In the Footsteps of Legends

Learning from the Golden Era Legends of Bodybuilding’s Past

     I was sitting in my recliner, laptop where it should be, on my lap, typing away at a transcript for a talk I’m giving this weekend at a writer’s conference when I just decided I needed a break.  I like giving talks, especially if I can help and inspire young or aspiring writers in any way, but writing a talk is not my favorite thing.  Giving the talk, I enjoy.  The process of actually writing the speech, not so much.  Anyway, I decided to take a break and write what I most enjoy, an essay where I just start typing away and see what comes out the other end.  There are times when I plan out an article in a lot of detail.  Sometimes, I do quite a bit of research, especially if I’m writing something such as a historical piece on Japanese Budo, but other times, such as this one, I just come up with a title, or have a basic idea in mind, nothing concrete at all, and then I just write.  Almost entirely spontaneous, I do nothing more than make myself a passive instrument of my creative muse—or something like that.  So, that’s what you’re reading right now.  Let’s see where this thing goes.

     Before I began competing in powerlifting back towards the end of the last century, and before I fell in love with everything strength and power training in general, my first love was bodybuilding.  To be more specific, it was the bodybuilding of the so-called “golden era” of Arnold, the stars of Pumping Iron, and their fellow bodybuilding kin of the ‘70s along with the bodybuilders of the ‘80s, in the years when I first started training.  I first gripped hand to barbell in the mid to late ‘80s, a time that is now often considered a part of the golden era of lifting yore.  For the sake of inclusion—it just allows me to discuss an even wider range of methods—in this essay, I will discuss the bodybuilding that came out of both the ‘70s and the ‘80s, the methods, techniques, and training wisdom that was utilized by not just Arnold, Sergio, Franco, Ferrigno, and Nubret, but also Haney, Gaspari, Labrada, Paris, Taylor, Christian, and many others.  The training methods that worked then still work now.  In fact, a lot of what they did has been lost and is in need of being rediscovered.

     The methods that I will discuss here are solely for bodybuilding purposes.  Sure, many of the golden era greats were strong, but it wasn’t strength that they were seeking.  It was physical perfection.  If you’re interested in strength and power, or performance for a sport, I have plenty of other articles, workouts, and programs that can help you in those areas.  This information is solely for those of you who want to look good—massive muscles coupled with aesthetics and symmetry.  Of course, even if you primarily train for strength and power, doing an occasional training cycle using bodybuilding tactics might do your body some good.  Perhaps your strength has stalled and you’re having trouble getting those lifts moving again.  If that’s the case, then you might want to consider using some of the advice here.  Change does a body some good on occasion.  Nonetheless, this essay is meant for the bodybuilder.

Bodybuilding Training as Art

     Sure, there’s some science involved with building muscle.  I’m not denying that.  But golden era bodybuilders, and those that came before them in the silver era, as well, approached their training, by and large, as an art form.  And that’s exactly how it should be.

     You can’t just start with this approach, however.  It’s a state of bodybuilding being that you train your way into.  To begin with, if you’re new to training, start off by using full-body workouts, training 3 days per week.  In fact, follow several different kinds of full-body workouts for about a year.  At least.  Old-school lifters would often train for years on end with full-body sessions before they transitioned into split training.  During these full-body workouts, you’ll learn a lot about your body, what sets and reps work the best for you.  Once you’ve built the muscle, you can then transition over into split training and more high-volume workouts.

     To be capable of training in a more-or-less “instinctive” or “intuitive” manner using high-volume split routines, you need to have a strong work capacity.  Many look at the high-volume training of the old-school bodybuilders and think that the only way it worked for them was because of the use of anabolic steroids.  Yes, anabolic steroids do allow bodybuilders to train with high-volume regimens without building up the work capacity beforehand.  But natural bodybuilders can train using all I’m going to suggest in what follows here if they take their time to build up their work capacity by using increasingly higher workloads in their training.  Too many times, modern bodybuilders think about training in terms of “hard” workouts, rest, and recovery.  But, if I achieve nothing else in my writing, I hope I can begin to shift the training discussion towards adaptation and accumulation, along with cyclical workloads in addition to hard training, rest, and recovery.  We need to learn to see the whole picture.

     Once you can train with high-volume training combined with a wide range of different methods, you will discover the sheer joy of bodybuilding training as art.

Experiment With and Utilize a Wide Range of Sets and Reps

     There is no one method of training that works better than all of the others.  You must find what works for you.  This can be frustrating to some (if not many) lifters, especially when they’re first starting out.  But a lot of that frustration just comes from the wish that building muscle was easy.  But it’s not.  And it shouldn’t be.  Thank God it’s not—nothing worth having comes easy in life and muscle-building is no exception.  It takes a couple years—a year, at the very least—to discover the methods that work for you.  That’s also another one of the joys, in my book, of what makes training so special.

     About the only thing that almost all golden era bodybuilders used, with a few exceptions, was high-volume training.  Other than that, everything else was up in the air.  Some bodybuilders—in fact, quite a lot of them in the off-season when they were most concerned with building mass as opposed to shape and symmetry—used one-exercise-per-muscle group workouts. Some used 2 per muscle.  Others used 4, 5, or even 6 or more exercises for each muscle group.  Some used only 8 sets for each bodypart at each workout.  Others used 25 sets or more per muscle group.  All of those can work.  You must discover what works, once again, for you.

