Editor’s note: This is a continuation from the “Old School Patron Saints of Iron: Part 1.”

A Meal for Iron Titans

It was a one-block walk from the seaside gym to a famous diner that served terrific food 24 hours a day, seven days a week. A favored hangout for hardcore gym rats, this place was known for plain American food, deliciously prepared, served in heaping portions. Reg and Marvin walked on the quiet boardwalk in the hot sunshine; both men were in good spirits. They joked about how “insane” and “productive” the training session had been. They were both a little woozy and suffering from a mild form of shock. It was a crystal clear day and already in the 80s. They entered the small diner and grabbed a booth.

After the meal, both men looked in danger of falling asleep in the booth.

The two pumped-up giants sank into the cool green naugahyde booths. They placed their food order with the grey-haired waitress. Two giant glasses of whole milk arrived at the table and each man gulped it down, moaning in ecstasy. This was the start of a glutton-fest: they would flood their starved and beaten bodies with calories, lots and lots of delicious calories.

All food in the mid-fifties was local and organic. The quality of their food was better than ours. This was prior to the supermarket revolution that began in the 1960s. Here, oceanside USA, protein of all type was abundant, varied and cheap. Marvin would switch his proteins between beef, pork, fish, shellfish, and lamb. In that ancient age of nutritional innocence and ignorance, Marvin still got it about 85% right by today’s standards. He went strictly by instinct and was guided by results; he effortlessly maintained a sub-10% body fat percentile, due to his insane work ethic and his blast-furnace-like metabolism.

Without a massive intake of calories, no drug-free body would be able to stand up to the repeated and intense pounding these men routinely subjected themselves to. That day at their post-workout lunch, Marvin started off with two garden salads. He then ate a meatloaf dinner, which included a 2-inch thick slab of meatloaf slathered in gravy and a heap of superb mashed potatoes. The gravy was so delicious Reg kept “sampling” Marvin’s gravy, to the “little man’s” feigned annoyance. Marvin also had a side order of green beans with bacon. Marvin then ordered and ate a half a roast chicken. The diner’s rotisserie-slow roasted chicken was crispy-skinned and moist, and he was addicted to it. Two pieces of homemade pie came for desert, blueberry and apple, servied with vanilla ice cream.

Meanwhile Reg had asked about the lunch special, veal cutlets. He wanted to know, how many cutlets came with a dinner? Three large veal cutlets per order; each dredged in flour, deep-fried, covered with melted fontina cheese then covered in marinara sauce – plus a side of spaghetti noodles and garlic bread.

“Excellent,” Reg responded. “I shall have four of your delicious veal cutlet lunch specials!”

Reg loved the way the diner prepared the cutlets: tender, pink, local-raised milk-fed veal, soaked in buttermilk. They had to bring his food out in shifts; there was only so much table space in front of him. Reg always astounded Marvin with his voraciousness appetite; Reg ate like a man liberated from a concentration camp and taken straightaway to a Vegas mega-buffet. That day, he went ape-shit crazy. He ate twelve cheese-and-sauce covered cutlets, three bowls of spaghetti noodles and damned near an entire loaf of garlic bread. Then he downed four scoops of ice cream for desert.

Marvin stared at Reg and shook his head. Reg looked fifteen pounds heavier than before lunch. The whole process took nearly two hours. Finally satiated, each man was visibly fading from the effects of the training and the food. The sum total of the traumatic training, combined with the staggering intake of calories, was impacting the men quickly and dramatically. They both looked in danger of falling asleep in the booth. The rich English movie star roused himself, jabbed Marvin, stood, paid the check, left a 50% tip, and wobbled a bit as he walked out the diner door.

They each had a towel and Marvin had a canteen and a bottle of tanning lotion. They walked the two blocks to the ocean, stepped off the boardwalk and onto the sand. Reg loved the breaking waves, the eternal breeze, the cry of the gulls and the majestic view. The beach was deserted at 2pm on this windy Tuesday. Marvin led the way to one of his favored spots.

On the beach, both men went into a narcoleptic coma, a state of suspended animation.

Once each man made themselves comfortable atop the white-hot sand, both promptly fell dead asleep. They each went into a narcoleptic coma, a state of suspended animation. As they slept, maximally restorative growth hormone was released into the bloodstream. They were literally growing as they slept.

Their training had triggered the trauma needed to trigger hypertrophy and the adaptive response; the food provided the raw nutrient building-blocks needed to reconstruct shattered muscles and fuel new muscle growth; the deep sleep completed the growth equation. Their sleep was narcotic sleep, sleep of the richest, fullest and deepest variety. To compound the depth and degree of their deep sleep, they were roasting like rotisserie chickens in the sun and sand. The dry heat intensified the whole experience.

