Classic Bodybuilding Articles and Essays

Real Bodybuilding: Old-School Antagonistic Chest and Back Training

Before we get started here, I want to apologize for the delay in posts. I have been working on, and formatting, my e-books so that I can start selling paperback versions of the same books. Be on the lookout for those in the next week or two. With that out of the way... I have a semi-regular, semi-ongoing series which I have titled “Real Bodybuilding.” The first installment—which I never, by the way, planned on being the first in a series of training articles—was some scribblings and thoughts on how old-school, real bodybuilders actually trained before the advent of large doses of various anabolic steroids in bodybuilding (which changed everything). And after writing that one, there was enough interest in the topics discussed that I thought some follow-up articles and essays were in order. Before we go any further, here are the links to the past installments. Reading th...

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 ...

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...

C.S. Sloan's Integral Strength

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