Westside Connection: The

Ultimate Guide to the Original

(and Superior) Westside Barbell
Club

By Jamie Lewis

Edited By Jamie Lewis

Cover Art By Jamie Lewis

First Edition – Nov 2023

Copyright Notice

The Ultimate Guide to the Original (and Superior) Westside Barbell Club

Published by Plague of Strength, LTD. Roebling, NJ 08554

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© 2023 Jamie Lewis

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without
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Table of Contents
Introduction.....................................................................................................................................2

Periodization is a Method That Does Not Apply to You, Unless You Currently Live in North
Korea............................................................................................................................................... 4

The Culver City Westside Barbell Crew: Runnin’ Everthang West of the Mississippi................6

Bill West.........................................................................................................................................9

Bill West’s Diet.......................................................................................................................... 1

The OG Powerlifter.................................................................................................................. 2

If You’re Not Cheating, You’re Not Trying............................................................................3

The OG Westside Crew Were OG Gear Whores................................................................. 4

The Muscle House (of Possible Male Prostitution) by the Sea............................................ 5

Joe Dimarco................................................................................................................................7

Joe Dimarco’s Basic Powerlifting Workout...........................................................................8

George Frenn.............................................................................................................................. 0

George Frenn’s Basic Program..............................................................................................6

Frenn Was Westside’s Biggest Squatter................................................................................ 8

Frenn Focused on the Deadlift.............................................................................................. 9

Westside Barbell’s Influences...................................................................................................... 13

Chuck Ahrens............................................................................................................................ 14

Paul Anderson............................................................................................................................. 3

Paul Anderson’s Powerlifting Routine................................................................................... 2

Paul Anderson’s Olympic Weightlifting Routine.................................................................. 2

Ike Berger..................................................................................................................................... 3

Ike Berger’s Contest Prep Routine.........................................................................................1

Tommy Kono................................................................................................................................2

Tommy Kono’s Basic Training Routine...................................................................................2

Steve Merjanian...................................................................................................................... 2

Bob Peoples.............................................................................................................................3

Zuver’s Gym.................................................................................................................................4

Zuver’s Gym Basic Program................................................................................................. 11

The Basic Westside Routine......................................................................................................... 12

Westside Offshoots....................................................................................................................... 22

Pat Casey.................................................................................................................................. 22

Roger Estep................................................................................................................................25
 Phil Grippaldi............................................................................................................................. 33

Closing Remarks........................................................................................................................... 38

Works Cited................................................................................................................................... 39
Introduction
When people think of the men and women behind the curtain in the world of
powerlifting, names like Mark Rippetoe and Louie Simmons, Dave Tate and Jim Wendler
likely spring to mind, alongside the names of faceless, mononymous Soviets like Sheiko
and Smolov. These names have been pounded into our heads over the last 20 years
thanks to the glories of the internet, and being the relentless self-promoters and marketers
that those people are, they have convinced you that either the old Soviet system is the
best (due in large part to the ridiculous hype placed upon it by non-powerlifter Pavel
Tsatsouline), or the modern Westside Barbell Club’s methods are the best, as they
combined the best of the two earliest systems for powerlifting training- the Soviet system
and the methods of the original Westside Barbell Club.

Both assertions are absurd, because the Culver City Westside Barbell Club of the 1960s
was by far and away the most dominant of the early powerlifting clubs, and their
methods were derived from those of York Barbell’s Olympic weightlifting team. That
underfunded, underfed, underpromoted, and almost entirely unloved team regularly
beat the Soviets, who were all professional lifters paid by the Soviet government to
master their craft. The American lifters worked menial jobs at York Barbell for low pay to
make a living as they trained to beat the pro Soviet lifters, while the Soviets enjoyed
prestige, publicity, and significant financial backing from their government, making the
playing field definitively un-level.

And the Soviets knew it- this is why they considered the mastermind behind Westside’s
methods, world record holding hammer thrower and early powerlifting record setter
George Frenn, to be the veritable god of powerlifting. If they weren’t long dead, they
would be laughing their asses off at the idea that their methods were superior to those of
York Barbell and the original Westside Barbell and belittling the shit out of the fake-ass
racists populating the smelliest corners of the shittiest basement gyms and their heroes,
the fake-ass racist slobs at the current Westside Barbell.

In stark contrast to the felon-filled, anti-intellectual ranks of its current incarnation, the
original Culver City Westside Barbell Club, led by ringleader Bill West, driving force Joe
Dimarco, and mastermind strength training strategist George Frenn, was a
amalgamation of the most interesting and diverse cast of characters in history. This band
of weirdos were drawn from fields ranging from acting to neurology and rocket science
to Olympic track and field, weightlifting, and the outdoor hammer throw to and boasted
the loftiest academic and intellectual credentials as well as insane sporting
achievements in everything from track and field to professional wrestling, and their
training methodology reflected that desire to reject normalcy and really embrace their
inner Gonzo.

This was possible because Bill West was like the Roger Bacon of powerlifting- though he is
credited with inventing methods and practices that he had no part in creating, he was
the one that brought those things to prominence by effectively combining them into a
sort of system no one else perceived. And in doing so, West's work in powerlifting is very
much like Roger Bacon's- wild-eyed enthusiasm for experimentation that just so
happened to yield incredible results, only to be forgotten in favor of more recent
iterations of the original.

So, if it’s not yet apparent why I’ve written this book, know that in my competitive career,
which included an all-time, all-federation raw world record total (and I tied the record in
the squat). Despite that, I have never and will never “peak” for a meet, and it was rare
that I was even sober at a meet. By my second deadlift I was usually drunk as hell-
peaking was about as far from my mind as it could have been. When meets finally
ended I’d read a book or two, gotten drunk, and was still bored out of my mind and glad
it was finally over.

Thus, I have always found the very idea of planning to peak to be ridiculous, because in
order for you to peak you have to valley… or crater. For there to be a planned peak,
there has to be a planned valley, and planning to suck is a lot like… planning to suck. I’ve
written in the past about my lack of use for periodization and will reiterate- it has no place
in the programming of a Western lifter.

In short, that shit the people masquerading as Westside Barbell are selling you is rotten
Periodization is a Method That Does Not Apply to You,
Unless You Currently Live in North Korea
Periodization was designed by the Soviets because they had outlawed bodybuilding in
Russia, which meant that when their lifters left their Olympic training center they had no
access to weights beyond the occasional kettlebell and/or access to one of the few
urban, underground gyms that existed. At that point in Russia, the Soviets had reinstituted
the ban on lifting for anyone other than circus performers, nobles, or foreign nationals
that the Imperial Russians had maintained for decades.

Thus, when home the Russian lifters would be on a restricted diet (because Russian
villages were often short of food, as were urban grocery stores, but government
employees always ate. That, combined with their lack of access to adequate training
facilities meant their lifters would spend up to half the year starving and detrained. When
they returned to the Olympic training center, their coaches would have to fill them full of
food and steroids while getting them back into shape before they could train for the
Olympics.

This ain’t that, unless you’re reading this in North Korea or a developing nation where
food and access to weights is scarce for half the year. Even then, there are better ways
to modify your training in times of privation than the stupid bullshit mediocre lifters have
been pushing on everyone for the last 30 years, and wherever you are has to be better
than hyper-polluted, illiterate, economically depressed, and starving mid-20th century
Russia. As such, periodization has nothing to do with you- you will neither train for 6-8 hours
a day nor spend a few months starving and without access to weights.

And because I know some of you are still pushing back, know that being an Olympic
athlete in many nations around the world is a literal job, and what was presented as
periodization to the West was intended as nothing more than the theatrical program for
a system the Soviets developed to deal with the odd lifestyle of their professional lifters.

The word “programming” in the lifting world never meant “computer

programming” prior to the internet- a lifting program is and always has been like a
theatrical program. Programs are intended to provide the broad strokes, not the
nitty gritty. A theatrical program doesn’t include the script- it just tells you how the
action is supposed to move along. And how could it? Lifters have been writing
programs for plebes to make money since at least the last quarter of the 19th
century- at least 75 years before the use of the word “program” was applied to
computers, and even then it was as a noun rather than a verb. It wasn’t until the
1980s that the term “programming” was even applied to computers in common
parlance.

In other words, you’ve even been doing that wrong.

Back to the Soviet lifters- these people lifted as their job, and left their homes for up to
nine months a year to bang away at weights under the watchful eye of political officers
who monitored their communications with Western lifters to ensure they weren’t doing
anything treasonous. These were not chubby college-age kids trying to squat 500lbs-
these were starving peasants taking their sole opportunity to transcend the hell of life in
Soviet Russia by getting locked into a weirdly rigid system that treated humans like and
required them to train for the same amount of time a full-time job would consume.

No person is going to thrive under that kind of idiocy, and they didn’t- they barely beat
the rest of the world when they did win, and they often lost to American lifters who were
only sponsored by York Barbell, and had no little money, support, or even interest from
the US government.

If the American lifters had obtained half of the support the Soviet lifters had from their
governments, they’d have beaten the Soviets so badly that the Russians would be a
laughingstock and no one would even say the word periodization, and every single
Russian lifter knew that (jump to the George Frenn section for more information).

Thanks to the “glories” of capitalism and the pernicious efforts by various uneducated
authors, just about everyone on the planet has this Westside Barbell and Soviet training
methods situation all the way- you’re far better off following the methods of the York
Barbell crew who beat the Soviets with little more than Budweiser and can-do attitude.
As you will discover within these pages, those methods were adapted to powerlifting by
Bill West and George Frenn at the original Westside Barbell Club in Culver City, California
(where many of the York guys lifted in their off-season), which would later be stolen with
their name by Louie Simmons before being dumped like wet garbage into the sewer that
is periodization to produce the modern Westside methodology with which everyone is
familiar.

In short, fuck Louie Simmons- the man was a goddamn moron and not a terribly
impressive lifter while he was busy being mysteriously chubby while on gear and meth.

Behold the real Westside Barbell’s badass methodology- no periodization, no bullshit, no

fatass racists, no Confederate flags, and no faux-tough guy posturing in the basement
while listening to shitty black metal all by yourself.
The Culver City Westside Barbell Crew: Runnin’
Everthang West of the Mississippi

In stark contrast to the Confederate flag-waving, chubby shitslugs populating the

modern midwestern Westside, the Culver City Westside Barbell Club was filled with a wide
array of exceptional weirdos from every walk of life. They included such powerlifting
luminaries as:

Bill “Peanuts” West, hyper-dominant 198lb powerlifter and the driving force of the LA
powerlifting scene.

Joe DiMarco, the silent driving force behind the OG Westside Club. Though far from the
strongest man in the club, he was the one to introduce shit like box squats and the incline
barbell press (which he learned from 1946 Mr America Alan Stephen) to the crew and
was an avid proponent of pad presses and the belly toss. Stuck between the
superheavyweights (which at the time was everything over 198, and Bill West's
domination of that class, DiMarco had trouble making room for himself in the limelight on
such a stacked team.

Pat Casey was the first man to bench press 600; under Bill's tutelage Casey also went on
to become the first man to squat 800 and total 2000. Despite the fact Casey ran a health
food store inside of the famed Bill Pearl's gym, he did all of his training in West's gym.

Bill Thurber, American record holder in the bench press and total in the 148s; under the
steely eyed gaze of West, he went on to hold American records in the squat, bench press
and total in two weight classes, and pulled 485 (and was apparently a beast at dips).

Leonard Ingro, the first 181lber to squat 500, and who pulled 540 in competition at 165...
which was bizarre because the guy was between 5'8 and 5'10".

Superstar Billy Graham, jacked-as-hell 6’4” and 325lb pro wrestler, powerlifter, and
possessor or massive 22” arms. Graham was benching 605 when his lifting partner, Pat
Casey, held the world record with 616.
Gay bodybuilding biker of a world-renowned powerlifting neurologist Dr. Oliver Sacks,
who pulled 620 in addition to a then record 600lb squat. Sacks’ resume is beyond
ridiculous- he has written a novel that was adapted into a film starring Robin Williams that
was nominated for an Academy Award, has honorary doctorates from half of the
universities on the goddamn plane (including Georgetown and Tufts), received an
honorary JD in law from Oxford, and even has a minor planet named after him.

Olympian, multi-record-setting powerlifter, rock star track and field athlete, and
all-around badass George Frenn, who organized the first international powerlifting meet
in history.

World record holder in the

hammer throw Hal Connolly.
Connolly was a better thrower
than Frenn, so Frenn did
everything he could to show up
Connolly on the platform, which
led to some insane competition
in the gym, including Connolly
hitting a 700 squat in training
after hearing Frenn did, when his
training max appeared to be
550.

Dallas Long, who won gold in

the shot put in the 1960
Olympics, trained with Bill
exclusively and not with the rest
of the crew, and as a result
could incline press 430.

Douglas Aircraft engineers Jim Hamilton and Howard Einstein, who pulled 550 and
squatted 500, respectively. A Revenge of the Nerds-esque pocket-protector-rocking
nerd, Hamilton was one of the mathematicians on the Apollo space mission and was at
the time the youngest person ever to have an office at the Pentagon.

Two-time gold medalist in the shot put, Parry O'Brien, who inclined 345lbs and still holds a
master's division record for putting the six kilo shot.

Two-time Olympic silver medalist in the shot put, George Woods.

Olympian shot-putter Dave Davis, who was injured during the 1960 Olympics but who
could incline 390. Though of no importance from a lifting perspective, he was a juror in
the infamous Rodney King case.

Dave Ashman, world record holder in the snatch and clean and jerk, was renowned for
his front and back squat, and who could pull 730 with a competition grip and 790 with
straps.
Dave Sheppard, silver medalist in Olympic weightlifting (and one of the guys who got
Muscle Beach shut down) who pulled 550 at 132 and could do a ridiculous eight sets of 2
in the strict press with 200lbs.

Incline bench press specialist and overall monster of a man Steve Merjanian, who
inclined 500 and used 400 for behind the neck presses.

A bodybuilder named Duke, who was a stand-in for Lou Ferrigno on the Incredible Hulk
and stood 6'3" 240. Duke was apparently a pro boxer for a while, and though I have no
information on his lifts, I can say that his one knockout in life came at the hands of a
caged orangutan who'd stolen his sunglasses at a random hillbilly-owned gas station.
Clearly, these men were utter maniacs.

Jim Klostergaard, a longtime powerlifting competitor who still holds USAPL masters
records and benched 254 at 181 at age 70.

and for a short period of time, both the ultimate powerbuilder Roger Estep and “The Man
With Four Legs” Phil Grippaldi.

Though they likely didn't create any of these training methods themselves, they were the
first to combine these methods into a cohesive system for use by competitive lifters. They
also had the great good fortune, like the touch system (spotter assisted reps), the box
squat, cheating skullcrushers, the various and sundry powerlifting aids they used, like
wrapping themselves in sheets and constructing their own knee and wrist wraps like they
were seamstresses in a Thai sweatshop, incline power rack bench presses, deficit
deadlifts, lockouts, and rack/box pulls.