After an hour, a groggy Eder swam upwards from the depths of his wordless, mindless unconsciousness. He nudged Reg. It was important that he turn over; he didn’t want his white-bread friend to crispy fry and burn on one side. Reg turned face down and passed out again. He was knocked unconscious, completely enthralled in some deep state of restorative bliss. He barely breathed; his was in a state of physiological ecstasy, his sleep was so deep and profound that he had achieved a state of hibernation. Growth hormone was coursing through his system; he was in a state of utter and bliss, deep relaxation.

As the two massive muscle men slept, the sun’s rays baked them. After another hour, Marvin stirred; groggily he took a long pull of water off the canteen. He sat up and nudged Reg. Time to head home. The two men would get together later for diner at a steakhouse and then head to a friendly bar. Reg would drink beer. Marvin would drink his milk.

Thus ended another perfect day in iron paradise…

Strength and power increases that created concurrent increases in muscle growth and muscle size.

Lessons to Be Learned from the Patron Saints of Iron

So what lessons are to be learned from spending a day with Marvin and Reg? Compared to the men of yesteryear, modern man under-trains, under-eats, and under-rests. Nowadays everyone is afraid of injury and over-training. “Moderns” are frightened of over-eating and eating the wrong thing. It would never occur to the average modern trainee to go the extremes in training and nutrition that the “ancients” did on a regular and routine basis.

The ancients didn’t overthink the process. They trained hard and they trained long and they trained a lot. They ate voraciously and with gusto; they didn’t nitpick over micronutrient content. They made time to sleep, they believed in deep rest. As a direct result of this simplistic yet radical approach, they grew gargantuan, they strengthened, they thickened, and thus improved in every measurable benchmark.

The degree of extremism these ancient men routinely demonstrated is sadly lacking in today’s sane and rational modern man. Winston Churchill once said of a political opponent, “A modest man – with much to be modest about.” And so it is with modern man, circa 2016: a race of modest, moderate, sensible men – with much to be modest about.

Early iron pioneers discovered the irrefutable relationship between increasing muscle strength that invariably resulted in an increase in muscle size. They also discovered the irrefutable relationship between food and recovery. The ancients advanced the idea that you could and should coordinate eating with training and add in legislated rest to achieve the desired end result: strength and power increases that created concurrent increases in muscle growth and muscle size.

Massive caloric intake creates anabolic fertility. And when anabolic, all the preconditions necessary for muscle growth are present and accounted for. Then all that is needed is a bar-bending, high-intensity, hardcore, free-weight weight training session that decimates the targeted muscles. Hard training followed by big eating accelerates growth and accelerates recovery; calories regenerate muscle tissue shattered during those extended sessions. The pre-steroid ancients stumbled onto the greatest secret in the history of transformational fitness. To transform the body you must:

1. Decimate a muscle
2. Feed the decimated muscle
3. Rest the decimated muscle

The Perversion of Anabolic Steriods

Anabolic steroids perverted everything. No longer could one tell where the man ended and the drugs began. A worse man with a better drug program could whip a better natural man most every time. To make matters worse, state-sponsored doping became epidemic. When communism was thriving, sports monoliths treated athletes like patients; teams of doctors created athletic Frankenstein monsters. This is still going on today.

In Marvin and Reg’s era, the 1950s, the entire world was drug-free. In the glorious pre-steroid era, all athletes everywhere were confined to using barebones tools – because that was all there was: they had barbells and dumbbells, perhaps a flat bench; if lucky some homemade squat racks, a chin bar and maybe a dip apparatus. Being limited to primitive tools and ultra-basic exercises turned out to be an advantage. When the name of the game is acquiring power, strength, and muscle, old-school resistance training methods using crude tools to perform primal exercises with maximum effort creates optimal results.

These primordial iron pioneers stumbled into the most effective form of progressive resistance exercise ever invented: free-weight exercises, compound multi-joint exercises, all done using a full range of motion and pristine techniques. Heavy poundage was handled for low to moderate reps for multiple sets; muscles were intentionally blasted to smithereens in every single session. By combining power training with power eating (and power resting) strength skyrocketed and muscle size gains went through the roof. The pre-steroid ancients achieved results in size and strength that, in many instances, remain unsurpassed to this day.

Anabolic steroids perverted everything.

