More Anthony Ditillo Training Wisdom for Developing Size and Strength My recent essay on the training methods of the great bodybuilding writer Anthony Ditillo has proven quite popular, more so than I thought it would be when I posted it. When I wrote it, I knowingly left out a few of his training routines due to length constraints. I was afraid it was a bit too long as is when I finished it, since my shorter articles tend to get the most views. Besides, I figured I could always write more down the road, though “down the road,” in this case didn’t prove to be very long. Ditillo was a huge proponent of using the “big,” basic barbell movements—squats, overhead presses, bench presses, bent-over rows, deadlifts, barbell curls, and the like. But in one of his many articles for Ironman , he wrote that there were three movements in particular that were all you needed to, in his words, “build great massiveness a...
Lessons in Strength and Muscle Building from Russian Weightlifting and Powerlifting Methods Ever since I wrote my essay The Bulgarian Way back in May of this year, I have had what you are now reading in my mind. That article—I recommend reading it if you haven’t already—was on the lessons bodybuilders and lifters can learn from the methods of the Bulgarian weightlifters. When I first started training back in the ‘80s, Bulgarian training was an almost mythical form of training. We had heard about it, or read a little about it, but we actually knew very little. When the “Serious Growth” manuals started appearing in advertisements in various bodybuilding magazines—particularly “Serious Growth 3: Big Beyond Belief”—purporting to explain how bodybuilders could use the methods of Bulgarian strength training in pursuit of hypertrophy, a willing and gullible bodybuilding public gobbled it up. For those who are/were actually “in the kn...