Full-Body Blast

George Turner’s Old-School Full-Body Program for Gaining 90 Pounds—that’s right, 90!—of Pure Muscle

George Turner was in his 60s in this picture!

     When it comes to old-school bodybuilders, George Turner remains one of my favorites.  Probably because of the fact that he was more than just a competitive bodybuilder.  He was a gym owner along with being a damn good writer of (damn good) training articles.  He was also a bit—how should it be said?—curmudgeonly.  But he was without a doubt curmudgeonly in the best possible way.  He was, in many ways, similar to Vince Gironda in that regard, just without the disdain for squats.  (That’s right, as much as I like Gironda, he wasn’t a fan of the barbell back squat.)  Myself, I love back squats.  As did Turner.

     Anyway, that paragraphic preamble is just a way of writing that, as I was thumbing through an old IronMan magazine this morning, looking for an article of mine that appeared in the muscle rag sometime in the late ‘90s, early ‘00s—which I did find, by the way, but I’ll save the information on that particular article for another essay sometime later in the month—I stumbled upon another article by George Turner that I had been looking for a couple months ago, but never could find at that time.  It happens—rather frequently, I must add—that I will often think about an old article, remembering roughly what magazine it might have been in, and then go on a search for the magazine in my attic.  I occasionally find the article/magazine that I’m in search of, but, more often than not, to no avail.  Part of that is my fault, as I have box after box after box filled with magazines in my attic, and the boxes, for the most part, all look mighty similar.  Picture, if you will, the warehouse that houses the lost ark of the covenant at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark—only in miniature—and you can see what it is that I’m up against.

     The article in question was entitled “Full-Body Blast: Train Your Body as a Unit for Maximum Muscle,” and I was searching for it a couple months ago because I wanted to include some of Turner’s thoughts on full-body workouts for one of my, well, full-body training articles.  The article (obviously) is Turner’s approach to full-body training and is the workout that he most recommended when training full-body.  (He wrote variations on the program in a couple of different articles, but we won’t get into those nuances here.)

     The program is similar to what Turner and others utilized starting in the 1940s.  Of that time in his (training) life, Turner had this to say[1]: “Some of us who’d been training awhile realized early on that not only did weight work rapidly make you stronger than your non-weight-training friends, but you also got muscles!  Even so, training was kind of a covert activity back in the ‘40s.  We pretty much kept our weight workouts to ourselves.  No one gave a thought to bodybuilding competitions.  Muscle magazines like Strength & Health and Iron Man rarely covered them.  Weightlifting was the only sport that got any coverage, and that was cursory at best.

     “Instead, the magazines focused on the strength, health, and endurance you could achieve through regular, intelligent weight training.  The idea of training just to build a physique that you could show off onstage was so blatantly narcissistic that if you’d told people you were doing it, you’d have been regarded as odd, even by your training buddies.

     “It wasn’t until after WW2 that organizations started staging regular physique competitions, and even then the shows were all amateur.  I started training with weights in 1942.  In ’48, I got a part-time job running the weight room at the Y.  Two years later, I opened my first commercial gym.  Until that point in my career, I always trained with a full-body workout.”

     Before we go any further, and I continue with Turner’s wise, sagely advice, let’s just pause for a moment and read that last sentence one more time.  Turner trained for 8 years on a full-body program!  Turner, like others of his era, believed that full-body workouts were the best at not just gaining muscle mass, but of building muscles that were functional.  Later, in the same article, he wrote this: “If you train for years on a basic, full-body program, you’ll find that you can apply your hard-earned physical gains to anything.  Bodybuilding is just ONE possibility. Total-body training changed me from a skinny kid of about 130 pounds to a strong, heavily muscled 22-year-old man of 220 pounds who was squatting 450 pounds for 10 reps and doing cleans with 255 pounds for 8 reps and military presses with 270.”

     With that intro out of the way—hopefully, I’ve whetted your muscle-building, strength-training, full-body workout appetite just a little—let’s look at the program that Turner specifically recommended:

The Full-Body Blast Workout (Turner said “it ain’t for sissies!”)

