about building power. They are ready to try any innovation, and always seem to find time and energy for a new experiment. They are dedicated to making ever greater lifts. " -Armand Tanny As with any program, nothing should just be Plug-n-Play when it comes to programming. Every program, no matter how allegedly comprehensive it might, can address the needs of each individual as they arise. There will always be a need for customization, and as we saw in the George Frenn series, the Westside
crew were more obsessed with customization than a 16-year-old who loves Call of Duty and the Fast and the Furious equally.
The Rack Pull / Box Deadlift West and the Westside crew utilized this movement to prevent deadlift fails just below the knee. They did the following program once a month, pulling from an inch to an inch and a half below their knees during their Tuesday workout, or a supplementary Wednesday workout. The "high deadlift" program was basically just a gradual progression toward a max attempt that must be done with straps. As Bill West put it, "When you start the pull, nothing seems to happen for several long moments. You keep turning on more and more power, and then finally the bar begins to move off the blocks. Without the grip to think about you can pull hard and long until you are fully erect. In one long big effort like this you have the equivalent, or more, of a whole set of heavy reps. It builds back muscle." To give you an idea of the progression, it would look something like this: 550 x 1; 585 x 1; 625 x 1; 660 x 1; 690 x 1 (with straps).
Snatch Grip Deadlift Day Bill West, like myself and the modern Westside crew, never trained the deadlift in the gym. Instead, West added a third day of training, doing some snatch grip deadlifting on Wednesdays. "By building the muscles from angles, the official movements are improved. We understand that the high dead lift improves the final phase of the pull. With the snatch grip, on the other hand, the
initial phase is improved. The back is in a deeper bent-over position, from a full powered standpoint slightly at a disadvantage, but building strength at this point completes the whole back picture. Strength exists through the entire range of back lifting. Bill uses this style for most of his dead lift training. Except for the High Dead Lift day once a month, he works the Snatch Grip Dead Lift every Wednesday." Snatch Grip Deadlift - 4 x 3 (increasing the weight on each set); 2x3 (heavier, and with straps). A typical progression might be 225x3; 315x3; 425x3; 500x3; 525x3 and 550x 3 using straps. Sumo Deadlift - 3 x 1 (87%1RM) This is (at least for a history nerd like me) fascinating, because I didn't know sumo deadlifts were even legal at that time. West called it a "close grip deadlift," and although Peary Rader claimed in 1976 to have done the lift in the mid-1950s, I haven't seen a pic of them that predates the 70s. "Notice that the last three singles are done with a close grip. The elbows are inside the knees. Actually, the legs are spread wider than normal. Again, this variation strengthens the leg pull from the wide position. It becomes obvious that a theory emerges that prohibits the existence of any weak spots. By closing the gaps, there is no chance for power to leak out. It is like military strategy: For every man at the front, you have 10 men supporting him at the rear."
Deficit Deadlifts Another favorite of West and George Frenn, these helped with breaking the weight off the ground for big pulls. After having his national record of 713 smashed by Gary Young, Frenn looked into Young's training and discovered that Young did high rep deficit deadlifts on a regular. Young had also had pulled 685 standing on a low box, so Frenn discussed it with West and started hammering singles on the deficit deadlift.
It didn't do a goddamn thing for him. He tried more singles, then he tried fewer. Singles weren't working, so he decided that if he could pull 600 for 10, he'd be able to smash through the 725lb barrier... which just killed his deadlift altogether. Once he dropped the weight even further, however, his deadlift blew up. With the program below, Frenn pulled 725 within three weeks, 740 within five weeks, and became a consistent 750-800lbs puller.
Tuesday Deficit Deadlift - worked up to 3 x 10 60%1RM. His feet just fit under the bar with 45's on it, and from the side, his chest is just about touching his thighs at the start position.
Saturday Deadlift Warmup - Triples up to 495. Deadlift - Singles with 565, 635, then work to a daily max and do three singles with that weight. No more than three singles with any weight.
High Pulls / Power Clean George Frenn was an absolute monster on the high pull, but (like me) could never manage to get his arms underneath the bar for a clean (one of many reasons he chose powerlifting over Olympic lifting). Frenn believed that high pulls were a fan more effective movement than cleans for this reason- the brute strength they require translated nicely to the deadlift and required none of the
skill and flexibility that the clean did. If a lifter can do them with big weights, however, Frenn sees no reason to replace them with high pulls. Cleans and/or Snatch Grip and/or Clean Grip High Pull - 4-9 x 3-5
Good Mornings Another great assistance exercise for Tuesday and Wednesday workouts. Good Mornings - 4-9 x 3-5 (Frenn used about 60% of his squat 1RM for these)
Box Squat in the Power Rack After nearly killing himself walking out a heavy squat attempt when fatigued one day, Bill West had an epiphany. The kind of epiphany when one wakes up in the hospital and thinks, 'it's pretty fucking hard to train for 15 hours a week when you're lying in a hospital bed with no beer and no prime rib." As he lay there, he realized that the typical weightlifting power rack wasn't up to the task he was about to set before it, because the dimensions were all wrong. As such, a plan began to form in his mind. "The box squat required a lot of horizontal movement, so he decided to widen the fore-and-aft distance between the two crossbars to 16 inches and lengthen by several inches the threequarter inch steel bars that served as elevation pins. In this way he could take the bar from a sitting position on the bench and come erect with plenty of clearance. With this in mind Bill built the power rack you see in the accompanying photos. The holes in the uprights are spaced 1¼ inches between the circumferences. The uprights stand eight feet high.
His box is a milk crate beefed up with two-by-fours making it perfectly rigid and still fairly light. It is virtually indestructible. It stands 18-and-a-half inches high which puts Bill himself (5'8") in a sitting position about 1½ to 2 inches above a parallel squat. This position seemed reasonable for a good bench squat." The whole point of the exercise is to start the lift from a full sitting position. Let the buttocks roll back, and in a continuous movement start forward and up again. You lose the effect if you don't settle into it all the way. If you only sit on the leg biceps, you get too much rebound from the muscle when it contracts. The spotter, as an added advantage, can help the lifter do forced reps by just touching the bar. Even where only a regular squat rack is available an assistant can help the lifter get started on box squats, but extremely heavy weights would not be recommended." West had observed that Paul Anderson's squat lockouts, as well as his own, had done exactly fuckall for his full squat. yeah, they made the walkout far easier, and he noticed more stability, but the squat itself was unaffected. Thus, he designed the box squat to be a three-quarter competition squat. Using this as one of his two squat sessions a week, he'd be able to use supramaximal weights in one and then coast off those weights in the second- his full squat would feel far easier as a result. After some experimentation he found he was able to go far harder in both sessions by alternating the two, and began box squatting in his Tuesday workout and full squatting in his Saturday session. "From this mishap he learned one everlasting lesson, and that was never to take any more steps than necessary with a really heavy weight on the shoulders."
Tuesday Warmup Sets - 2 x 7; 2 x 5; 1 x 3 Work sets - 7 x 1; Drop the weight 100 pounds x 10 reps; drop 100 more x 10.
Bill West's Balls Out Bench Press Routine True to form with the Westside Guys, this didn't fit their typical mold, but neither did that pastiche of bizarrely lovable weirdos. This routine would be followed twice a week, plus a lighter benching day thrown into the middle of the week. The crucial point here is to find a repeatable number for a near max single and pound the hell out of it. When you're using this routine, make sure you move the bench to the beginning of the workouts, so you hit it fresh. You'll do this for 6-8 weeks straight, going for a daily max or near daily max in each workout, then take a week or two off the program, hitting a less intensive bench workout for a couple of weeks, before resuming it.
The Heavy Days Bench Press - 1 x 10; 8; 6; 4; 1; 1; 1; 1 (same weight used for each).
The Lighter Day Bench Press - 1 x 10; 8; 6; 3; 1; 10 (last set is a light burnout/pump set)
The Westside Triceps Slaughterhouse
"The history of weight training has proved to be a constant game of hide and seek. Truant muscles are no longer safe from the prying efforts of modern power lifters. In the case of the bench press, the triceps, with its natural capacity for development, became suspect when it appeared to be riding on the efforts of the delts and pecs. At first, no one could say for sure. Maybe it was the delts. So, they tried military presses. They didn't prove to help the bench a great deal. So, they tried parallel dips with plenty of weight. Pat Casey did them endlessly, dropping to an extremely low position, but they ground up his shoulders, and he stopped. Extreme range of motion like the military and dip was out; the pecs and delts were out. That left the triceps." "Thus comes into being the 'Triceps Power Cheats,' a movement that is spanking the triceps into unprecedented effort and routine [bench press] records up the line. The movement flanks the regular bench press on the alternate workout of the week in which the bench press and [box squats]. In terms of two workouts a week, Saturday (heavy) and Tuesday, the power cheats fall on Tuesday." - Chuck Sipes Training with the Westside crew on occasion, 570lb bencher at 220 and only bodybuilder to defeat Arnold, Chuck Sipes, uncovered two insanely effective bench press assistance exercises- the Pullover Triceps Cheat and the Power Rack Triceps Lockout. Done twice a week with one of two methodologies, Sipes and other huge benchers of the time considered these exercises critical for a massive bench. Depending on your preference, you can use the Bill West style for this, Pat Casey's style, or some combination thereof. However, you do them, the best bencher under 240lbs for decades thought both styles had merit.
Tuesday/Friday Pullover Triceps Cheat (Bill West Method)- 135 x 10; 185 x 5; 205 x 5; 205 x 1; 255 x 6 x 1. West would put a folded towel on the bench a few inches over his
head and do his pullovers from that point, heaving the weight up over his eyes and then bouncing it off the bench in between reps so he could handle bigger poundages. Pullover Triceps Cheat (Pat Casey Method)- 135 x 10; 225 x 5; 275 x 5; 305 x 3; 325 x 1; 340 x 1; 355 x 1; 370 x 1; 325 x 1; 305 x 1; 275 x 8. Casey was the only human on the planet benching more than Sipes, and he used this methodhe'd have the loaded barbell on the floor off the end of the bench, hooks his feet around the supports for stability, starts the movement as a pullover off the floor and continues it as an extension to the top. Per the picture it looks like a pullover and press, but from the description it sounds like you're using lat strength and momentum to get the bar moving and then finish it like you did a skull crusher from just over the top of your head. Power Rack Triceps Lockout (Bill West Method)- 135 x 10; 150 x 10; 170 x 7 x 7. On an incline bench set at a 60-degree incline, take the barbell out of the rack with a grip about six inches apart and do short range skull crushers from just above your forehead to lockout. Your upper arm should stay in the same vertical plane as the bar. Power Rack Triceps Lockout (Pat Casey Method)- 225 x 6 x 7. Casey did these slightly differently, setting the pins in the power rack just above forehead level and pressing off the pins. He did these quickly, for a pump. Seated French Presses / Overhead Extensions (as a high rep burnout)- 3 x 10. Of note, Sipes basically thought you were a pink-bitch pussy if you used the cambered bar on tricep work and that you were basically just wasting your fucking time, so give the Olympic barbell a shot for these and see how they work for you.
The Touch System Settle down, you fucking perverts- it wasn't that awesome. The touch system is actually the tried-and-true handsy spotter method that all of the world now decries as useless bodybuilding bullshit, because if there is one thing the internet can be trusted to do, it's to fuck up any good thing so irreparably that Brie Larson's press junkets for Captain Marvel would look like a successful PR
campaign by comparison. Seriously- partner assisted reps are a great way to get through sticking points if done correctly, and the Westside club did just that. According to Bill West, the "first thing we learned was that the Touch System was ineffective on the bench press when the lifter used a weight he could not start from his chest by himself. A sense of defeat is promptly established when the weight is too heavy to budge. The positive approach must prevail. The bar must be off the chest at a point where the mind is firing a massive volley of impulses to the muscles in the attempt to pass the sticking point. There is a moment of truth where the bar is about five inches off the chest, where the simple touch of a finger under the middle of the bar acts in some magic way to keep the bar raising to arms’ length. Of course, there is a good deal more to it than that. For one thing, it doesn’t work for two strangers. The people using this system must know each other – their strong points, weak points, sticking points and idiosyncrasies. An almost symbiotic relationship exists. It gets to where a simple command, 'Go, Baby!' in the middle of a lift means everything in the world. A nod, a word a touch – they all mean something. How do they get that way? By training together, by having a common purpose. They depend on each other. And more, they’ve got to have that feel of a heavy weight oozing out to arms’ length, regularly, a compulsive effort that by another expression means they are 'hooked.'” In short, this is mostly mental assistance- it's not so much the help the spotter is providing but the belief in the help they're providing that keeps the bar moving. To use it is simple- you work up to a heavy single, something the lifter can get for a single or two, and do six singles there, with the spotter "riding with" the lifter throughout each of the singles. Though in the picture he's only using a finger, in practice West would grip the bar with both hands and make it look like he was giving a lot of help, even though he was barely touching the bar. This gave the lifter faith in his ability to keep the bar moving. Bench Press - 135 x 10 warmup; 225 x 10; 315 x 5; 355 x 3; 385 x 2; 405 x 6 singles
West's crew used them on the squat as well, utilizing the box squat weight for full squats with the spotter's help. Frankly, that sounds fucking exhausting for the spotter, but West insisted it is what gave the entire Westside crew the ability to break record after record in meets. "The assistant stands directly behind the squatter and grasps the bar with both hands. As the squatter begins to come out of the bottom position, the assistant applies the aid. His hands never leave the bar till the squatter is again erect. With perfect timing the assistant learns to give a slight tug at the perfect moment in coming out of the bottom position, allowing the lifter to build momentum and pass the sticking point."
Tuesday Workout Regular Squat - 3 x 10 x 395 Bench Squat - 2 x 15 x 475
Saturday Workout Squat (Touch System)– 3 x 10 x 475 One of the two spotters is Bill West, though I don't know which, and big Steve Merjanian is the one inclining 405 (though he maxed at 500 on the incline).
Incline Power Rack Presses "Power rack training is a cultural necessity. You will be left behind without it. The greats all employ it at one time or another. It has helped make champs like Bill West. Leonard Ingro and George Frenn. The power rack is what helped give Pat Casey the
ability to take 590 pounds from the flat bench rack, unassisted, and make a perfect Bench Press with it. " - Armand Tanny
As I've mentioned in my articles on Westsiders in the past, the incline bench press was the most hotly contested lift in Muscle Beach in the 1960s, and their numbers should have everyone this side of Hafthor and Larry Wheels considering seppuku as a result. All of the Westside guys had crazy incline presses, and what made them even more impressive is that because of the lack of stanchions on most incline benches, they either cleaned the weight and fell back into the bench, then pressed from their chest, or they had the weight handed to them by spotters and pressed from the chest. That's right- Merjanian did a presteroid era bottom position incline bench press with 500 lbs. And he wasn't the only one moving weight on the incline. ● Weightlifter Bill March, at 210, could press 375 ● Heavyweight Dave Davis did 390 ● Olympic thrower Dallas Long pressed 430 at 260 ● 245lb Olympic thrower Parry O’Brien pressed 345. ● Pat Casey did 3 reps with 220 pound dumbbells on a 40 degree incline and 7 with the 200s, plus he pressed 385 on an 80 degree incline. He has also done seven reps with a pair of 200’s.
● Bodybuilder and medical doctor John Gourgott, who took second in the Mr. America, pressed 325 from chin level off the power rack on the 80degree incline. at 200lbs. The Westside guys had another reason to incline press, however. According to Armand Tanny, "Incline Power Rack Pressing, then, is another way of intensifying effort. On the weekly basis of training where the Bench Press flat is done on Tuesday and Saturday a reserve power can be tapped in a different, and secondary, area by using the incline. Since heavy flat Bench Pressing two days in a row would only lead to exhaustion, the idea of attacking the muscles on another quarter proved to be correct. Intermediate areas in the pressing range of motion are weak. The power rack acts as a sort of a booster station. The initial impulse to boost the bar off the chest was suspected of weakening as the barbell went up. Why should the bar rise, say five inches from the chest, from an initial maximum explosion to come toppling back? If it went up five inches, why couldn’t it have gone up all the way? Over at the West Side Barbell Club in Culver City, California, not too long ago they began to suspect this common condition. They were losing too many presses after getting the bar halfway up. Down it come, a total loss. A flaw existed in the machine. To repeat the process meant only to be practicing their mistakes. There was no margin for error. They could raise their butt off the bench and complete the lift, but that meant practicing another mistake. What then?" What they came up with was ingenious- incline bench pressing at three different angles, off the pins. Form on these were insanely strict- no bouncing off the pins, no lifting your ass. This exercise was the closest thing on Earth to sacrosanct to the Westside crew, save for perhaps beer, and they treated it with the utmost reverence and respect.
Incline Bench at 50 degrees, with the bar at chin level in the power rack (about 5 inches off the chest)- the sets and reps varied, but it was something like 135 x 10; 185 x 5; 225 x 3; 270 x 4; 295 x 1; 315 x 5 singles Incline Bench at 50 degrees, with the bar at eye level (about 7½ inches off the chest)- No warmup; 5 singles with 300 Incline bench at 80 degrees, with bar at chin level - No warmup; 220 x 1; 235 x 1; 245 x 1; 255 x 1; 2 singles with 270. They would also occasionally end with three sets of ten with varying weights on this incline and level for a pump. And like with any other method, the Westside Crew's only rule was that there are no fucking rules. They adapted their training to their time constraints, energy levels, and mood on any given day, which was a far cry from the ridiculous adherence to programs and dogmatic defense thereof you'll find out of "lifters" who can't lift but two things- jack and shit. And Jack left town. "The procedure on these exercises is not necessarily rigid. Remember, these are supplemental exercises to be varied to suit your private stamina. If you happened to work extremely hard on positions 1 and 2, nothing says you can’t ease up on the third position by simply doing a light 4 sets of 10 reps. Also, you may prefer to limit this routine to once a week. A lot depends on your time and energy." And there you have all of the assorted tricks and shortcuts the original Westside Barbell Club utilized in order to revolutionize powerlifting. The combination proved deadly to their opposition and led to their adoption by just about every badass barbell club on the planet thereafter, including the far more famous current incarnation of the Westside Barbell Club, under Louie Simmons. If you're wondering, then, how Bill West's name isn't on the lips of every lifter, and how it could possibly be that no one has really codified the OG Westside's methods the way I have, it's likely because Bill West met a rather ignominious end, dying homeless, of a heroin overdose, on the beach in Santa Monica. He was buried in a pauper's grave in the 1980s, and it wasn't until recently that anyone had even erected a marker to commemorate the man's life.
To the posturing internet "lifters" who work menial jobs and still live with their parents, the man's end indicate that his life was not well lived, and that his methods were therefore unsound. That is because they have not lived, know nothing of achieving a seemingly impossible goal and having no idea where to go from there- their opinions are as meaningless as their lives. Bill West was certainly many things, but a man to be forgotten, he was not.