With that list in mind, powerlifting would look about as different from its current
incarnation without Bill West and the OG Westside Club as skinny CGI Steve Rogers from
the jacked Chris Evans version. Yeah, it’s a human by the same name, but one is a
withered husk of the other. And without this group of badasses, the Soviets wouldn’t have
been able to develop their system of periodization anyway- their lifters were relying on
George Frenn and his Oly training partner Jon Kuc for their information.
Bill West

George Frenn (l) and Bill West (r)

I realize that had I published this article a week or two ago I would not be met with the
ridiculous indignation likely forming in the minds of half of you, because surely everyone
knows the name of this titan of the iron- after all, he was name checked a dozen times in
the Westside documentary that just dropped. Whether or not you’ve seen the
documentary is immaterial, because Peanuts is hardly an individual who received his due
in his lifetime. Regardless, he was:

● the man behind most of the training advances made in the last 50 years, referred
to by pundits as the “Godfather of Powerlifting”
● the man who popularized the box squat, board press, and rack pull
● a legendary 198lb powerlifter
● an avowed gear whore who popularized wide lifting belts, the progenitors of
modern knee wraps, elbow wraps, squat briefs, and wrist wraps
● one of the greatest coaches in the history of strength sports,
● a bit part actor on TV shows, extra in films, and stand-in for Peter Lorre (who was a
big deal actor back in the day)
● ultimately a walking Greek tragedy who died homeless and was buried in a
pauper’s grave with no headstone.

It bears mentioning (since most sources fail to report this) that Bill “Peanuts” West was not
the sole genius or driving force behind the Culver City Westside Barbell Club- it was
actually the result of the work of three men (possibly four, with the addition of Ike Berger).
Bill was the leader / trainer / cheerleader of the crew, George Frenn was the Flavor Flav
of the crew and their analyst- he analyzed their system to determine how best to make it
work and who organized meets like the first International Powerlifting meet; and Joe
DiMarco was the Dick Cheney to West’s Bush- he created the programs that drove the
entire system, though without all of the poisonous fangs and black blood pumping
through his dead heart. In short, the OG Westside Club was hardly the Bill West show- it
was a team effort in which Bill was absolutely central, but not exactly indispensable.

As Bob Hise, famed strength sports author (who referred to West as the Godfather) of
powerlifting, put it:

“Probably Bill’s greatest asset is his genuine love for helping others and this
has earned him many friends. There are no charges assessed for training at
the Bill West Muscle Factory, those who train there are those who have
been invited, and that number is great. On special occasions like
birthdays, anniversaries, etc., Bill’s training partners will purchase extra
plates and through these generosities the gym boasts of over 5000 pounds
of weight.”

For whatever reason, most of the guys of this era were reported to be sickly little shits
when they were kids, and I’ve no idea if it was simply commonplace, or if these guys just
read too many comic books and wanted a good origin story. Either way, Bill West’s story
is no different. Born William Weiss in 1937, Peanuts spent his formative years in Philadelphia
looking, by his description, looking very much like a social media starlet suffering from
progeria

West was first introduced to the gym when he was 15 years old. At that age he was a
hilariously scrawny 87lbs, and looking like an emaciated middle schooler, West slunk his
way into an East Coast mecca gym- John Fritshe’s in Philadelphia. This was one of the
two most prestigious bodybuilding gyms on that coast, the other being the legendary
trainer and strongman Sig Klein’s physical culture gym in New York City, and would
essentially being akin to walking
into Larry Wheel’s home gym
looking like a concentration camp
escapee. West somehow talked
his way into becoming the
reigning Mr. Pennsylvania’s
training partner (which at that
time was a much bigger deal
than it might seem now), and
within six months the two training
partners and Bill’s brother Burt
(about whom I could find
absolutely no information
whatsoever and who never
seemed to be mentioned in
connection with Westside
Barbell) all hopped a bus for
California.

To say that the Wests’ and Wells’

first meal in California was a bit ignominious would be an understatement to match
“Robert Pattinson is a poor choice for Batman,” because the West brothers shared a can
of dog food between them and then begged a loaf of bread off the shop owner who
sold them the dog food. Nevertheless, these intrepid goofballs immediately dropped the
35 cents on a bus ticket to Santa Monica and boarded at the legendary Muscle House
by the Sea, which may or may not have been a house of male prostitution but it certainly
was a party house filled with shirtless, jobless, muscular, tanned men who somehow
managed to make gains and pay rent.

Nor did it sound like much of a picnic- Dave Draper took one look at the Muscle House
and turned around. “Amid conversation to suit the hour and the needs, we made our
way to lovely Santa Monica and the famous Muscle House, a crash pad on the Pacific,
for my first night’s sleep. ‘I don’t think so. There are a dozen guys in two rooms sprawled
out and snoring, George, and none of them in the dim light look like they have muscles or
a job. Perhaps I can sleep on the couch in Weider’s office” (Fernando).

Despite Draper’s squamishness about living in a vegetarian bodybuilding commune, Bill

West made gains with a vengeance while living in that place.

“Bill’s training resumed as did his consumption of peanuts. He ate one

pound of raw peanuts, ½ cup of peanut butter and six spoonfuls of
peanut oil every day. His bodyweight rose from 87 to 102 pounds. In 60
more days his weight was up to 132; and at the end of the first year his
weight had risen to 155. It was during this period that Joy stamped the
name “Peanuts” onto Bill’s locker, giving him the nickname which he has
carried to this day.

After his third year of weightlifting, Bill had risen to a bodyweight of 180. In
the year 1955 and Bill started to compete in various lifting meets. He
eventually posted Olympic lifts of a 260 press, 230 snatch and 315 clean &
jerk” (Vuono).
That year, Bill also tried his hand at odd lifting, and won his second of those meets with a
330 bench and a 420 squat, which seems incredibly low now, but at the time was a big
deal in the Southern California lifting scene. Seeing his success in odd lifting relative to his
comparatively lackluster performances in weightlifting, Ike Berger suggested West ditch
the fancy bullshit and just focus on the brute strength events contested in the odd lifting
meets… a suggestion that would change the nascent sport of powerlifting forever.

Also on the advice of Berger, West kicked his fat boy peanut fest of a diet into high gear,
which led to massive gains in both his lifts and his fat ass. Granted, Berger was likely
already using dianabol, which was being handed out at York Barbell like breath mints, so
it stands to reason that by 1956 he may have been feeding West his “vitamins” as well.
Winners do what it takes to win, and Bill West, as you will see, treated winning like most
people treat living- he was going to do it no matter what anyone else thought, said, or
did. It would be another 50 years until the natty bros and form Nazis would hit the scene,
but had they existed at the time, West would have just stuffed them into trash cans and
tossed them off the top of the tallest building he could find.

Training with gold medalist weightlifters Ike Berger and Dave Ashman and eating like a 10
year old with Prader-Willi’s an hour out of fat camp, Peanuts’ squat and bench went
through the fucking roof. According to people who saw his transformation, you could
literally see him getting bigger from training session to training session. Though a
somewhat fat 218, the man finished out 1957 one hundred twenty pounds heavier than
he’d been four years earlier, proving that there is literally no obstacle in training through,
over, and around which you cannot train and eat… especially when you surround
yourself with badasses of every variety and have the right attitude.

By this point he was hitting an impressive

355 in competition on the bench (if you’re
scoffing, recall this is three or four years into
training), a double dumbbell clean & press
with 127lb dumbbells, seven reps with
130lb dumbbells on the incline, and a
175lb strict curl. Though I don’t have an
exact date on it (it was around the time
Muscle Beach was shut down), it was
around this time that West and Joe
DiMarco opened the Culver City Westside
Barbell Club in a garage Bill rented for that
purpose, then moved to the garage
behind his house because the garage in
which they’d been training had no
electricity or heat, as brutal as those guys
were, no one really wanted to train in
prehistoric conditions.

The mold was broken when Bill West was

born- he was a wildly driven man with a
penchant for partying and a love of the
 weights who somehow managed to always be in the right place at the right time to
make friends with the right people, all of which culminated in the Culver City Westside
Barbell Club. Sure, his real-life Yes Man lifestyle seems to have gotten the best of him at
the end, but it’s highly likely West was so in the moment he couldn’t have cared less- this
was a man who lived life to the hilt and charged harder at his avocations than most
people even consider doing in their day jobs.

“He likes everyone and everyone likes Bill West. I have found Bill to be a
swash-buckling openhearted fellow with one of the most electrified
dispositions I have encountered in years. He seems a mass of energy. One
grand thing in his favor is his honesty and truthfulness. He speaks with
authority and relates facts, especially about his lifting poundages. Bill’s
sense of humor is immense. Once I chanced to catch him standing and
talking in the midst of a group of seven or eight fellows. Bill was
gesticulating and smiling as he talked, and all the other guys were
continuously enjoying a prolonged spell of laughter. He’s a quick thinker
and a very rapid talker; and yet remains true to himself, and that’s really
saying something” (Liederman).

It goes without saying that Bill “Peanuts” West would be unloved in your average try-hard,
super serious bro “hardcore” gym these days- he bore none of their accouterments. He
lacked a fancy belt, didn’t talk about training incessantly, didn’t stress and whine about
lifting to random strangers at every opportunity, didn’t take endless videos of his lifts, and
never once made an excuse for a subpar lift.

Nah, instead, Bill was the type of guy to challenge other lifters in his gym to a completely
bullshit movement he invented on the spot, just to mess with his friends. The type of guy
who’s not about to let some dickhead rooster in the neighborhood to keep him from
sleeping, so he took a machete and beheaded the goddamn thing when it stuck its
head through the fence to crow at him. He was the type of guy to stuff a handful of sand
crabs down the front of Joe DiMarco’s swim trunks, and as he was trying to pry the evil
little chitinous bastards off his junk, Bill stuffed more down the back.

In short, Peanuts was out to move big weights and then party hard for hours afterward,
and that was reflected in every facet of his life. Where most of the guys in the club had
full time jobs, Bill West made do working as a stand in and extra on movie sets. He wasn’t
out to make big money- which is why he didn’t charge shit to lift with the club- he just
wanted to have a good time. Which is what he invariably did.

Bill West’s Vital Statistics

Height: 5’7″ Arms: 17 3/4″ Squat (official): 635lbs

Weight: 198lbs Thigh: 27″ Deadlift (official): 615lbs

Neck: 18″ Calf: 17″ Total (official): 1680lbs;

(unofficial): 1825lbs
Chest: 49″ Bench Press (official):
430lbs
Were these the biggest totals in
history? Hell no, but in a brand new
sport with no flight system, the
strongest guys followed themselves at
minute and a half intervals on each
lift, using dead, bent bars, benches
so rickety they’d collapse under
heavy weights, homemade squat
stands, and unmatched plates. It was
a far cry from the sterile,
overly-regulated meet of today, and
modern lifters would probably get
trashed under those conditions. Shit,
most modern lifters would be piss
scared to walk out a squat wearing a
flimsy, old school belt, nevermind do
it three times in under five minutes.
Bill West’s Diet

Like all of the lifters of that era, Peanuts had a massive

appetite. A couple of his post-workout meals seems to have
typically come from a buffet called Rand’s Round Up, which
was a staple eatery of every lifter in the LA area and
apparently had amazing prime rib. For five bucks they ate all
they wanted, and pitchers of beer were a buck apiece,
which meant they were about as close to a Saxon Trio
post-workout meal as anyone ever has been. Though that
sounds cheap as shit now, I dropped it into an inflation
calculator and the cost was actually a bit stiff- $40. Given that their meals at the Muscle
House were free, however, that was still affordable a couple times a week.

There’s no information available on what he typically ate for meals, but like all of the lifters of
the 1950s, he chugged raw milk around the clock and supplemented his meals with the
aforementioned caloric peanut bomb, which clocked in at 2300 calories, 218g fat, 49g of
net carbs (20g fiber), and 70g of protein, in addition to protein shakes. Protein shakes at that
time were typically Bob Hoffman’s horrifying soy concoction, on which Ike Berger worked to
flavor for a few hours a day while training at York, or the vastly superior Rheo Blair protein,
which was the favorite protein of the bodybuilding community in Los Angeles. Either way,
Peanuts was likely using one of these bulking formulas (and the dianabol doctor John Ziegler
was handing out in buckets at York Barbell) for his shakes, as they were more in vogue at that
time than RPEs are today- and unlike RPEs, those shakes actually got dudes totals up.

Ever the pragmatist- Peanuts just added food when he wanted to get his weight up and cut
shit out when he needed to get it down. When he felt like he was getting a bit too thick, West
didn’t do anything too crazy- he just cut peanuts and milk from his diet. The man was as no
frills as one could get, and that was reflected daily in everything from his diet choices to the
homemade equipment on which he trained.
The OG Powerlifter
As I’ve mentioned, powerlifting didn’t exist when Bill West began training for it- instead, it was
odd lifting contests in which he competed, and they were a very loose, catch-as-catch-can
style of lifting competition that is to modern powerlifting what rough-and-tumble fighting is to
modern mixed martial arts. These meets consisted of the bench press, the squat, and either a
strict curl or a deadlift, and unlike today’s epic level of clenched-asshole nonsense in
powerlifting, no one took the shit too seriously. According to strongman/bodybuilder Earle
Liederman, “the ‘odd lifters’ didn’t usually get the same level of respect as Olympic lifters –
often being stereotyped as dim-witted, flip-flop-wearing slobs.” It wasn’t as though they gave
a shit, however- those guys were just about moving weights and having a good time, not
about micrometers and matching plates and turning the sport into a fashion show.

The first meet consisting of the three powerlifts wasn’t held until after Bill West had switched
entirely to the odd lifts, in 1956. That format was still a bit slow to catch on, however, and the
first national powerlifting meet wasn’t held until 1964. It was a gradual progression from being
either a completely informal pastime or an afterthought to weightlifting meets, but national
support for the sport was catching on.

At what can only be surmised as the urging of Ike Berger and the other Hoffman exiles, Bill
West and George Frenn teamed up with none other than bodybuilding magnate Joe Weider
to host the first international powerlifting meet in 1970, which by all accounts was a mess
driven by the Westside guys’ rampant cheating and intimidation of the judges to get white
lights. In spite of what USAPL lifters would bemoan as the Westside guys’ refusal to respect the
sport of powerlifting and take it in any way seriously, this meet paved the way for future
meets, and the methods the Westside guys used to dominate their opposition became the
basis for modern powerlifting.
If You’re Not Cheating, You’re Not Trying
This motto went for literally everything in West’s training life- from form to gear to steroids to
intimidating the shit out of the refs at a meet (massive Steve Merjanian came in handy for
that, since he’d load, spot, and glare at the judges at the appropriate times), West was
about winning at any cost. It’s not like he was out there with a crowbar, taking out the
opposition with extreme prejudice Tonya Harding-style, but if he could find an edge on the
competition, he’d use it. This was an outgrowth of the odd lifting mentality (which was the
spirit in which the Greek Olympics were organized)- whatever you could get away with was
legal. It’s only illegal, then, if you get caught.

“If you don’t cheat, you look like an idiot; if you

cheat and don’t get caught, you look like a
hero; if you cheat and get caught, you look like
a dope.”

– Darrell Waltrip, famed 20th century US

sportscaster
The weight had to get from point a to point b, however you could get it there. There were no
form Nazis bitching about bar path or hitching, no pussies on Youtube screeching about how
lifters were going to “Snap City” after a whopping six months of experience talking about
(but likely never doing any) lifting, and no natty bros endlessly crying foul over the perceived
use of anything from caffeine to growth hormone.

In fact, lifters like Chuck Ahrens were inquiring about where the pituitary gland was located in
monkey brains, Bill West and Dan Vadis both died of accidental heroin overdoses, and all of
them trained on speed constantly (Oliver Sacks being the biggest amphetamine head of the
bunch). They were as far from natty as a human being could get without becoming a
cyborg and had no qualms telling you about it.
The OG Westside Crew Were OG Gear Whores
I’ll admit I was shocked to find the prevalence of gear whoring shenanigans that went on
from the very beginnings of powerlifting- in fact, powerlifting gear predates the inception of
the sport. Odd lifters commonly utilized every trick of which they could think to get an edge
over their competition, and provided the judges didn’t catch them, it was all cool. I’m the
first person to run my mouth about the use of support gear, and I’ve always maintained that
geared lifting is an entirely different sport from powerlifting- I now realize I have it backward,
and geared powerlifting is the OG format. Thus, raw lifting is the newfangled imposter.