The Use of Caloric Anabolism

To compliment their uber-effective high intensity/high volume resistance training, these men added high calorie, nutrient-dense, organic eating. The copious calories made them anabolic; they would eat thousands of calories pre-workout and thousands of calories post-workout. Just as they had built their work capacity over time, so to had they build up their appetite capacity. Their metabolisms raged like a bonfire. They taught their body to expect food/fuel every few hours, and in turn, their bodies became adept at digesting and distributing nutrients that were consumed often.

Marvin and Reg had stumbled onto the eternal secret for spurring muscle growth: combine super-intense progressive resistance exercise with the copious consumption of rich, organic, wholesome food. The pioneers manipulated their food intake to improve results; they tweaked their food selections and modulated their food quantity in order to elicit specific physical change. This relationship between food and training was recognized and systematized.

The Need to Sleep Big

Reg and Marvin were exhausted, physically and psychologically, after a brutal training session. When followed by copious eating the natural inclination was to want to take a nap. If they gave into that natural urge, both men noted how deep that sleep was, how refreshing and revitalizing it was, how incredibly wonderful they felt when they awoke. They became adept at entering into a sleep-state mimicking catatonic narcolepsy.

They would pass out and enter into a sleep so deep and so profound that they entered into a healing state of suspended animation bordering on hibernation. Marvin swore he could “feel himself grow” as he slept. Reg was equally as insistent on “making time for sleep.” Both men felt that a nutrient-dense post-workout meal followed by a “power nap” delivered superior results to the training and the meal sans nap. Both men felt that deep restorative sleep optimized results. Deep and abundant rest was the final piece needed to solve the growth cycle puzzle.

More on training approaches:

Simple Progression Training: Where Did It Go?

Photos courtesy of Pixabay.

The post The Old School Patron Saints of Iron: Part 2 appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

When it comes to building muscle size and power, the eternal solution has been to combine resistance training with the anabolic properties of wholesome, regular food. The third piece to the growth equation is to take advantage of the regenerative properties of deep sleep. The trainee purposefully traumatizes the muscle, then feeds the muscle, and finally rests that muscle. Do so repeatedly to grow and strengthen that muscle.

Results and tangible gains in muscle and strength were leveraged in primal time. [Photo courtesy of Pixabay]

What follows is a fictionalized “docu-drama,” a mostly fact, partly fiction recollection of a day in the life of two immortal iron athletes: Reg Park and Marvin Eder. The rationale behind this is to show readers how results and tangible gains in muscle and strength were leveraged in a time before workout apps and powdered supplements.

The workout, sets, reps, and poundage are based on actual workouts and actual poundage used by this duo. The data was gleaned from previously printed material. The nutrition, the food strategies, and the quantities eaten are also taken from previously printed articles on both men. I have taken ‘artistic license’ in weaving the narrative between the two protagonists; I relate the actual workouts while I surmise how the two would have interacted.

Enter Our Protagonists

Marvin Eder was from Brooklyn and Reg Park was from England. The two men periodically trained together in the mid 1950s. Our story takes place in 1955, in the untainted pre-steroid era when radical results could only be attributed to training, nutrition, genetics, and work ethic. One truism both men came to realize independently was that the stronger they became, the more muscle they created. They recognized the irrefutable relationship between muscle strength and muscle size. They each sought to exploit this relationship, this elemental truism.

To build massive muscles, they knew they needed to handle massive poundage in Herculean workouts. But how far could they take this approach, this crazed combination of volume and intensity, without breaking themselves, damaging themselves, injuring themselves, and thereby derailing the effort? These men strode the razor’s edge that separates effective hypertrophy and training from catastrophic injury. Their manic training sessions were high-wire acts done without a net. But they both knew that extremism was where the big gains lay hidden.

These two men, along with Bill Pearl, were so far ahead of the rest of the humanity that, at the time, each man seemed superhuman. These guys were space aliens. Marvin Eder cleaned and pressed 345lb weighing 195lb. Reg Park bench pressed 500lb at a time when 300lb was considered amazing. When these two titans got together to train they pushed each other to stratospheric levels.

Opposites Do Attract

As people, Marvin Eder and Reg Park were complete opposites, physically and psychologically. Yet, as is so often the case, opposites attract. When they had the opportunity, the two men loved to get together and train. They loved to push each other past capacity in a game of alpha male one-upmanship. Their joint training sessions always resulted in superior workouts. They also enjoyed each other’s company.

They had a mutual admiration, and personality-wise the two men jelled. Marvin really was not much of an ego guy and Reg really liked Marvin as a person. Reg’s accent and outsized personality made Marvin laugh. Both men liked to be pushed in training, something that didn’t happen a lot because both were twice as strong as the bodybuilders they normally trained with. Reg and Marvin had developed training protocols that were remarkably similar, yet each arrived at the same conclusion independently.