Lest we end this story on a depressing note, here's one more tidbit to clue you in on exactly how insane the OG Westside crew really was. Though I realize that the tale of the Westside crew seems like it's jam-packed with more bullshit-filled tall tales than any other strength series ever written, I assure you that all of the tales of obscene strength have been true (at least insofar as I can ascertain through research). That stated, what I am about to relate next comes direct from Armand Tanny, who in addition to being a bodybuilder, was a strength author and bodybuilder with serious bonafides to his name. The actor in question, who's pictured below, was reputed to have destroyed strength legend Chuck Ahrens in arm wrestling around the same time that Ahrens was defeating entire professional football teams, in a row, in that sport. Dan Vadis was one of the many jacked dudes to play Hercules over the years, and though he was a pretty boy, was no pussy, and was well known in muscle beach for being a strong dude. Both of the guys in
this story trained with the Westside crew at times, as the "Ashman" mentioned is Dave Ashman, who was a member of the US Olympic weightlifting team with Ike Berger (who started Bill West in odd lifting).
Dan Vadis, looking Ryan Reynolds if Reynolds trained with the Westside crew. Unfortunately, he also died of a heroin overdose in the 80s.
"Doug Jamey, an Ashman contemporary weighing 165, did what was considered the grittiest display of back power ever made. Using wrist straps, you might say he was literally welded to the bar, he did three repetitions with 700. He hunched each rep every inch of the way. It looked like pop art in motion, the way his skeleton stretched and bent, a living impossibility. As an encore, he stood in front of the bar and did three reps from behind. At a bodyweight of 159 he did a continental clean of 400, inching it up his front in the same fantastic, drawn-out display of power. Theatrics of this sort naturally invited a bit of upstaging. Dan Vadis, now starring in European movies, challenged Doug to a finger twisting contest. It broke Doug's finger. Shortly after, Doug decided to walk to Alaska. With full pack and barefooted he said goodbye and started walking north up the beach from Santa Monica. No one has heard tell since, but no one doubts he made it."
Stefi Cohen- The Deadlifting GOAT’s Squat Training Stefi Cohen, for those of you who don’t know, is a 123lb collegiate soccer player, Florida State weightlifting gold medalist, and powerlifter who could rip off your arms, beat you unconscious with them, then stuff them up your ass and work you like a sock puppet to amuse herself until you finally quit breathing.
At 123lbs, she out-totals at least 75% of Reddit’s assorted lifting subreddits (1278.6lb total, 507-242.5-529.1), and her deadlift is brutal enough that she’ll make people forget Lamar Gant’s name before she quits competing (and if you’ve already forgotten him, he was a little dude with scoliosis who pulled a 5x bodyweight 688 at 132). The best part is that after the armchair experts of the internet deemed her a one trick pony because of her ridiculous pull, she blew into town and dropped a
wrapped 507 squat on them. Part of her secret for being such a well-rounded strength athlete is knowing how to pick her weights- in an interview with athlete daily, Cohen stated that she will never miss a max attempt. “The only weight I’m ever going to put on the bar is a weight that I’m going to 100 percent be convinced that I’m able to do. I won’t put the bar down unless I’ve made a bad call and it pulls me back down. I’m going to keep pulling until I can’t, because I convinced myself before I did the lift anything I put on the bar I’m going to make.” And to those retards out there incessantly quoting Ronnie Coleman during lifts and screeching “light weight, baby,” Cohen would like you to keep your teeth together. “It pisses me off when people are like “light weight, baby” when you go up to a heavy bar. It’s not going to be light, you are going to put that weight on your back or pull it from the ground and it’s going to be fucking heavy. And you’re going to have to find a way to lift it anyway.”
A Squat Session with Stefi Cohen As I gather it, not all of her sessions are identical, and she apparently adheres to a fairly rigid program created by her powerlifting and weightlifting coaches. Nevertheless, this session is definitely enlightening, as are her methods (and hopefully she doesn’t take too much umbrage with being included in an antiprogramming manifesto, given her amusingly extreme distaste- which is likely professionally motivated- for program hopping). Squat - bar x 6; 145 x 4; 235 x 4; 325 x 4; 375 x 1 (uses this to test out her strength for the day, rep was done extremely slowly); 415 x 1 (the week prior she had done a triple at that weight, but because that one was so brutal she cut off her sets there. Of note: When squatting, Cohen deliberately descends with a pace that can best be described as glacial, which is surprising for a former weightlifter.
Her reasoning behind the ridiculously slow descent is that she believes it engages all of the muscle groups more intensely, which in turn drastically improves her stability and forces them to fire harder out of the hole. Given her rapid improvements in the squat, it might be worth a try. Pause Squat - 335 x 4 with a 1-2 second pause; 355 x 4 1-2 second pause Barbell Sissy Squat - 3 x 8 x 225 (this is an old school exercise that is really cool to see included in a powerlifting session. She put ten pound plates under her heels, with her stance so narrow her feet were almost touching, and squatted ass to grass)
Doug Young- The Bench Press Badass the Internet Loves as a Muscle Bear D oug Young is one of those guys, like Roger Estep, that even the most
homophobic, pickup truck driving, gun totin’, MAGA hat ownin’, Texan would look at and say, “yeah, I’d suck that guy’s dick.” Basically embodying everything about a man that another man could covet, Doug Young was a human in the form of a Dodge Viper-Humvee-Bear Syfy style chimera who was the first person under 300lbs to bench press over 500, and he managed to pack on 80lbs of rip in eight months to do it, training nothing but upper body.
Legendary 8 Month Bench Specialization Routine
Throughout the aforementioned eight month period, Young was every bit the bench bro. This is what he did, three times a week, to become masturbation material for every “straight” powerlifter who has ogled him since. Bench Press - 135 x 12; 225 x 6; 325 x 2; 375 x 2; 425 x 1; 465 x 1; 485 x 1; 500 x 1; 515 x 1; 530 x 1; 540 x 1; 540 x1; 490 x 9; 300 x14 Front Raise - 3 x 15 Skullcrushers - 6 x 6 Stiff-Arm Pulldowns - 6 x 6 Cable Crossovers - 6 x 6 One-Arm Concentration Curls - 6 x 6 One Arm Rows - 6 x 6 If he was sore, he’d go for doubles rather than singles. The only leg and back work he did was four or five singles in the squat every ten days, and six or seven singles in the deadlift every 15 days. In eight months, his arms ended up almost 20” and his chest was 60”.
Roger Estep- If You’re Gonna Lift Big Weights, You Might as Well Look Good Doing It Much like Doug Young, Roger Estep has been the “no homo” man crush of the powerlifting world for the last 40 years. Though he looks every bit like a bodybuilder, Roger Estep never competed in anything but powerlifting, in spite of Joe Weider’s attempts to get him into the sport and encouragement by Frank Zane. Thus, at 198lbs, Roger Estep basically boasted the best and strongest physique on the planet under 200lbs.
Maybe the craziest thing about Estep is the fact that he put 424lbs onto his total in 4 years- in his first meet he only managed a 1520 total, but when he won the World’s, he did it with a 1944 and a wrapped 769 squat. Tragically, he actually hit 815 in the gym the week prior and couldn’t replicate that at the meet, but sometimes shit just doesn’t work out the way you’d like it to. That is a nice segue into his training however, because clearly it was ridiculously heavy, at all times. And when I say ridiculously heavy, I mean maximal or supramaximal weights (for forced reps) at basically every session, no matter how shitty, sore or tired he might have been feeling. This, in turn, led to a hell of a lot of injuries, but it also led to a hell of a lot of success. You’ll notice Estep was big on box squats, and that was due to his summer in California spent training with George Frenn and Bill West. After training with the Westside guy, Estep took their methods back to his gym in Ohio, where he and his crew, “The Wild Bunch,” put them into practice and used them to become one of the most formidable powerlifting teams on the planet.
Monday High Box Squat - Light warmup, followed by 90lb jumps to a work weight that is 50-75lbs over his best max squat. He'll use that weight for a single set of 10 on a high box, though if his knees were giving him shit, he'd cut that to 7. After a light warmup set he takes 90-lb. jumps to a poundage 50-75 lbs. over his best max squat single and goes for 10 reps. Low Box Squat - Using a box height that put him 2-3 inches below parallel he'd take 100lbs off his 1RM and rep out. Bench Press - 4 singles followed by an AMRAP pump set Good Mornings -3 x 10 Leg Curl - 3 x 10 Random Bodybuilding Shit
Wednesday Squat - Work up to a max set for ten reps. Later on in his career he'd just work up to a single rep about a hundred pounds off his max, to grease the groove, as Pavel put it. Deadlift - Work up to a max set for ten reps, without straps. Leg Curl - 3 x 10 Random Bodybuilding Shit Snatches and Cleans (On occasion)
Friday Squat - Four singles, competition style, treating each attempt like it was a meet. Bench - Four singles, competition style, treating each attempt like it was a meet. Deadlift - Four singles, competition style, treating each attempt like it was a meet. Leg Curl - 3 x 10 Random Bodybuilding Shit "Train hard… party hard… makes the body hard." - Roger Estep
Jeremy Hoornstra- Sometimes Benching More Than You Squat is Cool as Shit Though it’s fairly certain Jeremy Hoornstra gets endless shit from his training partners and friends because he benches considerably more than he squats or pulls, I can imagine it’s done with a level of respectfulness you generally wouldn’t see otherwise, because getting punched by a man that strong is likely going to be fatal. Hoornstra broke Mike McDonald's 33 year old raw bench record at 242 with 661 press after nipping at its heels for a bit, and has since hit 675 in what looks like an effort to be the first human being under 300lbs to bench 700 raw. Hoornstra competes in both bodybuilding and powerlifting, sports arms big enough to make you consider heaving yourself off a goddamn cliff, and is the 242lb and 275lb world record holder in the bench.
Amusingly, Hoornstra's bench press routine is exactly what you'd expect from a bodybuilder- there’s a reason bodybuilders out-bench the powerlifters in most gyms. Surprisingly, it's not done on International Bench Press Day (Monday), nor is it followed by a bit of biceps, just to get a pump on before the club. Instead, Hoornstra's split is a two-sessions-a-day schedule that looks like this:
Monday - Back, Cardio (night) Tuesday - Chest, Traps and Forearms (night) Wednesday - Biceps, Cardio (night) Thursday - Shoulders, Calves and Abs (night) Friday - Triceps, Cardio (night) Saturday - Legs
Yes, biceps get their own day. No stranger to volume, Hoornstra's throwing around a lot of weight for a shitload of reps with a variety of angles when he hits bench day, and rests no more than three minutes between sets. A typical workout looks something like this, but according to Hoornstra it varies greatly with his mood and enthusiasm: Flat Bench Press - 225 x 15; 315 x 10; 405 x 10; 495 x 8; 585 x 3; 635 x 2; 405 x AMRAP Incline Bench Press - 315 x 10; 405 x 8; 495 x 5; 495 x 5 Incline Dumbbell Flyes - 3 x AMRAP x 140 (they’re the heaviest dumbbells the gym has) Flat Cable Flies - 3 x 10 x stack Hammer Strength Chest Press - 2 x AMRAP X as much weight as it will hold
Brutally In Depth: Terrible Ted Arcidi, Bench Beast and Utter Maniac
The fact that most of the people endlessly (and fruitlessly) babbling about training online in the modern era seem to know the names of people like Brad Castleberry, Jujimufu, and that Athlean-X shitslug but not that of the first man to bench 700lbs so raw he wasn't even wearing wrist wraps is indicative of just how useless the vast majority of the fitspo bullshit truly is, and how pointless the machinations of everyone using the hashtag fitfam truly are. Absent in Ted Arcidi's herculean effort are even the oft-repeated bodybuilder critiques about over-arching, because Arcidi wasn't trying to be the most famous belly tossing contortionist in history, nor was he about gaming weird biomechanical bullshit to trick lift the weight- Ted Arcidi was instead about
moving the most weight with as much raw aggression and brute strength as he possibly could from his chest to arm's length while laying on his fucking back. Period. No tricks, no nonsense, and no poser jitbaggery... and to top it off he was a truly interesting and compelling figure throughout his life, rather than a poser chasing dollars with a fabricated resume and the depth of character to match that of a sheet of saran wrap. If you want the TLDR of Terrible Ted Arcidi's resume, you can pretty much just toss all of the weaksauce bullshit you've got on your bucket list into the trash and imagine a biography that stops just short of conquering a small nation and walking on the moon. He's owned gyms, a supplement company, a sporting goods company, acted in movies with Denzel and DeNiro, shared the small screen with Tracey Morgan, traded mustache grooming secrets with Tom Selleck, wrestled in the WWE and WCW, traveled the world, rocked a physique envied by many and matched by very few, and out-benched almost every single person who's ever walked the Earth.
Vital Statistics
Height : 5'11" Weight : 291lbs Raw Bench (Competition): 705lbs Single-Ply Bench (Competition): 725lbs Standing Behind the Neck Press (Strict): 375lbs x 5 Squat : 750lbs [800lbs a little high] Deadlift : 730lbs
The world-shattering bencher and substitute-for-the-hilariously-incarceratedKen-Patera pro wrestler Ted Arcidi was born in Buffalo, NY in 1958 to a firstgeneration Italian-American orthodontist and a nurse. Being a kid in Buffalo during the 70s, he played hockey year-round. At that time, defenseman Bobby Orr was setting the goddamned world on fire by being one of the highest scorers in the league and in history while playing defense. In a time when ice hockey defensemen were basically just broken-faced serial killers on ice, Orr managed to lead score like the best forwards and be a vicious, helmetless slaughterbeast at the same time. As such, every kid in North America wanted to be him, and every chick with a working vagina wanted to fuck him blind. If you can get past the fact that there was a time in the US when people actually gave a shit about hockey, know that Arcidi was admittedly no better than average at the sport. It wasn't for lack of trying however, as he broke his ass off training for it, doing endless pullups, dips, and pushups, tons of road work, and playing a ton of street and ice hockey. As a freshman at Salem State University, Arcidi wasn't exactly setting the world on fire from a grades or hockey standpoint- he was spending any time he wasn't spending in the bar trying to bang every broad who passed his field of vision. Rocking what he claims was a 0.00 GPA going into the second semester of school, Arcidi was treated to a blizzard that dropped 27 inches on Boston, so he hit the gym out of nothing more than boredom and was instantly hooked. According to Arcidi,
"And I think the fact that, you know, partaking in sports is important, but even when I was doing sports the calisthenics, I was like insane about it. And I really feel that doing-I used to do dips like an animal, push-ups, chin-ups. And I really feel that that just commenced a great basis for weight training because my tendons were really strong. I, I because I did that for years. I did that for at least three years before I even touched the weight."
Source: YouTube
“It was kind of like opening up Pandora’s box for me. The developing of strength, size and power was something I hadn’t experienced before and I enjoyed it very much.” From there, it was all downhill, and by downhill I mean easy as falling off a ladder into a bucket cunt at an orgy. In his sophomore year, Ted benched 420. One of Ted's friends convinced him to transfer to Norwich State, which he did in spite of the fact he'd have to sit out a year of hockey- he figured he would spend the year lifting so as to enter his next year a goddamn beast. There, he essentially forced the school administration to allow him the same access to the dining hall as the football team so he could eat enough to fuel his insane workouts, and proceeded to blow up like the goddamned Hindenburg. At his first meet, less than two years after he first picked up a weight, Terrible Ted pushed 460 at a bodyweight of 220 (fully 50lbs heavier than his starting weight). The following year, he his 545 at 242. The year after, 610 lbs. Then, in 1985, almost seven years to the day after he first picked up a weight, Ted Arcidi became the first
man to bench over 700lbs in competition, putting up 705lbs at the Budweiser World Record Breakers in Honolulu. "We all have a great deal of talent within us, but the key is unleashing it." All steroids, right? Ted readily admits to gear use, but he didn't touch it until after he was already benching 600. And if you think it just came easy as shit to him, think again- after gaining admittance to some of the top dental schools in the country (Tufts, Marquette, and NYU, and Georgetown), Ted chose Tufts and worked as a substitute teacher to pay his way through the program. Then, realizing that he was insanely close to smashing the shit out of the world record, Arcidi had to make a choice- school or legendary status in the strength world. "And I’m just saying to myself, “I’m not, I better not blow this,” you know? Because at one point I was, I was thinking you know I have a shot to be the first man to bench press 700 pounds. I mean that’s gonna, that’s gonna be earth shattering. No one’s ever done it. The world record at the time was 661. You’re breaking it by like forty something pounds, that’s like Bob Beamon in the long jump. You just blew it away." As Janae Kroc put it, "After dropping out of school, Ted moved into a small, dark, damp basement with a single room and a pull chain toilet so that he could focus completely on breaking the record." The man was the living embodiment of being a driven competitor, and he let absolutely nothing stand in his way. As such, Arcidi officially became the proud owner of the biggest bench press in human history, surpassing the legendary Bill Kazmaier, within a year. Having smashed the ever-loving hell out of the bench press record, Terrible Ted started looking around for other opportunities to showcase his strength (and actually make a little cash). With Ken Patera in prison for his notorious and utterly amazing McDonald's incident, the WWE needed a strongman, and Arcidi fit the bill perfectly. At the end of Patera's prison sentence, Arcidi was released, and he went on to wrestle alongside The Ultimate Warrior, Ravishing Rick Rude, and Mick Foley in WCCW (a Texan organization run by the Von Erich wrestling dynasty) for a couple of years, won the heavyweight title then finally turned his attention back to powerlifting in 1990 when that organization went tits-up.
Tragically, five years of professional wrestling combined with years of ultra heavy benching took their toll on Arcidi, and though he was able to easily set another record using one of Inzer's new bench shirts, he had problems locking out the weight and ditched his comeback after a year. From there, he opened a gym in New Hampshire, continued selling his own brand of supplements for years, and opened a business refurbishing exercise equipment for resale. On top of that, he introduced Triple H to Killer Kowalski after repeatedly trying to talk him out of joining the record business and was a strength trainer for both Chyna and Triple H early on in their careers. And if that weren't enough goddamned entries in his book of awesome, he acted alongside Denzel in Equalizer 2, Law and Order, with DeNiro and Rene Russo in The Family, Nurse Jackie, 30 Rock, and Blue Bloods, among other things. With that utterly ridiculous biographical intro, you people better be dying to find out how the man ate and trained, and you're in luck- I researched this hard enough that I might at this point be world's foremost authority on this badass.
