Historians can fall in love.
It’s true. I’ve seen it countless times and have, on rare occasions, fallen in love myself. The problem for historians is that the people we fall in love with are often dead, and in many cases, often very cranky and contentious people. Simply put, they’re the most interesting in the archive.
My historical crush, despite how much I write on Eugen Sandow, is the ‘Iron Guru’ Vince Gironda (1917-1997). From the 1960s to 1980s Gironda was a fountain of bodybuilding knowledge. He trained some of the sport’s most aesthetic physiques, including two-time Mr. Olympia Larry Scott and two time Olympia runner up Mohamed Makkawy.
Every time I come across Gironda’s materials I can’t help but smile for one simple reason. The man was a truly creative thinker. He reinvented certain exercises and movements, was obsessed with symmetry and his supplement guidelines were incredibly detailed (which is my polite way of saying insane).
The thing about Gironda is that his methods worked. He was a highly sought after coach and one of the few voices respected by the majority of trainees. Was he a perfect person? Far from it, and according to contemporaries, he was blunt to the point of being insulting. The ‘Iron Guru’ had an opinion on almost everything, and his six-week bulk course from the late 1960s/early 1970s, is a great example.
Gironda began the short course with a simple question.
“Do you want increased body weight, or is it size that you are after?”
According to him, the answer was invariably, and perhaps obviously, “SIZE”! To steal from Arnold’s nutritionist John Balik, you ‘can’t flex fat.’
In other words, Gironda drew a sharp distinction between getting heavier (i.e. just increasing the number on the scale) and actually building muscle. The latter, especially for advanced trainees, can be heartbreakingly difficult. Gaining weight, on the other hand, can be pretty easy. Gironda was in the body-building business so his answer was to
“not confuse body weight with muscle growth.”
Dan John, who is now on Substack, has a wonderful reminder to “keep the goal the goal.” For Gironda bodybuilding had three parts, muscle building, leanness and symmetry. Anything that took away from these goals was useless and, for those doubting his commitment, Gironda was the man who famously told Arnold he was too fat to win contests when the Austrian Oak first landed in America. In Gironda’s defence, he was VERY lean when he himself competed in the 1950s.
Let’s begin this post not with Gironda roasting Arnold but with some of the 32 movements he used in his bulking routine.
The Six-Week Bulk Routine and Its Weirdest Movements
In his bulking course, Gironda divided his workouts across eight body parts, with four exercises each. Similar to his 8×8 program, there was “no hesitation (no rest between sets)”, and you had to move deliberately from one movement to the next. Rep ranges ran from four to twelve reps, increasing reps progressively across workouts. This was a fairly standard way of progressing back in the day. Begin with four to six reps on a certain weight. Keep adding reps across workouts and, once you hit twelve reps, increase the weight and begin again at six reps. Even though exercises were done at a fairly fast clip, tempo was important.
“You must use slow movements (no cheating).”
Many of the movements Gironda recommended are pretty straightforward and recognisable. The basics remain for a very simple reason… they work. But it’s the movements that are unfamiliar that I find so fascinating because they show a thinking mind at work.
Gironda’s chest routine began with a wide parallel-bar dip with the bars around thirty-two inches apart and the chin tucked into the chest. The back had to remain rounded, and the toes were pointed down beneath the face. The elbows had to move outward and “never back”. This, he believed, isolated the lower fibres of the chest. Here is Daryl Conant, a really good Gironda writer, detailing the right form.
Gironda’s sternum chin was even better, albeit its tougher than a two-dollar steak. Instead of pulling your chin up over a bar, or swingly your legs wildly until your momentum carries you upward (you know who you are), Gironda’s chin ups did things differently. Here you arched your back, pushed your head back and pulled until your sternum touched the bar. Gironda’s explanation was simple.
“The function of the latissimus is to draw the shoulder girdle down and back!”
And his tolerance for anything else was eloquent.
“Any other type form is worthless!”
Again here is the form video
His back section also included a pulley row with the exact specification to keep the pulley “16” high with a foot brace 12” behind Pulley.”
You are perhaps beginning to see what I love about Gironda. He was meticulous about his exercises and their function. Also, if you’ve never tried any of these, what you will find is that there is a logic to them. The small movements, the smaller adjustments etc., are the result of someone slowly moving through movements and focusing on how they recruited the muscles.
Gironda also included Zottman Curls but, I bet you a pound to a penny that you have never seen anyone perform them the way Vince demanded
Then it came to the legs where Gironda, famously a hater of the traditional back squat, discussed things like the frog squat, performed on the on the toes with the heels touching and the torso kept upright.
“One of the exercises which I consider to be important is called ‘The Frog Squat’.”
In the text Gironda seemed to suggest doing this either under a squat or a press machine. For health and safety I’ll include the hack squat machine version!
His hamstring curl amounted to holding a dumbbell between your feet, lying face down on a bench and curling it upwards until:
“the weight touches the buttocks.”
For shoulders Gironda included his incredibly strange looking but fun lateral raises were the dumbbells were tilted upwards as if you were
“pouring water out of the bell”
Finally there was an upright row where you used the bar to get
“a bouncing rebound off bent thighs.”
While the final instruction would probably make a modern personal trainer phone somebody immediately in panic, Gironda was radically focused on good form.
For all the weirdness, there was a clear coaching eye at play here. Gironda was not, nor was he ever, a ‘big weights’ guy. What I mean by that is that although he trained strong people, his obsession was on muscle gained and not weight moved. A lot of these movements are nigh on impossible to do with poor form. The tempo was slow and the tension was meant to be absolute. Gironda was obsessed with making exercises feel different through small changes in angle, grip and body position in ways that I honestly rarely see nowadays. He was incredibly thoughtful and insane. Did I mention insane? Because we are about to discuss his dietary advice which is… well you get it by now.
The Completely Insane Diet
Gironda was known, fairly, for his love of supplements. His bulking diet will show you why. Without a doubt, Gironda’s “All Protein Muscle Building Diet” is where his course went from eccentric to magnificent.
Breakfast consisted of twelve ounces of half-and-half, two eggs, milk-and-egg protein and an ounce of amino acids, all mixed in a blender and taken down smooth (I imagine, or if not smooth, then some horrible lumpy concoction).
Then came the supplements With breakfast there was
“3-4 Hydrochloric Acid Tablets”
“3-4 Enzyme Tablets”
“1 R.N.A. Tablet”
“1 Organic Iron Tablet”
“3 Tri-Germ Oil Capsules”
Lunch was a hamburger patty and cottage cheese, followed by much of the same supplement stack and at three o’clock:
“Natural (not processed) Cheese & 1 oz. Amino Acids”
Dinner was steak or hamburger “up to 1 lb” with more cottage cheese accompanying it. Before bed came protein powder mixed with milk, half-and-half or cream. And between meals:
“(Every three hours) 6 Liver Tablets”
Because even he may have suspected that this was a lot for one person to eat, Gironda even wrote about how to digest food properly. He recommended “lying or sitting with your feet propped up on a high footstool after each meal.”
I remain a Gironda stan. Much of the training advice is thoughtful, some of it is brilliant, and nearly all of it makes you want to get into the gym and try something. The dietary advice has a rather different effect. Still, if nothing else, the course captures Vince perfectly. It was exacting, inventive, utterly confident and apparently determined that no human being should ever be more than three hours away from six liver tablets.
P.S. As an amazing follow on, check out this guy’s YouTube where he followed each of the bulking course’s workouts with the correct form. Thank you internet!