Classic Bodybuilding Articles and Essays

Classic Bodybuilding: Serge Nubret's "Chase the Pump" Training

For those of you who are my age or older, you can probably remember well the first time you saw the amazing physique of Serge Nubret: It was in the pseudo-documentary we all now know and love as “Pumping Iron.” With the director and writers of Pumping Iron attempting to make out the film as a “David vs Goliath” with the young (but massive) Lou Ferrigno taking on the older “Goliath” in the form of Arnold Schwarzenegger, they had no idea that their whole half-true enterprise would crumble a bit with the entry of Serge Nubret. You took one look at Nubret and you knew there was no doubt that Ferrigno was out of his league with both Schwarzenegger and the Frenchmen. (Nubret was French.) Nubret - to this day - had one of the most classically beautiful physiques of all-time. Arnold, of course, won the whole thing, but Nubret easily came in 2nd. By the time I watched Pumping Iron sometime in the mid to late ‘80s, there was very little information that I could fin...

Marvin Eder’s Mass-Building Methods

The Many and Varied Mass-Building Methods of Power Bodybuilding’s G.O.A.T. Eder as he appeared in my article "Full Body Workouts" for IronMan magazine. In many ways, the essay you are now reading is the one that has had the “longest time coming.” I have no clue why it has taken me this long to write an article specifically on Marvin Eder, especially considering the fact that I have long considered him the greatest bodybuilder cum strength athlete of all friggin’ time . In fact, over 20 years ago, I wrote this in the pages of IronMan magazine: In my opinion, the greatest all-around bodybuilder, powerlifter and strength athlete ever to walk the planet, Eder had 19-inch arms at a bodyweight of 198. He could bench 510, squat 550 for 10 reps and do a barbell press with 365. He was reported to have achieved the amazing feat of cranking out 1,000 dips in only 17 minutes. Imagine doing a dip a second for 17 minutes. As Gene Mozee once put ...

Consistency and Variety

The Two Keys to Mass-Building, Strength-Training Success The other day, in my essay on the “ 2 principles of strength training ,” I outlined what I believe are the two most important principles for continued results in strength training or muscle-building (or a combination of the two). In many ways, those two principles revolve around staying consistent and injecting variety into your programs. So, here, I want to present some thoughts on much the same concept but frame it in a slightly different manner to touch upon varied aspects of proper programming. I’m going to call these the “two keys to success” and they are: 1. You must be consistent. 2. You must inject variety into your program. Consistency is the key for continued success, make no bones about it. This is true no matter your goal. You must train consistently to impro...

C.S. Sloan's Integral Strength

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