The Various Victuals of Terrible Ted
Like some of the behemoths of the 1950's, Arcidi's rise to cryptozoological dimensions was quick and focused, but nothing Earth shattering, restrictive, or ridiculous. Nah, he wasn't on some proto-Vertical Diet, nor did he weigh and measure each morsel like he was a moneylender from ancient Sumeria faced with tables of weird exotic spices to exchange for coin. Instead, the dude who packed on 100lbs of rip in five years stuck to the basics. Breakfast for Ted always consisted of oatmeal, whole eggs, juice, and multivitamins, though it was his smallest meal of the day. Thereafter he adhered pretty rigidly to 1980's bodybuilder fare mostly consisting of chicken and spaghetti. He believed that a ratio of roughly 40% carbs and 60% protein was optimal, keeping fats as low as possible, because the 1980's were an insanely fatphobic era. This meant he ate a massive amount of chicken breasts, because Terrible Ted was wolfing down 7,000 calories a day to gain and mass. He stayed away from sugars with near religious fastidiousness, believing that hypoglycemia was the ultimate gains killer, but once every two weeks he'd eat a candy bar just so he remembered what chocolate tasted like. As for protein sources, Ted believed that chicken and fish were the best options, and stated that "If you are going to eat red meat do so just twice a week. Red meat, I feel, makes you sluggish. It takes so long to digest. It interferes with your workouts. Red meat is not such a good source of protein for myself anyway. I feel chicken and fish have less corpuscles between its muscle fibers." If that made you blink in confusion, you're not the only one- my mental image of the man immediately changed from a ~300lb man mountain to an elderly man in a tonsure and black robes who's giving alchemical advice while slowly dying of mercury poisoning. Compounding that statement is one most people will likely find even more unconventional but was common among powerlifters in that era- Arcidi's bodyweight in the offseason was 15lbs lighter than his competition training weight. Because Arcidi and his fellow powerlifters weren't the attention whoring, narcissistic douches of the modern era, they were delightfully unconcerned with what the people around them, or in the world at large, thought about their training, form, training weights, and physiques were in the offseason, because again, they trained because they enjoyed training , not because their
existence was so empty, lonely, and valueless that they required constant affirmations of their existence from complete strangers. “I like to let my bodyweight drop during the off-season. To tell you the truth, I felt pretty good after I went to the Patriots football training camp and got down to 260-265 lbs. I got some cardio. I like to drop down about 15 lbs. to 270 lbs. before I begin cycling for a powerlifting competition." Though I now despise cardio with a vehemence most people reserve for having their public persona match their banal private existence, I recognize its utility. As such, I let people know it's possible to be jacked and ripped without it, even though science actually says you'll be bigger if you do cardio. People have taken that to mean I am staunchly anti-cardio, but it's more that I despise it and would rather find alternate means to awesome. In any event, big Teddy didn't share my hatred of the shit- he loved it. His opinion of cardio belies his beginnings in hockey: “It’s good to incorporate some running in the OFF SEASON, but not during the season. I think you lose too much bodyweight. Now and then if I do feel that I’m getting out of shape, if I feel I’m losing my breath during a workout and can’t cope with it on a light training day, I’ll go extremely FAST. I’m talking about a marathon. I’ll get my workout done in 45 minutes. I’ll just fly right through it because all I do on Monday is light benches and heavy assistance work anyway, so I can fly right through it. So, it gets my blood going, gets my heart beating up a nice, big training pulse.”
And lo and behold, Terrible Ted has an answer for the natty bros of the world who claim that in spite of the fact Ted put his education and life on hold to focus
himself entirely on training for a world record, his gains were naught but steroids at work. “I feel they’re necessary for gaining strength. Especially at a WORLD CLASS LEVEL because everyone else is taking them. I’ve tried a few, but if they work as well as people have said they work, then I thought I’d be seeing more people benching 700 lbs. I’m the only one in the 700 lb club right now. I think a lot of it is not the steroids. It’s NUTRITION and REST and a good LIFTING CYCLE and a POSITIVE ATTITUDE."
Terrible Ted’s Bench-Tastic Training Cycle Terrible Ted only competed a couple of times a year, and spent 4-5 months a year in his offseason, at a lighter weight, doing more cardio. Bear in mind when reading this program that it was the bare bones, mainstay of what he did. It wasn't as though he didn't deviate from this, as he was no pussy who feared "overtraining" like Russians fear Keanu Reeves. The dude did plenty of shit that is not listed here, like neck. For instance he felt "that being tight on the bench is very important," so he did unlisted "neck work because the insertions of the neck muscles lie in the shoulder girdle and thus help stabilize it during the bench press." Given the size of his traps, it's basically unthinkable that he never shrugged, and given his ridiculous biceps it's preposterous to assume the man only did 18 reps of bicips a week. Thus, look at this as a framework, not one of the retarded, stone-set programs so in vogue with 150lb know-nothings on Reddit. "We’re trying to set the precedent and not anyone else. That’s why I respect [Kaz] a lot, especially at his age. I’m not saying he’s an old man, but he is the senior of a lot of lifters. He has no mental barriers. That’s got to be the biggest key that we both have. I think I could Bench Press 750 lbs. I DON’T HAVE ANY MENTAL BARRIERS."
Off Season Training Framework
Clearly, this is an outline, not the sum total of his training.
Monday: Light on the bench presses and medium on behind the neck press.
Tuesday: Usually a rest day, but he occasionally does four sets of ten on lat pulldowns and then some abs
Wednesday: Complete rest and relaxation.
Thursday: Heavy bench press and light on standing BTN press.
Friday: Like Tuesday, he occasionally moves lats to this day from Thurs.
Saturday: Heavy standing BTN press.
Explanation of Loading Light: 80%1RM for 5-6 reps Medium: 85% for 5 Heavy: 90+% for 2-3 reps "No coach, no mentor. All me. All me."
11 Week Contest Cycle 1st 3 Weeks : Use repetition pattern consisting of 6’s on bench press. 2nd 3 Weeks : Use repetition pattern consisting of 5’s on bench press. Final 5 Weeks : Begin to adapt to reps of 3’s and then begin utilizing a combination of 3’s and 2’s the final two weeks of the cycle. Week 12 was pre competition week, in which he trained very little. If you want the specifics on that, read Dennis Weis' e-book). According to one source, who chronicled Ted's efforts leading up to his 1982 win in Hawaii, Arcidi's competition cycle sometimes stretched to 13-14 weeks. Unlike modern trainees, he wasn't wedded to a hard and fast system. In re his rep schemes:
“Sixes are great, you get good endurance and strength. I feel that 6’s are the greatest thing that man ever came across for repetitions in the bench. With 6’s, you’re away from the heavy, heavy weight but yet you still have to throw some weight around, because it’s not exactly light weight. Imagine going for your best 6 reps. That means for me I’ve got to get 560-570 lbs. This gives me a lot of tendon and ligament strength. This is a very important factor when getting into the heavy triples and doubles later, because the endurance and increased lung capacity from the 6’s, you’ll be able to blow up those 5’s, 3’s and 2’s.”
Monday (Day 1) Bench Press - 3 x 5 x 405 to 415-420lbs (plus forced reps on the last set) Standing Behind the Neck Press - 1 x 5 x 260, 275, 300 Skullcrusher (to Nose) - 1 x 6 x 340, 350, 350 Standing Barbell Curls - 3 x 6 160 - 195 Lat Machine Pulldowns - 3-4 x 10 x 235-240
FUCK WHAT YA HEARD: Terrible Ted gave exactly zero fucks about training with paused reps. All of his bench reps in training were touch and
go, with a moderate speed on the descent and as explosively as possible off his chest. Yes, folks- he loved bounced reps more than most of you love your own genitalia.
Thursday (Day 2) Bench Press - 3 x 6 560-570lbs. Standing Behind the Neck Press - 3 x 6 x 225lbs The rest of the day is the same as Monday
Saturday (Day 3) Squats - 1 x 5 x 550 Deadlifts - 1 x 5 540 to 620 Standing Behind the Neck Press - 1 x 3 x 335 and 365 for 1 set each And rest periods? He took them in spades. “I do take a lot of time resting between heavy benches. I take up to 5 to 6 minutes between sets. I don’t care, I want to get the weight, so that is why I take a lot of time in between my sets on heavy days. I need to be recuperated fully for the next set. Now, on my light days on the bench and even with assistance work, I go extremely fast because I’m not going for any heavy weights.” According to John Buckley, day one of the last phase of Arcidi's training in 1982 looked like this: Bench Press- 155x8, 225x3, 335x3, 405x2, 475x2, 525x1, 575x3, 575x3, 600x2 plus 4 forced reps.
Skullcrushers (bar brought to nose)- 120x5, 210x3, 305x6, 325x6, 335x6, 335x6, 335x6 Triceps Pushdown- 190x6 Standing BTN Press- 45x6, 135x6, 225x7, 245x7, 245x7, 245x7 EZ Curls- 3 x 6 x 200
Several sources mention Arcidi's love of naps, so he really isn't kidding when he says recuperation is vital for a big bench. That's not to say he was into taking a week off every month like every shit coach and natty dipshit online suggests, but rather that Arcidi religiously napped between 60 and 90 minutes a day, every day. Beyond that, Arcidi believed that neck work, skullcrushers, and strict standing behind the neck press were critical components of his bench press success. Though he is the only source beyond me who seems to have noticed or mentioned this, the abdominal strength that heavy overhead presses confer carry over strongly into every other lift, so doing them seated basically destroys their utility. And there you have it- Terrible Ted Arcidi, one of the greatest benchers in history and without question one of the coolest people to ever walk the planet. If nothing else, this should stand as a reason to get off your ass and do something interesting with your life, because however much interesting shit you do, your life's story will bore the shit out of anyone who knows Ted Arcidi's tale.
You don't owe anybody anything. You're your own man. When the party's over and you've screwed up, you're the guy you have to answer to. If you do well, you still have to answer to yourself . Ted Arcidi
Jennifer Thompson- Natty Superwoman
Seeing a good woman bencher is about as rare as seeing a John Wayne impersonator in a gay pride parade. Unless, of course, you happen to know Jennifer Thompson, who’s been out-benching most of the guys in her gym for the last 20 years. Given that she competes in a federation that seems to revere Josef Stalin as the godfather of fun, you know there was a dude out there with a micrometer and someone measuring the weight on the bar to the nanogram to ensure her 319 bench at 138 was legit. After she hit that, she was probably polygraphed, strip-searched, beaten with reeds, polygraphed again, and then piss-tested for everything short of protein excreted in her urine. I'm sure even after all of that they chased her around screaming "liar!" at her and pelting her with rotten vegetables until her blood tests came back negative. The USAPL’s collective psychosis aside, Thompson has managed to put together so much consistent success in her class that they might as well just rename the class after her and get it over with. as unfun as they are men-out-of-time, since they would have been far more at home in early 20th Century Europe, when being a fascist made you cooler than Rob Van Winkle in "Cool As Ice". In any event, the standard weaksauce criticism usually bandied about to dismiss a person’s lifts, like “steroids” or “fake plates or whatever, just don’t apply to Jennifer Thompson. At 45, she’s still moving huge weights, dominating her class, and consistently- she’s standing on the podium twice as much every year as most people change their goddamn oil.
Thompson's approach to just about everything seems to be completely unique, from what I've seen, from the fact that she competes every month or two to the manner in which she structures her workouts. Instead of alternating speed and heavy days, she's got alternate speed and heavy weeks. As she puts it, her “heavy week involves static holds and heavy set work. My speed week uses bands and I work on my single max lifts. When I have a long period between competitions I do a 12-week workout that starts with exercises at 10 reps and works its way down to 5 reps. I use this to build up my base strength." Interestingly, the weight isn't as important as the speed of the lift for Thompson, and she will "drop 10 to 15 pounds on that exercise and work on the speed of the lift" if she's not improving from workout to workout.
Her overall split looks like this: Day 1: Chest Day 2: Off Day 3: Back, Biceps, and Calves Day 4: Off Day 5: Shoulders and Triceps Day 6: Off Day 7: Legs Day 8: Off *Abs are done as a warm-up on workout days. (8-12 weeks on, then 1 week off. When restarting she simply lowers the weights and starts over.)
Speed Week
Chest Bench Singles (1 rep strict bench singles)- 3 singles with 65%, 75%, and 85% of max Increase one of your singles every lift if you get all 3 Bench (with bands or chains)- 3 x 5 Set up the bands or chains to add resistance to the top of the lift to increase your speed through the sticking point. Incline Bench - 2 xf 5 Decline Bench - 2 x 5 Speed Bench Presses - 2 x 5 Strict (long paused explosive rep) Flyes - 2 x 8 Stabilizer Pushups (Push-ups on a stabilizer ball or board): 2 sets to failure
Shoulders and Tris Military Press - 3 x 5 Upright Rows - 2 x 8 Lateral Raises - 2 x 8 Dumbbell Shoulder Press - 2 x 8 Offload Bench Press - 3 sets of 5 (Attach bands above the bar so that weight is taken off the bar at the bottom to help increase your transition into your triceps) Close Grip Bench - 2 x 8
Tricep Extensions - 2 x 8 Pushdowns - 2 x 8
Heavy Week Chest Bench Press Heavy Hold (Unlocked bench press hold for 15 seconds)- 3 x 5 Incline Bench - 2 x 5 Decline Bench - 2 x 5 Negatives - 2x 2 Dumbbell Stabilizer Presses (Dumbbell presses while lying on a large stabilizer ball)- 2 x 8
Shoulders and Tris Military Press Heavy Hold (Unlocked military press hold for 15 seconds)- 2 x 5 Upright Rows - 2 x 8 Rear Lateral Raises - 2 x 8 Dumbbell Shoulder Presses - 2 x 8 Heavy Lockouts (Bench press last 5-7 inches of lift): 3 x5 JM Presses : 2 x 8 Weighted Dips - 2 x 8
Single-arm Pushdowns - 2 x 8
Vince Anello and Larry Pacifico- Bodybuilders and World Champion Powerlifters Flying (and Winning) By the Seats of Their Goddamn Pants The men pictured above, Vince Anello and Larry Pacifico, were powerlifters who competed against each other throughout their careers, trading records back and forth as they sought to be not just best powerlifters on the planet, but the best looking. You would think, with a goal like that, that they would have meticulously planned their rise to victory like the internet tells you to, plotting and planning and calculating and formulating, weighing food and checking macros and doing all of the other extraneous bullshit people discuss to avoid the cold hard fact that none of that shit is worth a velvet painting of a whale and a dolphin gettin' it on if you’re not training until your fucking eyes bleed every time you hit the gym.
These two, however, loved training and trained like they were a couple of epic masochists trying to pick up a new play partner at a BDSM convention, and just beat the ever-loving shit out of themselves. Pacifico ended up with 54 world records as a result and hit 832 on the squat with ACE bandages for wraps, a 593 bench, and a 771 deadlift in powerlifting meets with no flight system. And Anello, by the end of his career, broke the 800 barrier on the deadlift for the first
time at a sub 200 bodyweight, and pulled 821 in competition with a 750 squat and a 500 bench. But because the real lifting was done in the gym, not outside it, both men had even more ridiculous numbers witnessed by multiple people, including an 880 pull by Anello and an 885 squat by Pacifico. Like any strong person, Anello and Pacifico knew it was only weak people who would utter the tired adage “it doesn’t matter unless you do it on a platform,” because when you’re just lifting for yourself, you don’t give a fuck if anyone else approves of your lift. Thus, they would go into the gym with the type of wild-eyed zeal usually seen on the faces of people wearing vests styled by ISIS and attack the shit out of the goddamn weights. As neither man was huge on planning, they don’t even have a basic framework to show you. What they did have, however, were sort of trends in their training. ● Partials and Isometrics : Both men relied heavily on partials and isometrics to build strength. Anello would do deadlift partials from just below or at the knee. He’d also do partial squats, which (very interestingly) he thought were far more helpful for the deadlift than they were for the squat. Both guys used isometrics to improve their pull, setting the top pin just under their knee and pulling a light weight against it as hard as possible for six seconds. ● Negatives : Whereas Pacifico used these on the bench, Anello adopted the deadlift method of unracking a deadlift at the top of the movement, doing a very slow negative, then pulling it back up from the floor. This was the training style used by Bob Peoples, who was the first man under 200lbs to pull 700 in competition, and People was actually int the crowd when Anello did the same with 800. ● Bodybuilding : Both men competed in bodybuilding and stayed lean year-round. Because of this, they both had incredibly well-rounded totals, and they looked like Greek gods on the platform. ● Shrugs : Though everyone these days seems to think shrugs are stupid, both Anello ● Go seriously heavy : Both guys trained primarily in the 1-3 rep range and focused on getting the weight up any way they could rather than
having the best form. A form check on Anello’s deadlifts would likely have caused most of the internet’s gurus to have a goddamn stroke. Calling his deadlift ugly is like calling someone like the Rock or Kate Upton “pretty”- it’s not really a word that can accurately describe what’s going on. To give you an idea of how these guys trained, here is a sample week from Larry Pacifico- there is no rhyme, reason, or pattern- he just trained his goddamn ass off, doing whatever he wanted whenever he liked.
Day 1: Deadlift Isometrics Deadlift Isometrics - two levels, 455 for 6-second holds
Day 2: Light Back Chinups - 3 x 10 Cable Rows - 3 x 10 Pulldown s- 3x10 Leg Raises Situps
Day 3: Heavy Squat and Bench Squat - 1 x 3 x 535; 1 x 2 x 615; 1 x 2 x 705; 1 x 1 x 740 Bench Press - 4 x 6 x 425;1 x 4 x 475; 1 x 2 x 505; 1 x 1 x 540 Wide Grip Bench (long pause)- 435 x 1; 435x3
Situps
Day 4: OFF Day 5: Deadlift Deadlift - 1 x 2 x 615; 2 x 2 x 700; 2 x 2 x 720, 1 x 1 x 720; 2 x 4 x 525
Day 6: More Light Back Chinups - 4 x 8 Pulldowns - 3 x 10 Bent Over Row - 3 x 10 Situps - 2 x 25 Forearms - 3 x 10
Day 7: Squat and Bench Squat - 1 x 3 x 525; 1 x 2 x 615; 1 x 2 x 705; 1 x 2 x 740 Bench Press - 4 x 6 x 325; 1 x 4 x 415; 1 x 2 x 505; 1 x 2 x 540 Skullcrushers - 1 x 8; 1 x 6; 1 x 4; 1 x 3; 2 x 1 Situps - 2 x 25
Brutally In Depth: Pat Casey Outworks Everyone in History Nowadays, it's not uncommon to see a lot of guys weighing in the 200s benching 600+lbs, so you'd think that a guy like Pat Casey would fall by the wayside in a discussion on big benchers. That, however, is because most people wouldn't take into account the fact that triple-ply bench shirts can double your bench, and equipped guys often can barely handle half their opener in a warmup without their shirts or suits. Casey, however, was the first guy to ever bench 600, squat 800, and total 2000, and he did like a goddamn beast in a t-shirt and shorts. How'd he do it? Sheer badassery, some sick genetics, schooling from the first guy to officially bench 400, and by never missing a scheduled workout . I'm not sure if you guys are seeing a pattern among these legends of strength sports, but there's definitely a solid one at this point- consistency is the ultimate key.
