The Old-School Way

The Classic Bodybuilding Approach to Cycling Workloads, Developing Work Capacity, and High-Frequency Training

     I’ve been lifting since the mid ‘80s, when my father bought me one of those old, shaky DP weight sets for, I think, my 13th birthday.  If you are my age or older, you know well the kind of set I’m talking about, with weights made of plastic, gray in color, and filled with cement.  Many a young man got their start in iron from just such a set.  It was about all you could find down at the local Sears & Roebuck department store.  The bench was flimsy as all get-out, the weights not that long-lasting, but, honestly, it got the job done.  In many ways, it was all I (or others) needed.  You could do deadlifts and cleans, overhead presses and curls, not to mention all the bench pressing your pre-pubescent heart desired.  Like all other young teenagers, I wanted a big chest and biceps, so I did entirely too much benching and curls.  Having written that, I did use it to supplement my martial arts training, though, even then, I did it as much to look like Bruce Lee or my favorite Shaw Brothers movie stars such as Gordon Liu and Lo Mang (and a couple years later, Jean Claude Van Damme) as I did to develop stronger punches and kicks.  Then, by the early ‘90s, it was bodybuilding that became my new love.  Bruce Lee was no longer my aesthetic ideal—now it was Lee Haney, Rich Gaspari, Lee Labarada, Bob Paris, Shawn Ray, Francis Benfatto, and a few others, though those 6 spring immediately to mind.  Around that same time, however, another bodybuilding star changed everything for those of us training in the pursuit of hypertrophy.

     The paradigm shift occurred in 1993, when Dorian Yates won his 2nd straight (he would go on to win 6 in a row) Mr. Olympia title.  What was paradigm shifting was the amount of muscle Yates put on his already massive frame after winning his first Mr. O.  Gaining a lot of mass in a short period of time is nothing new in the history of bodybuilding—from J.C. Hise and Mark Berry in the ‘30s to Casey Viator, and the infamous “Colorado experiment,” in the ‘70s—but to do it when you were already the largest, most massive, most well-built man walking the planet was something else entirely.  With Yates' rise came the simultaneous ascension of “high-intensity,” fairly low-volume, and no doubt low-frequency programs.*  Many bodybuilders switched over to similar training programs and, lo and behold, gained a lot of muscle mass.  Until, well, they didn’t.

     If you have been training with a lot of volume, and, in fact, too much total workload for what your body has the capability to handle, then switching over to a hard “briefer-is-better” program will no doubt bring you substantial gains.  The “issue” is that your gains are in response to the fact that you were simply training with too much volume and frequency than what you should have been doing to begin with, not the fact that you have stumbled upon the be-all, end-all training program—like some kind of Middle Earth muscle-building method, the one hypertrophy program to rule them all.

     The fact is that, for the majority of lifters, though not all, a high-frequency training (HFT) program is superior.  This is especially true if you are a natural lifter who doesn’t use any kind of performance enhancement, including “TRT.”  The “problem” with HFT is that many lifters don’t understand how to program it, or they don’t take their time to learn how to program it.  We won’t get into all of those “programming details” here—I have other essays on the blog that can answer some of that, and will write ones in the future, as well—but I do want to discuss a few thoughts swirling around my muscle-building-addled brain at the moment, where all things old-school seem to dwell and seem to perpetually provoke my writings.

     One reason for the popularity of “HIT” training such as the kind Yates utilized or anything similar—in the world of strength training, it would be Ken Leistner’s workouts—is that it’s easy to program.  You go to the gym, “destroy” and “annihilate” your muscle group (for some reason, high-intensity guys like to use a lot of military sounding jargon) in the workout with whatever “intensity techniques” your little Mentzer-inspired heart desires, and then wait until it’s no longer sore—which sometimes takes as long as a week—until you train that muscle again.  It’s a catch-22, however.  Sure, resting plenty between workouts allows your muscles to “rest and recover” (something your body may very well need depending on the kinds of workouts you were doing beforehand) but it also never allows your body to adapt to higher workloads.  You never develop a strong work capacity.  But developing the capability to handle heavy, high workloads—the definition of work capacity—is one of the most important factors if you want to develop a well-built, natural physique.  Of course, this doesn’t mean to simply start going to the gym and doing more workouts and training longer.  That kind of fool-hardy approach to high-volume, high-frequency training is what allowed “high-intensity” and “heavy duty” methods to become popular in the first place.  Instead, you need a well-planned approach, one that will allow you to slowly build up your work capacity over years of organized training cycles.

     The biggest myths about bodybuilders of the so-called “Golden” and “Silver” eras of old-school bodybuilding—from the 1940s up through the ‘70s—is that they trained with voluminous high-frequency routines because (A) they didn’t know any better and (B) they were genetically gifted “easy gainers.”  I believe this simply isn’t true; the view is, at the very least, short-sighted.  Not only is it wrong to assume that “they didn’t know any better” but it could be that they knew even better about training than we do now.  The bodybuilders of those eras were largely either natural or “low dose” steroid users.  Today, when high amounts of anabolic drug use is prevalent not just among professional bodybuilders but your average (often way too young) gym-goers, the training reflects that.  If you are using anabolic steroids, you may very well get much better results from infrequent training.  Being largely natural, the old-school bodybuilders experimented with different training methods until they found what was the most effective.  And, yes, many of the top bodybuilders of that time were the most genetically gifted—that’s the reason they were the Mr. Universes, and the Mr. Americas, and the Mr. Olympias of those eras—but that didn’t mean that your bodybuilder with the more “average” genetics couldn’t apply their workout programs to get good results.  They could.  And they did.