     “The following is an excellent total-body workout but make no mistake: it’s not for beginners.  In fact, if you’ve been using a split routine—which is usually a purely bodybuilding approach, designed without consideration for overall strength conditioning—you’ll probably have to work up to the complete program gradually.”

Start by training every third day

     Turner’s first piece of advice, before he got around to outlining the actual routine, was to recommend that most lifters start by training every 3^rd day, not the typical 3 days per week.  So, at first, you would train on Monday, then Thursday, then Sunday, then Wednesday, and so on and so forth.  This will give you approximately 10 workouts a month.

Stick with that schedule the first 3 months

     After 3 months of every 3^rd day training, switch over to the “typical” 3 days a week, training on, say, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday—or whatever 3 non-consecutive days you prefer.  When training 3 days a week, for instance, my favorite days were always Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday.  I liked getting in a hard workout on Sundays, before I started my “work week” the following morning, and I enjoyed having off Fridays and Saturdays for rest, relaxation, and spending time with my family.

     Now, Turner’s next piece of advice is one that you might want to try, but don’t feel as if you must do this.  He recommended, after 2 months of 3 days a week, switching over to an every-other-day program for a month, where you never take off 2 days after any of the workouts.  This way, for that last month, you can get in 15 workouts instead of the 10 you started with 5 months prior.  “By this time, your body will have taken on a much more symmetrical appearance.  You’ll be able to sustain your strength and energy throughout the entire workout, and not only will you be recovering completely between workouts, but you’ll be much stronger and more proficient at all physical activities outside the gym, whether you’re playing softball, climbing rocks, shoveling snow, or whatever.  You’ll be in far better condition than you were when you started, I guarantee it.”

The 12-Exercise Full-Body Program

     You will start the workout by training your abs and your lower body with 4 movements.  When you are finished with the lower body work, Turner recommended resting for 8 to 10 minutes before completing the upper-body portion of the session.

1.      Steep sit-ups: 4 x 30, 25, 20, 15

2.      Squats: 4 x 15, 12, 10, 8.  “Position your feet shoulder width apart, squat between your legs, not over them, and go below parallel (to the ground) on every rep.  Do NOT bounce on the bottom.  Pyramid your weights.  These sets should require maximum effort.”

3.      Leg curls: 4 x 10, 8, 8, 8

4.      Machine or donkey calf raises: 6 x 15, 15, 12, 12, 10, 10

5.      Bench presses: 4 x 12, 10, 8, 7.  “Use a slightly wider than shoulder-width grip, touch the weight just above your nipples, and don’t bounce the weight or arch your back off the bench.  Pyramid the weight.  The last 3 sets should require a maximum effort.”

6.      Incline dumbbell presses: 4 x 10, 8, 8, 8

7.      Wide-grip chins: 4 x failure.  “Try to get at least 12 reps on every set.   Really stretch out at the bottom.”

8.      Barbell or T-bar rows: 4 x 8. “Do all 4 sets as heavy as you can, without cheating.”

9.      Seated dumbbell presses: 4 x 10, 8, 8, 6

10. Hang power cleans: 4 x 8. “This is a favorite of mine.  It’s a tough but great exercise for traps and lower back and a great all-around conditioner.  It’s just about as important to your upper body as squats are to your legs, so make a real effort to get all the reps.

11. Seated dumbbell curls: 5 x 8, supersetted with:

12. Lying triceps extensions: 5 x 12

     I’ll leave you with the words of Turner to sum up this program:

     “This is a kick-ass 2-hour workout—that’s what it should take once you’ve gotten used to it.  Don’t try to do all the sets right away.  Start with about 3 sets per exercise.  If you’ve been following a split routine, don’t be discouraged if this workout gets difficult about 2/3 of the way through it.  Once you’re accustomed to it, you’ll see dividends you never got from split training—and you’ll be in the greatest overall shape of your life.”

 

 

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[1] All italicized quotes that follow are Turner’s and come from the article “Full-Body Blast” in the September 2001 issue of IronMan magazine.