It should come as no surprise that the California lifters are the ones who get the credit and
the blame for the ridiculous arms race in support gear that was to occur in powerlifting.
According to Dave Yarnell,

“The state of the art in ‘gear’ [in the 1960s] consisted of ace bandages for
wraps, doctored/reinforced Levi’s jean shorts for squatting suits, elbow wraps,
multiple shirt layering, and some even resorted to cleverly placed pieces of
cardboard (jean pockets, under elbow wraps, etc). There were inconsistent, if
any, rules governing the use of these aids early on, or at least enforcement
thereof, and some lifters took full advantage of this. Elbow wraps were not
allowed after 1963, and multilayered shirts were also cause for disqualification
after this” (Yarnell 59).

“DiMarco recalled one lifter being disqualified from a meet in which elbow
wraps were allowed, but the lifter had reinforced the wraps by placing
cardboard under them. The same guys was disqualified from another contest
for wearing 6-7 t-shirts! The judges did not check the jeans back then, and this
was the only “aid” Joe used for squatting” (Ibid).

And it didn’t just stop there. One of Pat Casey’s proteges, Tom Overholzer, was infamous for
the crazy shit with which he’d try to get over on the judges and his competition. It started
with two sets of jean shorts, one skin tight and the next pair up one size, but Overholzer wasn’t
done there- not by a long shot.

“At the 1968 Seniors, Tom was “caught”, as some lifters complained to the
judges, that some of his teammates were wrapping him in a bedsheet. Placed
over the jean shorts, the bedsheet was then wrapped with a layer of Ace
bandages. The singlet went on over this. To aid the bench press which was
performed first, there was already some static because some lifters had t shirts
that went below the elbow, obscuring Ace bandages that had been
wrapped around the upper arms and/or chest area. ” (Leistner).

“‘Despite the illegal wraps, a tremendous psyche, and probably steroids along with an upper
or two; the minute the guy got the bar out of the rack he looked like he was going to die …
you know … he’s shaking … the bars shaking … the plates are rattling … the guy’s face is
purple … he’s surrounded by half a dozen nervous spotters,’ Lambert wrote.

“Nevertheless, ‘with [Overholtzer’s] lifting attire on you couldn’t see any

tell-tale seams from the wraps underneath,’ Lambert admitted. However,
 according to Glossbrenner, because Overholtzer’s hips and torso were
wrapped so tightly, he was unable to walk. This meant that his handlers – one
under each arm – had to carry him from the backstage warm-up area and
out to the lifting platform and place him directly under the bar. At that point
all he had to do was lift the bar up off the squat stands, wait while his helpers
removed the squat stands, make his attempt, wait while the racks were
replaced, and then have his spotters once again carry him offstage” (Todd).

Clearly, the Westside guys were really ramping up the insanity. Frenn and West were the first
people to start sewing Ace bandages together to skirt the “one Ace bandage” rule for knee
wraps, and then started sewing in half a tennis ball behind the kneecap to give a bit of extra
bounce out of the hole. When that wasn’t enough, they’d get nylon from sailmakers and
make their own squat briefs and suits, then use nylon edging from fabric stores to make
super-stout knee wraps. They’d sew multiple belts together to give them the kind of support
people get with thick belts today, or failing that, would wear the belt with the buckle in the
back for squatting. And you might be scoffing, saying that those sort of homebrew gear fixes
couldn’t put much weight on you lifts, but Overholzer’s world record squat was a
metal-as-hell 666lbs with his gear, but a paltry 480 without- clearly, their work as amateur
seamstresses was paying off with wins and weight.
The Muscle House (of Possible Male Prostitution) by the Sea
While this bit will likely only serve to allow me to speculate as to the awesomely shady
potential of this stable of man whores run by a single woman with a vested interest in
keeping her men jacked and their cum sweeter than the ice cream in diabetic heaven, the
value to Bill West of having lived here really cannot be understated (though just about
everyone who’s ever written about him have glossed right over this place.

The Muscle House was owned by a woman named Fleurette “Joy” Crettaz and beloved
both by the older ladies and widows of the area and by the lifters who stayed there. The
condition were spartan- it was basically just a couple of rooms with mattresses everywhere,
and dudes would train until until their eyes bled, party their asses off, and crash at the house
before doing it all over again the next day.

Sword and sandal flicks were huge at the time, so most of the guys who lived there ostensibly
paid their rent with day work on those movies (or worked for six months a year, quit and lived
off unemployment for the other six months while they trained)… though there are enough
clues to indicate that perhaps the lifters were engaged in more traditional meathead side
gigs, a la the pile of rich ladies through which Sandow had to bang every night.

Take for instance, the fact that Joy cooked for all of her boarders and insisted they eat a
strict vegetarian diet. As anyone with an ounce of sense knows, this is just goddamned
stupid, especially at a time when vegetarian options for muscle building were literally limited
to suckling cow’s teats and the tasteless mushy subject of children’s songs about heart health
and flatulence. Joy wouldn’t hear of any of the guys eating meat in the house (though they
all apparently stuffed themselves with as much meat as physically possible at a buffet
nearby), and it seems a fairly simple logical leap to say this was to ensure their cum would be
sweet (Sokol).

Food and board cost only $100 a month ($973 in 2019). Even with a dozen guys staying there,
that woman was hardly making much money, and she was working her ass off cleaning up
after a bunch of teenage and 20-something meatheads and cooking them immense
amounts of food. That is, of course, assuming she didn’t have these dudes out earning for her
nightly… and there are plenty of anecdotes floating around of the “support” given to these
guys by lonely older women

The guys in the Muscle House were the ones implicated in the statutory rape/underage
drinking scandal that led to the Muscle beach Gym being closed in 1959, and all of the guys
who lived in that house were notorious for banging everything under the sun. While that’s
hardly proof that they were man-whores, a bunch of pussy-crazed musclemen living nearly
for free in a single woman’s boarding house at a time when unmarried cohabitation
between the sexes would still have Bible thumpers looking for the torches and pitchforks
seems… very much like a madam with a stable of he-bitches.

“[The Muscle Beach] community was largely made possible by the free
availability of the park, as well as the stipends given out to military personnel
returning from war. Steve Reeves, the actor and bodybuilder best known for
his role in Hercules and the sequel, Hercules Unchained, was a regular at
Muscle Beach after leaving the military. He lived off the 52/20, which stood for
 $20 for 52 weeks that the government provided, and shared a room in what
was known as Joy’s muscle house by the sea. Fleurette Crettaz, known as Joy,
was a bodybuilding fan that ran a communal house in Santa Monica where
gymnasts and weightlifters could live. She did all of the cooking, cleaning and
shopping, charging $100 a month per room, so the athletes could dedicate all
their energy to training.

But as the era shifted from wartime public works to budding urban crisis this
very success was transformed into a sort of latent threat. The massing-together
of bodies—specifically working class bodies—had turned a public health
institution into a site of perceived moral and social decay. Different accounts
as to what exactly happened range from “anti-social behavior,” to charges of
bodybuilders partying with underage girls. In 1959, the city of Santa Monica
decided to shut down Muscle Beach, with a judge determining the park
endorsed, ‘freakish’, ‘homoerotic’, and ‘unbalanced’ activity” (Auto Body).

Whether or not my speculation is correct (though I think a great many people would agree
that any all-male revue could easily be described as freakish, homoerotic, and unbalanced
activity), the Muscle House had a profound impact on West, his diet, and his training
methods. It was there that he gave up on bodybuilding and started training for the odd lifts
almost exclusively, and where he started competing against the other residents of the
Muscle House in the lifts that eventually became the sport of powerlifting.
Joe Dimarco

In the era in which Joe Dimarco lifted, the heavyweight class wasn’t everyone over 308lbs for
the men- it was everyone over 198lbs. That changed things considerably and cut down on
the opportunities for lifters weighing over 198 to make a place for themselves in the hallowed
ranks of Westside’s most prestigious lifters, because at 5’10” and a not-terribly-lean 230lbs, he
was too small to compete with guys like Pat Casey and too big to compete with the guys at
198 (who he couldn’t beat anyway). That said, he was a linchpin for the Westside Barbell
Club, which began its life in Vic Tanny’s Santa Monica gym.

There, Dimarco and Bill West formed the nucleus of the team, and they utilized the methods
of every badass lifter in the place. Vic Tanny’s member roll was perhaps even more
impressive than that of Westside itself, by the way. It included:

● 1947 AAU Mr. America and 1950 NABBA Mr. Universe Steve Reeves

● 1948 AAU Mr. America and 1962 NABBA Mr. Universe (and incredibly popular gym
owner) George Eiferman

● Founder of Gold’s Gym and World’s Gym, Joe Gold

● Founder of Nautilus and inventor of HIT, Arthur Jones

● Bodybuilder Bill McArdle, who possessed what are arguably the greatest triceps in
history

● Perennial best abs winner and Gold’s Gym manager Zabo Koszewski

● 1954 Ironman winner (combination of powerlifting and bodybuilding), 1954-55, 1957,

1961 FICH Mr. World-Universe, inventor of knee sleeves and consultant for the
development of the first weightlifting shoes, and an Olympic gold medalist in 1954
and 1960 with a silver in 1964 in weightlifting, Tommy Kono
 ● And it was the West Coast gym for the York Barbell team when they traveled.

Dimarco himself stood 5’10” and 230lbs at his best weight, and was still capable of benching
his 242lb bodyweight at the ripe old age of 80, which is probably 20 years longer than any
Ohio Westside lifter will live, and 242lbs more than they could bench without a shirt at the
age of 60 if they somehow managed to live that long. He mostly credited his bench pressing
strength to his lat work, interestingly, though he was very fond of George Hackenschmidt’s
favorite chest exercise, the belly toss, which led to the Ohio Westside’s use of board presses
in their training.

“[The belly toss] was the opposite of dead starts pressing off the blocks. He
worked on this cheating style until he was using uncontrollably heavy weight,
600 lbs. for 6 reps, and 660 for a single. All these efforts, undisguised dedication
to a cause, still. largely undisclosed, made for the great power Joe possesses
today. Though he may bull around a heavy weight on the belly toss, he
subscribes to perfection of movement. A machinist by trade, working with
close tolerances, he may have developed a high sense of perfection and
prefers to train with a thick, recoilless bar so that he doesn’t come to depend
on external help. With a “dead” bar he fells in full control. The heavy traffic in
bench press technique disturbs him somewhat, and he wishes the incline press
could be adopted as the official press movement of powerlifting. As an
exercise he prefers it to the flat bench press in both feeling and muscle
building. There little chance of cheating on the incline press, no springy rib
box, no arch and less influence of bench width. He has a point there.

To ensure that no area of development can escape detection, he works a

wide range of motions. Along with inclines he does declines to supplement
the regular bench press. Consistent with this “three-way” development idea
he does three different movements for the upper back, whose development
he finds makes an effective bench press launching pad. Joe estimates that lat
development adds 40 pounds to his bench press and he integrates it with
extensive lat work: (1) chins behind neck; (2) upright row; (3) long incline
pulley. The upright row thickens the rear deltoid, a smart addendum to high
back work. Nor does he reserve punishment on these exercises. On the long
pulley he works with 500 pounds for 5 reps. He mournfully guesses that he is a
natural puller rather than a pusher, and by pure prolonged effort he has
made himself into an exceptional presser” (Tanny and Yarnell).
Joe Dimarco’s Basic Powerlifting Workout
Recall that you had to basically throw these guys out of the gym, so this is the bare minimum
that Dimarco did. He began his lifting career as a bodybuilder, and continued to train with
bodybuilders throughout his life- this was just the meat on the entree plate in his proverbial
four-course meal of daily lifting.

Tuesday and Saturday

Bench Press- Incline Press Chins

135x10 225x5 5 sets of 10-15 reps with

bodyweight.
225x10 275x3

315x5 325x2

370x5 350x five singles

425x five singles. 265x10.

Thursday and Sunday

Squat Front Squat- 5x1x300 to 375. Deadlift

135x10 225x10
245x5 335x 5 singles
335x5 425x2
425x2 475x2
465x five singles 525x 5 singles
335x10. 400x10.
George Frenn

George Frenn is yet another of the strength world luminaries

who has been all but forgotten in today’s sad little
Instagram-and-Youtube superstar-obsessed,
blinders-on-unless-it’s-in-4k-video environment. Though Open
Powerlifting for whatever reason ignores all but his first meet,
Frenn was not only the first powerlifting champion ever at
242, defeating bench press beast Mel Hennessey with an
1850 total (705-400-710), but he was the first man to officially
get through the 800lb squat barrier, the first man to total
2100lbs, and one of the greatest 242lbers of all time (853lb
squat, 520lb bench, 812.5 dead)… all in spite of the fact Frenn only powerlifted to aid his
Olympic hammer throw aspirations (Yarnell 139).

We’re not talking about a guy who got four and five attempts at a world record, a guy who
used knee wraps that would give him 150lbs on his squat, a guy who squatted standing still in
a monolift, a geared lifter, or a guy who used sumo- none of the little tricks that allow modern
lifters to get over on their forebears were part of George Frenn’s giant, Santa Claus-sized bag
of whoop ass.

Frenn not only lifted under the Oly rules wherein there were no flights (the heaviest attempts
went one after another), but

● he walked his gargantuan squats out of homemade squat stands

 ● used ace bandages for knee wraps
● squatted under rules wherein he had to wait for an “up” command (Unit)
● lifted in a format of bench-squat-deadlift rather than squat-bench-deadlift (which
meant that as the strongest guy in most meets, his squats and deadlifts were done in
an insanely compressed time frame more in line with a Crossfit Total than modern
powerlifting)
● and even had an informal agreement with Jon Kuc under which they “would not at
any time change [their] lifting costume - so as to have a little uniformity between
[them] when comparing totals – especially when they were done in separate
locations.” This ridiculousness resulted in Frenn deadifting in boots with a 3/4″ heel
throughout his career (Fernando).

Let all of that sink in- basically, every little bit of effort you’ve spent on perfecting your form,
finding and utilizing the best equipment, and agonizing over the details of your program all
boil down to one thing- you’re not even hard enough to be considered the girliest prison
bitch in the world of George Frenn.

In fact, the people who make that shit their focus rather than simply focusing their will into
white hot rage and applying that rage in stark defiance to gravity itself likely aren’t even
goddamned lifters in his mind, because the shit on which they focus isn’t lifting- it’s the
wretched produce of weak minds who think that lifting weights is simply a series of fakeries
and tricks to be performed in front of an audience.

George Frenn considered lifting to be a means to an end, rather than the end in and of itself.
Perhaps that was part of the secret behind their lifting success, because rather than obsess
over minutia they simply focused on getting brutally strong. The real secret behind their
success, though, was the fact that all three of those men were animals during competitions,
and they’d work themselves up into serious madspace when it came time to put their
muscles where their mouths were.

“Psyching up and mental build-up for training

and competitions was of prime importance to
George Frenn, as was getting himself into a
near-frenzy for big contest lifts” (Fitten).
Of course, it’s super fun these days to dismiss that sort of behavior as meatheadishness. After
all, a thinking man would simply use math to determine their best lifts, then train with a given
percentage of that with incremental progression to gradually increase their max. That’s what
the Russians did at that time, right? You wanna know what they actually did?