In re the second reason Casey was such a beast- the Godzilla-strong cocksucker benched 420 at a bodyweight of about 215 when he was 17 years old. Hideously unfair, for sure, in the eyes on anyone who was, like me, pumped about a 285 bench when they were 17. Nor was this a big deal for him- according to Bruce Wilhelm, "he did not have to check his biorhythm chart, or to be totally rested or to have his own equipment to do his best lifting on." Oh, and to add insult to injury, Casey competed only as a bodybuilder at the time, rather than a powerlifter. That's not to say that Casey trained like a poofter- he trained in marathon sessions on a regular basis, doing 7-8 hour sessions of weighted dips. Once, at a
bodyweight of 300, he did a single with 308lbs hanging off him. Additionally, he'd occasionally bench with no spotter in a shed without electricity, by candlelight (and nearly killed himself doing so on at least 2 occasions). This wasn't uncommon for him, as Casey trained by himself, reading magazines to motivate himself, and then just busting his ass for endless hours doing the most ridiculous shit of which he could think, like a neck bridge pullover and press with 405 lbs. According to the man himself, "At a bodyweight of 300 and using a 250 pound dumbell I did 200 repetitions. I started with sets of 5, then 4, gradually descending all the way down to singles. I did this over a 7 hour period of time and I can readily attest to the fact that I was totally thrashed. I felt shot for the next two weeks. But for some reason at that time I felt that they helped. On several other occasions I did over a 100,000 pound workload dipping, working over a period of 8 hours." Insane. Casey credited his massive benching power to his marathon dipping sessions, in addition to having done thousands of bench press lockouts in his homemade bench in the aforementioned shed. He mentioned that he got the idea from Marvin Eder, another bonafide badass who lifted insane poundages prior to the advent of lifting equipment or the prevalence of gear. Additionally, like Eder, his workouts were absolutely beastly. Wilhelm lists the following as a typical week in the gym for Pat Casey:
Monday : Bench Press Lockouts -Singles from 4 inches off chest. 3 singles from 7 inches off chest.After lockouts, 2 sets of regular benches with 405 x 3. Dumbbell Incline - 3 sets of 5 reps warmup. 120 x 10, 200 x 3 x 5 Lying Triceps Extension - 5-6 x 3-5 Chins - 2-3 x 8-10 Curls - 3 x 5.
Tuesday Squats - 135 x 5, 22 x 3, 315 x 2, 405 x 2, 585 x 2, 650 x 5 singles, 515 x 10 Leg Extension - 3 x 20 Leg Curls - 2 x 12 Deadlifts from below knee - (working on sticking point) 315 x 5, 405 x2, 515 x 1, 565 x 6 singles.
Friday Bench Press - 135 x 20; 225 x 10; 315 x 5, 405 x 5; 515 x 1; 560/570 x 5 singles, 405 x 10, 315 x 20. Seated Mlitary Press - 135 x 10, 225 x 5, 315 x 3, 400 x 1, 315 x 5, 225 x 8. Dips - Bodyweight x 3 x 5; 10 x 5 x 205
Saturday: Lockout Squats - above parallel, squat down and stop on pins. Dead stop. No bounce at the bottom. 135 x 10, 225 x 5, 315 x 3, 405 x 2, 515 x 1. 585 x 1, 650 x 1, 750 x 5 singles, finish with full squat – 405 x 5 with a pause at the bottom. These lockouts were mainly for the feel of handling heavy weight. Leg Extensions - 3 x 20 Leg Curls - 2 x 12
Monday Wide Grip Seated Presses - 10 x 5; 1 x 20 Cheating One Arm Lateral Raises - 5 x 5; 1 x 20 Cheating One Arm Front Raises - 5 x 5, 1 x 20 Dips - 8 x 5, 1 x 20
Wednesday Handstand Presses Against Wall - With hands on boxes. 10 x 5. If you cannot do a complete press-up from the position do a half press until your strength increases enough to do full movements. You can add weight by tying a plate around your waist. One Arm Lateral Raises- 5 x 8, 1 x 20. Bent Forward Lateral Raises - 5 x 8; 1 x 20. Dumbbell Shrugs - 10x 10; 1 x 20.
Friday Seated Press Behind Neck - 10 sets of 5, 1 x 20. Dumbbell Shrugs - 5 sets of 10, 1 x 20. One Arm Dumbbell Presses - 10 sets of 5, 1 x 20. Strict Standing One Arm Lateral Raises : 6 x 10 Workouts like those detailed above made Casey insanely, frighteningly strongwe're talking super-chimp on steroids and HGH strong. So fucking strong, in fact, that Casey once picked up a bench and moved it across the floor, failing to
realize at the time that it had been bolted directly into the fucking concrete. Thus, the next time you think you've fucking torn it up in the gym, rememberthere's always someone who's taken it a step further, so it's time to take two fucking steps forward and lay down your fucking marker on history.
Pat Casey’s Shoulder and Arm Specialization Pat recommended this shoulder and press specialization program for six weeks.
Monday Wide Grip Seated Front Barbell Press - 10 x 5; 1 x 20 Cheating One Arm Lateral Raises - 5 x 5; 1 x 20 Cheating One Arm Front Raises - 5 x 5; 1 x 20 Dips - 8 x 5; 1 x 20
Wednesday Handstand Pushups - 10 x 5; 1 x 20 One-arm Incline Lateral Raise - 5 x 8; 1 x 20 Rear Lateral Raises - 5 x 8; 1 x 20 Dumbbell Shrugs - 10 x 10 ; 1 x 20
Friday
Seated Behind the Neck Press - 10 x 5; 1 x 20 Dumbbell Shrugs - 5 x 10 One Arm Overhead Dumbbell Press (brace with the free hand)- 10 x 5; 1 x 20 Lateral Raises - 6 x 10
Weightlifters Dmitriy Klokov- If Jesus Had Been a Russian Weightlifter, His Name Would Have Been Klokov, Because This Motherfucker Walks on Water The chances someone who’s been doing any kind of real lifting in the last ten year might not know the name Dmitri Klokov would be like someone not knowing Guy Fieri’s name after binge watching the Cooking Network for a week straight, or a cokehead not knowing the name Pablo Escobar. On the off chance you’ve been off in a shed atop a mountain doing nothing but training for the last few years, Klokov was Russia’s shining star in weightlifting for a few years and built an insanely fervent online following with a combination of being really, really ridiculously good looking and the ability to put sick weights overhead with relative ease.
Since he retired from weightlifting, Klokov has won a Physique competition, been accused of engaging in some kind of collusion with Trump (and that is a weird rabbit hole to research if you get bored) and competed in the Pro Grid
League, which was a short-lived professional sports league that threw bodyweight exercises, CrossFit, and gymnastics into a blender. In addition to his 431lb snatch and 510lb clean and jerk, Klokov beat Crossfit legend Rich Froning on Isabel (30 snatches with 135lbs for time) and Heavy Isabel (Isabel with 220lbs), Klokov Presses 335lbs, and has done a five second paused front squat with 550lbs. Like just about everyone else in this book, the dude looks at least as good as his lifts say he should.
Monday Hyperextensions - 3 x 10 Muscle Snatch + Snatch Grip Behind the Neck Press (Klokov Press) + Overhead Squat - 3 x 2+2+2 Deficit Snatch Grip Deadlift + Deficit Snatch (with straps)- 3 x 2+1 (add weight each set) Deficit Snatch Grip Deadlift - 3 x 3 "Trapi" (swinging upright rows with snatch grip)- 5 x 5 (same weight) Snatch Grip Behind the Neck Press - 3 x 3 (add weight each set)
Tuesday Hyperextensions - 3 x 10 Snatch (no hook)- Work up to two heavy singles (as heavy as needed) Snatch Grip Deadlift (no hook)- Work up to two heavy singles (as heavy as safe. When he misses a weight, he moves on to the next exercise and adds weight)) Snatch Grip Deadlift (hook)- Work up to two heavy singles (same as above)
Snatch Grip Deadlift (straps- Work up to two heavy singles (same as above) Trapi - 5 x 5 Back Squat (slow descent and long pause) + Front Squat (with same weight)- 3-5 x 1+1 Barbell Jump Squat - 3-5 sets of 10 reps
Wednesday Clean + Front Squat + Push Press + Pause Jer k- 3 x 1+1+1+1 Clean Grip Deadlift + Shrug Extension - 3 x 3+3 Standing Military Press - 3 x 3 Hyperextensions - 5 x 10
Friday Hyperextensions - 3 x 10 Pause Snatch (at knee with straps)- 3-5 x 1 Snatch deadlift + snatch stiff leg deadlift + snatch deadlift + snatch stiff leg deadlift- 3 x 1+1+1+1 (add weight each set) Trapi - 5x5 Snatch Grip Behind the Neck Push Press + Overhead Squa t- 3 x 2+2 Sots Press - 5-6 x 3
Saturday
Hyperextensions - 3 x 10 Power Clean + Push Press - 1+2, 3 sets going up in weight Clean Grip Deadlift - work up to a daily max, do three singles, then a backoff set of ten reps. Back Squat - work up to a daily max, do two singles, then a backoff set of ten reps. Barbell Jump Squat - 5 x 10
Russ Knipp- He Strict Pressed Your Best Bench… Weighing Only 165lbs Unless you’re a history buff of US Olympic weightlifting or an evangelical Christian who’s super into muscular Christianity, it’s almost a certainty you’ve never heard of Russ Knipp. This man set a half dozen world records including an unreal 350lb press weighing 165, which is frankly one of the more insane strength feats of which I have ever heard- over two times his bodyweight. What follows is the six day a week program Knipp used just to bring up his press- he trained the rest of the Olympic lifts were trained on those days as well, but what’s listed is just what he recommended for people to bring up their press. One quick note- though Knipp wasn’t known for push jerking his press, he was a master of the double layback, which is how he managed his 350lb press. As such, he had to practice both the strict military press and the Olympic Press, to ensure his strength and technique were where they needed to be in order to move massive weight- that’s why you see both lifts included.
Mon, Wed, Fri
Bench Press to the Neck (with a standing press grip)-: 135 x 10, 205 x 8, 240 x 5, 255 x 5, 275 x 5, 255 x 5 Reverse Curl - 45 x 8, 65 x 8, 3 x 5 x 75 Situps - 8 x 25
Tues and Thurs Military Press - 135 x 10, 175 x 8, 205 x 5, 225 x 5, 230 x 5, 235 x 5, 2 x 5 x 220 Reverse Curl - 45 x 8, 65 x 8, 3 x 5 x 75 Situps - 8 x 25
Saturday
Olympic Press - 135 x 5, 175 x 5, 205 x 5, 240 x 5, 275 x 3, 290 x 3 Reverse Curl - 45 x 8, 65 x 8, 3 x 5 x 75 Situps - 8 x 25 Hand Stand Pushups (between two chairs)- 6 x 15
Brutally In Depth: Ike Berger- The Odd Lift Virtuoso and Beast-Mode, Pocket-Sized Weightlifter Ike Berger exists as the death touch for any manosphere / redpill / Bodybuilding.com user / Redditor dumbfuck who opens his cock holster about "manlets," because Berger was a goofy looking Jew lifter who stood 5'2" and 132lbs and crushed more vagina than all of Reddit has collectively seen in its life. Berger partied like he was trying out for Mötley Crüe, chased women like a cartoon skunk, and outlifted everyone on the planet more than once, and on top of all of that was absolutely crucial to the creation of the foundations of modern
powerlifting training. Berger's story is even cooler than Bill West's, frankly. Like the tiny baby Jewish Christ man before him, he was born in Jerusalem and immigrated to the US with his parents at 13. Being a veritable dwarf with what can only be assumed was a Yiddish accent so thick he'd even have stood out in a Mel Brooks film, the little guy started to get his ass kicked on the regular. Being a ballsy little midget, he just walked his ass directly into the first gym he saw, walked up to the biggest guy in the gym, and asked him to help him get jacked. "I think I paid him a dollar a week, because I didn’t have any money then. So, he said 'have you ever worked out?' and I told him no. He said
to me ‘you look very strong, did you ever lift weight?’ and I didn’t even know the meaning of 'lifting weights.' So he showed me what to. He put on like 80 pounds and he pressed it and then I took the 80 pounds and I pressed it. Eventually, he put up 120 [pounds] on there and he pressed it and then I pressed it and he couldn’t believe that I pressed body weight and never touched a weight. So he said, 'Look from now on, I’m going to train you weightlifting. I think you have tremendous possibilities and there will come a time if you get really good and that maybe you’ll get to the Olympics and win a gold medal. Maybe you’ll get to be the strongest man in the world, pound for pound.'" Whoever that dude was, he was not fucking wrong, because Berger blew up like he was a closet racist on Twitch. He had one of the fastest rises in US weightlifting history, improving so fact that he became a national champion in the sport only three years after starting his training. A year later, injured and defending his title against all comers, he still managed to win and got a spot on the Olympic team. Let that sink in- Ike Berger broke his ass so hard in training that he managed to gain a spot on the US’s highly competitive, all-star Olympic weightlifting team just seven years after he first touched a weight. Nor was he training in some Chinese weightlifter factory wherein he’s rubbed down nightly be whatever Chinese geishas are called and fed the best food and supplementation the Chinese government can offer. This was a scrawny, poor Israeli immigrant who busted his ass and pulled off a near impossibility all on his own merit. Even better, he blew the weightlifting world’s skirt up by winning the Olympic Games as a teenager and breaking the world record in the total at the same time. He then went on to win both the 1958 and 1962 World Championships, silvered in the 1960 and 1964 Olympic Games. He went on to set a few more records, the last of which was at the Olympic Games in Tokyo, in 1964, with a 152.5kg clean and jerk. That record lasted for more than 5 years, becoming one of the longest held world records in weightlifting history" (AOBS honorees).
Vital Stats Height : 5’1.5”
Weight : 132lbs Bench Press : 320lbs Squat : 500lbs Front Squat : 407lbs Clean and Jerk : 336lbs Press : 267lbs (without a layback)
Snatch : 236lbs Total : 843lbs Whenever he wasn't required to be in York to prep for the Olympics, Ike and his training partner and fellow Olympian Dave Sheppard lived in the Muscle House and trained with Bill West. Like a lot of the US team, Sheppard and Berger found Bob Hoffman's heavy-handed Christian morality obnoxious, and Hoffman was forever bitching about the guys’ endless “skirt chasing” (which in York means they'd fuck literally anything, because that town is nothing but a crack den with a lifting museum in it), so they avoided training there like the plague. Those two, however, were both accused of statutory rape and impairing the morals of minors in 1959, which led to the shutting down of Muscle Beach and a lot of shit-talking from Hoffman. Berger beat both charges, but a point was made- a Jewish midget and his manlet training partner (Shepperd was 5'6",
185lbs) were able to do so much fucking in a beach town in the 50's that the city shut down an entire community to stop them. Or so they thought- the shutdown of Muscle Beach was exactly the impetus Bill West needed to start his own club- the Culver City Westside Barbell Club. Berger trained there with West on and off over the years that followed and was considered to be part of West's inner circle, which only consisted of himself, Berger, and Joe DiMarco. Ike's training methods came from a variety of sources, but seem to have been heavily influenced by Paul Anderson, with whom Ike trained frequently at York Barbell when preparing for the Olympics. Anderson, as I think we all know, was an odd lifting virtuoso discovered by deadlift monster Bob Peoples, and Bob Hoffman convinced Anderson to try his hand at the Olympic lifts to give the US a chance at defeating the great Russian heavyweights of the time.
At York, Berger also trained with legendary strength coach Bill Starr and one of the greatest Olympic lifters of all time, Tommy Kono, as well as every bodybuilding luminary you could name from the 1950s in California. The man was surrounded by greatness and was at the time considered to be the pound-forpound strongest lifter on the planet, so his influence on the training methods of the Westside guys cannot be overstated.
Contest Prep Routine
In the offseason, Berger seemed to focus heavily on the odd lifts, a habit he likely picked up from training with Paul Anderson at York. His focus was to maintain and develop his strength and build ligament and tendon strength so that he was ready to pound the fuck out of the Olympic lifts when contest prep time rolled around. Given that he trained with the Westside guys, it stands to reason he was training between two and five times a week for lengthy periods of time, then getting hammered afterwards. Berger felt that without his off-season regimen, "I would have run the risk of becoming physically and mentally drained. This could have left me open to injuries that would have set my training back for months or even years" (Alpert). Anyone who is interested in competing in Oly might want to take note of Berger's comments there, because the incessant fiddlefucking around with light weights and form work with which American Olympic lifters are positively obsessed doesn't seem to be yielding much in the way of medals. Ike’s serious contest prep involved a twelve-week period of training with the lifting event scheduled at the end of the twelfth week. He divided the twelve weeks into two-week sequences. While the basic approach to training was the same as during the non-contest periods, the intensity of the training was increased. A typical two-week schedule would be:
Monday (Medium-Heavy) Olympic Lifts and assistance exercises (squat, bench press, and various pulls)First three sets were rep work/warmups, then 3-6 x 1 with 90%
Wednesday (Medium) Olympic Lifts - First three sets were rep work/warmups, then 3-6 x 1 with 8085%
Friday (Heavy as Hell) Train up to 95% Olympic lifts and assistance exercises.
Monday (Medium-Heavy) Olympic Lifts and assistance exercises (squat, bench press, and various pulls)First three sets were rep work/warmups, then 3-6 x 1 with 90%
Wednesday (Medium) Olympic Lifts - First three sets were rep work/warmups, then 3-6 x 1 with 8085%
Friday (Heavy as Hell) Max out on all Olympic lifts and assistance exercises. These workouts were balls to the wall effort to push the max on every lift higher, which would then raise the training weights accordingly. This workout in week ten only included the Olympic lifts, because accessory work was then dropped, and the Olympic lifts were trained exclusively for the following two weeks. These max out days were insanely competitive, and every guy on the team made an effort to outdo the others. On top of that, Coach Starr introduced a habit to the team he’d had in his previous gym- betting a pint of milk over whether or not the lifters would make their lifts. This, in turn, ramped up the competitiveness of the lifts even further. Berger went so nuts with the betting that he earned the
nickname "Betcha Berger," a nickname and a habit that Berger later brought to Westside… though those guys were likely betting beers or shots rather than anything so wholesome as milk.
Brutally In Depth: Coach Fang, Tian Tao, and Squatting Like a Fucking Monster with the Chinese Weightlifting Method
According to the President of the Russian Weightlifting Federation, Maxim Agapitov, China has by far and away the best weightlifting system in the history of the sport- better even than the system used by the Soviets in the past. One can only assume that President Vladimir Putin rode into Agapitov’s office, barechested and on horseback and pistol whipped the man to death for his insolence, so making that kind of a statement is fairly profound. Russian pride and wistfulness from the proud days of grimmdark Soviet strength sports dominance aside, China actually has one of the oldest traditions of weightlifting in recorded history, with roots in ancient strength competitions dating back 2700 years that involved lifting tripods, city gate bolts, and (less interestingly) stone barbells.
