Hail to the Dinosaurs!
When I was a kid, I would go to the public library and plop myself down in the sports section and look for books about weight training.
The library had exactly FOUR of them:
1. Weight Training for Athletes, by Bob Hoffman.
2. Weight Training in Athletics, by James A. Murray and Dr. Peter Karpovich
3. Bodybuilding and Self-Defense, by Myles McCallum (no relation to John McCallum, who wrote the “Keys to progress” series for Strength and Health magazine)
4. The Wrestling Physical Conditioning Encyclopedia, by John Jesse.
That was it.
If you went to a bookstore, you fared WORSE. You’d be lucky to find a single book about weight training or weightlifting.
If you went to a health food store, as they called them back then, you might find books about diet and nutrition, the miracle of wheat germ oil, the power of protein, or the joy of the soybean -- but you didn’t find any books about getting down and dirty with a barbell.
It was really frustrating. Here I was, desperately interested in what I would later learn to call the Iron Game – and looking everywhere for books about it – and I could hardly find anything at all.
Later, I discovered the muscle magazines of the era – Strength and Health, Muscular Development, Iron Man, Muscle Builder and Power, Mr. America, and Muscle Training Illustrated – and those gave me plenty of information.
Some of it was good, some was okay, some was bad, and some was downright terrible.
Correction – MUCH of it was downright terrible.
The only way to figure out what worked was to pick up your barbell and give it a try.
It was good old-fashioned trial and error.
That’s what I did, and it’s what pretty much all of us did.
We tried everything. You name it, we did it. Bombing, blasting, blitzing, super-sets, tri-sets, drop sets, isometrics, isometronics, bodybuilding, weightlifting, powerlifting, Nautilus training, fast reps, slow reps, forced reps, quality training, peak contraction, giant sets, PHA, breathing squats, pre-exhaustion, split routines and double split programs.
And eventually, we found what works.
If you’re my age, you probably remember that process of trial and error.
If you’re younger, you have it made. All you have to do is to try the stuff that worked for the older guys when we were your age.
I’ll give you a hint: the stuff that works involves basic, compound exercises – hard work – abbreviated training – and above all else, always trying to add weight to the bar. Progression is the name of the game. For more details, see Dinosaur Training, Chalk and Sweat and my other books. They’re the books I wish I had had when I was a skinny kid with big glasses prowling the library stacks and looking for books about how to get bigger and stronger.
As always, thanks for reading, and have a great day. If you train today, make it a good one!
Yours in strength,
Brooks Kubik
P.S. Dinosaur Training. Strength, Muscle and Power. Chalk and Sweat. Gray Hair and Black Iron. My Doug Hepburn training course. The Dinosaur Files newsletter. They’ll teach you how to build strength and muscle – and you can find them right here:
http://www.brookskubik.com/products.html