The Russians sent their lifters and throwers to the US to train with George Frenn
and Jon Kuc, who were so far ahead of the competition in throwing and lifting
that they seemed absolutely superhuman (Sheperd).
Nor was his training style indicative of a lack of thoughtfulness- Frenn had two graduate
degrees, and he rigorously applied sports psychology to his massive numbers on the field and
the platform.

“Exalted by enthusiasm, bursting with facts, figures and muscles, saturated

with education, possessed of a fiery ambition that seems the natural outcome
of bubbling health, George Frenn, Power Lifter, Hammer Thrower and student
of Physical Education, is the happy and precise combination of all things that
go into making a space age champion” (Fitten).

George Frenn was a preternatural amalgam of psychosis, brazen intellectualism, brute

strength, and supreme confidence, and those things translated to two world records in the
hammer throw and multiple world records in powerlifting. Frenn’s confidence was so
absolute that after defeating the Olympic gold medalist in the hammer throw in a small
meet, Frenn put out a call to all comers- he’d cough up $10,000 if anyone in the world could
beat him in the hammer throw. “I’d meet him anywhere, and it’s a one sided bet, too,” Frenn
said. “If I win I get nothing. I’ll take on all comers. Anyone, anywhere. I’m flat broke, but I’ll
never have to pay up. There’s no one who can beat me. Bring on, Wilt Chamberlain. No one
can beat me” (Twersky). Part of that, obviously, was due to the fact that he’d just utterly
destroyed the Olympic gold medalist. The other part is that Frenn and Bill “Peanuts” West had
figured out a way to trick their nervous system into moving far more weight than they’d ever
thought possible.

“The “Receptor Principle” particularly fascinates George. It puts lifting on a

higher level of awareness he believes. Only a small percent of available
muscle fibers that make up a particular body of muscle are activated in a
simple muscle contraction. The strength of the contraction depends on how
many fibers contract at the same time. “Group Firing”, as it is called, can be
controlled largely by conscious thought. It becomes a confidence game.
Simply telling yourself the weight is heavy and that you must lift it doesn’t
usually work. The muscle must be tricked. Take the classic case of the 120
pound woman who lifted the end of an auto off her injured child. Fierce
motivation propelled her. Muscle can be tried into making super lifts. The
available nerve channels are there, but discovery takes searching. Conscious
searching. Discovery is by chance. Take the case, as another example, of the
man who saved twelve thousand dollars over a period of years from money
he had found on the streets, only because he looked for it.

How does the brain receive the impressions (Receptor Principle) that will send
out the message to the muscle to contract stronger (Group Firing)? One was is
the touch system developed by chance by George and Bill West working
together. The hand of the training partner on the bar or the body during a
limit attempt offers the additional “power of suggestion.’ Once when George
was struggling to deadlift 710 off the blocks Bill got him past a sticking point by
lightly placing his fingers under the bar. A sharp slaps on hips in the low
positions of a heavy squat will also work wonders. They have named it the
 Assistant Method. Then, of course, there are cheating movements, less
delicate than the power of suggestion method, in which you take the muscle
by the collar and force and overload on it” (Tanny).

Reading that, you might see how a guy who in 1966 was quoted as saying, “I will probably
wrap up power lifting when I make an eighteen hundred total,” a total he broke in his very
first meet, ended up setting record after record in the hammer throw and powerlifting
(Tanny). He was so invested in turning his body into an explosive powder keg of barely
restrained muscular violence that literally nothing stood in his way when training, and he was
always ready to compete, whether it be in the original Westside Barbell Club in Bill West’s
garage, on the track, or in a meet. If anyone is a living testament to the methods described
in my article on somafera, George Frenn is it, because his ability to slaughter weights while in
a self-induced frenzy is what gave him the records he accumulated over his life.

“Under the right conditions, anything is

possible.”- George Frenn
Frenn wasn’t simply some berserker content with just whylin’ out on the weights like he was
Tookie Williams on PC, however- being a thinking man, he also utilized what were then
cutting edge sports psychology techniques (Smith):
George Frenn’s Mental Techniques for Sports Dominance
Cue words– George was known for constantly reaffirming himself throughout both workouts
and meets, telling himself that he’s got this, etc. This was essential to

Focus on himself, not others– Though Frenn was aware of what others were doing, his
attention was turned entirely inward while competing and training

Develop effective routines– From his reliance on twice weekly sprints to develop explosive
strength to the structure of his workouts to the use of three spotters on squats, Frenn was
constantly analyzing his process and refining his methods to develop the most effective
routines possible.

Develop a competition atmosphere in practice– George convinced Bill West to toss out all of
his old weights and replace them with Olympic competition plates to ensure that the
conditions under which they trained would be as near to competition as possible. “‘It’s strictly
a mental thing,’ says George. ‘You must remember that emphasis is on maximum lifts at all
times. You have to channel not only effort but also training conditions to the maximum effort
and conditions that exist in and at a contest'” (Tanny).

Focus on day-to-day success– Frenn knew that with his style of lifting and temperament,
continuous incremental progress was not what he was after- his strength varied wildly from
workout to workout. Thus, he followed a simple rule- break a personal record, any record, at
every workout. “Become conditioned to successful attempts,” whether it be “an added rep
or an added pound almost anywhere you have never done it before” (Tanny).

Use mental imagery– George would start visualizing his attempts months out from a meet to
ensure that once he entered the competition the fear of the attempt would be gone,
because he had already performed it dozens of times in his head.

Concentrate on the process, not on outcomes. Frenn had success so ingrained in himself that
the process itself really was the outcome. The trophy at the end was simply part and parcel
of the process.

These methods weren’t simply pulled out of a textbook- they were the combination of
George, who had medical and psychological experiments to confirm what he had already
seen in his own training, with the experiential evidence of Bill “Peanuts” West, the leader of
the Westside Barbell Club (which was his garage). From this, George and Bill developed a
couple of principles unique to themselves, like:

“‘Change of Heart Syndrome,’ mood effects performance. Mental depression

hinders effort. Peace of mind, then, becomes as important as the act of
training. Nor is peace of mind static. Like heavy single attempts, peace of
mind comes hard, but with continual striving, it comes.

“‘Labyrinthine Principle.’ Medical research indicates that when the head is

forward, the face down, an upset occurs in the middle of the ear that causes
relaxation of the spinal muscles. By forcing himself to look up George can
maintain the arch and rigidity of his back, the form necessary for both the
squat and deadlift. He recalls the time at a contest when his final deadlift
 stuck half way, and suddenly realizing his head was down he threw it back as
hard as he could which gave his spine arch, and the weight moved up again
steadily to completion.”

To be sure, not all of Frenn’s methods led to success, nor did any of them really endear him to
his fellow competitors. Given his penchant for fling into a blind rage and maintaining that
state for the duration of a competition, the shit-talking of others could definitely throw off his
game. Faced with the Olympic silver medalist after breaking the indoor world record, Frenn
was already feeling pressure. As Frenn put it, “the day before the meet he walks up and tells
me he’s going to break my world record. And, he says, he’s going to use my weight to do it
with. My record was 68’7½”. On his first throw, Harold does 72’2¾”. I fouled four out of my six
throws” (Putnam). That worked both ways, however, and Frenn was well known for talking
mad shit at meets… for which the guys against whom he competed hated him.

Frenn’s wild-eyed competitive spirit knew no bounds. He named his dog Burke, after his chief
rival. Before a meet in which Burke was competing but Frenn decided to sit out, Frenn
introduced Burke to Burke, explaining he’d named the dog after the thrower. Frenn then
proceeded to yell to his dog throughout the meet. “‘Hey, Burke, come over here and sit
down. Burke, cut that out. Burke, quit licking my face.’ Burke, the human, didn’t do very well
in that meet” (Putnam). On top of that, all of the throwers in the US looked up to the
aforementioned Harold Connolly, about whom Frenn referred to as “father,” constantly
whispering evil shit to Burke like, “Father’s here,” and “you know you could never beat
Father” (Ibid). Eventually, all of it just ate Burke up, and he quit throwing shortly after the dog
incident.

“‘I don’t like George’s mouth,’ Burke said before quitting. ‘I don’t like his
harassment. I used to handle him but no more. He’s just too strong. But you’ve
got to give him credit. Everybody else in world class has more speed and
more quickness and more coordination. But George makes up for that with his
strength. And his mouth‘” (Putnam).

Though I personally find this mentality to be asinine macho posturing, lifters in that era took a
lot of speed and made a lot of bad decisions, so Frenn saw any friendliness out of his fellow
competitors as weakness, and if he received any pleasantries out of the competition, he
claimed that he was a lock for the win. Dipping into his madspace, Frenn would say shit like

“If he was ready, really feeling vicious for this meet, he would have just glared
at me. He’s not feeling ornery enough to win” (Putnam).

In competition, Frenn had no friends- just foes to vanquish. To Frenn, it was the thrill of
competition, not the bosom of his competitors and the warmth of camaraderie or whatever
noncompetitive people say competition is all about, that drove him. Win or lose, Frenn would
go balls out and do his level best to trash everyone else there.

That said, Frenn’s best numbers, which don’t appear on any rankings online I saw, should still
have him at #15 (above Dan Green) in the squat, #18 in the total, #19 in the deadlift, and
#18 in the bench. Put in the raw category (an argument I think is worth having), he’d be first
by a long way in the squat, tenth in the bench, and fourth in the total, over 40 years after he
competed. And yet, I’d be surprised if you could find 10 powerlifters who could tell you a
thing about him without Googling it, which is a goddamned shame.

What makes Frenn’s utter invisibility in modern discussions about the greatest powerlifters ever
is the fact that the bodybuilders, strength athletes, Olympic athletes, and Soviets at the time
considered Frenn to be a literal god among men. If Larry Wheels, Klokov, and Thor were
merged into a single being, they still wouldn’t have the same cred that George Frenn and
Jon Cole had in the 60’s and 70’s. According to Dr. Greg Shepard, the guy who founded the
Bigger, Faster, Stronger program, George Frenn was the absolute man in his day.

“Also joining George at that time were many other elite throwers who came
from all over the country to live in the LA area, where they could throw all year
round with many of the best athletes in the world. As a football coach, I
looked at these guys and was amazed at their conditioning. There were at
least 30 of them, and they weighed an average of 270 pounds and ran 4.6 to
4.7 in the forty. They were far bigger, faster and stronger than the pro football
players of that era”(Shepherd).

When Frenn squatted 853lbs, Paul Anderson was not only considered to be the greatest
squatter of all time and one of the strongest humans ever to walk the Earth… but Anderson
had never squatted 850 under meet conditions, weighed 400lbs, and was so fat he might as
well have been wearing squat briefs, because the pressure of his body pushing against other
parts of his body got him out of the hole. Jon Cole ended up breaking the 900 barrier, but
only did so after bumping up to what is now 308 to do it. Simply stated, Frenn is a guy to
whom you have to pay attention if squatting an apatosaurus is on your bucket list.

Given Frenn’s hyper-competitiveness, which the rest of Westside shared, it’s a miracle we
have any info on their training methods in the first place. The only guy to ever have reported
on their squat workouts in detail, Ron Fernando, got stonewalled by every big swinging dick
in the club when he pressed them for details. According to Fernando, “we spoke to half a
dozen members and got the same reply: ‘Nothing doing. You want answers, talk to George.
We don’t encourage competition.'” Even after getting an audience with the legend,

“then they wouldn’t let George say a word. No sooner was he letting me in on
the secrets of heavy squatting than Bill West threatened to hide his favorite
150-lb. biggies (plates). Frenn was stymied — his personal code of
sportsmanship says everybody should share all their secrets for the growth of
the game — but he winded at me and signaled with his head. ‘Peek through
the window,” he seemed to say. “Watch the exercises and listen to me instruct
the guys'” (Fernando).
George Frenn’s Basic Program
For the first four years of his training, George Frenn treated the bench press like A-List
Hollywood flicks treat Scott Adkins, or evangelicals treat masturbation. Thinking that it
wouldn’t aid him in the hammer throw one iota, Frenn didn’t bench at all while training by
himself in his garage. It wasn’t until 1966 that he decided to plop down and bench a bit,
since he’d joined up with Bill West and the original Westside Barbell Club, and those guys
were serious about the big three. Powerlifting still hadn’t seen its first official meet, though the
lifts were contested at odd lifts meets around the country, but the guys at OG Westside
wanted to be ready the second the first official meet was announced. Thus, Bill “Peanuts”
West assembled what was essentially the strength world’s version of the Avengers, and they
started training like goddamned animals.

As you’ll see, most of the crew trained twice a week in marathon workouts. Their routines
varied in execution but the main lifts kept the same tried-and-true rep scheme for the most
part, even if the six sets listed for bench below often stretched to 18. They included all sorts of
wacky shit, like the belly toss, which had only really fallen out of fashion in the 1950s, and
they’d frequently have impromptu competitions on lifts like the hang clean.

“Perhaps the most important aspect of

George’s training to emphasize once again is
that he treated his lifting very seriously, putting it
absolutely number one in is life” (Fitten).
Saturday (Heavy)

Bench Press– 135 x 10; 225 x 5; 295 x 4; 320 x 2; 360 x 1; 285 x AMRAP (when his max was 420)
Bench Press with pads (basically a soft board press)- 405 x 2; 425 x 2; 440 x 1
450 x 1; 460 x 1; 470 x 1; 295 x AMRAP

Squat-135 x 10; 225 x 5; 325 x 5; 425 x 4; 525 x 3; 565 x 2; 600 x 1 – 2; 635 x 4 singles; 655 x 1; 500
x AMRAP

Deadlift– 225 x 6; 315 x 5; 415 x 4; 500 x 4; 550 x 3; 575 x 2; 620 x 1 or 2 singles

“Lift as much as you can as easy as you can.

Success begets success.”
Tuesday (Light)

Warmups same as Saturday. No deadlifting on this day.

Bench Press– 375 x 5 singles; 295 x AMRAP

Squat– 575 x 5 singles (and these were later replaced entirely by box squats)

Notes: Frenn believed that strong calves could add 1 or 2% to your squat numbers, which
could mean the difference between winning or losing, breaking a record or languishing in
obscurity. Thus, he did a calf raise at the top of every rep of his squat. Interestingly,
deadlifting monster Ernie Frantz also believed that strong calves were absolutely essential for
a big pull, so train your calves already.

For the AMRAP sets, use 100-120 lbs less than your max and shoot for for 10+ reps. “In this way
when one rep is tried, the mind can draw on the physical ‘bank’” (Fernando).

Wednesday or Thursday (Piddling Days)

High Pulls– 225 x 10; 275 x 10; 325 x 4 – 5 (his max was 405 x 10 with wrist wraps)
Tricep Extensions – do some. Doesn’t matter what.

Do Not Skip Your Assistance Work

Unlike modern trainees, who seem to fear innovation and “program hopping” like comics
nerds do badass women, the guys at Westside were all about embracing new methods and
new exercises. As such, the Westside Club’s methods were definitely more of a Hunter’s Stew
of training methods and exercises, though the guys who served primarily as the “chefs” were
Bill West on the deadlift, George Frenn on the squat, and Pat Casey on the bench. As a
result, the pre-eminent guys in each of the individual lifts ended up innovating and honing
their craft to the point where the entire team

Each lifter would bring in the new shit they’d learned from other lifters. Having trained with
John Cole while on the European Track and Field circuit, Frenn brought with him some tricks
he’d learned from that beast. DiMarco pushed the belly toss hard in addition to the
bench/box squat, Pat Casey and Bill West did the same with skull crushers, and because they
were all “odd lift” competitors, all of them injected their pet odd lifts into the workouts.

