Hail to the Dinosaurs!
Back in the old days, when you bought a barbell, you had absolutely no idea what to do with it.
Think about it.
There was no television – no video – no DVD’s – and no YouTube.
Gyms were few and far between.
There were very few books or courses that taught weight training or weightlifting. And most folks would go their entire life and never see a barbell, or someone using a barbell, or someone who had barbell-built muscles.
So if you wanted to make a living but selling barbells, you needed to offer very simple, very basic, easy to follow instructions on how to use the darn thing.
The Milo Barbell Company did a good job of that in the old Milo Barbell Company courses. Writers like Alan Calvert (“Super Strength”), George F. Jowett (“The Key to Might and Muscle”), and Mark Berry (“Physical Training Simplified”) did a good job of it, as well.
But the very best courses were the ones authored by Bob Hoffman, and sold with barbell sets from the York Barbell Company.
One of the great things about the York courses was that they were progressive. And by that, I don’t mean that you implemented the principle of progressive resistance training by adding reps, and then adding weight to the bar.
Instead, I mean that the courses were progressive in the sense that you started out on a beginners program (course no. 1) – and then you moved to a variation of the beginner’s program with slightly more advanced exercises (course no. 2) – and then you got serious by doing heavy leg and back training (via “repetition weightlifting” in course no. 3). After that, you moved on to course no. 4, which was nothing more nor less than training for weightlifting competition.
It was a wonderful way to train. It covered everything from beginner to intermediate to advanced men. And it made sure that you built a body that was strong and powerful from head to toe – hard and muscular—well-balanced, well-proportioned, and well-developed – with muscles that were functional and athletic.
Over the years, the basic York approach – the progressive exercises or progressive programs approach – built tons of muscle and brought great results to tens of thousands of boys and men around the world.
It also produced some remarkable champions, both in weightlifting, in bodybuilding, and in other sports. In the 1940’s and 50’s, virtually every great lifting champion or bodybuilding champion in the United States used a variation of this approach – and virtually every athlete who trained with weights did the same thing.
At some point, however, we forgot about this way of doing things. Gradually, we reduced the number and variety of exercises we were doing.
Pretty soon, everyone was doing pretty much the same exercises – and many of the really productive movements used back in the 30’s, 40’s and 50’s fell by the wayside.
Case in point. The very first barbell set I ever owned – one of those hollow pipe bars with caps on the end, and plates made of concrete inside of poly-vinyl – taught only ONE leg exercise: the two dumbbell swing and squat on toes, which you were supposed to do for two sets of five reps as a warm-up.
No back squats, no front squats, no overhead squats, no Jefferson lift, no squat and press, no squat and press behind neck, no power clean and front squat, no squat snatches, no split snatches, no split squats with the bar on your shoulders, no split squats with the bar overhead, no dumbbell squats, no one leg squats, no one arm overhead squats with barbell or dumbbell, no deep knee bends on your toes, no walking or going up steps with a barbell on your shoulders or while holding heavy dumbbells – literally NOTHING for your legs and hips.
My notes show that I weighed 86 pounds when I started training. A year later, I still weighed 86 pounds. Could it possibly have been the lack of leg training? Go figure.
The more I’ve thought about this, the more I’ve thought that it would be a real service to write a book that contained a whole bunch of training programs for beginners – like perhaps ten different programs.
If you were getting started, you could take a very basic, simple program and follow it for four to six weeks.
Then you could follow a different beginner’s program – and follow it for another four to six weeks.
After that, you could follow a third program for beginners. Or you could alternate back and forth between two or even three different programs for beginners.
The idea would be to lay a really good foundation for future training.
After that, you would tackle more difficult programs – programs designed especially for intermediates. And once again, you’d have ten of them to choose from.
After paying your dues on a couple of the intermediate programs of your choosing, you’d move on to the really fun stuff – programs for advanced lifters.
Once again, to make the book as complete as possible, there would be ten different programs for advanced lifters.
And in each of the sections of the book – beginner, intermediate and advanced – there would be detailed instruction on how to train the RIGHT way for your current level of development.
And because different guys like to do different things, there would be a nice mixture of barbell training, dumbbell exercises, bodyweight training, Olympic lifting, powerlifting, and heavy awkward objects. So there would be something for just about everyone.
And then – still following that old time idea of progressive programs – there would be two chapters devoted entirely to the kind of training that will take you from advanced to super-human – or perhaps even to super-gorilla.
Heavy leg and back training.
The stuff that will build as much muscle mass, as much strength and as much power as is humanly possible.
Once again, you’d get a variety of different programs. Perhaps ten heavy leg specialization programs – and ten heavy back specialization programs. With detailed, step by step advice about how to use them.
That would be a pretty good book – and a pretty valuable one. It would have something for virtually every trainee in the entire world – and for many trainees, it would have the very best and most effective training programs that he or she had ever seen.
The more I thought about it, the more I decided that this book really needed to be written.
So I sat down and started to work on it.
When it was finished, I needed to choose a title. And THAT part was easy.
CHALK AND SWEAT
You can see the cover for CHALK AND SWEAT right here:
http://brookskubik.com/chalk_and_sweat.html
The little monster is currently at the printer, and it’s scheduled to be finished and shipped to Dino Headquarters this coming Friday (December 17) . I use an out of state printer, so the books will be shipped to me by truck – and it takes a few days to get them to me – and that means that if all goes well, I should be getting the shipment on Tuesday (December 21) or Wednesday (December 22).
That’s not going to be early enough to get them out the door in time for Christmas, but you probably won’t be training on Christmas anyway – so go ahead and enjoy the Holidays, and be looking forward to seeing CHALK AND SWEAT arrive in the mail not very long after Santa, his elves and his reindeer taking a long, long nap up at the North Pole.
I’ll put an order page up after the printer has finished the books and the delivery truck is heading to Louisville. That way, you can pre-order and reserve your place in line. As always, once we have the books, we’ll shoot them right out the door to you – and we’ll fill the orders in the same order in which we receive them.
Yours in strength,
Brooks Kubik
P.S. Once Chalk and Sweat is here, we’re going to be buried in orders for it – so if you’re thinking of grabbing anything else form Dino HQ, please do it now. Chalk and Sweat is going to create a log-jam for a couple of days:
Our new Dinosaur Training hoodies are here:
http://brookskubik.com/dinosaurtraining_hoodie.html
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http://www.brookskubik.com/products.html