     Through trial and error, old-school bodybuilders knew that full-body programs were the best.  They didn’t just jump right into high-volume, split workout routines.  They transitioned to those regimens after they had built up the work capacity to handle them.  They used full-body workouts for years, slowly adding more sets and more exercises, until it reached the point that they had to switch over to a split routine, just so they weren’t in the gym for 3 hours (or longer) at each session.  And, once they reached that point, it was nothing for their work capacity to be able to handle 6 days straight of training—half the body one day and the other half the next—with 3 workouts per week for each muscle group.

     Old-school bodybuilders also cycled their training loads.  This might be the one factor that is misunderstood more than any of the others when modern bodybuilders read a training program from a champion bodybuilder of the ‘70s or before.  The misunderstanding largely comes from the magazines that printed their workouts.  You would often read that Mr. Champion Bodybuilder So-and-So trained a muscle group 3 days per week for 12 to 20 sets for each bodypart, using 3 to 5 exercises for 4 to 5 sets per exercise.  But what the magazines didn’t tell you is that not all of the workouts were heavy or even remotely hard.  I had a conversation one night with Jeff Everson—former publisher of Planet Muscle magazine and longtime editor-in-chief of Muscle & Fitness, along with being one heck of a bodybuilder in the ‘80s—about this very subject.  (He was also a really good guy—may Jeff’s memory be eternal.)  He told me that, having witnessed the champion bodybuilders of the ‘70s train, that what was printed in the magazines was often just one of their weekly workouts.  He said that, sure, they trained each muscle group 3x per week for multiple exercises and sets, but he said that only one of the workouts was what we would consider “hard” but the other two were light, or either one light or one medium.  He also said that some guys trained harder more often than others but that they all cycled their training loads.

     That’s the way that you should train, too.  Whether you do full-body workouts or a split program, there is no need for each workout to be “all out.”  Although I often push “systematic” programs, such as Bill Starr’s heavy-light-medium programs, you can also be more “instinctive” about it.  That’s how Everson said the old-school ‘builders went about it.  They didn’t train chest (or any of their muscle groups) heavy on Monday, light on Wednesday, and medium on Friday.  Rather, they just did what they felt needed to be done when they started training—they often didn’t know whether or not the workout was going to be “heavy” until their session actually began.

     Sometimes, that’s the way it goes.  You don’t know what you’re going to do until you start doing it.  But that does take, to steal the term from Bradley Steiner once more, the “mature muscle man.”  If you’re not at the level that you can train instinctively, you need to follow a more “set-in-stone” program.

     Writing articles and working out are more similar than you might think.  I intended for this article, just to use a handy example, to be about another subject entirely.  I won’t even tell you what the original title of this article was—I’ll save it for my next essay.  But as I started typing away on my laptop, and after producing 1,500 words in about 45 minutes, I realized that I hadn’t once mentioned the originally intended subject.  Writing is like that.  Lifting is like that.  Heck, life is like that.  It will surprise you with discoveries and epiphanies that you never saw coming.  Maybe it’s time for me to put down the computer, finish my cup of morning coffee, and head to my garage gym to see what the iron has in store for me today.  While I train, the wisdom of the old-school way will be swirling in my thoughts once more and influencing my workout.  In my humble opinion, that’s just the way it should be.

     If you enjoyed this essay, then you would like my book “Ultimate Mass and Power Essays.”  It’s filled with informative and (hopefully) entertaining stories, many like this one.  If you are one of those lifters who does need a systematic, full-body program, then consider purchasing my latest release “The Strongest Shall Always Survive.”  It has plenty of heavy-light-medium programs, from beginner to highly advanced training protocols.  For more info on those books, and others, visit the My Books page.

*I must note that Dorian Yates’s training wasn’t really as low-volume and “high-intensity” as the magazines, or Mentzer, would have had us believe.  Yes, he often did 1, or maybe 2, hard set(s) to complete momentary muscular failure for an exercise, but he did quite a few sets working up to that final, all-out set.  So, the magazines would print a Yates workout with 3 or 4 exercises for 1 or 2 sets per exercise, but it would have been just as true to say that he did 5 to 7 sets per exercise, since that’s how many “warm-up” sets he would do to work up to the “HIT” set.  Bill Starr didn’t call his method the 1x5 but the 5x5.  With Starr’s system, you work up over 5 progressively heavier sets to one hard, all-out set, so, using HIT terminology, it would be 1x5.  But, here’s the thing that HIT bodybuilders often miss, those progressively heavier sets matter.  They build up your workload, increase your work capacity, and, yes, they even build muscle.  It’s a complete mistake to assume that only the “final” set of an exercise taken to complete muscular failure is the one that produces hypertrophy.  They all matter.  Watch the video of Yates training from the ‘90s, titled “Blood and Guts,” and you will see that Yates does a large number of “ramp” sets, so many that it would be completely fair to call his program a “high-volume” routine.  Of course, he still rested a lot between workout sessions and trained each muscle group infrequently.  That is probably his biggest influence on modern bodybuilders.  A lot of “bro split” trainees do a high-volume, once-a-week-per-muscle program.