The modern Chinese weightlifting program, however, is incredibly new- the Chinese team didn’t even have a training facility until they commandeered a disused military facility in 1995 and made it their home. There, with no entertainment beyond a single color television and some drafty, leaky buildings, the rise to Chinese weightlifting hegemony began. Since 1996, the Chinese men have medaled in almost every weightclass between bantamweight and middle weight in the Olympics (they’re not terrifically large people and have thus not medaled above middleweight in that period), and the Chinese women are almost exclusively the ones taking the gold in every weightclass but heavy weight (though they’ve swept the superheavy golds). The Chinese claim their secret is in combining the best parts of the Soviet system, which dominated for 30 years, and the Bulgarian system, which dominated for the twenty after the Soviets. After discovering that the Bulgarian system only seems to work in concert with PED use and a blatant disregard for the health and welfare of its lifters, the Chinese decided to forge their own pathand it’s working beautifully. According to Coach Fang, the Chinese focus their youngest lifters on technique, then work on the development of absolute strength- the type of brute strength one commonly finds in strongmen and less technical powerlifters. Once that’s been developed, the Chinese focus more on speed strength, which is the ability to accelerate the bar to a high speed in a short time. For people who don’t have the good fortune to be born in the People’s Republic of China, Coach Fang says 80-85% of 1RM for 8-10 sets of 3-5 reps a couple of times a week is a good idea, and for anyone who squats under 200kg, squatting should be a priority. If you’re not hitting those numbers, it’s cool to simply train nothing but squats during a workout periodically, and no matter what your discipline, to train squats first in a workout. He said it’s fine to squat 3 times per week, but 2 times is enough (that’s including front and back). Maxing on the squat once a week is plenty, by the way. If you’re one of those work up to a training max every goddamned session kind of lifters, it might be time to rethink that position. According to Coach Fang, you should test your 1RM on the squat once a week, because it takes too much energy to keep going to 1RM’s and it cuts your capacity for more work. That’s energy that could be
used to develop more strength and power, rather than simply testing what you have already. In re the number of reps to be done per set, vary your rep ranges, but never stray too far off the 1RM- leave the CrossFit workouts to CrossFitters, unless you’re just working your aerobic capacity. That said, bodybuilding exercises are crucial in weightlifting, and lifters who avoid them will find their snatch and clean and jerk suffer as a result. Additionally, lifters shouldn’t neglect their cardio- the Chinese team uses a short jog to cool down after every session.
Tian Tao, the Squatting Machine Perhaps the coolest feature of the Chinese weightlifting system is its ability to produce world class squatters as a byproduct of their training methodology. Their awesome squatters are legion, but Tian Tao stands head and shoulders above just about everyone on the planet when it comes to squatting (and the clean and jerk- he just set a new record with 507 in the 211lb weight class). For those of you who’ve never heard his name, Tian Tao is a Chinese weightlifting virtuoso who started lifting at the tender age of ten years old. He’s silvered in the Olympics and World Championships and won gold at the Asian Games twice, but what is most interesting about Tao is his superhuman squatting ability. At 181lbs, Tian easily walked out 682 and squatted it in training (in knee sleeves), and has front squatted 617 at 187. We’re not talking about a guy who was peaking for a meet and hit those numbers- we’re talking about a guy who just happened to bang out those lifts in the middle of an average training session. The way Tian and his teammates acquire these insane squatting abilities is through the use of four squat sessions a week comprised of a variety of squats that include front squats, back squats, heavy partials, pin squats, and paused reps, in addition to a shitload of heavy pulling. Thus, if your squat is a disaster, you might want to drop that stupid, dated, and dull as dishwater Shieko bullshit for a bit of the General Tso’s method. The Basics of the Chinese System Before you begin:
● The national team training programs are pretty loosely structured they allow for a lot of auto-regulation in terms of reps and weights, which are chosen at the athlete’s own discretion. In short- you’re not a goddamn robot, so go ham when you’re feeling your oats and back off when you need to. This shit isn’t that hard. ● A max attempt for back squats should only be performed on days when heavy weights feel lighter than normal and you have at least one person to spot you. The Chinese team is adamant about preventing the injuries that plagued the Russians and Bulgarians and try to avoid forcing a square peg into a round hole whenever possible. ● Heavy pulls and heavy squats should never be done in the same workout , because you’ll be trashed from the first lift and won’t perform well or with good form on the second. ● Heavy pulls are even more mentally taxing than they are physically taxing, and are thus awesome. Doubles and triples build physical strength, but heavy singles build the type of mental strength that you’ll need to carry you in competition. Don’t neglect heavy singles on clean pulls . ● One or two bodyparts should be chosen to train at the end of every training session . Go to failure on six sets per exercise, bodybuilding style, to build strength and improve conditioning of small muscle groups that can be neglected by focusing on big lifts. Coach Fang insists this is absolutely necessary for progress in the snatch and clean and jerk. o The Chinese team are big proponents of overhead extensions holding
Monday
Snatch - Work up to a 1RM, then 3 × 3 80%1RM Clean and Jerk - Train up to a 1RM, then 3 × 2 (for the doubles, you clean it once, then do two jerks. Coach Fang is adamant about not
dropping the first jerk and re-cleaning it) Back Squats - 8-10 x 3-5 80-85%1RM Clean Pulls - 5 x 3 Behind the Neck Push Press - 5 x 2-5
Tuesday
Snatch - Work up to a 1RM, then 5-8 x 2-3 80%1RM (Overhead squat after completion of each rep) Snatch Balance- 5-8 x 1-3 Snatch Pulls - 5-6 x 2-3 Block High Snatch Pulls with Rebend - 6-8 x 2-3
Wednesday
Clean + Front Squat + Jerk - Work up 1RM, then 5-8 x 2 80%1RM Front Squats - 5-8 x 1-3 Clean Pulls - 5-6 x 3 Behind Neck Push Jerk - 8 x 1
Push Press -5 x 3
Thursday
Back Squats - Work up to a 1RM, then 6-8 x 2-5 Snatch - Work up to 85-90%, then 2-3 x 1 Clean and Jerk - Work up to 85-90%, then 2-3 x 1 Strict Press - 5 x 3-5
Friday
Snatch - Work up to a 1RM, then 3 x 1 Clean and Jerk - Work up to a 1RM, then 3 x 1 Snatch Pulls - 5 x 3 Block Snatch High Pull with Rebend - 5 x 2-3 Jerk Drives - 8×3 (Use about the same weight as your max 1RM back squats)
Saturday Front Squats - Work up to a 1RM, then 5-6 x 1-3 Platform Clean Deadlifts - 5-6 x 1-3 Snatch Balance - 5-6 x 1-3 Push Jerk - 5 × 1-3
Some of the Assistance Work
Back Squat - Warmup sets have a 2-5 second pause at the bottom of the rep Snatch Grip Bench Rows - sets of 4-8 reps with a hold at the contraction Weighted Deficit Pushups - sets of 8 Unilateral Overhead Dumbbell Triceps Extensions - very light, for high reps, to condition the elbows Isometric Hip Extension Holds - 55lbs for time
Bob Bednarski- 100% American Built Muscle
Bob Bednarski was a burgers and beers style, ultra-crotchety broski who lifted for the Americans in the last of the US Olympic Weightlifting heyday. Though he never medaled in the Olympics, Bednarski did set 12 world records and won five national championships as a heavyweight, and was a superstar lifter in the 1960s. A contrarian in just about everything he did, Bednarski restricted his training to almost nothing but the Olympic lifts, because while his interests definitely included winning, they didn’t seem to include casual weightlifting or gazing at
himself longingly in the mirror. In essence, he was the polar opposite of just about everyone you know. The Russians had, at the time, analyzed lifters and found that the lifters with the strongest press, i.e. the strongest, were often terrible at the jerk and the snatch. As such, they encouraged their lifters to focus heavily on squatting and the quick lifts, a system that Bednarski aped. The following is a program Bednarski developed after moving up a weight class and adding 150lbs to his total in just four months.
Monday Morning: Squats - 65%1RM x 5; 70% x 5; 77.5% x 5; 85% x 5; 90% x 2; 95% x 1
Monday Evening Press - 55% x 5; 65% x 3; 70% x 3; 75% x 2; 80% x 1; 85% x 1 Clean and Jerk - 75% x 2; 85% x 1; 2 x 90% x 1; 92.5% x 1; 90% x 1
Wednesday Morning Squats - 65%1RM x 5; 70% x 5; 77.5% x 5; 85% x 5; 90% x 2
Wednesday Evening Snatch - 65%1RM x 5; 72.5% x 3; 80% 2; 85% x 1; 90% x 1; 92.5% x 1 Clean and Jerk - 75% x 2; 85% x 1; 90% x 1; 2 x 92.5% x 1
Saturday Squats - 65%1RM x 5; 70% x 5; 72.5% x 5; 77.5% x 3; 85% x 2; 90% x 1; 95% x 1 Snatch - 65%1RM x 5; 72.5% x 3; 80% 2; 85% x 1; 3 x 90% x 1
Sunday Max out on the snatch, clean and jerk, and clean and press, and act like a crotchety old man throughout the entire experience (if you really want to capture the essence of Norb).
Wrestlers / Fighters / Arm Wrestlers / Random Weirdos
Too many lifters seem to completely ignore a wide array of people walking around looking like members of an advance squad of crack orkish troops planted here to prepare the world for an other-dimensional invasion of vastly physically superior humanoids. There are guys like Richard Lupkes, a 63 year old farmer who briefly wrestled in the WCW and periodically lumbers into arm-wrestling tournaments to trash all comers- in spite of the fact that the man has never seen an arm wrestling table outside of a tournament. The man’s overwhelming strength (he benched over 600 raw in his prime and still boasts 18” forearms on a ripped 6’2” 315lb frame) allowed him to dominate his opposition even though he never trained for the sport once. You’ve also got guys like Mike Gould, a 53 year old with 21” arms and 18” forearms, and the Russian mutant Denis Cyplenkov- arm wrestlers can show you a thing or two about being jacked. The same goes for professional wrestlers- too many people overlook the fact that prior to the internet, it was damn near impossible to make a living out of lifting weights. The only way for genuinely unstable, massively over muscled, hyperaggressive dudes to make a living and stay out of jail back in the day was professional wrestling. In those days, it was commonplace to hear stories like “Andre the Giant drank 106 beers the other night,” or “[Olympic weightlifting phenom] Ken Patera and Masa Saito beat the shit out of 16 cops at once and then missed the verdict of their court case because they were out at a bar getting drunk and asleep in the courtroom, respectively. Thus, you’ll find that most of the insanely strong guys of yesteryear gravitated toward professional wrestling. The list of random jacked people goes on and on- they’re around, if you just look for them. The key thing to remember, and something that elite lifters like myself can easily confirm, is that it is often the strongest people who don’t compete. I’ve seen far more 500lb benchers outside of competitions than in them, and they required no fanfare or special setup for their lifts- they just plopped down on the bench and moved the weight because it was their bench day. Keep that in mind when you’re online talking shit on people who don’t bother competing- there’s no real upside to competing beyond satisfying the weird muscle worship of a bunch of sweaty dudes online who don’t lift themselves.
Brutally In Depth: Bruno Sammartino- From War Refugee to World Champion Back in the day, if a guy was a wrestler, he was a bona-fide badass. The sport, which grew out of what were essentially MMA fights with less striking and more wrestling (catch style), was filled with badasses who ate big, lifted big, and lived big. They were living proof that the Paul Bunyans and Spring Heeled Jacks and other men with skills so mad that they are often considered the fanciful bullshit of legends or conspiracy could have actually existed. I realize that the same cannot be said for the modern era of wrestlers, since other than the Rock being ridiculously jacked and charismatic, none of them seem larger-than-life to the point of being supernatural. It was from this era that the longest reigning WWE Champion in history, holding the WWE Title for 2,803 consecutive days, known as the Italian Superman came. Bruno Sammartino, who presided over what he perceived as wrestling's fall into "the chemical years" (of which Hulk Hogan's apparently the evil figurehead), was so beloved by Italians and wrestling fans that they went quite literally berserk when a heel who turned on him, stabbing him, smashing his cars, flipping over his cabs on the way to matches, and at one point a mobster friend of Frank Sinatra's even offered to shoot "Classy" Freddie Blassie on Sammartino's behalf. Bruno was an Italian immigrant who had spent two years in the arctic environs of mountains of Italy (from age 7 to 9) running around like Brendan Fraser in Encino Man with a sharp stick and dining on dandelions and wild animals. Yeah, so when you're telling your goddamn sob story on Instagram about how a rough childhood and broken home are the reason you have a sub 350lb bench, take a big step back and literally fuck your own face, because big Bruno was so malnourished in his formative years that he only weighed 80 lbs at age 15. That year, Sammartino arrived in the US, the docs prescribed him a diet of meat and potatoes with a side of heavy lifting (holy shit, I was born in the wrong goddamned era) and shit proceeded to get real. Sammartino basically treated being the best at everything the same way most people act when they're finishing a delicious sandwich- it was just what he did,
and he neither sweated little shit nor bemoaned any "hard times" that befell him. One of his favorite memories is travelling to an annual Strength and Health picnic and competition in York, PA in 1957. In the era before people abandoned their pride and set up GoFundMes to pay for their travel costs, Sammartino slept on a goddamn park bench and then proceeded to wipe the platform with his competition. He then repeated that process over and over, and by the time he was 22 be had won Mr. Allegheny in bodybuilding, set a world record for the bench press, and boasted a 565lb bench, 625lb squat, and 675lb deadlift. Bear in mind when viewing those numbers that powerlifting didn't officially exist at this time, and the power lifts were just three of 72 lifts contested in odd lift meets at the time- it's not as though these guys specialized in them unless they just loved the ever-loving shit out of them. He didn’t just stop there, either. His all-time best lifts are borderline absurd.
All-Time Best Lifts Bench Press - 315lbs for 38 reps; 330lbs for 33 reps right after hitting a max of 500 for the day; and 565 in competition, with a flat back and two second pause Floor Press - 545lbs Strict Curl - 235lbs Olympic Press - 410lbs
Deadlift - 705lbs (though he never trained it because he thought it was bad for the back) Squat (Competition)- 685lbs Snatch - 270lbs (both his snatch and clean and jerk were hamstrung by the fact his elbows wouldn't lock out fully, which he attributed to malnourishment while living in the Alps) Clean and Jerk - 370lbs
Not too goddamned shabby, especially considering the fact that he was fanatically drug free and trained in a time before supplements, and he put up his 565 bench on a rickety homemade bench with no uprights. His workouts were absolutely legendary, and weren't spurred by anything but Sammartino's imagination, his defiance against gravity, and his titanic brass balls. Sammartino did this workout three days a week, did calisthenics another two days a week, and ran eight miles a day.
Bench Press - 10 sets, working up in 2-rep jumps to his max (I'm guessing 2 sets of 10, 2 sets of 8, 2 x 6, 2 x 4, 1 x 2, 1 x 1). His 11th set was a death set with about 65% of his 1RM for the day. Floor Press - 5-7 x 3 with ~550lbs (see pic above, because it's different than what I've done as a floor press) Incline Dumbbell Presses - 5 x 5 (heavy as hell- when he was training with the legendary Karl Norberg, he was using 150-pound dumbbells) Incline Laterals - 5 x 5 (again heavy enough to make your eyes bleed, 125-pound dumbbells) Cheat Upright Rows - 6 x 6-7 x 205lbs High Pulls (to the navel)- 6 x 3-4 x 400-425lbs Squats - 8 x 3-5 reps x 650lbs
Strict/Military Barbell Curl - 10 x 10 x 135 to 175 pounds (he'd also occasionally do cheat curls with 225)
Elias: Badass Active Recovery on a Rest Day
As you can see, Elias, a brawler in the WWE, has followed the Hollywood plan for development- all of his weight is in his chest, shoulders, and traps. Not a bad plan for anyone who wants to look good with their shirt off, and for someone who wants to look imposing when they do so. Frankly, there are plenty of guys in this book with better traps and shoulders, but very few of them suffer through what amounts to multiple car crashes a night for 300 days a year. For WWE Superstars, recovery is at least as important as the training itself. Given the fact that most guys have to abbreviate their training to accommodate the demands of their job, even their rest days have to be somewhat active. This is where Elias’ active recovery workout comes in. The workout Elias recommends shares a lot of similarities with the Bear, but is a bit less technical. As such, it’s absolutely perfect for sweating out a hangover without puking up your breakfast. This workout is done in giant set, moving directly from one exercise to the next until they’re all complete, and is done for
five rounds. The idea here is not to go heavy, so 135 is plenty, and if 135 seems hard, go lighter- the idea is to get the blood flowing, not to get in a brutal lift.
5 Deadlifts 5 Bent Over Rows 5 Hang Cleans 5 Overhead Presses 5 Squats
George Irving Nathanson: Rest Pause Insanity for One Lift Specialization Here’s a name you’ve almost certainly never heard- George Irving Nathanson. Nathanson was a lifting partner of JC Hise, a legendary strength author and coach from the early 20th Century, and had a system of training so unique I feel like I need a wild-ass blowout to discuss it while claiming it’s the product of ancient alien intervention in human strength development. Nathanson used this system to pull off sick a 300 x 8 push press as a 175lb 18year-old in the 1940s, but was adamant beginners should use it about as often as blind toddlers should run holding a freshly sharpened chef’s knife. According to Nathanson, this program requires a massive amount of sleep to work (18 hours the night before and 12-13 the two nights after) and involves three sessions every two weeks, then a week layoff, then repeat. Do one exercise only . Each workout consists of that exercise for 100 singles with one minute of rest between attempts. He claimed with this system his military press went up ten pounds every workout until he hit a sticking point. Though he doesn’t give a loading protocol, I would likely try 90%1RM for thisthat should give you enough weight to make the lift challenging without making it overly impossible.
Isaac Nesser: Probable Bullshit Artist, But Interesting Nonetheless The history of strength sports is filled with some odd characters, some of whom are full of shit and some of whom are the real McCoy. In the former group, you’ve got guys like Chuck Ahrens, whose lifts seem to be tall tales until you consider how many people could corroborate the tales, and how many of those people were incredible lifters as well. Then you’ve got guys like Isaac Nesser, whose claims seem like they could be total fabrications and are incredibly difficult to corroborate.
Because the age of Synthol is upon us and the records Isaac "Dr. Size" Nesser claims, the world’s largest muscular chest and arms, are now held by goofs who don’t even appear to lift, it’s difficult to even confirm his claims about those records. Furthermore, discussion of the guy is almost exclusively limited to Angelfire websites that haven’t been updated since the internet’s infancy, so any sensible person’s bullshit alarms should be screaming.
Nevertheless, this random weirdo is compelling just from his pics, and he claims to rock a 74 inch chest, 29 inch arms, to weigh 362lbs, bench press 825lbs, curl 315 for 5, do one arm tricep extensions with 180, and to be drug free. To develop that legendary strength, Nesser trains eight to ten days in a row, then takes two to three days off, alternating heavy workouts with crazy long rest periods with light ones. If you’re wondering why you’ve never seen Isaac Nesser on a platform or in a strongman competition, it’s because he refuses to compete against anyone or associate with anyone who uses PEDs. That sounds like a gigantic, Santa Claussized bag of bullshit, but the fact remains his measurements are among the largest ever recorded on a human being, so there’s got to be something there.