     Some old-school lifters used heavy weights and really low reps.  Others used lighter weights and high reps.  Bertil Fox often did 3 exercises per muscle group for 3 sets of 3 reps on each one.  Serge Nubret would do one exercise per bodypart for 20 sets of 20 reps.  Many others were in between those two extremes.  And a lot of bodybuilders used both heavy weights for low reps and light weights coupled with higher reps.  Some did that in the same workout for a muscle group and others split that training into 2 different sessions.

Train for the Pump

     Our old-school bodybuilding forebears called it “chasing the pump” or “racing the pump.”  No matter what methods they used above as far as sets and reps go, almost all of them to a tee trained for a massive pump in their workouts.  One of the methods they espoused was to not count sets or pre-determine exactly how much volume you will use in each session, but simply train until you reach a massive pump.  The goal was to pump your muscles “up” as much as possible.  Once a complete and total pump is achieved, stop the workout.  You don’t want to stop the workout short of a complete pump but you also don’t want to keep training once the pump is achieved.  They believed that continuing to train once the pump was “complete” actually reduced muscle size.  In fact, many of them during their pre-contest training would continue to train once they had a full pump.  But that was in order to make the muscles harder and to bring out more detail.  But not to gain size.

     I’ve shared this before, but here’s a story from Greg Zulak that he wrote for MuscleMag International on Sergio Oliva’s chest training.  It’s a good example of the training of not just Oliva but others from this era and their belief in training for the pump.  “After a particularly long and grueling workout that consisted of many sets of weighted dips, Sergio went to the change room to take off his sweat-soaked gym clothes and to take a shower.  After someone helped him remove his sweatshirt (his arms were so pumped he could barely get them over his head), Sergio decided to do one more set of dips, so he headed back out to the gym floor to do them.  After the set, he returned to the change room, removed his shoes and socks, and then went back out to the gym for one more set of dips.  Then it was back to the change room.  After removing his sweat pants, and wrapping a towel around his waist, he returned once again for one more set of dips.  After this, he hit the showers, but a couple of times during the shower he put the towel back on and went back to the gym floor for more dips.  After the shower, he dressed, but before leaving the gym to go home he performed yet another set of dips.  Finally satisfied that his triceps and pecs were as pumped as they could be, only then did he go home.”

Cycle Your Workloads

     Whether it’s muscle, strength, or both, one of the most important concepts you need to learn is the importance of cycling your workloads.  Every workout doesn’t have to be “all out” and you don’t have to set PRs each and every time that you hit the gym.  Now, old-school bodybuilders didn’t do this in a “set” fashion.  Some of them did, that’s true.  Marvin Eder, one of the silver era greats, is an example of one who did do that, but many simply followed their workout schedule and used a “light day” when they felt as if they could use a little more rest.  It was, to reiterate, intuitive.

     Old-school legends didn’t feel as if they had to always be stronger at every single workout.  In some ways, they used what you might call a “Bulgarian approach” but applied it to pump training.  With the Bulgarian method, you max out on a lift at every single workout but you don’t worry about setting a PR each time.  You know that some days you’ll be stronger and some days weaker, but eventually even your light days will surpass your heavy ones as far as strength goes.  Many of the classic bodybuilders did train all-out and even used “intensity techniques” such as training to failure followed by partial reps, but they didn’t worry if the amount of weight they could use on these sets undulated from workout-to-workout.  In fact, they expected them to.

     When they felt particularly good, they’d do more sets and more total work for a muscle group.  Other days, they’d do quite a bit less.  This is one of the reasons that the bodybuilders in the ‘70s could train a muscle group 3 days per week with as many as 20 sets at each session.  One of the workouts each week would be all-out, but the others would use ¾ or even ½ of the workload of the heavier day.  But over time, they reached a point where even the lighter sessions were using a heavier workload than the “heavy” ones when they started.

     You can be systematic about this if you wish.  Here’s a good approach.  Let’s say that you train on a 3-on, 1-off schedule using a push/legs/pull split, where the 1st day is chest, shoulders, and triceps, the 2nd is legs, and the 3rd is back and biceps.  At the 1st push day, train heavy.  On the following leg day, train light.  On the 3rd session for back and biceps, train heavy.  After your off day, on the next chest, shoulders, and triceps day, train light.  Follow it with a heavy leg day and then a light back and biceps workout on the 3rd day.  This allows you to still train frequently enough to produce gains, but ensures that you’re relatively fresh despite the frequency and high-volume training.

The Sum of All Things Golden Era

     I was originally going to include a section on various exercises that the golden era bodybuilders used, but I realized as I was typing away that I have enough stuff in my mind to turn this into an entire series.  In subsequent essays, each part will focus on a different muscle group and the various exercises—many of them little-used by today’s bodybuilders—and methods that they used for the various bodyparts.  Whether the 2nd part will be my next post or I work on something else before then, I’m not sure at the moment.

     Look for my next article sometime early next week.  I’m going to be at a writer’s conference this weekend, so I won’t have any time to work on another essay before Saturday evening.  In the meantime, if you’re after more muscle, consider applying the lessons learned from the golden era legends.  Walk in their footsteps and achieve the same results they did.

     As always, if there are any comments or questions, leave them in the “comments” section below or send me an email if you prefer private correspondence.  I try to get around to answering my emails every couple days.

     If you enjoyed this essay and like reading my blog, please consider purchasing one of my books to support my work.  Click on the link for details on all of my books.  I hope to have a book on old-school bodybuilding ready for my publisher in the next several weeks.  If you liked this essay, you will like it.