One such innovation was what they call the bench squat,
which is now called the box squat. According to powerlifting
historian Dave Yarnell, Joe DiMarco introduced the bench
squat to the Westside guys after learning the exercise from
1946 AAU Mr. America and 1949 IFBB Mr. America Alan
Stephan while training with Stephan in Minnesota. Stephan
apparently hated regular squats and eschewed their use
altogether for bench squats, and since he was moving some
serious weight that way, DiMarco started doing them and
introduced them to Bill West when he moved to LA… leading
to the intense irony of tr00 powerlifting bros who look down
their nose at bodybuilders owing their chief squat assistance
exercise to the sport they profess to hate.

Each lifter would bring in the new shit they’d learned from
other lifters. Having trained with John Cole while on the
European Track and Field circuit, Frenn brought with him
some tricks he’d learned from that beast. DiMarco pushed
the belly toss hard in addition to the bench/box squat, Pat
Casey and Bill West did the same with skull crushers, and because they were all “odd lift”
competitors, all of them injected their pet odd lifts into the workouts. In short, these guys
absolutely had no set routine, because they knew that they needed to stress their bodies in
insane ways in order to move insane weights.
Frenn Was Westside’s Biggest Squatter
With Frenn leading the team on the squat, “15 members gained an accumulative total of
3325 pounds on the squat since we went operational on assistance training” (Frenn).
Although no one in the club other than Frenn was a squat specialist, all of the guys in the
club put up impressive numbers in the squat. And before you scoff, remember that
powerlifting was in its infancy, and these guys were using nothing but Ace bandages for
wraps, often following themselves for attempts because there was no flight system, and were
using homemade squat stands that were basically just poles stuck into concrete poured into
car wheels, and the barbells they used were utter trash- Eleiko didn’t invent the modern
barbell until 1962, and even then it wasn’t commonly found in gyms. That meant that these
bars would bend and/or snap with regularity.

Despite that, Frenn coached his team into some notable squat numbers, all of which were
national or world records save Sacks’ lift, which was a California record.

● Joe Molloy (at 165lbs) 547.5lbs

● Oliver Sacks (242): 600lbs
● Bill West (181) 655lbs
● Harold Connolly (220) 705lbs
● Dick Allen (218) 705lbs
● Pat Casey (308):
● George Frenn (242): 853lbs

Using the above program as the basic framework, the team used the following shit as
assistance work designed to “condition” their legs to perform under massive loads. As you’ll
see, Frenn’s methods were basically adopted wholesale by Louie Simmons and then
perverted into the stupid shit you see them doing.

High Bench Squat / High Box Squat

Done with a bench between 14″ and 20″ high (they just put bricks or cinder blocks under a
bench to get it to the right height), “you descend with your hips well to the rear of the bench.
Keeping the hips back make contact with the butt and much of the hamstrings. For an
instant relax after landing, then rock forward and using this momentum drive erect. We find
results are better if the feet are kept fairly straight or at least aligned with the thighbone.
Suggested poundage: 100-125 lbs. over your best squat.

Sets/Reps: 5 x 5″ (Frenn Squat).

Low Box Squat

Same as above, but with a bench 6″ lower than the high box squat, so that on the bench
you’re at competition depth (RPS depth, not USAPL’s dumbass “asshole to the floor” depth).
Frenn claimed that the weight here would be less than the high box squat but more than
your competition weight because the rocking motion would propel you out of the hole.
Suggested poundage progression: Squat max minus 75 pounds to squat max plus 50 pounds.

Sets/Reps: 5 x 5 (Frenn).
Good Mornings

These were suggested by the aforementioned Jim Klostergaard, and they all loved this
exercise. Suggested poundage: 66%1RM.

Sets/Reps: 3 x 5 (Frenn Squat).

Yoke Walks

Frenn would often walk 70 yards (down to the end of the driveway and back with about
700lbs on his back, then do calf raises with it before re-racking it (Yarnell 180). Suggested
poundage: 90% 1RM. Sets/Reps: Unclear, but he generally did 3-6 sets of assistance shit.

Front Squat

According to Frenn, “this is a damn good assistance exercise for PL men because it attacks
quad fibers left untouched by any other type of squat; the angle of descent and ascent are
so different. It also taxes the back and abs to keep the trunk erect at all times. And cheating,
such as the rocking in the bench squat, is impossible…. If you drop the back squat until the
front and back are equal you should be able to add 50-75 pounds to the rear (depending
on your power squat style) the first workout you retry it. Suggested poundage: 80-90% back
squat work weights. Sets/Reps: Same as the Saturday workout (Frenn Squat).

Leg Extensions

“Obviously leg extensions are not a power exercise; yet they have a more important purpose
— preventative medicine. [Dallas] Long recommended by physical therapists for patients
with weak knees, extensions with 150-200 pounds work even better wonders for powerlifters.
They strengthen the ligaments, tendons, sinews and muscle around the knees, thereby
cutting down squatting injuries, those terrible calamities which can wipe out a year’s progress
in a flash” (Frenn Squat).

Leg Curls

“Thick bulgy thigh biceps help in squat rebound; they shorten the distance between the
thigh and calf a tiny bit making it just that much easier to hit the full squat and bounce back
up. But more importantly, strong thigh biceps add to an overall stronger, fitter and better
prepared leg and that’s the entire import of this routine” (Frenn Squat).
Frenn Focused on the Deadlift
Though Frenn’s focus was on the deadlift rather than the squat (and he had to follow himself
twice on the squat before moving directly into following himself on the deadlift due to the
meet structure of the day, Frenn’s deadlift was still elite as hell at the time. In another stroke
of what seems to be a “great minds think alike” situation with Frenn, he concluded that the
deadlift didn’t need to be trained weekly in order to make improvements. As he put it,

“If you perform religiously the following four exercises – power cleans,
snatch-grip and clean-grip high pulls, and good mornings – your actual
deadlifting can be limited to once every ten days. Then you should take a
weight about 100-120 lbs less than your maximum and try to get 10 reps with it.
I venture to guess that a fellow like John Kuc who can pull 870 plus can easily
take around 730-745 and perform 10 solid reps with it. Hey, that in and of itself
is one hell of a feat. As far as reps go in the assistance moves, 4-9 sets of 3-5
reps would do nicely” (Fernando).

Frenn vehemently denied that form work on the deadlift was necessary because “the form
on the pulling movements, at least the start of the pull, is, or in my opinion should be, the
SAME. That is, close stance, hands outside the knees, flat back and head up,” a statement
with which I completely agree after having made a similar discovery with the combination of
shrugs, Pendlay rows, and stiff-legged high pulls (Ibid). He went on to say:

“Basically, there should be one main philosophy behind deadlifting,

something that I have shown countless times and that many of the other great
lifters have shown. That is, the willingness to continually lift heavy weights. You
have to mentally, emotionally train yourself to pull those big numbers,
regardless of the time of year it is” (Fernando).

And in case you’re curious where he came down on the subject, he believed
sumo deadlifting was a joke, and that the guys who used that method were
just fooling themselves about being strong.

Tips and Tricks From George Frenn

DON’T RELY SOLELY ON THE BACK SQUAT. I’m looking at you goofball martyrs
who endlessly yammer on about how you squat daily. Not only does that shit
not impress big squatters, it’s stupid. Frenn agrees, saying “nothing BUT
squatting to improve your squat may cause problems later on. Variety can
extend your lifting life and help you avoid wear and tear injuries. Power
competitors should keep in mind the style aspects of squatting even if it
means slightly lower poundages” (Frenn).

Don’t neglect your cardio and stretching: Frenn believed that running was
more essential than bringing Truvada on a whore house tour in Swaziland. As
such, he did twice weekly sprint training consisting of 10-50 yard sprints. He
believed these would help him maintain intra-thoracic pressure during max
squats and deadlifts, which would convert to bigger weights moved.
Additionally, he also swam and stretched regularly to ensure he wouldn’t
injure himself through inflexibility (Tanny Frenn).

Abs aren’t just for the Instagram crowd. Strong abs make for a huge squat,
and play a massive role in your ability to overhead press big weights. If you
neglect them, you will fail as a squatter, a lifter, and a human being in
general.

Shrugs are good, and more shrugs are more gooder. “Big hunky traps cushion
the weight with less pain than little ones and make enduring the load and
concentration on the lift easier” (Frenn).

Warm up your knees before squatting heavy. “Do plenty of light or freehand
reps before hitting the big bars” (Frenn).

Peaking for meets is a joke. A real lifter should be, in Frenn’s mind, ready to
put his ass on the line at any time, anywhere, and demonstrate the full,
beautiful brutality of his Earth-shaking strength. In his words:

“From what I know about cycling, I personally don’t believe in it per se. Yes, of
course, I realize that one cannot (especially in the beginning stages of his
career) lift max 100% weights every session – however, even a beginner can
respond well to utilizing 85% of max for a certain number of reps. Cycling is
fallacious to me because it seems that the environment controls the lifter –
you have to control the environment. By building up a physical ‘bank’ of
strength and emotion by simply doing the lift with heavier and heavier
weights, one can always ‘peak’ for any given meet. For example, I entered
(and won) the YMCA Nationals in 1976. Prior to the meet the very best that I
had pulled in the deadlift was 585×5 reps. Yet by drawing on these reserves in
my ‘bank’ I was able to pull a 765 that day” (Fernando).
I believe much of the reason Frenn’s name is not more widely remembered and revered is
because Frenn was at odds with everyone but the Westside guys, all of the time. A strongly
principled man who would today be considered the wokest of social justice warriors, Frenn
pissed off the IOC by siding with athletes throwing up the black power salute at the 1968
Olympics. He then proceeded to piss off the US Olympic committee by self-financing a
documentary on the pathetic state support for the US Olympic track team (at a cost of a
cool $25k out of his own pocket, which would be $172k… on a teacher’s salary)
diplomatically titled The Hard Road to Munich (Twersky). The film mocked the expectations of
the US and their professed support for track athletes and ultimately predicted the US’s poor
showing in Munich in 1972. His favorite bit of the film was an interview with the only American
to ever serve as the head of the International Olympic Committee, Avery Brundage.

“‘The present status of amateur athletics in the United Statist,’ Brundage, who
broke into laughter, replied, ‘there no status of amateur athletics in the United
States.’ Over the long run, the only reason track and field survives, says Frenn,
is because of the ‘oddballs and weirdos’ who bear any burden and pay any
pricer for the chance to compete” (Twersky).

If it weren’t enough to piss off his fellow throwers, various white Olympic athletes in the
Olympic Village in Mexico City, and the US Olympic committee, Frenn also butted heads with
the AAU and Bob Hoffman and the York Barbell lifters. Frenn worked tirelessly with Joe Weider
to promote powerlifting and get it sanctioned by the AAU, but only succeeded in making
Hoffman and the AAU crazy in what turned out to be nothing more than Frenn’s use as a
pawn by Weider (Fair 261-2, 282, 301-2). And when I say crazy, I mean they referred to him as
the Ralph Nader of powerlifting, which in today’s terms would be like calling him the AOC of
powerlifting. What was likely the final straw, though, was Frenn’s participation in the inaugural
Gay Games in 1982.

“In 1982 he agreed to carry the Olympic flag into San Francisco’s Cox Stadium
at the inaugural Gay Olympic Games, which he calls ‘the biggest mistake of
my life.’ Frenn says he isn’t gay–he agreed to participate at the request of
organizer Tom Waddell, a friend and fellow Olympian. ‘I always had been a
loner and done whatever I wanted, so I said yes.’ But after the games people,
including his students, had a hard time believing he wasn’t gay. The
controversy, he says, contributed to his leaving a teaching job. ‘All it did was
wreck my reputation,’ he says” (Syken).

Because 1982 America very much resembled modern day Oklahoma, Idaho, or Russia, it was
not ok to be gay (even if you actually weren’t in the first place), and Frenn found himself
immediately unemployed, dateless (women who saw the article apparently thought he was
an icky gay guy), and apparently ostracized by the powerlifting community. Although Frenn
was able to find work thereafter, his participation in that event seemed to be the straw that
broke the camel’s back, and he fell from grace in the strength world altogether.

And thus, one of the most badass powerlifters and throwers in history has been all but stricken
from memory for being nothing more than a man who had his own ideas and give a shit
what other people thought about them. As I’ve written in the past, being a wild-eyed
eccentric in a sport inexplicably filled with conformists may be the best path to infamy but is
not a methodology by which one either makes money or finds themselves remembered
fondly. This essential heretic, however, stands as a beacon of badassery for those of us who
want to forge our own paths to relentless, unforgiving, soul-crushing strength.

And he would have stood staunchly against the modern Westside Barbell.
Westside Barbell’s Influences
Frenn, West and their club were all heavily influenced by the York Barbell lifters, some of
whom lifted with the Westside guys during the summer (which was their off-season). The York
guys, however, had been heavily influenced by two of America’s premier non-Olympic lifters,
Bob Peoples and semi-mythical strongman Paul Anderson. Those two lifters traveled regularly
to York to train with the Olympic guys, and their unique training methodologies heavily
influenced those Olympic gold medalists Ike Berger and Dave Ashman, and silver medalist
Dave Sheppard who trained regularly at Westside. Furthermore, the York guys and the
Westside guys all trained together at Vic Tanny’s “Dungeon” gym when they were on the
West Coast, which meant the York guys had still more opportunity to influence the training
methods of the Westside Barbell Club.

To reiterate, the York guys were regularly beating the Soviets in weightlifting, as were George
Frenn and John Kuc in track and field. The Soviets went to Frenn for programming advice, not
their coaches preaching that dumbass periodization nonsense. If you’re using periodization,
you’re going backward, not forward.

So let’s move forward, shall we?

Chuck Ahrens
Standing 6’1″ and weighing somewhere between 300 and 330lbs, Chuck Ahrens wouldn’t
make the largest strongman in the modern era (though if he’d trained legs, he’d be up
there), but in the 1950s looked like he tore through a movie screen out of a monster film,
ready to rampage through downtown Tokyo if provoked. Said to have a visibly larger upper
body than fellow behemoth Paul Anderson, Ahrens was only photographed in a t-shirt once,
finally satisfying Peary Rader’s curiosity
about the actual size of his arms. He
and Steve Merjanian often trained
together, and they spread the gospel
of the incline bench far and wide as
every lifter in Los Angeles (including
Westside) did their best to adapt their
strategies for building unreal size to
their own training.

To be clear, Ahrens never trained at

Westside insofar as I am aware, but as
his training partner Steve Merjanian
did, and the Westside guys trained
alongside Ahrens in Vic Tanny’s
“Dungeon” gym, it is a safe assumption that his training heavily influenced theirs.

Chuck Ahrens’ Vital Statistics

● Lived: 1958-2010
● Height: 6’1″
● Weight: 330 pounds (at his strongest); ranged between 280lbs and 330lbs
● Chest: 58″ (unexpanded)
● Arms: 22.375″
● Shoulder Width: 28″

Internet “lifters” love to drag Ahrens, and you’ll often see some skinny dickhead questioning
Ahrens’ 28 reps with 400lbs on the bench claim, citing the fact he never benched heavy.
Ahrens is documented by multiple sources doing a triple with 355lbs on a skullcrusher. I’ve
known a few guys who could hit 12 reps with 405 on any given day, and they struggled to do
a few reps with 225 on skullcrushers. Another lift that would go a long way toward
corroborating his bench claim corroborating that is his behind the neck press of 380lbs, as
would his steep incline benches for reps of 225lb dumbbells. So let’s dispense with the weak
shit- just because you’ve never seen it doesn’t mean it hasn’t been done.