Monday: Heavy Day (Legs) Squats - 3 x 3-5 (80%1RM) Romanian Deadlifts - 2 x 3-5 (80%1RM) Leg Press - 3 x 8 (80%1RM)
Tuesday: Light Day (Arms and Shoulders) Dumbbell Press - 3 x 5-8 (80%1RM) Shrugs - 3 x 3-5 (80%1RM) Skullcrushers - 3 x 3-5 (80%1RM) Barbell Curls - 3 x 3-5 (80%1RM)
Wednesday: Heavy Day (Back) Deadlifts - 3 x 3-5 (80%1RM) Dumbbell Rows - 3 x 3-5 (80%1RM) Weighted Pull Ups - 3 x 3-5 (80%1RM)
Thursday: Light Day (Shoulders and Arms) Military Press - 3 x 3-5 (80%1RM) Farmers Walk - 3 x 100 yards (100%1RM) Barbell Curls - 3 x 3-5 (80%1RM) Skullcrushers - 3 x 3-5 (80%1RM)
Friday: Heavy Day (Chest) Bench - 3 x 3-5 (80%1RM) Flat Dumbbell Bench Press - 3 x 3-5 (80%1RM) Close Grip Bench Press - 3 x 8 (80%1RM)
Saturday: Light Day (Speed Training) Sprints - 3 X 20 meters Dumbbell Lunges - 3 x 8 (80%1RM) Split Squats - 3 x 8 (80%1RM)
Sunday: Heavy Day (Legs) Squat - 3 x 3-5 (80%1RM) Romanian Deadlifts - 2 x 3-5 (80%1RM) Split Squat - 3 x 8 (80%1RM)
Braun Strowman: Simulating Strongman Events to Trash Guys Who Have Real Implements Though he is now well known for his dominant run in the WWE as that promotion’s modern day Andre the Giant, 6’8” and 340lb Braun Strowman actually began his athletic career as a strongman, pulling down the Arnold Classic Amateur World Champion title in 2012. It goes without saying that the dude is strong, and boasts a 550lb bench, 885 deadlift, and a 400+ overhead press. Thus, when Braun speaks about getting strong, people should listen.
One facet of Strowman’s training that’s incredibly useful for the average person is that when he won the Amateurs, he trained in a tiny, backwoods gym in rural North Carolina that contained absolutely no strongman equipment - he had to make that shit up as he went. Like Richard Lupke, Strowman’s training had to make him brutally strong enough that missing the finer points on implement technique wouldn’t keep him from mangling everyone in meets. Here are the slices of deep fried gold with which he came up in order to destroy his opposition on contest day:
Use A Squat Rack To Simulate A Car Deadlift Set up a squat rack with two bars over one of the safety bars, so they’re about 16” off the ground (and if possible angle the other end under the other crossbar on a low enough height to keep the bar’s end on the floor. Then you load the high end, face away from the rack, stand in between them, and deadlift them. This is an event for reps, so there’s no need for a max single attempt- work reps with heavy weights.
Seated Military Press on a Flat Bench For The Log Clean and Press Grab a flat bench, drag it into the rack, and plop your ass down on it- forget the little bench designed for the shoulder press- it does more harm than good in preparing you to press a log overhead. For that shit, you need a spine comprised of steel cables and the upper back stability of a massive bridge abutment. Since the log press can be contested as a max effort lift or a max reps with a given weight in 75 seconds, you can train this with a combination of high and low reps to ensure you’re ready to move serious weight when the time comes.
Squat Rack Isometrics as a Substitute for the Yoke Yokes are a hard implement to find, but you can find a squat rack in any gym. Set the pins about four inches below lockout on the squat, load up the bar with a ton of weight (it should be easy enough to find out hat typical yoke weights for your class are online), and do a partial with a hold for time. Then repeat. Doing this might not prepare you for the taking of steps with a weight on your back, but it will build the ab and back strength you’ll need for it. After you’ve fortified your physique with the strength it needs, taking a yoke weight designed for novices for a bit of a ride should be no problem.
Use a bucket of sand for the Farmer's Walk . Braun decided to take it back to the old school for working on his grip strengthall the way back to Shaolin monk training. Though he has some more standard suggestions like buying Farmer’s Walk handles on amazon or using dumbbells or barbells for training this even, he has another that you likely won’t have heara bucket of sand. Just like the Shaolin monks who used to practice knife hand strikes into sand to toughen their hands and improve their wrist strength, Strowman suggests thrusting your hand into a five gallon bucket filled with sand and practicing making a fist and then opening your hand over and over. Doing so with build crazy grip strength without much expense, and it will give you crazy bragging rights online when you tell everyone how hardcore your grip training is. If that’s not to your taste, you can always practice your pinch grip strength by pinch gripping two ten pound plates together for time. It’s a far less cool method, but it should be effective as hell (it was also a favorite grip training method of the legendary John Grimek.
Rob Vigant Jr’s Forearms of Doom
At 6’2” 205lbs, you’re probably not expecting Rob Vigant Jr’s arms to look like they do. Vigant’s got arms as big as a lot of dude’s thighs, and even stronger than they look. Because most of the strength required in arm wrestling is forearm/wrist strength, Vigant trains the shit out of a part of his body most of us ignore… though we likely shouldn’t- if we can learn one thing from the history of strength sports, it’s that insane grip strength leads to insane overall strength. Vigant trains arms and forearms every three to four days on top of his regular practice and weight training, using a pretty unique method- thumbless training. Thumbless Reverse Curls - 3-4 x 6-12
Thumbless Dumbbell Rows - 3-4 x 6-12 (If you can’t get to the gym) Wringing Out A Wet Towel AMRAP #
Brutally In Depth: The Ultimate Warrior, “If what that man did in his life, makes the blood pulse through the body of others, and makes them believe deeper in something larger than life, then his essence, his spirit, will be immortalized by the storytellers, by the loyalty, by the memory, of those who honor him and make whatever the man did live forever.” Although I've never been much of a fan of pro wrestling, I'm definitely a fan of pro wrestlers and the history of pro wrestling. I am a fan of true, unbridled insanity painted with a thin veneer of sport and rammed into a hyper-muscular physique designed to commit violent acts and impose one's will on others. Clearly, I'm not referring to the modern era of family-friendly wrestling, wherein they hide behind drug tests and steroids allegations to cover the fact that guys like Chris Benoit had brains that looked like Swiss cheese when they killed their families- I'm talking about the pre-drug testing era. When one considers that there's less money in lifting than there is sucking cock behind dumpsters in any American ghetto, however, it makes sense that anyone who loves to lift would gravitate towards wrestling. Furthermore, lifters are by and large boring sonsabitches. They go to the gym, train people, and go the hell home, never once stopping to rip an entire eight ball of a line off the dashboard of a moving car and then leap out at the nearest passerby screaming unintelligible words, then throw them through a plate glass window as their best imitation of a practical joke... like Ken Patera did.
THE FAMILY THAT I LIVE FOR ONLY BREATHES THE AIR THAT SMELLS OF COMBAT!
This is why it is necessary to profile a wrestler like James Hellwig, The Ultimate Warrior. A man with the sanity of a serial killer stuffed into the body of a Greek god and imbued with the fashion sense of an LSD user who grew up in Chernobyl. The Ultimate Warrior was sane in the same way Oprah is thin and the Kardashians are actually people- his promos were so unintelligible to the point where you wondered if he was simply such a genius that you lacked the requisite intellect to comprehend him, or if it was just a muscular, oily man in face paint on so much cocaine he was incapable of human speech. He was one of the most physically violent and remarkably unskilled pro wrestler of the modern era, relying on drug-fueled rage, rawer-than-your-dick-after-jerking-itwith-sandpaper brute strength, and so much pants-shitting insanity that the love child of the Joker and Bane would be tame as a field mouse by comparison.
Like his eventual coke and dbol-fortified tag team partners, the Mad Maxinspired, freakishly coiffed, angriest tag team on Earth, the Road Warriors, the Ultimate Warrior's go to move was the gorilla press slam, which requires less athleticism than one would get out of Stephen Hawking but more brute strength than you'd get out of ten meatheads at the nearest powerlifting "destination gym" to complete. It is for these reasons, then, that the Ultimate Warrior’s life and training methods require investigation.
The Ultimate Warrior’s Vital Stats
Height : 6'3" Weight : 280 lbs.
Gorilla Press : 303 lbs (Hulk Hogan) Bench Press : 550 lbs (gym) Sanity : Nonexistent
Awesomeness : Incalculable.Perhaps you're thinking that the above list of strength accolades doesn't warrant a place among guys like Arthur Saxon, because he's never been a competitive lifter. You're thinking like old people fuck- badly and in blatant defiance of the will of the gods. The Warrior hails from a bygone era in which bodybuilders actually lifted heavy. When Warrior hit the mat for the first time, he was part of a generation of bodybuilders like Eddie Robinson (610 bench press in competition at under 200 lbs.), Tim Belknap (renown for being a flaming asshole and ruining every barbell in the gyms where he trained for using insane poundages on partials), and cave-dwelling, psychotic felon Benny Podda. Bodybuilders in that era were so strong that they either had competed in and dominated powerlifting, or were simply content to compete with one another and heave around enough weight to smash a herd of mastodons flat. Not only that, but the Warrior eventually became tag team partners and ostensibly trained with the Legion of Doom, which would mean that he was both psychotic and incredibly strong. LOD were well known for moving massive weights, hitting bench presses of over 600lbs (even with broken ribs) and shrugging over a thousand just because it was Tuesday, and because no more weight would fit on the bar. Not only that, but the LOD were also famous for being shitty wrestlers, and pretty much relied solely on massive physical trauma and press slams to stop their opponents, both of which were the mainstays of the Warrior's wrestling repertoire. YOU DESERVE NOT TO BREATHE THE ATMOSPHERE THAT WE WALK IN. Though true wrestling aficionados bag on them like they're Clinique counter girls at Macy's talking shit on Amy Weinhouse's crack whore makeup motif (only likely in a far more effeminate manner, as I've yet to meet a true wrestling mark who doesn't live in his parents basement and appear to spend the bulk of
his time stealing and sniffing his mother's shoes), all of the most entertaining wrestlers of the past seem to have been the least technically proficientGoldberg, Big Poppa Pump, the Legion of Doom, Hulk Hogan, and Andre The Giant are living (and dead in the case of half of LOD and the Giant) proof. Speaking of Andre, the Ultimate Warrior might not have displayed his lifting prowess on the platform, but he sure as shit hefted that tubby acromegalic goof off the ground for a body slam when Andre was tipping the scales at 545 lbs. For those of you who think that's not all that impressive, feel free to try to hoist a saddie in a scooter at your local Walmart and dump them on their ass. Whether or not you succeed, you'll be a goddamn legend for trying and will gain valuable insight into what it feels like to heft about 600 lbs of uncooked cookie dough, flip it upside down, and smash it on the ground. Though many of the biggest badasses in history have interesting starts to their careers, Warrior's is perhaps the most ridiculous- he wanted an ass. On the lecture circuit, Warrior would frequently tell his audience the story of how “a skinny little kid befriended a rusty old workout machine and the machine gave that kid an ass.” And he didn’t even use the term “glutes.” He ignored his own arms, traps, delts, and pecs and bragged about the ass that machine gave him. To that end, the Warrior signed on with an all-male review called “PowerTeam USA,” which inexplicably included a mime, and featured two other random, jacked and tan, ambiguously gay in a 1990's sort of pink spandex sort of way. At the same time, Warrior got into competitive bodybuilding, placing decently at regional shows until he and the other bodybuilding members of PowerTeam USA decided to make the transition into professional wrestling. The Warrior debuted as James “Justice” Hellwig in a shitty little Texan federation I recall seeing on UHF stations on Saturday mornings as a kid, and to my recollection the ring was octagonal, prefacing the UFC's cage shape by 10 years. I realize that has absolutely no bearing on the discussion at hand, but I recall thinking that was a stupid-assed gimmick even as a little kid. By the time he hit the mat for the WWE, the Warrior had established himself as a bonafide maniac capable of few legitimate wrestling moves, but also as the single greatest promo cutter in the history of wrestling. Not event the Rock could touch the Warrior's stilted, guttural, incoherent rants, so rife with insanity that you couldn't help but
pay attention. I'm honestly not even sure his rants were a work, given that everything he's done since is equally nonsensical and insane. Once you’ve witnessed his insanity (check it out on Youtube), it will likely come as a shock to you that his workouts were not all that exciting. He's admitted a great many times that he has no idea how many years steroid abuse took off his life, so those of you chomping at the bit to scream "STEROIDS" can look smug and pat yourselves on your back. Then, punch yourselves in the fucking face, because steroid use is so goddamn common in commercial gyms that even in Belgium, a country that has literally never produced a lifter of note, 25% of of recreational lifters use gear. Thus, steroids were not the magical panacea for muscle building and strength you might have thought they were. Instead, insanity seems to be the primary factor in the Warrior's lifting and career success, just as it was for Tookie Williams (though Tookie relied pretty heavily on PCP as well).
Were you to watch the Warrior's training, you would look directly into the face of a man who's managed to channel enough insanity to fill 100 horror movie loony bins with gibbering maniacs, self mutilators, and compulsively masturbating cannibalistic evangelical Christians. I've been around multiple Special Olympians in my day, and I have never before seen a human being perform exercises with that much grimacing and slobbering. That moaning chick at every commercial gym who sounds like she's working her way through a 50 man gangbang while lifting makes less of a scene than the Warrior does while warming up. Nick Manning makes less of a spectacle of himself dropping loads on bitches' faces. A roomful of naked, shit-covered midgets with Tourette's would draw less attention than the Warrior in your local Gold's Gym. It's like the Warrior is trying to get his face as jacked as his body by cutting the most dramatic faces he possibly can in the least amount of time
possible. It's almost as if he's using time under tension for his face, and somehow it radiates out to the rest of his body. Whether it's intensity or insanity, however, the shit is clearly working- he looked better at 54 years old than most people look at 24. In his later years, the Warrior did what he referred to as a "bodybuilding type of workout," and was preternaturally excited about the fact that he trained calves. For the vast majority of his training in his later years, Warrior did 10-15 reps for each set with warmups in the 30 rep range, though in the past he was known for going far, far heavier. True to his completely nonsensical form, the Warrior believed that worked the muscles from the “inside out."
We could spend the next hundred years with linguists, scientists, and psychologists trying to parse exactly what the hell working a muscle from the inside out means and would likely be no closer to the answer than we are now. Nevertheless, it seems to work for the Warrior, who was jacked to goddamn bits at 50 and angrier than ever. Just ask the band Asking Alexandria if his methods work- in a pilot for a television show that sadly never saw air, the Warrior spent the better part of an hour berating the skinny jean clad metallers from that band for disrespecting him and interrupting himself with a great deal of psychotic pseudo-intellectualism without ever really putting them through a workout. In spite of the fact that they learned nothing more than what psychotics smell like up close, I bet each one of those skinny dickheads put on 5lbs just from being in the same room as the living embodiment of every fear extremist feminists have of “machismo” that is the Ultimate Warrior.
I am not exaggerating when I say that the Warrior appeared to make up for uninspired training routines with full-blown lunacy, skull splitting intensity, and what appears to have been a dogmatic adherence to a lifelong strict diet and training routine. If nothing else, this should prove to one and all that your program doesn't matter nearly as much as the effort and persistence you put into them. The Warrior's routine literally could not be objectively less interesting, likely to help him lift a 600lb man off the ground and slam him, or strict press a wiggling 300lb man overhead, but who needs good programming when you have maniacal training intensity? One of the Warrior's workout videos literally shows him spending 20 seconds grabbing random benches and throwing them around the gym in a manner I previously only believed befit eternally spandex-clad and Otomix shod douchebag bodybuilder Branch Warren. As anyone's do over the course of a couple decades, the Warrior's methods varied pretty widely. Like everyone else, his workouts in the 1970s were 20 rep squat affairs with a ton of pullovers. In the off-season in the 1980s, Warrior's routine was pretty standard, but it worked . not only did he look like what Greek gods would masturbate to the thought of looking like, but he was strong as shit. And I mean Larry Wheels-esque strong-incline benching 495 for 4, squatting 700, strict barbell rowing 405 for 4, and he could do an old school clean to overhead press, then sit on a bench with no back and press 360lbs for 6 behind
the neck. The following is the basic setup of his training routine pieced together from several sources- as I mentioned, he rarely did the same thing twice, and his workouts ranged in length from 45 minutes to a few hours on any given day. As such, this is the basic framework of what he did, but he kept his rests short except for his heaviest sets and went to failure on every single set, which is something that is about as out of vogue as jodhpurs in gyms these days, but definitely a trend that could stand to be revisited, because it worked .
The Warrior's Mass Split Monday / Thursday: Squats and Deadlifts
Very Close Stance Squat (Tom Platz style) - 12, 10, 8, 2 x 6, 2 x 4 Leg Press - 4 x 6-10 Leg Curl - 4 x 8-12 Leg Extensions - 4 x 8-12 Deadlifts o r Stiff Leg Deadlifts - 12, 10, 8, 2 x 6, 2 x 4 Calf Raises - 4 x 8-12
Tuesdays / Friday: Chest and Back
Barbell Bench Press - 12, 10, 8, 2 x 6, 2 x 4, with the occasional double or single thrown in for good measure. Incline Dumbbell Press - 4 x 8-12 Flat Bench Flies - 4 x 8-12 Hammer Strength Rows - 4 x 6-10 Behind the Neck Pulldowns - 4 x 8-12 Pulldowns (alternating back to front) - 4 x 8-12
Weekend: Shoulders and Arms Stiff Legged Power Clean to Behind the Neck Strict Press - 5 x 4-10 (He would clean the weight from the floor with form that would make the weightlifters in your gym stroke out, and power that would make themselves secretly stroke themselves when alone later that evening. He'd increase the weight each set and go to absolute failure)
Dumbbell Laterals - 4 x 8-12 Bent Over Laterals - 4 x 12-15 Dumbbell Shrugs - 4 x 20 Preacher Curls - 5 x 4-12 Straight Bar Curls - 5 x 8-12 Dumbbell Curls - 5 x 10-12
Tricep Pushdowns (variety of angles)- 10 x 10-15 (he'd change up the handle or the angle of movement every couple of sets) Dumbbell Overhead Extension - 6 x 4-12On the road, at his peak, the Warrior trained six to seven days a week, occasionally twice a day, keeping his training to 45 minutes to an hour with short rests These alternated between two workouts.
