Real Bodybuilding the Old-School Way

 

How Classic Bodybuilders Gained Mass, Sculpted Their Physiques, and Achieved Fantastic Condition!

   

     Ever since I first picked up a muscle magazine in the 1980s, I have loved the old-school, classic bodybuilders from the decades that came before me.  I realize that I’m old enough that even my training heyday of the ‘90s is now considered “old-school,” which, if I’m being entirely honest, seems quite odd to me.  However, when I think of old-school, I think of the “silver era” of bodybuilding (roughly the ‘40s and ‘50s) along with the “golden age” of bodybuilding (‘60s and ‘70s).

     I still love those eras.  I love writing about those eras.  I love reading about those eras.  I love the training from those eras.

     I think that the training wisdom from those bygone days of bodybuilding glory has a lot to offer the modern bodybuilder, especially the drug-free one.  I also think there’s a lot of confusion about the training of the silver-era and golden-age bodybuilders.  Sometimes downright misinformation.

     Truth be told, when I first read some of the programs of many of those eras’ top bodybuilders, I thought one of two things, sometimes both together.  Because of the sheer amount of volume they utilized—in both a single workout and over the course of a week of training—I thought that (a) they were genetic freaks who could handle that amount of training and/or (b) they were ignorant of “proper” training, causing them to do too much work because they simply didn’t know any better.  The truth, however, is that I was the ignorant one that didn’t know better.  Those top bodybuilders took years to build up to that amount of workload.  They were pretty systematic about it, too.

     For the remainder of this essay, I would like to discuss the “secrets” that allowed those old-school bodybuilders to not just handle what we might consider an “insane” amount of volume and intensity, but that also allowed them to build massive, powerful, and lean physiques with little to no performance enhancing drugs.  I have a feeling that many bodybuilders today think of old-school, “classic” bodybuilding the way that I did at first.  But the truth is that most modern bodybuilders—at least, once again, the drug-free ones—would be better off training the old-school way than whatever it is they are currently doing.

 

The Methods that Built the Muscle

     Old-school methodology was actually fairly simple and straightforward.  Not easy by any stretch of the imagination, mind you, which is one reason that many bodybuilders won’t follow it even if they know it will produce better results than whatever-it-is they are currently doing. What follows is how a great many of the bodybuilders trained from the ‘40s up until the ‘70s.  Now, I realize that this is somewhat of a generalization, as there were some different methods utilized by some of the lifters, and some of the old-school bodybuilders didn’t follow the pattern I’m going to reveal here.  But they would have been the outliers.  Also, even within this system, there would be some bodybuilders who did more work.  And some who did less.  But the system itself was almost universal.

     For the most part, there were three stages to their training.   First, they built their physiques (by and large) through full-body workouts performed 3 days a week.  And this is not just something they did for the first 6 months of their training, or even the first year.  They utilized full-body workouts for several years before switching over to a different mode of training.  These full-body workouts were comprised of big, bang-for-your-buck movements, too—different varieties of squats, bench presses, overhead presses, cleans, snatches, deadlifts, and curls; done with barbells and dumbbells.  (Oh, and sometimes even kettlebells, if you think that’s something that wasn’t utilized until more recently in our training history.)  As they progressed, they did more-and-more work until they had built up not just an impressive physique, but one that could handle a hefty workload.

     During their use of full-body workouts for the first few years of training, they focused on bulk and power.  They worked on getting as strong as possible on all the aforementioned movements.  They ate a lot of food and got big, sometimes downright massive, but not fat.  Although they ate a lot, they made sure that their waistlines stayed in check.  There were guys, of course, who took this too far, but they always paid for it in the end because of how hard it was to get the bodyfat off.  Old-school lifters gained plenty of bulk and were “smooth” but not soft.  You could still see the muscles.  They didn’t want them to lie beneath too much fat.  Old-school they might have been, but they were still bodybuilders who prized aesthetics.

     After several years of this bulk and power training, once they had achieved their desired size, they then switched over to the 2^nd stage of training: specialization on lagging bodyparts.  There were some various ways in which to do this, but the most common was to continue training mainly full-body workouts 3 days a week, but with a difference.  They would save their bodyparts that needed improvement for another 3 days of training, on alternate days.  If your shoulders and calves were the muscle groups lagging behind the others, then you might train your chest, back, quads, hamstrings, biceps, triceps, and abs Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, in a manner similar to what you had been doing with full-body sessions.  Then, on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday, you would really blast your shoulders and calves to bring up those weak areas.  Now, after doing this for 8-12 weeks—the length of time spent on a particular specialization varied according to the lifter—you would then re-evaluate your physique and would often go to another bodypart or two that needed improvement and specialize on that bodypart (or two) for another cycle of specialization training.  You would continue with this approach for however long it took to build a massive, but balanced, physique.  It was then time for the 3^rd stage…

     At this point, the bodybuilder focused on definition, conditioning, and endurance while still adding more, quality size if needed.  They did this through 2-way split workouts, training one half of the body on one day and the other half on the next, often training 6 days per week, 3 days per muscle group.  The workouts at this point were chock full of a lot of work, often doing many sets per muscle group.  These were the sort of workouts that I read about as a young, aspiring bodybuilder.  And dismissed.  But the old-school ‘builder could handle it because he had taken the time over many years to really build up his work capacity so that, not only could he handle it, but he thrived on it.

     These workouts at the “last” stage weren’t, however, what might now be considered “pre-contest” workouts.  They didn’t just focus on definition and symmetry at this point.  In fact, most of these workouts were what we now commonly call “power bodybuilding” or just power building workouts.

     I thought about all of this recently when I was reading John McCallum’s “The Complete Keys to Progress.”  I’ve written about my love for this book recently, but if you’re not familiar with it, it’s a collection of columns that McCallum wrote for Strength & Health magazine in the ‘60s.  And if you read it straight through, you notice something: it follows the same system we’re discussing here.  His columns for the first couple of years were almost entirely focused on different forms of 3 day a week, full-body workouts.  Then, he wrote columns for another year or so that were mainly centered on different forms of specialization.  Then, his final columns were all about training for size and definition and endurance.  Oh, and health!  That’s another thing about this form of training.  Old-school bodybuilders believed in not just being big and strong but being lean and in good shape.  If you had problems walking up flights of stairs or going for a long, several-mile hike, then you were considered out of shape.

     I must note one other thing before wrapping this up.  Although I write of these different stages, it might be best to think of them, not as linear steps, but circular phases.  Old-school bodybuilders would often return to full-body workouts and specialization routines after a long time spent on “advanced” splits.  I think that’s a sound approach for all bodybuilders.

     The methods used by old-school bodybuilders are still good to this day.  As far as I’m concerned, when it comes to hypertrophy, the old-school way is still the way.