His lifting partners, who were far stronger than most, said Ahrens could do their best lifts cold.
And finally, the people talking shit on Ahrens lift nothing and know less-

“it was argued in MILO®: A Journal For Serious Strength Athletes that if one
considered the consistency of the reports along with the sources involved, it
would be hard to conclude anything other than that he really did do things
 like a standing overhead press of around 300 pounds with one arm” (Strossen).
We’ll never really know, however, because according to Peary Rader “We…
try to keep readers informed about Chuck and his progress but he is very
much against publicity” (Piche).

If you go and read Piche’s piece (in the sources), which I used for a lot of the weights
attributed to Ahrens, he fails to mention in stating that Ahrens’ lifts are semi-mythical that
Ahrens would often quit lifting for extended period of time, which would account for the rise
and fall of reported body weight, weights lifted, and associated measurements- no matter
whether he was 280 or 330, if he had lifted yesterday or hadn’t lifted in months, the man
made mountains look like tiny little bitches

Going back to the man in question, he was rarely photographed and virtually all of the
records of his lifts come from second hand sources, weirdly in spite of the fact that he was a
mainstay of Muscle Beach when it was the mecca of weight lifting and bodybuilding. This
would be like Tara Reid only getting caught on film a couple of times in the entire Sharknado
series (and how glorious it would be not to have to look at her hideous, Michael
Jackson-impersonating visage for ninety minutes). Given, however, that the man was about
as disinterested in public relations as he was about training in temperature appropriate attire,
it confuses me why people would discredit his lifts. It wasn’t Ahrens bragging about his
strength, because he wasn’t some attention whore with Histrionic Personality Disorder
begging people to like him by posting every goddamn workout online, no matter how shitty-
it was anyone from his own training partners, one of whom was a well-respected minister, to
well respected journalists, and sundry other onlookers.

In regards to his training partner,

Carlin Venus, he was a 5’10”, 255lb
Doctor of Nutritional Science and
Holistic Nutrition with an IQ between
180 and 190. Not only was the guy a
champion bodybuilder with a 60″
chest, 18″ calves, and 20″ arms, but he
was a pro wrestler, boxer, and martial
artist who spoke five languages
(Minichiello). This is a man who would
not be given to hyperbole in
describing the feats of others. To wit,
the following are Carlin’s best ever
lifts, all of whom were attested to by
the guys at the gym where he trained,
and all of them were notarized. These
lifts, Carlin said, were lifts that Ahrens
could do in long sleeves and pants,
without any warmup at all, on any
 given day. By Carlin’s account, Ahrens was one step shy of Superman (Green) and
several dozen steps ahead of everyone else. He reported the following insane training
lifts.

Good Mornings – 395lbs. Press From The Racks – 475lbs for 2 reps.

Deadlift – 625lbs for 12 reps. Strict Barbell Curl (with back against the
wall) – 245lbs.
One-Arm Dumbbell Press – 210lbs for 10
reps, either hand. Reverse Curl – 205lbs.

Due to the fact that the naysayers always manage to say “nay”, I thought it pertinent to
mention that the one of the most prominent authors on the subject of strength history, David
Willoughby, considers Ahrens’ feats to have been legit. Furthermore, renown strength
luminary and President of the All-Round Weightlifting Association, “Thom Van Vleck [said]
that he remembers his uncles discussing Chuck’s lifts in the early JWC Club – both skeptical
and in awe of him. Chuck Ahrens inspired many lifters to ‘take on the impossible’ and get
stronger” (Meyers). If you prefer to think that his lifts are all bullshit, that’s on you, and you
suck, so you might as well just quit lifting anyway. For the rest of you, check this shit out, and
let it motivate you to John Wick up and do the impossible.

Chuck Ahrens’ Best Lifts

Standing Behind the Neck Press – 390lbs One Arm Row – 350lbs for reps

One Arm Strict Overhead Press – 270lb Skullcrusher – 400lbs x 1; 375 x 2 (without a
dumbbell warmup); 355lbs x 3 (another account has
345 x 2)
One Arm Push Press – 350lbs dumbbell
Standing Tricep Extension – 305 x 2
One Arm Continental Overhead Press –
(without a warmup)
375 x 1 (according to bodybuilder Oliver
Sacks); 310 x 3; 280 for reps the year Seated Dumbbell Cheat Curl – 180lbs x 1;
before that (continental press it kind of the 165 pound dumbbells x 3
lay back method used in the Olympics
Alternate Dumbbell Cheat Curl – 200 lb.
right before the press was dropped) [Note:
dumbbells (per the legendary Pat Casey)
Anderson could only do 300 in this style]
Curl – 375lbs x 3 on a bent 1″ diameter bar
Two Arm Dumbbell Overhead Press – 204lb
dumbbells (408lbs total) with Paul One Arm Concentration Curl – 115lbs on
Anderson watching an Olympic bar, in strict form and without
bracing his arm against his leg
One Arm Front Raise – 200-pound
dumbbell Bench Press – 560 or 570 x 1 (according to
historian David P. Willoughby); 400 x 28
Crucifix – 150lb dumbbells
(per the same); 400 x 20 (according to Apr
Two Arm Dumbbell Clean and Press – 205lb 1995 MILO)
dumbbells
 “[Ahrens’] favorite exercises are curls, and presses with dumbbells and the
triceps press on bench with barbell. He specializes on these with heavy
weights and rather low reps.

“He has done almost no leg and back work.”

“He likes to eat six large steaks per day to maintain his bulk and size” (Piche).

Of course, nothing Ahrens did was at a steady pace. Ahrens was a sprinter, not a marathon
runner, and as such he would train in bursts followed by month long or more layoffs. As you
can imagine, that meant that both his bodyweight and the weights he’d use in training had
their ups and downs, although he generally didn’t see much of a concomitant dropoff with
his training weights as his bodyweight. His secret? He treated the weights like their name
was Deebo and he was Smokey in the movie Friday- he had mind control over that shit. That
is how he forced the weights to constantly increase, in spite of whatever setbacks he might
have had, and make everyone look like his punk bitch in doing so.

To forestall the inevitable “‘mind control’ is an obvious euphemism for ‘steroids'”, I’ll remind
you people that I’ve never dissembled about steroid use- the man was not on gear. Ahrens’
opinion of steroids, in the words of his lifting partner:

“The way Charlie (Chuck Ahrens, Carlin’s training partner) and I felt, if you
wanted more steroids . . . just eat more meat! After all, the beef was so
loaded down with that junk for breeding and raising. Hahaha, we determined
one time just how much was being pumped into chickens and beef at the
time and it blew our minds. I guess you could say that we were on steroids.
Indirectly. I mean, we got a big laugh out of that, but there was something to
it” (Green).

To add a bit to that, here is an editor’s note from a writeup on Chuck, whose strength
peaked in 1957-1958:

“[Ed Note: We must remember that although testosterone was being

manufactured by 1935, it was almost never used by people in the iron game.
Remember also that 1957 was several years before Bill March, Tony Garcy,
and Lou Riecke— aided by John Ziegler— introduced anabolic steroids to the
strength sports in this country. Dianabol was not manufactured until 1958]”
(Neece).

Instead of steroids, Chuck Ahrens believed in the power of sleep in a way no one else did-
narcoleptics would marvel at the man’s ability to drop and sleep wherever he stood.

“He’d even sleep right in the middle of the gym if it was time! Can you
imagine? Hahaha . . . I’ll never forget. Guys like Sidney Sheldon and other
movie producers and moguls would come into the gym and have to step
over Charlie who might have decided to take a noon nap near the door. I
mean, if it was time for a nap, it was time. Everybody was cool, though. They
respected Charlie and didn’t disturb him. After awhile no one thought
anything of it” (Green).
One exercise we sort of know he did frequently, and with which Ahrens is credited,
apparently helped build his herculean shoulder strength and is the eponymous Ahrens Press.
I’ve done this exercise for years, having learned of it in some Men’s Health book years ago
under the name “W Press,” without having any knowledge that it was Ahrens’ apparent
bread and butter lift. In addition to unbelievably heavy lateral raises, overhead barbell
presses, and high incline presses the Ahrens Press was apparently his jam, his jelly, his peanut
butter, and his peanuts.

This is a modified dumbbell press, which shouldn’t shock you after looking at Ahren’s best lifts-
the man loved dumbbell pressing like crazy obese people love excuses and donuts. The
modification, obvious if you see the above, is that the dumbbells are pressed up and out to
make a V with them. The great irony here is that it was a matter of utility for Ahrens, who had
to use really long-handled dumbbells loaded with a shitload of plates, and we’re just some
assholes waving light dumbbells around in the air. Nevertheless, doing your dumbbell presses
(or FreeMotion machine presses, which are actually a pretty awesome way to knock these
out) like this will bring the pain, and undoubtedly place stress on your delts and traps that will
lend itself to bigger gains and a bigger overhead press.

“Think it.” – Chuck Ahrens

The most powerful tool is THE MIND.

Paul Anderson

Have you ever felt like just digging a hole in

your backyard, then building a squat stand
over it and loading a thousand pounds on
it, then standing in the hole and doing
partials with it? Me neither. Paul Anderson,
however, thought about a lot of crazy shit
like that. Paul Anderson, if you don’t know
already, was an American Olympic
weightlifter, proto-powerlifter, and
strongman who was well known for his
weird-ass training style and his penchant
for shattering world records, and it was this
man who taught the York Barbell team
how to squat, and they in turn coached up
the Westside lifters.

Height: 5’9″

Weight: 330-360 lbs

Chest: 58″

Biceps: 22″

Thigh: 36″

Neck: 22.5″

Paul’s Pro Boxing Record: 2W-1L (2 KO’s)

Paul lost his first amateur fight from basically being Butterbean- he knocked his opponent
down three times but was wheezing by the third round and asked the ref to stop the fight so
he didn’t die. His pro loss came from a disqualification when he just picked up his opponent
and body slammed him (Silver).

Paul’s Best Confirmed and Alleged Lifts

Standard clean and press: 402.5 lbs Squat: 920 lbs. (confirmed); 1,202 lbs.
(confirmed) (alleged); 800 – 900 x 10 reps (depending
on the source)
Snatch: 347 lbs. (confirmed)
Silver Dollar Squat: 1,160 lbs. (alleged- the
Clean and Press: 445 lbs. (confirmed);
owner said it weighed 1000 lbs. and was
415×3 (confirmed); 424×2 (confirmed).
$15k in coins, and the weights here
One arm overhead push press (with hanging off the bar to improve the
Olympic barbell): 250 lbs. (confirmed); 300 leverage)
lbs. x 8-10 with right and 5-7 with left hand
(alleged)
Bench Press (Raw): 450 x 3 (confirmed); Continental and Jerk: 460 lbs. (alleged)
627 lb (alleged)
Two Hand Overhead Press: 400 lbs. x 7
Deadlift: 750 lbs. (confirmed); 820 lbs. (alleged)
(alleged)
Push Press: 500 lbs. (confirmed); 545 lbs.
Backlift: 6270 lbs (alleged and apparently (alleged)
entirely unwitnessed)

Hip Lift: 4100 lbs.

Paul’s Weightlifting Record

1955 US Nationals: 1st +90kg 1956 US Nationals

1955 World Championships: Gold +90 kg 1956 Olympic Games: Gold +90 kg

As loudmouth internet warriors are wont to be incredulous about the poundages with which
Anderson is credited, I posted both the lifts that have been confirmed in documentation or
competition and the ones he’s alleged to have lifted. Though many of his lifts have been
verified by some of the greatest lifters in history, including Bruce Wilhelm, Bob Peoples, and
Pat Casey, and all of them would slap you out of your shoes if they witnessed you shit talking
Anderson’s epic lifts, Anderson’s biography was apparently pretty well full of shit and people
are prone to making outrageous claims about Anderson’s strength (Neece). Tommy Kono,
however, one of the greatest American Olympic weightlifters, said of people’s doubts about
Anderson’s lifts (before the claims started to get really outrageous):

“Anyone who never saw Paul lift should reserve judgment because his
strength levels had to be seen to be believed- it wasn’t just the size of the
weights Paul handled, but the ease with which he handled them was so
staggering. People have to recognize that many of Paul’s lifts were done
under impromptu conditions– such as Paul accommodating people by lifting
whatever was at hand at the moment. This contributes to the discrepancies in
reported weights, etc., but should not diminish the significance of the lifts”
(Wilhelm 12).

Additionally, Paul was reported by Tommy Kono to have done a set of ten full squats, with no
warmup, with 700 lbs., “so rapidly that it was as if free squats were performed” (PP 16), and
shattered the world record in the strict press lifting IN THE RAIN, pressing 402 lbs in strict
competition fashion over his head- 72 lbs more than the previous record. Ten years later, he
broke the record again with 420. You can see why people felt comfortable making
outrageous claims about Anderson’s lifts, then, because the real weights were so
phenomenal they were easy to embellish.

Paul Anderson was a deeply religious Southern Baptist big softie who some might say
squandered all of his talent performing exhibitions rather than actually competing to raise a
youth home for disadvantaged kids. Nowhere will you find stories of Paul Anderson, hard
drinking, coke snorting, bulldozer of a man who once threw a boulder through the window of
a McDonalds, or smashed his face open by headbutting a pay phone off a wall, or holding
people hostage for a ham sandwich. Instead, Paul Anderson was what can only be
described as a really nice guy.

Born to a standard white Southern American family, Anderson was huge even as a youth.
According to Earl Liederman, “when he was 12 years of age he weighed 160; at 15 he
tipped the scales at 200; at 16 he was around 210; at 17 his weight went to about 230; at 18
he weighed 250; and at 19, 270 pounds,” and by the time he was 20 he was 295 (Liederman).
According to Clarence Bass, Anderson’s noob gains were beyond idiotic, but as everything
about Anderson seems larger than life, it should come as no surprise. “In less than a year of
training, Paul transformed himself from “just another small town Southern boy” into a
275-pounder with a 21 l/2″ neck, 20″ arm, 33″ thigh and 19″ calf. In later years, his arms and
neck grew to 25″ and his thighs to 36″” (Bass).

No real record exists of the sizes of his parents, but with dimensions like those you’d expect to
hear a story that Gojira was a female and King Kong knocked her up, only to produce
Anderson. Well, save for his height, but what he lacked in height, he made up for in girth.
Paul Anderson was a mere 5’9″ and weighed around 350 pounds at the peak of his strength
career, though he at one point ballooned to 400 and snagged his Olympic gold weighing
303. Though he was famous for his fast sprint starts and concomitant explosive strength, he
was apparently hideously out of shape and usually wheezing in an effort to catch his breath.

No matter his failings as an endurance athlete and the fact that Anderson was fatter than
Chris Farley after a weekend locked inside an all you can eat buffet- his resultant strength
has made him a legend in strength sports, a successful pro boxer, an Olympic gold medalist,
an epic powerlifter, and the king of the odd lifts in the 20th Century. Anderson’s career was
as all over the place as his bona fides would indicate. He had a show for some time in Las
Vegas, in which he squatted a barbell weighing over 1,000 lbs loaded with $10,000 in silver
dollars.

Later, he appeared on the Ed Sullivan show, and other late night shows, in an effort to raise
money for his youth home. Given what is still continuing indifference to awesome feats of
strength in the fat-ensconced brains of the American public, Anderson soon turned to
professional wrestling and boxing to earn money. Additionally, he continued to tour the
country performing exhibitions wherein he would backlift while playing some kind of wind
instrument to raise money for his youth home. He did this so often, in fact, that “[Bob]
Hoffman would later claim, with a straight face, at a USOC eligibility hearing that [Anderson]
was a musician, not a professional weightlifter” (Archibald).

