Gironda is undoubtedly a site favourite. Known for his unique style of training and nutritional approach, Gironda didn't pull any punches when it came to giving his opinion. The below errors, 35 in total, may raise a few eyebrows. Nevertheless they demonstrated Gironda's willingness to give his opinion! Over training! (Anything over 45 minutes is… Continue reading Vince Gironda, ‘Common Errors in Bodybuilding’, The Master Series of Nutritional Bodybuilding (Iron Guru Publishing, 1983), 5-7
Let me set the scene. Four days. A cascade of terrible decisions, each one made with the quiet confidence of someone who absolutely should have known better. Day one…walking lunges to failure with dumbbells. Not a few sets. Failure. As in, the point at which my legs simply declined to continue being legs. Who does… Continue reading I Walked Like John Wayne for Four Days
Who remembers P90X? As a teen growing up, P90X advertisements always seemed to promise the simplest and most effective way of getting lean. Honestly, it was marketed as a cheat code. Follow this program for a couple of weeks, at home no less, and suddenly you would have a six pack. Easy! Now forgive me,… Continue reading How P90X Turned Romanian Sports Science into a $120 Fitness Catchphrase
I am a big fan of novelty barbells. This is not news to anyone who has read my stuff for long enough. Give me an EZ bar, a trap bar, an earthquake bar, a thick bar, a homemade bar, or some bizarre object a strongman once claimed was impossible to lift and I am happy.… Continue reading The Thickest Barbell Alive and the Lost Art of Odd Lifts
As the inaugural Enhanced Games approach in Las Vegas this May, the deadlift has become ground zero for one of strength sport’s hottest debates. Hafþór ‘Thor’ Björnsson, the former World’s Strongest Man and current raw deadlift world record holder at 510 kg, will square off against Mitchell Hooper in a head-to-head max deadlift exhibition. Thor… Continue reading Dressed to Pull: The Hidden History of the Deadlift Suit
“Tom and I worked for Vince McMahon… as a marketing gimmick, we were obliged to go head to head in a ‘great squat-off.’” That’s Fred Hatfield reflecting on the 1992 contest with Tom Platz, a moment that is still regularly circulated as evidence in debates about training. The footage is treated as a kind of… Continue reading The Most Cited Squat in History Was a Marketing Stunt
Open almost any public health website and you will see the same number repeated with quiet authority. Adults should aim for around 150 minutes of moderate physical activity per week. This usually gets translated into the simpler phrase ‘thirty minutes a day’. The number carries a scientific aura. It sounds as if researchers eventually discovered… Continue reading When Did Exercise Become ‘30 Minutes a Day’?
I’ve been spending a lot of time lately in 1930s Britain, at least archival-wise, working through old Health & Strength magazines from the period. It’s one of my favourite physical culture publications: it first appeared in the late 1890s and, in various forms, survived right up until the last decade. The article below comes from… Continue reading How Beginners Learned to Lift Weights in 1939
Owing to the inquisitive nature of a PCS reader, I've finally gotten my act together, or at least come close enough to some semblance of normality, to go down the rabbit hole once again. The topic of todays post, is the rather more niche but nevertheless effective Glute Ham Raise (GHR) machine. Having spent years… Continue reading The History of the Glute Ham Raise
There are some exercises so basic, so ubiquitous and so difficult that their origins are often taken for granted. Previously when detailing the history of the squat, we encountered the difficultly of tracing a movement found in every culture and arguably every human movement. The Chin Up and the Pull Up exercises offer a similar… Continue reading The History of the Pull Up