The Warrior's Routine on the Road
Day 1 : Chest, Delts and Arms Day 2 : Back and Legs
Stereotypical of 1990's bodybuilders, these workouts had almost zero rest between sets, and consisted of one to two sets of three to four exercises per muscle group, hitting everything from a variety of angles and relying heavily on Hammer Strength equipment. And now, to flog the same cold, dead horse I beat every time I do an in-depth discussion of a lifter- there is no one ideal program, and no program is useless if you apply enough pants shitting insanity to it. Just look at this dude- is there anything at all in his program that would indicate that he's capable of moving prodigious weights? Nope. Will a pack of useless shitbirds content themselves with simply screaming "STEROIDS!!!!!!!" despite the fact that nearly everyone in your gym is on shit and none of them can do what the Warrior can do at age 54? Yup. In spite of the fact that everyone knows that excuses are like assholes, people just don't want to admit that's just what they are, because the only thing the lot of us should really be injecting is a truly terrifying dose of insanity- that's where the goddamned gains come from. And if you don't believe me, here is an email from the man himself. “Overtraining. Got quite a few emails about my comment that I believe overtraining is (another) sissy modern-day concept -- and BS. Many of you who commented couldn't believe I said such a thing. You think I should explain myself -- "if you can," you snidely add. Apparently, you're concerned young kids following my BODY advice might be "mislead." Going by your training standards today, you might be right. Young kids who follow my advice would be mislead in how to become champions -- winners. And God knows, we can't have any winners in our culture today. Not when kids are "lead" to be losers.
I found it interesting that the majority of you commentators seem to think you also read that I said rest or recovery is not necessary at all. Along with disagreeing with me by believing overtraining is possible and legit, you support your beliefs by chastising me, "You know rest is important for the body to recover, Warrior, so I don't understand why you would put forward any idea that it is not." Yes, Einsteins, I do. I do know rest and recovery is important. I never said they were not. I never put forward any idea as you imagine. You read something into what I actually said that was not there at all. What I said -- and absolutely still stand by -- is that overtraining is not possible unless you believe so in your mind. Oh, and it is BS. Like most of the modern day theories intended to stifle action but stimulate a lot of yakkity-yak, overtraining is one of those state-ofthe-art suppositions that keep people from doing the THREE triedand-true things they actually most need to do to build up their physiques or their physical strength: Train. Train Hard. And TRAIN HARDER. For good measure you might want to throw in a fourth thing if the three above don't seem to be working. Back in my bodybuilding days it was typical to train bodyparts three times per week, including even the compound exercisessquats, deadlifts, bent over rows and heavy bench. I continually and progressively got huge and strong (all the monsters I knew then did too). Gritting, grinding, grunting, gnarling and growling were training concepts regularly witnessed, but overtraining? Never heard of it. Train big. Eat big. Get plenty of good, sound rest. Period.
All kinds of bodybuilders and strength athletes thrived off this simple three-part formula. This was before they had all the theories, all the science, all the trainer certifications, and all the mad, over-the-top chemical experimentation that goes on today. During my sports entertainment career, for over 5 years of a practically straight-through tour of duty, I traveled on a plane nearly every day, never missed any hardcore HIT workouts (no less than 6 days per week), survived on 3-4 hours sleep a night, and ate mostly 5-6 cans of tuna fish per day (and practically nothing else when I could not find eating establishments that served good, clean food). Many times, I would go 24 hour periods without any other kind of food -- no carbs, no fats...just tuna out of the can. That's 24 hours where I would have also executed my workout and performed a wrestling match. I worked nearly every night of the year, pushing my body and energy reserves to the absolute limit. My success was dependent on my physique and physical conditioning. It was not something I could leave to chance or give silly, half-ass attention to. The limited caloric intake and the extreme workload never manifested anything but the most positive effects. My body ALWAYS took whatever exertion I subjected it to and it responded by getting better and better over time even though the mental and physical demands became greater and greater at the same time.” Number Four: TRAIN EVEN HARDER. Training is what people of all ages, young and old, need to concentrate on before they think too much about doing anything else -- including the silly idea that they might be overtraining. Actually, doing the exercise work at hand will do wonders for your body you would not believe. I guess, though, this isn't a training method scientific enough for today's trainers and trainees. On the other hand, thinking and talking too much can actually prohibit training altogether. Go figure. Walk into any gym today and see this self-evident truth at work for yourself.
Young recruits today think they need supplements like prohormones and NO2 stimulants before they even go to the gym and experience what it is like to grab the iron and throw it around for a while. In my mind, a long while, say 3-5 years, for starters. Maybe after they put in that kind of time and commitment they can start having some serious thoughts about what might be important next. I must get 50 emails a day asking me what is the best prohormone, and what is most important, working out? OR food and supplements? And they do not mean food and supplements to go along with the working out they would do at the same time. They mean -- is it more important to eat food and take supplements OR workout to build my body? Yes, fellow warrior, you are understanding me correctly in the way I've written this. Somehow or other these kids have the idea that they can eat food and supplements without working out and build their bodies that way. Exercise might not be necessary according to the newfangled bodybuilding theories they hold. This is a direct result of the fraud and idiocy the health and fitness industry perpetuates, to sustain their desire to keep people ignorant, stupid, and confused. If a young kid is going to be mislead, and potentially do harm to himself, it is the modern-day crap that it is going to cause it, not me saying overtraining is bs. My advice will actually help the kid. The problem with young people today is that they are doing too much theorizing and talking and not enough damn work. It's no mystery that athletic champions in any sport put in a lot of hours - a full day's work of 8-10 hours working on what needs to be done to succeed at the highest level. How all this BS started that the body of person working out with weights can only handle 90 minutes of training a day only a few times per week, and the remainder of the time should be spent
laying around eating gourmet health foods and shoveling down expensive supplementation, I don't know. But I do know it is all BS because I speak from experience that undisciplined, weak-minded individuals and skinny fitnesstraining theory freaks never had. All of this nonsense came from out of the minds of midgets who saw big money in marketing easy muscle building strategies to the masses of lazy, afraid-of-hardwork losers like themselves. Sounds like excuses to me. Damn pathetic ones. Ones not tolerated around here. Get to the gym, shut the hell up and train your guts and brain out. Your body will tell you when it needs rest and recovery. When it does, give it some. But don't be a slave to its whining. Your best and most effective muscle building workouts will be when you least feel like going to the gym. Don't be a sissy to soreness and hard work -- or even pain. Try it -- I promise, if you are serious about building muscle, you'll love it. If being big and muscular was natural, we'd all be big and muscular. Your goal to be huge is not natural and your body is going to try and come up with all kinds of excuses because it does not like what you are making it do. Tough shit. Engage Mind over Matter and go back and torture the crap out of it again. Any kid out there training 5, 6 or 7 days a week and doing everything and anything, giving it his all, keeping his attitude positive, paying attention to what his body is telling him, drinking gobs of milk and not worrying about whether he has the new age supps -- now, that's a kid you do need to be afraid of. There's a kid you will want to keep your eye on. Why? He's been mislead, and he's certain to be a future champion -- and warrior.
Kicking your OWN ass is the best way to discover what it takes to kick the ass of your competitor -- in any game or sport. Leave your OWN blood and guts in the training arena and your opponent will leave his on the battlefield.
Goldberg: Train Like an Athlete and You’ll Perform
Like One Anyone who has ever seen Goldberg in action knows that the man was a beast in the ring, and one of the more physically imposing humans to ever wrestle. Goldberg wasn’t the biggest, by any stretch of the imagination, but at 6’2” and 270-280, a man who’s athletic enough to man open field tackles on all-time leading NFL rusher Emmitt Smith in his prime is a man who can put a hurt on anyone. By the time he made his way to the WCW, Goldberg had packed on even more mass, and was strong enough to casually gorilla press slam 280lb Scott Steiner with an ease that made it look more like he was smashing the corpse of a small child into the mat than a wriggling mass of oily testosterone and beef. Although his training is definitely heavy on the Hammer Strength movements these days, these exercises are the basis of the training program that gave Goldberg enough strength and power to be one of the most intimidating men on the planet, even in his 50s. Though his sets and reps have never been provided,
the nature of the program would lead me to suggest you could easily insert the sets and reps used in the Chinese weightlifting routines here.
Monday- Cleans and Squats
Heavy Cleans Light Snatches Olympic Squats Weighted Back Extensions Hammer Strength Four Way Neck Machine
Tuesday- Snatches and Incline Bench
Heavy Snatches Light Cleans Close-Grip Incline Barbell Press Weighted Dips Hammer Strength Four Way Neck Machine
Thursday- Overhead and Back
Behind-The-Neck Push Presses T-Bar Rows Weighed Close-Grip Pull-Ups Standing Sit-Ups
Friday- More Overhead and High Pulls
High Pulls Military Press Dumbbell Clean and Press Decline Dumbbell Press Standing Sit-Ups
Diet: This Shit Ain’t That Hard Diet is as much a matter of personal expression as body painting naked people at an orgy. If you put zero effort into it, you will get zero results… and you will likely struggle to get laid, because if you can’t see your junk, it’s unlikely that anyone else is going to want to see it either. And that is not simply in regards to making the correct food choices- that means eating, period. Far too many lifters fall into the trap of making bizarrely small portion choices, focusing on the wrong things, and generally sabotaging their performance with idiotic dietary decisions. That said, this is not a diet book. What you’re getting is the bare bones basics of a dietary prescription, because it seems no one absorbs information on diet in one go. Or twenty. Or one hundred. It seems diet is one of those things with which you must be smacked in the face until you’re only half aware that you’ve agreed to try it, and even then, only under duress. You might be fat, you might be skinny, and you might be somewhere in between. Whatever you are, you can rest assured that there is no magical diet that is going to fix whatever mess you’re looking at when you look into the mirror. Before you just throw up your hands and dive face first into the ice cream like your name is Honey Boo Boo, however, know that eating to be a beast is far less complex than people make it out to be. All that shit you’ve heard about your physique being 90% diet are horseshit- getting in competition shape once you’re already jacked and lean is 90% diet. Getting jacked and strong, however, is likely more like 50% training and 50% diet. If you want the quickest and dirtiest diet prescription on earth, it’s this: If you’re trying to gain weight , use double your bodyweight (in pounds) in grams of protein. That is one third of your calories. Split the other two thirds evenly between fat and carbs and keep your sugar as close to zero as possible.
So, if you’re 200 lbs, eat 400g of protein (1600 calories), 400g of carbs (1600), and 178g of fat (~1600). With that split you should put on a decent amount of lean mass without too much flubber. If you want a fairly slow and easy recomposition diet , 1.5 times your bodyweight in grams of protein and make that 40% of your calories. That means you have 1800 calories split evenly between fat and carbs, so 225g of carbs and 100g of fat. If you want to end up crazy shredded , there are half a million diets out there from which you can choose. The one that has brought me the most success if my Apex Predator Diet, which is a cyclical ketogenic diet too involved to discuss in this book, but is simple enough to Google (“Plague of Strength” “Apex Predator Diet”) or you can snag my Issuance of Insanity 3 ebook at Chaosandpain.com, that gives an exhaustive rundown on a ton of dietary stuff and ketogenic diets particular. With that in mind...
Unless You’re Already a Disgusting Landbeast (and I Mean Landbeast, not “Could Be Leaner”), Bulk, then Cut
Having been positively besieged with questions over the years asking how lean a person should be before bulking, I thought it was high time to introduce a new generation to the modern human marvel- Bruce Randall, a strongman, powerlifter, and bodybuilder famous in the 1950s for making an insane amount of progress in a very short period of time. I realize that it's all the rage to traipse through your fitness club in skin tight capri pants and a melon colored string tank top, checking out your abs between lackadaisical sets of whatever Jeff Seid happens to be recommending these days, but if you actually want to impress real, live people when you walk down the street as a physically imposing and impressive human mountain, chicken breasts, kale, and P90x isn't going to cut it. And before we delve in, bear this in mind this quote from strength sports historian Steve Neece: "We must remember that although testosterone was being manufactured by 1935, it was almost never used by people in the iron game. Remember also that 1957 was several years before Bill March, Tony Garcy, and Lou Riecke— aided by John Ziegler— introduced anabolic steroids to the strength sports in this country. Dianabol was not manufactured until 1958."
I realize that for anyone reading this while rocking athleisure clothing, this revelation will come as a goddamn shocker, but it's true. The only person of whom I can think who successfully shreds and then lean bulks is Sylvester Stallone, cited above. As such, I am not saying it is not possible to do, but it's a mostly idiotic way to go about things for most people. A far better example to follow would be a person like the aforementioned wrestler Bruno Sammartino (in the Wrestlers segment), who gained over 100 lbs of muscle in 4 years and set
a bunch of lifting records while doing it, or the man pictured above, Bruce Randall. Bulking hard and then cutting allows you to overeat like crazy to pack on muscle, which is easy enough to hang onto if you keep your protein high. Actor Sylvester Stallone is the reigning world champion of cutting, then bulking. "[W]hen I did Rambo III, I didn’t like the way I looked anymore, so I decided to reshape myself. I went down to 168 pounds. I put on weight slowly and got sinewy, hard-cut muscles. I wound up weighing about 200. But it was all muscle – my body fat was down to 3.8 percent. Now my fat count is 6.8. I’m 5’10” and weigh 187 pounds." So, having already written about Sammartino's methods, allow me to introduce you to Bruce Randall- at 6'2", his weight ranged anywhere from 183 to 401lbs. In the course of his career, the man managed to gain world renown for his strength, then gained even more renown for shredding like crazy and winning the Mr. Universe title against some renowned strongmen in 1959. The thing that made him stand out in my mind (for which I unfortunately couldn't find a citation) is neither of those things, though- it's that once he cut down he was so unaccustomed to his own strength that he grabbed a bench to do some benching and noticed everyone staring at him. When he set the bench down, he realized the goddamn thing had been bolted into the ground, but he was able to rip it out of its moorings with no more effort than what it took to pick up a bench. Before we get going, I know half of you are going to call bullshit on his weights and progress, but the dude was heavily documented by Iron Man magazine the entire time. The other half of you are going to talk shit about his programs, because the knee jerk reaction for people these days is to say "that's horseshit and you're a lying pussy" rather than actually considering the implications of what you are reading actually might teach you something, rather than just reinforcing what you think you know. That said, let's delve into the story of a man whose life tale is so tall it's like Mark Henry and Johnny Appleseed double teamed Calamity Jane to create a man who makes Paul Bunyan seem like a punk bitch in comparison.
Bruce Randall was a professional bodybuilder and insanely strong guy who leapt into the public eye early in life and disappeared from public view just as quickly. Born in 1931, Randall didn't actually start lifting until he was of legal drinking age, and only did so at 21 because he needed to weigh 225lbs to play for the base football team in the Marines. Approaching the base lifting coach, Chief Petty Officer Walter Metzler, Randall explained he needed to pack on mass as quickly as possible so he could go out and be the crazy white Lawrence Taylor of the armed services. So at a bodyweight of 203lbs, Randall began his training with weird as hell program and an ingeniously simple diet that initially just included an extra loaf of bread, quart of milk, pork chop, or whatever he could get during every meal. Clearly, that dietary methodology is so simple a six year old could have figured it out, but frankly it never once occurred to me to try that sort of thing- luckily for all of us, it's never too late to try to pack on 30 pounds of mass in six weeks. His program was also incredibly simple, and although you'll all hate it, his methodology was sound. Having grown up in an era where you're gonna get mocked for skipping legs, you would likely all write a beginner program based around the Olympic lifts or power lifts in an effort to engage as many muscle groups as possible. Randall, on the other hand, said fuck that noise. Instead of doing some lame fucking 5x5 program wherein you are allegedly going to get huge off three days of lackluster lifting a week, Randall did the following program 6-7 days a week. His logic?
"I found that in my case I could work on my arms almost every day and make gains. I assume that this is due to the natural recuperative powers of the arms. Because they are always in use they seem to be able to regain total strength with just one night’s rest and are ready for more the next day." In short- you can make serious hypertrophy progress training your arms every day like a goddamn maniac, but the same couldn't be said for a program comprised of squats and deadlifts. You'd fall apart faster than a scarecrow in a tornado.
Randall's First Routine, Aka the "Curls for the Girls" Routine Strict Barbell Curls – 3 x 6-8 x 100lbs Dumbbell Concentration Curls – 3 x 5-6 x 50lbs Overhead Tricep Extensions / French Press – 3 x 6-8 x 70lbs Dumbbell Kickbacks – 3 x 6-8 x 35lbs Dumbbell Preacher Curls – 3 x 6-8 x 45lbs His weights are the weights he started the program with, so a couple of years of chopping wood prior to starting this program definitely paid off as unplanned preparation for lifting. He'd start with six reps per set, and as he grew stronger he would wait until he hit eight reps for all three sets, then increase the weight and start back at six. With this program and diet, Bruce Randall's progress was nothing short of pants-shitting (both figuratively and likely literally). In six weeks, he increased his weight from 203lbs to 225lbs and his arms grew from arms increased from 16” to 17.5”. Because football was still a few months off, Randall decided to change his goal to gain another 25lbs using the same routine and diet, and he got his weight up to 265lbs. Clearly, this kind of weight gain and progress is just goddamn ridiculous, but it should immediately indicate to every last one of us that we eat like Angelina Jolie and we need to level the fuck up at the dinner table. Lest you think I am
suggesting that we all should get fat as shit to pack on mass, I'm not. There is a happy medium between gaining 200 lbs in two years and applying similar principles to this in order to quickly gain mass, or to smash through sticking points (and there is definitely evidence that our collective sticking points are due in large part to eating like fucking hummingbirds. So at 265lbs, Randall decided it was time to take his diet to the next level and alter his training to involve the larger muscle groups. The following just the basis of his training, and he would add exercises as time permitted. Again, he started with three sets of each exercise, dropping the starting reps to 3-5, and adding weight when he hit 8 reps. His starting weights were still light, but recall at that point lifters had to clean the weight to their chests and fall back into a high incline board for incline barbell press, which definitely increased the level of difficulty considerably. He took as long as he felt he needed in between sets, often lifting from 3 to 5 hours a day . Bruce Randall called- you’re not training enough .
The Basis of Bruce Randall's Second Routine
Dumbbell Bench Press – sets of 5-8 x 120lbs Decline Dumbbell Bench Press – sets of 5-8 x 130lbs Incline Barbell Press – sets of 5-8 x 250lbs Good Morning – sets of 3-5 x 295lbs
If you are wondering, like I was, why the squat still wasn't in this program, I have your answer right here: "Randall originally shied away from the squat because of a serious injury there years previously in which he broke his leg in seven places. He would periodically test his strength in the movement and attributed the hard work in the good morning exercise for allowing him to squat 680lbs. He actually once took a shot at a 750lbs good morning but had to drop the bar because the weights shifted on him."