Anderson could have cited his unique training methods as the key to his success, but being
an evangelical Christian, he gave all the credit to someone else. It’s all well and good if
you’re religious, but if you’re squatting upwards of 900 lbs, chances are it was a combination
of long, brutal workouts, a little genetic luck, and a lot of eating, since the Catholic Church
doesn’t seem to be fielding the majority of the gold medalists in the Olympic Weightlifting
and Jesus wasn’t well known for being a strongman. Weirdly, however, Anderson rarely
chose to compete, even though he was nearly criminally strong and was occasionally even
at competitions performing exhibitions. This is probably why so many people are apt to call
bullshit on his lifts. For instance:

“In 1958, in Madison Square Garden, he gave an exhibition after a USA-USSR

competition in which the U.S. team was defeated. Hoping to soothe the
crowd, he took the Soviet heavyweight’s winning clean and jerk of 424 lbs.
and cleaned and pressed it for two reps. A few years later, in 1962, when Yuri
Vlasov broke his amateur record with a press of 415 lbs., Anderson answered
by pressing 415 lbs. for three reps in an exhibition in Dalton, Georgia” (Neece).

In spite of the fact that he preferred exhibitions to competitions (a distinction historically only
made by rich people looking for a reason to diminish the physical feats of people outside the
aristocracy) and some of his lifts are somewhat disputed, his methods for getting crazy strong
still bear investigation. I’ve already alluded to, and shown a picture of, one of his favorite
training methods- squatting in a hole. As time progressed, he would add dirt to the hole,
increasing his range of motion, and he eventually got to the point were he could allegedly
squat 1,200 (though bear in mind he allegedly squatted 315 for ten reps the first time he got
under a bar or 400 for a double, depending on the source [Wilhelm, Liederman]).

As you can see above, he had a multitude of ways to do partial squats and gradually add
weight, and it seems he included the use of proto-crazybells in his partials as well (this rig
apparently weighed about 1800 lbs). The key to these partials was to start at the bottom,
rather than the top, so eliminate the bounce out of the hole and increase the loads your
body is capable of handling.

Another wacky training method Anderson used was to set up two golf holes on his farm
about 300 yards apart. He’d whack the ball down to the one hole, where he’d set up an
outdoor rack with a bar loaded to 400. He’d do 3-5 reps in the overhead press with it, then
whack the ball back to the other hole, where he’d set up a squat rack loaded to 800. He’d
bang out 3-5 reps with that weight, then repeat, all afternoon. Anderson’s typical workouts
(according to Marty Gallagher in Purposeful Primitive) were 6 days a week and took 3-4 hours
to complete.

Paul Anderson’s Powerlifting Routine

Monday, Wednesday, and Friday

Press Off Rack– 1x6x300, 1x2x400, 1x2x390, Push-Press Off Rack– 1x3x450
1x2x370
Bench Press– 1×6-8×400-450
Press Outs (from sticking point to lockout)-
1x4x500

Press From Shoulders To Top Of Head–

1x4x500

Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday

Full Squat– 2x10x600, 1x2x825, 1x2x845, Quarter Squat– 1x2x1800
1x2x900
Deadlift– 4×6-8×650
Half Squat– 1x2x1200

Bob Whelan gave another account of an Anderson Program- one that was specialized for
Olympic Weightlifting. Though many Oly lifters would scoff at this routine, it was developed
by a man who had no coaching in the sport, yet who easily took the gold at the Olympics
and won the world championships in Olympic Weightlifting. As such, you may want to bust
out your pens and take some notes on the following routine.

Paul Anderson’s Olympic Weightlifting Routine

Monday, Wednesday, and Friday

Overhead Press– Lots of sets of 2×320 Squat Clean– Singles up to 400 pounds.

Dumbbell Press– 7x3x135 Deadlift– 690 pounds, 2×3.

Press Behind Neck– High reps to pump up High pulls (to waist)- 500 pounds, 4×3.
the shoulder area.

Snatch– Singles, working up from 225 to

300 pounds.

According to Whelan, Anderson was a big fan of using straps and metal hooks to aid his grip.
For the Oly stuff, it seems, he used straps, whereas with deadlifts, he used hooks (and
reportedly worked up to a grand with a double overhand grip). His rest periods explain part
of the reason he trained all day, too- he rested 10 to 15 minutes between sets, and would
sometimes take an hour break between exercises.

Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday

Full Squats– Doubles, working up to 780 pounds for 3×2.

These were basically active rest days for Anderson, hence the low volume.

Sunday

Rest.
Anderson was also a big fan of day-long workouts, wherein he would rest up to 30 mins in
between sets, sipping milk and bullshitting. He’d apparently drink a gallon or more of milk
during the course of his workout. Lest you think his workouts were limited to the above lifts,
though, think again- Anderson was an all-round lifter who had a massive array of lifts he’d
work into his daily lifts, and was weak at nothing as a result.

For instance, there are pics of Paul training neck and grip incredibly heavy all of the internet,
as well as walking on is hands in the pushup position using a rolling cart he designed for the
purpose, and even doing upside down tricep extensions inside a squat cage.

He left no stone unturned and literally left no weight unlifted when he trained- there was no
exercise too silly, or too beneath him, or too “worthless” for him to do, and he’d have even
incorporated Bosu balls into his training if they’d existed.

To fuel his workouts, Anderson claimed that the key was protein. Having been plagued by
health problems as a kid stemming from Blight’s Disease, which affects kidney function,
Anderson was restricted to a vegetarian/fruitarian diet until the poor, malnourished little dude
plied his mom with enough tears to get her to feed him meat.

From then on, the man ate meat like it was going out of fashion, using what little spending
money he had as a kid not on candy, like his friends, but on canned fish. Later, he
experimented with protein drinks made of sweet milk and raw eggs, and eventually adding
ingredients until his ultimate formula contained “ice cream and milk shakes with… soybean
meal, raw eggs, [and] milk” (Anderson). On top of that, Anderson consumed any type of
meat put in front of him, cooked rare, and not surprising to any of us after reading my
stewroids series on [Link], a very thick soup:

“This soup was usually made of some canned variety in which she added a
liquid that she squeezed with a hand press from ground beef. She would put
the beef on the stove in a large pan and add some water. As this started to
get hot she would allow it to simmer for about a minute, actually just long
enough for it to get hot, and then pour it through a lemon-squeezing press,
that would extract all of the fluid. She would pour this fluid into the soup and
serve it to me in that manner. Thinking of this, I decided I would add this type
of strength-builder to my then fortified protein diet, and every morning for
breakfast this is what I would have to start my strenuous day” (Anderson).

So how the hell did the man get so fat? He thought sugar was the key to digesting protein.
Nevermind the fact that this is quite literally impossible- Anderson believed it and ate
accordingly.

“Occasionally I would drink soft drinks during my training and noticed when I
did this I could perform much better, and my digestive cycle would work
much faster. This proved to me that I needed a great deal more sugar. It
seemed that the more protein I took, the more sugar I needed to help digest
the protein, and also give me quick energy. I turned to the greatest sugar
supply I could find, which was honey. I soon found that much of the honey
that could be bought in grocery stores did not do me as much good as honey
direct from the beehive, bought from a farmer. It was my personal belief that
much of the honey that was on the market had been heated in a pasteurizing
process and had lost some of its quick digesting qualities.
Some days I would consume even a half pint of honey, when I was working
out strenuously and carrying on my tremendous traveling schedule”
(Anderson).

That might, and should, seem idiotic to you, but I have witnessed with my own two eyeballs
some old head at a meet drink three bottles of honey in a single day. I waited for the man to
go into diabetic coma and had “9-1-1” dialed into my phone with my finger on the send
button, but wheeze as he might, the dude failed to die in front of me. As he’d squatted in a
suit and bench shirt, I was somewhat disappointed, but at least now I know why he did what
he did.
Ike Berger

“Another guy that would come into the gym was the great Isaac Berger. One of the premier
weightlifters of all time. So I could press 210 ten times with one arm – so what! Here was a guy
who was pressing double bodyweight, and he looked like a muscular, little guy. Front squats
with 400 for endless reps. He weighed 132 and would press 265! I looked at this guy’s body
and wondered what he had. Well, he had big glutes, thighs and traps, but his arms were
small . . . huge traps and very heavy back development. Other than that you’d swear he
couldn’t lift a thing. A great guy, too”

This brings us, then, to a man who single-handedly debunks the dumbass theories of redpills
and blackpills, all of whom seem to think that no one under 6′ tall ever gets laid- Ike Berger.
Berger exists as the death touch for any manosphere shitslug who opens his mouth about
“manlets,” because Berger was a goofy looking Jewish lifter who stood 5’2″, 132lbs and
crushed more vagina than the entirety of the Ohio Westside guys have collectively seen in
their lives. Berger partied like he was a member of the Foo Fighers on tour in Colombia,
chased women like a cartoon skunk, and outlifted everyone on the planet more than once,
and it was Berger who imparted the most training knowledge to Bill “Peanuts” West.

While living together at the Muscle House, Berger took West under his wing and showed him
how to really train. West had gone from a hilariously tiny 90lbs to 150 in his first year of training,
and by his third year was tipping the scales at 180. In spite of frantic training for the meets,
Bill’s Olympic lifts were nothing to get excited about, so Berger suggested he ditch them,
gain some weight, and focus on the odd lifts. That year, West’s weight went from 180 to 218
and his bench and squat both shot up 100lbs. West realized he’d gotten a bit sloppy,
however, and cut to 198, but he continued to use all of the methods that Berger espoused to
gain strength.

Honestly, Berger’s story is even cooler than West’s. Like the baby Jesus before him, Ike Berger
was born in Jerusalem and immigrated to the US with his parents at 13. Being a veritable
dwarf with what can only be assumed was a Yiddish accent so thick he’d even have stood
out in a Mel Brooks film, the little guy started to get his ass kicked on the regular. Being a
ballsy little bro, he just walked his ass directly into the first gym he saw, walked up to the
biggest guy in the gym, and asked him to help him get jacked.

“I think I paid him a dollar a week, because I didn’t have any money then. So
he said ‘have you ever worked out?’ and I told him no. He said to me ‘you
look very strong, did you ever lift weight?’ and I didn’t even know the
meaning of ‘lifting weights.’ So he showed me what to. He put on like 80
pounds and he pressed it and then I took the 80 pounds and I pressed it.
Eventually, he put up 120 [pounds] on there and he pressed it and then I
pressed it and he couldn’t believe that I pressed body weight and never
touched a weight.

So he said, ‘Look from now on, I’m going to train you weightlifting. I think you
have tremendous possibilities and there will come a time if you get really
good and that maybe you’ll get to the Olympics and win a gold medal.
Maybe you’ll get to be the strongest man in the world pound for pound'” (USA
Weightlifting).

“Isaac Berger had one of the fastest rises in weightlifting history. After entering
his first weightlifting competition in 1952, Berger improved so fast that by 1955
he became a National Champion. Defending his title in 1956, despite an
injury, Berger lifted enough at the 1956 Olympic Trials to earn a berth on the
team going to Melbourne. He moved his training into high gear and shocked
the weightlifting world by winning the Olympic Games as a teenager and
breaking the world record in the total at the same time. He later went on to
win both the 1958 and the 1962 World Championships, along with silver
medals in both the 1960 and 1964 Olympic Games. Isaac also set many world
records across his illustrious career. The last world record he earned, at the
Olympic Games in Tokyo, in 1964, was a 152.5 kg. C&J. That record lasted for
more than 5 years, becoming one of the longest held world records in
weightlifting history” (AOBS honorees).

Ike Berger’s Vital Stats

Height: 5’1.5” Clean and Jerk: 336lbs

Weight: 132lbs Press: 267lbs (without a layback)

Bench Press: 320lbs Snatch: 236lbs

Squat: 500lbs Total: 843lbs

Front Squat: 407lbs

Whenever he wasn’t required to be in York to prep for the Olympics, Ike and his training
partner and fellow Olympian Dave Sheppard lived in the Muscle House and trained with Bill
West. Like a lot of the US team, Sheppard and Berger found Bob Hoffman’s heavy handed
Christian morality obnoxious, and Hoffman was forever bitching about the guy’s endless
woman chasing (which in York means they’d bang literally anything, because that town is
nothing but a crack den with a lifting museum in it), so they avoided training there like the
plague. Those two, however, were both accused of statutory rape and impairing the morals
of minors in 1959, which led to the shutting down of Muscle Beach and a lot of shit-talking
from Hoffman. Berger beat both charges, but a point was made- a tiny Israeli immigrant and
his manlet training partner (Shepperd was 5’6″, 185lbs) were able to have so many sexual
shenanigans in a beach town in the 50’s that the city shut down an entire community to stop
him.

Or so they thought- the shutdown of Muscle Beach was exactly the impetus Bill West needed
to start his own club- the Culver City Westside Barbell Club. Berger trained there with west on
and off over the years that followed and was considered to be part of West’s inner circle,
which only consisted of himself, Berger, and Joe Dimarco.

Ike’s methods came from a variety of sources, but seem to have been heavily influenced by
Paul Anderson, with whom Ike trained frequently at York Barbell when preparing for the
Olympics. Anderson, as I think we all know, was an odd lifting virtuoso discovered by deadlift
monster Bob Peoples, and Bob Hoffman convinced Anderson to try his hand at the Olympic
lifts to give the US a chance at defeating the great Russian heavyweights of the time. At
York, Berger also trained with legendary strength coach Bill Starr and one of the greatest
Olympic lifters of all time, Tommy Kono, as well as every bodybuilding luminary you could
name from the 1950s in California. The man was surrounded by greatness and was at the
time considered to be the pound-for-pound strongest lifter on the planet, so his influence on
the training methods of the Westside guys cannot be overstated.
Ike Berger’s Contest Prep Routine
In the offseason, Berger seemed to focus heavily on the odd lifts, a habit he likely picked up
from training with Paul Anderson at York. His focus was to maintain and develop his strength
and build ligament and tendon strength so that he was ready to pound the hell out of the
Olympic lifts when contest prep time rolled around. Given that he trained with the Westside
guys, it stands to reason he was training between two and five times a week for lengthy
periods of time, then getting hammered afterwards.

Berger felt that without his off-season regimen, “I would have run the risk of becoming
physically and mentally drained. This could have left me open to injuries that would have set
my training back for months or even years” (Alpert). Anyone who is interested in competing
in Oly might want to take note of Berger’s comments there, because the incessant screwing
around with light weights and form work with which American Olympic lifters are positively
obsessed doesn’t seem to be yielding much in the way of medals.

“Contest preparation involved a twelve-week period of training with the lifting

event scheduled at the end of the twelfth week. The twelve weeks were
divided into two-week sequences. While the basic approach to training was
the same as during the non-contest periods, the intensity of the training was
increased. A typical two-week schedule would be as follows” (Alpert).

Monday (Medium-Heavy)

Olympic Lifts and assistance exercises (squat, bench press, and various pulls)- First three sets
were rep work/warmups, then 3-6 x 1 with 90%

Wednesday (Medium)

Olympic Lifts– First three sets were rep work/warmups, then 3-6 x 1 with 80-85%

Friday (Heavy as Hell)

Week One – up to 95% Olympic lifts and assistance exercises.

Week Two – up to 100-100 plus percent – Olympic lifts and assistance exercises.

According to Howard Alpert, the “Friday workouts of weeks four, six and eight were pushed
very hard to try to establish new personal records. The Friday workout for week ten included
only the Olympic lifts and was an all-out effort. Assistance exercises were dropped for the last
two weeks.” We also know from Bill Starr that Berger was obsessed with betting a quart of milk
on whether or not someone would make a lift in training, to the point that he was called
“Betcha Berger” by the other guys on the team. Starr apparently brought that habit over
from whatever gym he started at, and Berger later brought that to Westside, which is what
led to their extremely common impromptu competitions on training days.

