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Showing posts with the label classic bodybuilders

Old-School, Full-Body Mass Building

Get Big and Strong Using this Old-School Workout Program      Old school bodybuilders—from the ‘70s and before—built their muscles with full-body workouts.  They started their lifting careers with basic, full-body training sessions using only a limited amount of exercises, with a limited amount of sets to boot.  As they slowly built up their work capacity, they added sets to their exercises, and then added new exercises once they had the ability to handle them.  They stuck with full-body workouts even as they began to use multiple exercises per bodypart for multiple sets.  Eventually, some of these classic bodybuilders began implementing split programs, but that was only if their workouts got so long that they were almost forced to change to a split system.  But then there were guys like Clancy Ross—perhaps bodybuilding’s original mass monster—who stuck with full-body workouts throughout his career.      The old-school way is in stark contrast to modern bodybuilding.  Today, it’s not

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 it, “Modern bodybuilders couldn’t