Reg Park was the greatest European bodybuilder of his day and arguably the greatest bodybuilder in the world. Inarguably he was the man that mentored Arnold Schwarzenegger. Reg burst onto the British bodybuilding scene in the early 1950s and simply took over. Tall and handsome as the Greek god that he would later play in Hercules movies, Reg Park was a full 6’2″, weighed 240lb, and sported 9% body fat. He had a fabulous set of budging, beautifully proportioned muscles. He had great structural architecture: wide shoulders, narrow hips, great calves. Reg was as strong as he looked, and could squat 550lb when 350lb was considered incredible.

Marvin Eder, in contrast, was a short yet extremely well built man. Perhaps 5’5″, Marvin weighed 195lb and was the strongest man in the world at his bodyweight. He was the proverbial brick shithouse. Marvin was all power from head to toe, and his lifts are legend. He could deadlift 665lb, despite it being a lift he never practiced. He could strict curl a pair of 100s for eight reps and then, without setting the bells down, press them for eight reps. Eder could dip with 445lb strapped to his waist; he rep rowed with 405lb and could do a press behind the neck with 330lb. During his glorious peak, no man on the planet could match Eder in strength on a pound-for-pound basis.

Pictured: Bill Pearl

The Titans Clash on the Bench

In July of 1955, Reg Park was stateside and had arranged to stay at the beach for a few weeks. It seemed only natural that Mr. Universe would visit Marvelous Marvin, and that they would get together to train. Marvin and Reg met at the seaside gym at 10am on a Tuesday. They would be attacking two exercises simultaneously: the barbell bench press would be “super-setted” (alternated) with the barbell row. The bench press would maximally tax the upper and lower pecs, the front and side deltoids and triceps. The barbell row would work upper and lower lats, rear deltoids, rhomboids, and teres. Two barbells were set up and the barbell for rowing was positioned on the floor next to the loaded bench press.

Each man took three warm up sets in each exercise, honing technique and acclimatizing to heavier poundage with each successive set. They benched and then rowed in turn, first Reg, then Marvin. Each exercise began with 135lb. After successive warm up sets with 135lb, 225lb, and 315lb, they were ready for the meat and potatoes of the workout: eight sets of eight reps each in the bench and row with 365lb for both lifts.

This is an astonishing volume of work. They sought to perform 64 reps with 365lb in the bench press and 64 reps in the row with 365lb. That’s 128 cumulative reps, and 46,720 cumulative pounds lifted (if anybody’s counting). The duo took less than 15 minutes to work through their six combined warm up sets. They took a water cooler break and then readied for the real work.

Reg Park was a massive and imposing man, tall and wide, on that day he was 245lb. He bulled the weights around, using a raw, slightly out of control style. Marvin, in stark contrast, was a natural technician, a lifting machine. His techniques were exemplary textbook stuff, cutting-edge, and extremely efficient. Reg was a Viking in attack mode, or perhaps a charging rhino; Marvin was a surgeon, a sniper, a robot.

As was expected, each man manhandled the first five sets of eight in the bench/row super-set. However, on set 6 Reg Park began to falter, he made his final reps on the bench press, but rep eight was barely there. Marvin quietly got fired up seeing his friend stumble. After all, both men were highly competitive alpha males. On set seven, Reg lost a rep off his bench press and he could not pull his 8th row rep to his chest.

Marvin the Machine made it through his seventh round with power to spare. The two exhausted men took their longest rest break between sets 7 and 8, five full minutes. When they were ready, they grinned and shook hands. Both were sweat-soaked and both had muscles that felt more like lead. The adrenaline had long since been exhausted and they were running on nerve, willpower, and machismo.

Muscles were maximally pumped and engorged with blood. Each man’s central nervous system was fried from the severity of the effort. The careful observer would note how Reg Park’s arms involuntarily shook as he tried to gather himself for one final, all out assault. He pulled himself together and revved himself up into a berserker mindset for one final kamikaze, all out effort. In his eyes, his manhood was on the line.

Reg gathered his mojo for the 8th and final set; he stood stock-still in front of the exercise bench and stared at the barbell like he was trying to hypnotize it. Marvin watched, dumbfounded. Reg glanced at Marvin and thought he detected smug satisfaction on Marvin’s face. To Reg, Marvin had the look of the magnanimous victor in a competition just won. And he, Reg, was the vanquished. Anger began to roil in Reg, like lava percolating in the core of an active volcano. Reg wanted the anger; he would channel it and redirect it and use it to his berserker advantage.