It was with this program, just under a year into lifting, that he managed to win an Olympic weightlifting competition, in spite of the fact he trained less for it than most people train for fun runs. In December of 1953, 11 months after he started training, Randall entered his first meet, the Capital District, and won with a 300lb press, 230lb snatch, 315lb clean and jerk, and 845lb total. As his training evolved to suit his heavier training with more compound lifts, so did his diet. Centered around four massive meals (a cafeteria tray filled to overflowing with rice and pork for dinner, or a breakfast of his typical breakfast, consisting of 28 fried eggs, loaf and half of bread and two quarts of milk) a day, at 6:30am, 11:30am, 4:30pm, and 9:30pm. Between meals he didn't snack beyond drinking milk, of which he drank a fucking unreal amount (8-10 quarts on average). When I say unreal, I'm talking unicorns that fart cinnamon and sneeze rainbows unreal- at least one time he drank nearly five gallons in a day, which gave him almost 15,000 calories and 600 grams of protein just by themselves. “I remember one incident that happened to me at lunch. I weighed about 330 at the time and came to lunch ready to eat like a horse. They were serving a favorite Chinese dish of mine, fried rice with pork. It happened that I was eating at the Navy mess hall at the time and so had a metal tray with five different compartments in it to eat from. Well, I filled the entire tray with rice and pork. The mound was so high that if another spoonful was added it would run over the side of the tray.
Carefully balancing the tray so as not to drops a precious grain, I made my way back to a table amid incredulous stares from every sailor in the hall. Upon sitting down and tasting a few spoonfuls I found the rice to be slightly undercooked. The center of each grain was a little pasty and absorbed all the moisture in my mouth when I chewed. In order to solve this frustrating dilemma, I secured several quart bottles of water and proceeded to eat the rice with a swig of water every so often. Under this procedure I was able to finish the entire tray of fried rice and pork (I made it an absolute rule to finish everything I took. Wasting food is an unpardonable sin!). Upon getting up, I was, to put it mildly, sufficiently filled. When I arrived back at the Marine Barracks I found myself feeling rather strange sensations going on in the region of my stomach. I made a hasty retreat to my bed and lay upon my back for five hours taking short panting breaths because I found that deep breathing caused even more pressure on the stomach. Thereafter I made quite certain that the rice was well cooked before I loaded up the tray." Those of you who remember the Saxon Trio's eating habits will note even they would have thought this was just an egregious amount of food and milk, and the man's bedroom must have smelled like a Turkish bathhouse in which Gary Busey and Nick Nolte had been doing squats. If you slept in a sewer you probably would have breathed better than you could in this man's room. And Randall gave less fucks than Deadpool would while donkeypunching Gina Carano in the middle of a child sex ring- he actually once said that if he'd pushed his weight to 500lbs he could have deadlifted 1000lbs. Putting aside that Randall's bedroom must've smelled like a camel threw up eggs onto a pile of cow shit, and his bathroom was likely considered a Hazard Zone by every governmental agency in the country, we'll go back to his training. Randall said he never really had a "set" program, but he did specifically alter his training to the following, done five to six times a week: Incline Clean and Press (pictured) – sets of 3-5 x 355 lbs Quarter Front Squat – sets of 6-8, 1,010 lbs
DB Bench Press – sets of 3-5 x 205 lbs DB Decline Press – sets of 3-5 x 195 lbs Good Morning – sets of 3-5 x 565 lbs His training kept changing from then on, rotating in and out various exercises (but usually keeping the total exercise count to six) that constantly ramped up the insanity as he tested his digestive system and his body's ability to adapt. By the time he had two years of training under his belt, Randall's lifts were among
the best in the world at the time.
Randall's Best Lifts (after 2 years of training, at 335-410lbs)
Military Press – 365lbs x 2; 375 x 1 Squat – 680lbs Good Morning – 685lbs (Bent knees, back parallel to the floor) Deadlift – 730lbs x two reps; 770 x 1 Strict Curl – 242lbs Dumbbell Bench Press – 220-pound dumbbells x 2
Bench Press – 482lbs (with a 3-second pause on the chest) Decline Dumbbell Bench Press – 220lb dumbbells ¼ Front Squat – 1,320lbs Incline Clean and Press – 380lbs x 3; 410 x 1 It seems that his switch in diet happened basically on a whim he mentioned to a friend, that he wanted to “look at life from the other side of the weight picture,” and his friend essentially told him he was out of his motherfucking mind, which only served to strengthen his resolve. I can respect that kind of motivation, because as I've written in the past, spite is an amazing motivator. "As far as I was concerned there is no such word as "never" in a lifter’s vocabulary." Taking up the challenge like a heroin addict takes up a fentanyl habit, Bruce knew he would have to immediately change both his diet and his routine. Interestingly, he had the exact opposite opinion about the matter than Arnold, though they both ended up at the same conclusion using the same simile. Whereas in Pumping Iron Arnold said, "you look in the mirror and you say, okay, I need a bit more deltoids ... so that the proportion's right, and ... you exercise and put those deltoids on, whereas an artist would just slap on some clay on each side," Bruce Randall said, "take a sculptor about to create a statue. He takes a big, ungainly piece of rock and with a hammer and chisel he chips away at it until the desired effect is created." At 401lbs, Randall saw himself as that big, ungainly piece of rock, and the weights and diet were his hammer and chisel. With that in mind, he reversed his previous methods and reduced his food intake at each meal, trying to keep his protein and green vegetables high while cutting back on starches and fats. At the same time he reduced his food intake, he increased his volume in a way only a dangerously psychotic and probably self-destructive person would, training 6-7 hours a day (and once 27 hours in two days and 81 hours in that week), 6-7 days a week (and once 27 days in a row) doing more than 20 exercises with 4-5 sets of 12-15 reps apiece. He also started walking daily, gradually increasing his walks and pace until after a month he would walk/jog, and was running 3-5 miles a day by the end of his 9 month cut. And if you say
that's going to kill your lifts, no it won't- you're just being an excuse-making pussy. According to the man himself, "I found that it did not adversely affect my workouts in the gym and in addition to the above mentioned benefits it increased my stamina and endurance greatly." His workout was as unconventional and volume dense-as-a-black-hole as you would guess:
Randall's "Reduction" Routine Situps, L eg raises, H anging L eg R aises – sets of 20-50 Bodyweight Squats – sets of 20 Leg Curls – sets of 25 Leg Extensions – sets of 25 Bench Press – sets of 15-20 Flyes – sets of 15-20 Chins – sets of 15-20 Dips – sets of 15-20 Curls – sets of 15-20 Rows – sets of 15-20 Upright Rows – sets of 15-25 Seated Dumbbell Press – sets of 10-15 Incline Bench Press – sets of 10-15 More Abdominal Work – sets of 25-50 Miscellaneous optional exercises at the end of each workout
If that's not insane enough for you, his 1956 New Year’s resolution was to do 5000 situps a day for the first 15 days of 1956.... in addition to all of the other ab training he did. He credited that with his waspish waist, which was an amazingly trim 33", and whatever else it did, that resolution confirmed that the man was indeed crazier the Heath Ledger Joker on angel dust and flakka. He did, however, say that in retrospect his reps and sets should have been reversed, much as I have, loudly and repeatedly, over the last ten years.
"I prefer to REDUCE the repetitions and INCREASE the number of sets." "To illustrate the above point let us take the following example. Instead of performing 3 sets of 20 repetitions per exercise, I would prefer to perform 10 sets of 6 repetitions per exercise when training for definition. Let us say that we were able to do 3 sets of 20 reps with 100 pounds in the curl. Now, if we were to increase the sets to 10 and reduce the reps to 6 we would be able to increase the weight substantially to, let us say, 150 pounds! The point is that at the end of the exercise we have performed exactly the same amount of repetitions. However, on the high set, low rep principal, we use 50% more weight thus accomplishing more work and therefore burning more energy which is necessary in order to reduce fat and attain definition.
Remember, it is the amount of energy you have burned up which in turn is determined by the amount of work you have performed that will determine the amount of fat reduction. This approach to definition should also enable the trainee to retain a great degree of muscle density, at the same time encouraging greater definition. The writer is not suggesting that the reader follow the idea of 10 sets necessarily. It is true that the more sets you perform the longer will be the length of your workout. It is also true, however, that it is necessary to put in many long workouts in order to bring the body around to top contest condition. Ask any top physique winner and you will find that this is true." In the end, Bruce Randall was eating like most kids online claim they're eating when they "literally can't eat another thing." How those kids have such tiny appetites almost as big a mystery as how the formerly competitive-eater level Randall got his food intake down that low. By the time Randall was down to 183 in 1956, he was eating the following:
Breakfast 2 soft boiled eggs Plain pint of skim milk Glass of orange juice Apple
Lunch Salad, dates and nuts
Dinner Round Steak Two vegetables Quart skim milk with additional powdered milk Gelatin Coffee (Occasionally) As you can see below, his first couple of competitions didn't go quite as well as Bruce Randall would have liked- but the man remained undeterred. When he stepped onstage in 1956, Bruce had increased his weight up to 219 lbs., continuing his bizarre weight yo-yo. In 1957, Randall took a different tack and went lighter, coming in 6th weighing 195 lbs. At that point he was walking around at a much more reasonable 203lbs-240lbs in the offseason, and won in 1959 weighing 231lbs, four pounds lighter and an inch shorter than Arnold Schwarzenegger, who would win it nine years later.
Bruce Randall's Competition History 1956 – Mr. America – AAU, 13th 1957 – Mr. America – AAU, 6th 1958 – Universe – Pro – NABBA, Tall, 2nd 1959 – Universe – Pro – NABBA, Tall, 1st 1959 – Universe – Pro – NABBA, Overall Winner “ I constantly put personal goals before myself and these goals acted as a stimulus of sorts. In other words, I would set a date, perhaps three weeks hence, when I would try to accomplish some change such as a loss of 12 pounds or a reduction around the chest or waist of several inches. This idea of using goals is something that I learned when I was gaining weight and strength. I would tell myself that at a certain date I would press or deadlift, etc., such a poundage. Thus I found myself constantly challenged and I love challenges!" And that is essentially where the Bruce Randall story ends. He fell off the map and no one really heard from him again. Likely, he burnt himself out and just didn't have it in him to keep training. On top of that, his unconventional methods and ridiculous training volume lent themselves about as well to coaching athletes as John Belushi's party practices would have lent themselves to leading AA meetings. In any event, the man is a fucking textbook on how a zero-fucks-given attitude and big brass balls can push you to the forefront of the strength game. Incidentally, if you're worried about the bullshit you read about how yo-yo dieting will kill you faster than ingesting plutonium, Randall lived to the ripe old age of 87, probably just to prove one unnecessarily awesome point. A couple of gems Randall had for people regarding training were: ● “I did do one exercise during this time which may have had some influence on my squat. This was the good morning exercise. When I
reached over 400 lbs. on this exercise I found that I could not do the exercise in the strict sense because I had to band at the knees in order to compensate for the weight at the back of the neck. I made 685 in this manner with my back parallel to the floor and once almost made 750 but was forced to dump it because of a shift in the weight." ● “I found the ¼ Front Squats helped me push-press heavy weights and believe it to be a fine exercise." ● When cutting- “I use powdered milk and skim milk mixed together, thus increasing the protein content. I also took coffee at times finding it tended to curtail my appetite." ● Just as Mac from It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia said about his season-long weight gain, Randall felt good at his heaviest. "Actually, I felt fine when weighing 400 pounds but found that I perspired freely and had a bit of trouble getting about the city. Of course, I needed great amounts of sleep and food. My food bill (early ‘50s) was never under $80 per week and very often well over $100. I know that if I wanted to gain again I could weight 500 lbs. in 18 months’ time." ● On doing anything you believe you can- "Many people say that added weight is not necessary to become stronger. Perhaps they are right, but in my case, it was necessary because I believed it was. " ● "I would suggest that those who find it difficult to refrain from the cake pie and candy routine remind themselves that each candy bar will cost them another 500 situps to work off! I found this to be a very persuasive means of combating temporary dietary temptations!" ● Finally, all you Zyzz- and Jeff Seid-loving goofs out there take note- " Remember that anyone can have the definition he desires if he is willing to train and will apply a little “exercise” of the will power. In conclusion I think it might be wise to add that there is a time to be extremely defined and a time not to be quite so defined. I feel that it is unwise to maintain an extreme degree of definition for great lengths of time because, by reducing the body fat to an absolute minimum, one also reduces his resistance and may subject his body to colds and many other possible illnesses."
So what have we learned? First, we learned once again that the form Nazis out there can take a big step back and literally fuck their own faces. We also learned that literally anything is possible if you set your mind to it and go balls-to-thegoddamn-wall. Finally, it should also seem fairly obvious to anyone paying attention that bulking at the outset to build strength and size makes far more sense than trying to achieve and maintain Instagram-ready abs at all times. Frankly, I wish I'd dirty bulked in my formative years, so I could maintain a higher set-point of muscle mass, rather than constantly scraping and scratching to gain a little muscle every year on a diet of rice and chicken... plus, pizza is delicious. A bit of food for thought, at least. "Singleness of mind and the willpower to stick to something with the courage to go on in spite of what people might say is a great factor to success."
Another Case for Bulking First- The Story of 1980s Powerlifting Monster George Hechter George Hechter was a fat kid. I seriously fat kid. Competing in powerlifting as a heavyweight, Hechter was a walking heart attack with a 24” neck and 24” arms, and he must’ve snored so loudly he’d shatter windows and crack the plaster on the ceiling at night, but the man was strong as a bull. Competing in the early years of single ply, he managed a 975lb squat and a 584 bench, but when his lifts stopped moving up, he figured he needed to switch it up. Thus, Hechter began one of the most impressive fat losses this side of Bruce Randall, and in nine months went from the Blob to an extremely hirsute Colossus. To wrap your head around this fat loss adventure, we’re talking about a man who drank two to three gallons of whole milk every day of his life. A man who took fourth in the 1985 World Strongest Man to Geoff Capes and Jon Pall, but looking at him you’d have thought he was a competitive hot dog eater, not a
lifter. Given that information, you’d think there would be article after article about how Hechter managed that feat, but there’s not. Instead, there are multiple accounts of how Hechter gained his weight in the first place. How he built his strength. How he rose to the top of the lifting world in a very short period of time but chugging milk and smashing weights... and that’s because losing bodyfat is easy as hell .
The Hepburn Routine What Hechter used to build his strength was actually a methodology developed by Doug Hepburn, a strongman, weightlifter, and proto-powerlifter who was the first man to officially bench press 400, 450, and 500 pounds. In spite of having a clubfoot, Hepburn was a massive squatter and deadlifter who could hit 800 on both lifts and set a world record in the press in his short stint as an Olympic weightlifter. He developed this strength primarily through the use of a lot of singles. Monday - Bench Wednesday - Squat Friday - Deadlift For each of these, he would work up to singles close to his max, then back off and do five sets of five. For instance, if you have a max of 335, your sets would
look like this: Warmup sets of 135×5, 225×5, 275×3, 295×2 Five singles with 325 5 x 5 x 275 (82%1RM) For deadlifts, Hechter had another trick up his sleeve- he’d clean his warmups. He would start off and power clean 135 lbs, 225 lbs, 315 lbs, and 405 lbs. At 495, he would high pull the weight, and then start deadlifting the weight at 585. Doing his warmups that way gave him sick speed off the floor, and that translated into more weight pulled With that program, chugging milk all day long and eating sandwiches between sets, Hechter got huge and crazy strong- he went from 250lbs to 360lbs and put over 400lbs on his squat, 200+lbs on his bench, and 300lbs on his deadlift in the span of five years, then got ripped and crushed ass like a champ for a while (and even improved his deadlift at the lighter weight).
In short- worry about getting big and strong first- that’s the hard part. Any asshole can get abs by eating like a little bitch, but the rub of that story is you’ll end up lifting like one, too.
A Month of Meals for Assholes Some of these are legit recipes, others are just things we just throw together at Casa de la Chaos. This is a GUIDELINE, not a diet plan. While Jamie is content to eat the same thing (steak with chimichurri) over and over, Tara hates doing that, while insisting on eating like an unattended five year old at a birthday party. There are things that become lifesavers if you work long hours: ● Squeeze bottles of herbs ● Pre chopped garlic ● Store bought rotisserie chicken ● Pre chopped, pre-cleaned ANYTHING actually ● Glass meal prep containers ● Premade or jarred pasta sauces ● Fairlife Milk ● Atkins’ frozen meals (I live on these during the construction busy season, honestly) ● Frozen veggies ● Crockpots, Ninja Foodies, Instapots Are homemade better tasting and slightly healthier? Yeah. Are you doing yourself any favors being up all night chopping shit and cooking to get your meal prep done? Get real. Most if not all of these recipes can be made in bulk and frozen into single servings (or multiple if you are bulking, we don’t judge).
A Word on Eating Red Meat
It is wildly in vogue for lifters to solely consume chicken and tuna for their meat choices when dieting. Frankly, this is stupid. First, both of those taste like shit, and tuna is about the worst smelling thing you could consume. And if you’re one of those people who thinks they’re cool for violating office code and eating that hot trash inside a confined space can rest assured your coworkers will kill you first if they ever have an opportunity. In the past, I’ve informed coworkers that the next time they bring fish in for lunch they will finish their meal in the hospital. You might as well just shit on all of your coworkers’ desks, while you’re at it, if you’re going to eat fish inside of a closed space. Seriously, if you’re going to be that kind of monster, just go whole hog, because you might as well earn the ass whipping that you have coming. Beyond the superior taste, smell, and flavor of red meat, there are other reasons to make it the staple of your diet- an essential fatty acid called arachidonic acid. This badass sounding EFA actually increases protein turnover and synthesis. For the slow kids, that means that you can build more muscle while bulking with red meat and maintain the muscle you have even while on a brutal calorically restrictive diet with the stuff. Red meat also contains highly anabolic saturated fat, but before you start whining about your cholesterol, it also is jam packed with stearic acid, which will actually help prevent and reverse atherosclerosis. And while we’re at it, stop wasting your money on filet- it’s tasteless trash that they serve in expensive restaurants only because it’s finished with a quarter pound of butter. Otherwise, it’d be the briquette you actually ordered. Fattier cuts of steak like ribeye and porterhouse taste far better, and bone in meats impart even more flavor as the marrow leeches out in the cooking process, and studies have shown that eating meat on the bone increase aggression. Furthermore, a 2010 paper published in the Frontiers of Neuroscience showed that the tastiest foods are those that are high in calories and fat content. Not only that, but the fat content increases taste, smell, and mouthfeel of food… which means the fattier cuts of steak are the tastier cuts.
The Basics
Better Brisket Than Most Restaurants (Without Using Brisket or a Smoker) I know the title sounds impossible, but I am a man who loves brisket more than I love just about anything else on the planet not living in my house. That said, I don’t always have access to a smoker or cheap brisket (it used to be $5 a pound, but hipsters have driven the price through the fucking roof). As such, I have figured out how to make banging brisket using any flat cut of beef and an oven. I typically use a boneless chuck roast, and it comes out better than most of the brisket I’ve had in restaurants of late. Goddamned hipsters and their trash bbq. ● 4-5lb boneless chuck roast, brisket, flank, or any flat cut ● Liquid Smoke ● Coarse sea salt ● Coarse ground pepper ● Yellow mustard ● BBQ sauce of your choice (I use Stubbs)