He looked at Marvin again; Yes! That was a smirk! Reg Park stomped his foot and cursed, then let loose with an incomprehensible scream at the top of his lungs:

“EZNOBLOODYWANKERPISSHELL!!!

This startled the hell out of a dazed and exhausted Marvin Eder. While Reg conjured up a smirking, triumphant Marvin, Eder had actually been spaced out, distracted, and thinking about what food he would order later at the diner. Marvin had been sprawled against the dumbbell rack, just wanting this death march of a training session to be over. And now Reg Park was going berserk. What the hell had gotten into him? Five minutes ago, Marvin was ready to call Reg an ambulance and now he’s frothing at the mouth like a crazed psychopath with bugged-out eyes that circled in different directions crazily.

Marvin rushed to the rickety bench with the flimsy uprights and lifted off the 365lb to Reg. As Marvin guided the barbell out and over Reg’s pecs, and before releasing his grip, Marvin stole a glance at Reg’s face. It was contorted into that of a mad man, an insane person. His well-spoken, witty, funny friend, was gone, replaced by an insane alter ego, who screamed as he repped, spittle flying, banging out sloppy, crazy reps like a jackhammer. He made the first six reps before he started to stall, then somehow made rep seven – barely.

“Oh my God,” Marvin thought, “Reg is going to try another rep.” Marvin placed his hands on the barbell when it became clear Reg the maniac was lowering for rep eight. If Reg collapsed, Marvin would try is best prevent the 365lb barbell from splitting his skull open. Marvin looked down at Reg’s tomato-red face, blood vessels bulging on both sides of his neck. Marvin decided to give Reg some fuel.

“C’MON YOU PUSSY ENGLISHMAN! We had to save your asses in TWO WORLD WARS!”

Marvin knew the right insult at the right time would cause Park to go further insane.

“EEEEAGHHHH!!!”

Park screamed as he pushed his guts out. In truth, Marvin had to help Reg through the sticking point to complete the rep – but no matter, the desired effect was attained. The barbell clattered and the plates jingled as it was dumped back onto the supports. Park leapt up off the bench as if he’d been electrocuted. He was jubilant. He was also gigantic, pumped to what appeared to be twice his original size.

Reg’s face had morphed from deranged fiend into Herculean hero. He announced with perfect enunciation, “I shall now ROW!” Before Marvin could utter “be my guest”, Park was attacking the barbell on the floor with a violence that was shocking. Reg screamed on each rep and on each subsequent rep he yelled louder and rowed with increased violence. He made six reps, stopped, set the barbell on the floor and knelt, gasping but not releasing his grip. After five breaths, he reassumed the row position and banged out the final two reps.

He collapsed to the floor in a panting, wheezing heap. Reg was done, literally, figuratively, spiritually, physically, and emotionally. Reg had pushed so far past capacity that Marvin wondered if Reg was having a heart attack. He began to grow concerned.

“Reg, seriously, are you all right?”

An exhausted Park looked up, heart beating out of his chest, and grinned maniacally and hissed, “Never better in my life mate!” He extended his arm and Marvin pulled the big man to his feet.

After that theater of the dramatic, Marvin was going to serve up a different flavor of whoop-ass. Not to be anticlimactic, but after seeing Reg use his gonzo maniac psyche to propel him across the finish line, there was no way in hell Marvin Eder was not going to crush these two final sets and do so with complete control and precision. Now it is true that on rep 7 of the final set in the bench press Marvin slowed, and rep 8 was slower still – but the outcome was never in doubt. Then he crushed the rows in robotic fashion. To punctuate his performance, Marvin did ten reps on the final set of rows.

“You bastard,” the grinning Park remarked as Marvin coolly set the barbell down quietly and carefully and stood. Marvin, like Reg, had exponentially expanded himself. The thickest pecs in the world just got a whole lot thicker.

Both men shook hands and laughed. There was nothing to say. What they were experiencing was the hormonal after-glow that comes in response to 100% effort expended over an extended period. The result is utter and complete physical decimation; with the effort and the decimation comes a wordless state of zen bliss. Physically traumatized, mentally exhilarated, torrents of narcotic-like endorphins were coursing through their veins. The two men hit the gym showers and within 30 minutes both were clean, somewhat refreshed, attired in beach wear, and ready to eat some food.

To be continued…

More on “primitive” training methods:

Of Muscles and Might: The Workman’s Conditioning Program

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