Evidently, Berger was not a stickler for form at any point in his life. He also sold that gold
medal for just under $18k a few years ago, so I’m guessing the Body Shaper didn’t end up
making him rich.
Tommy Kono
Tommy Kono is one of America’s untarnished Olympic
treasures- he was a badass in Olympic weightlifting,
bodybuilding, and early powerlifting meets, and had an
strict overhead press of 347lbs at bodyweight of 198lbs.
Kono’s method varied significantly from those of the rest
of the York lifters, and he had some very specific theories
on how people should train- namely, that less is more and
more will send you to Snap City, USA. Although that is an
anathema to lifters like me, it must have been a boon to
the Westside guys, all of whom loved training on speed,
and all of whom had wives at home rage quitting their
nuptials because their husbands were spending so much
time lifting with the bros. It’s probably Kono who helped
the guys pare their group training days to three a week
by helping them focus on the essentials and cut out the extraneous shit (which the other guys
would do on their own at another gym anyway)

If you, like me, love training and think low volume programs are to be scorned and belittled,
you might initially think Kono’s program would be somewhat unfulfilling. That is, however,
until you consider the frequency with which he does each lift. Kono broke his program into
two parts, the first of which he’d do for three to six weeks, and the second of which he’d do
for two to three. Both periods of the program consisted of two to three days of the same
workout.

Tommy Kono’s Basic Training Routine

Like everyone prior to the advent of the internet, Kono hated doing the same routine day
after day and changed his exercises and rep scheme regularly.

Monday Strict Press- 7-8x3

Power Cleans- 4-6x3 Friday

Clean and Jerk- 4-8x1 Power Cleans- 4-6x3

Tuesday Full Cleans- 4-8x1

Strict Press- 7-8x3 Snatch- 4-8x1

Bench Press- 3x3 Saturday

Wednesday Strict Press- 7-8x3

Power Cleans- 4-6x3 Bench Press- 3x3

Snatch- 4-8x1 Sunday

Thursday Rest
Precontest, Tommy Kono would split his training into two phases. In phase one, Kono would
do something the following:

Overhead Press- 5x5

Power Snatch- 3x3

Then in the second phase, Kono stepped it up a notch and took a page out of Doug
Hepburn’s book, as he included the press off the rack. In this phase, Kono’s overhead work
consisted of:

Press off Rack- 8x3

Power Snatch- 3x3
Squat Snatch- 2x3; 2x2; 3x1

When he wasn’t training for a competition, Kono stuck with three days of overhead pressing,
8 sets of 3 for his press work. The interesting thing about Kono’s training, in my opinion, is the
fact that while his overhead work likely outstrips the average trainee’s to a degree that it
resembles the comparison of a nun’s sex life with a back alley prostitute, Kono was a
vociferous advocate of lower-volume training.

According to Brian Carson, “Kono was very outspoken at the time against the bodybuilding
and lifting magazines that advocated heavy volume training. Kono insisted that the body
responds better to brief workouts performed 2-3 times per week with less not more exercises.
Yes, people, Tommy Kono was/is a very smart man.”

And that’s low-volume training the 1960s way- 18-24 sets of near maximum shoulder pressing
even in the off-season. Think maybe you’re not training hard enough?
Steve Merjanian
According to
Oliver Sacks,
Steve Merjanian
invented the
incline bench
press, and that
shit was his baby.
But that isn’t
where his
influence ends,
because he was
the biggest
bencher at
Westside, as well
as the training
partner of Chuck
Ahrens (and the
two of them
trained with
another 500+lb
bencher, Richard
Kee, but not with Pat Casey, who was Merjanian’s rival on the bench). These 300lb beasts
stomped around the Vic Tanny and Bruce Conner gyms in LA handing weights unthinkable in
most gyms today on equipment that was as rickety and homemade as it was effective.

These dudes trained often and they trained heavy, and they had the physiques and lifts that
belied their efforts. They rarely, if ever, entered contests because that’s not what they were
about- they were about having a good time, heaving weights around, and throwing up
double bis that would melt the underpants off anyone nearby if they didn’t just blow straight
off from shock and awe.

What’s this you say? Panties blew off and the man didn’t scamper about in the gym wearing
tights and endlessly blabbering on about Smolov? Well then, he must have done Sheiko?
How about neither, and he was content with running a mile in the sand and doing calves for
his legs. Every now and again he’d bust a half squat just for shits and giggles, but Steve
Merjanian was not about that life- he just loved training heavy and loved being strong. Even
at age 44, he was still hitting 405 for a behind the neck press, which is an age and a number
so inconceivable to the average message board goer these days I’m sure they’re screaming
bullshit at their screen and hypergraphically scribbling “STEROIDS” on the wall in crayon.

Unlike the three preceding 300lb monsters, Merjanian’s success didn’t come overnight- he
broke his ass day in and day out for fifteen years, first as a bodybuilder and then a
powerbuilder, to build up to the massive poundages he ended up moving at his peak.
Perseverance and harder work than a Thai ladyboi at a NAMBLA convention definitely paid
off better than George Soros shorting the dollar in an engineered recession, and Marjarian
became one of the strongest upper body specialists to ever live. Those two bizarre similes
notwithstanding, here are Merjanian’s stats:

Steve Merjanian’s Vital Stats

Born: 29 Jul 1935 Waist: 39″

Height: 5’11” Arms: 20.25″

Weight: 280-300lbs Forearms: 18.5″

Chest: 59.75″ Thighs: 28.5″

Neck: 21+” Calves: 19.5″

“Doug Hepburn, Ronnie Ray, Chuck Ahrens, Paul Anderson, Marvin Eder, Mel
Hennessy, John Molinaro, Bill Seno. Chuck Sipes, Steve Merjanian, Bruno
Sammartino, Karl Norberg, Jim Williams, Bud Ravenscroft. Pat Neve, Jon Cole,
Tom Hardman, John Kuc, Bill Kazmaier, Joe Bradley, James Roude, Jeff
Magruder, Mike Bridges, Lee Moran, Ted Arcidi, and Mike MacDonald are the
great men in history. Bev Francis is the great woman.”

“What about Roosevelt, Salk, Einstein, Kennedy, Ghandi, and Lincoln? A

bunch of nothings with low benches (although Abe Lincoln benched 325 for a
double and you have to admit he did have a long way to push the sucker).”

“The only way to remedy this national malady is to start now and GET YOUR
BENCH UP.”

– Jeff Everson

Steve Merjanian’s Best Lifts

Incline Bench Press (40° Angle)– 500lbs dumbbells x 2 reps

Flat Bench Press – 560bs (touch and go) Front Lateral Raise– 165 lb dumbbell x 1
Press Behind Neck– 405lbs; 335lbs x 7 Lateral Raise – 125lb dumbbells x 2, 100 x 4
Dumbbell Overhead Press – 190lb Half Squat – 850lbs

Unlike the aforementioned leviathans of late 50’s/early 60’s Muscle Beach, Steve Merjanian
didn’t eat like he was recently released from a North Korean prison camp four times a day.
Instead, his diet consisted mostly of meat, eggs, and (interestingly) fruit juice in massive
quantities. Nor was he a GOMAD guy- he never seemed to drink the stuff, and had little
interest in the supplements of the day (which were appalling tasting and remarkably
primitive) beyond multi-vitamins. Nope- big Steve was content eating a couple of breakfasts,
a few sandwiches mid-morning, an early afternoon salad, and a dinner consisting primarily of
massive amounts of some form of dead animal.

If his diet looks like he rode an apatosaurus to work, his training looked like he rode to the
gym in a chariot pulled by velociraptors on meth. Every week big Steve maxed on
everything he felt like maxing on… though that thing was almost never the back squat.
Merjanian hated squatting, preferring instead to just run a mile a day through the sand four
times a week and warm up with a 400 yard beach run before every workout.
Although I’ve only got the details of one of his workout styles, Merjanian had two basic
routines. One consisted of 10-12 sets of an exercise, the last five of which were singles with
roughly 95% 1RM. His other type of routine was 8 sets of 5, as heavier than a Crowbar
concert after an all you can eat buffet. The only thing Merjanian did with getting a pump in
mind was back- he did lots of sets and lots of reps emphasizing a serious squeeze and brutal
stretch to force as much blood into the muscle as possible. Whatever he did, however, it was
hardly flexible and never a rigidly structured program- he just went as hard as he felt like and
blasted weights like they were a porn star’s face in a bukkake film.
Steve Merjanian’s Basic Workout Routine
Monday / Wednesday / Friday

Dumbbell Press- 5×7 Skullcrushers- 5×7

Dumbbell Laterals- 5×7 60 Degree Incline Press- 10×7 reps, 7×1
Front Dumbbell Raises- 5×7 using 20 lbs. less than max (Brace yourself
Pulley Rowing Motion- 5×7 for this news- his first warmup was 350 x 10)
Dumbbell Curl- 5×7
Bench Press- 5×7
Dips- 5×7
Tuesday / Thursday / Saturday / Sunday
Calf Raise- 10-15 x10
Pulley Forearm Curl- 10-15×10
Face Pulls- 10-15×10
Standing Triceps Extension- 10-15×10
Running- approximately one mile in the sand

Word is Steve trained legs early on in his lifting career but abandoned them for one reason or
another as he got huge. It didn’t seem to negatively impact his lifts, however, and his leg
strength was pretty serious in spite of his disdain for training them. He was known to
occasionally jump in on legs out of curiosity, and would pull off shit like banging out a set of
five easy reps with 315 in the front squat as a goof, or a single with no warmup, and his legs
were always strong enough to allow him to hang with the guys who treated the front squat
like it was going to reveal the meaning of life to them. In fact, big Steve’s legs were so strong
that he would occasionally jump from a standing start onto what had to have been the
stoutest ping pong table in the history of the sport to mess with anyone who said “gigantic
white men can’t jump” and to just scare the shit out of unruly teenagers. It was his shoulder,
chest, and tricep strength that was the show stopper, though. He’d do cheating lateral
raises with the 144lb dumbbells and a standing triceps extension with a ridiculous 275lbs, but
both of those paled in comparison to his gargantuan 405lb behind the neck press.

“Presses behind the neck were usually done sitting on a flat bench, ducking your head under
the bar and lifting it clear of the rack on the back of your shoulders, pressing it overhead and
then lowering it to your shoulders and returning it to the rack. A man who could do three
hundred in this manner was considered strong. I reckon there are a lot of the guys that do
(or claim to do) four hundred or more in the current style (overhead liftoff, bringing the bar
down to the top of the head & pressing it up) would be unable to do three hundred in this
manner” (Neece).

The amount of camaraderie the lifters in Muscle Beach, and particularly at Gold’s, enjoyed in
that time period would make the Care Bears look like a bunch of backbiting, foam rolling,
shit talking, natty powerlifters by comparison- these dudes not only lifted together, but they
formed a sort of informal Guardian’s Angels of jacked dudes to scrap with young ruffians on
the beach when they’d get out of hand, and they all participated in goofy shit like
tug-of-war competitions on the weekends. And these weren’t nobodies, either- were talking
pro baseball players, NFL players, epic strongmen, actors, at least one Olympic silver
medalist, and even the vice principal of a local high school (Neece). Given that most
“serious” strength gyms these days are populated by people who would be harder to
wrangle than wet cats, and would assent to heading in the same direction with far more
yowling and general disaffection than those cats, the fact that everyone was so willing to
chip in and help out in the community should illustrate exactly how tragic the modern era is.

It’s even more poignant when you consider that Gold’s Gym in 1968 boasted three monsters
“who were over four hundred on the incline: Steve, myself, and a man named Joe
Kanaster…. There were several others in the 375-400 range, there were others who had gone
over four hundred in the past but no longer trained there and a couple of others who would
hit four hundred or more at a later date” (Neece).

Having three guys benching over 400 on the incline in a single gym in a single year is like
having three guys in the same gym who own multiple Lambos and call their hot-ass slut of a
girlfriend “Concubine,” or having three people in the gym so hot you can’t even look directly
at them who shit Froot Loops on demand. It’s like opening your closet and having six
masturbating leprechauns jump out, and then telling your friend about it and him saying the
same thing happened to him last week. Winning the Powerball three months in a row is less
likely, and yet, that was what was happening in Gold’s Venice, Vic Tanny’s Gym, and Bill
West’s garage in 1968.

Looking a little closer, for those of you who are like me and yearning for yesteryear, it wasn’t
all blowjobs and cheesecake then either, because powerlifting. There was a small faction of
very early powerlifters led by Bill “Peanuts” West who resented the hell out of big Steve’s
pressing power and the fact that he gave less shits about powerlifting than most people do
about Olympic curling. They employed various schemes to punk Merjanian, but in the end
they were ultimately fruitless.

“It is my opinion that Peanuts resented Steve’ not competing in the three
powerlifts and only occasionally training at his (Peanuts’) garage. Peanuts
thought of himself as one of the founders of the sport and he was very zealous
in his efforts to get everybody involved in what he probably considered to be
at least partly his creation. Steve, however, marched to his own drummer and
had no interest in the three lifts. In addition, he liked to enjoy life and only
trained when he felt like it” [Emphasis mine].
“Peanuts used to needle Pat about Steve’s inclines and one day in 1967 just before
he retired Pat decided to settle it once and for all. It was at Peanut’s garage and
George Frenn wrote about it in Weider’s magazine. Someone also took a picture of
Pat inclining 515. Peanuts and his bunch told Steve that he had been dethroned
However, looking at the photo I could tell they were using an angle of about thirty
degrees, or eight to ten degrees less than the angle on the bench Steve and the
Gold’s/Venice/Muscle Beach crew used” (Neece).

Steve Merjanian Filmography

● played Abdul alongside Davy Jones in The Monkees, Season 2, Episode 3 (1967)-
“Everywhere a Sheik, Sheik”
● played The Moroccan alongside Jackie Chan in The Big Brawl (1980)
● played Tug the muscle man alongside Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello in
Muscle Beach Party
● was a stuntman in the first Planet of the Apes film

So there you have it- Steve Merjanian. So big he should be one of the 8 Natural Wonders of
the World, stronger than a couple of oxen cybernetically attached Frankenstein’s Army-style,
and chill as hell, though ready to scrap for fun on the weekends. Still training daily at the age
of 65, Steve kept with it because “enjoyed training and being strong but he enjoyed life as
much or more,” and in spite of the fact that he was a monster, he had a sense of humor
about himself and training most people could stand to emulate.

In short, Steve Merjanian was the man, and the lot of us can learn a great deal from
following his example and not that of the racist, slob, posers at the Ohio Westside.
Bob Peoples

Where Joe Dimarco brought Westside the box squat, Paul Anderson brought the full squat,
and Steve Merjanian brought all sorts of bench press badassery to Westside, it was Bob
Peoples who taught the York lifters how to pull, and they in turn taught the Westside guys. To
the lifters of the 1950s and 1960s, Bob People was deadlifting.

To state that Bob Peoples appears to have been obsessed with the deadlift would be

and understatement along the lines of stating that Jeffrey Dahmer somewhat enjoyed

killing and eating young homosexual men. Peoples was a farmer, working 12 hours a

day in backbreaking labor and then devoting multiple hours to honing his deadlifting

technique and hammering the shit out of it four to five days a week.

In stark contrast to the methods of Westside lifters and just about everyone else in history,
Peoples actually maxed out on the deadlift 4-5 times a week (Carson), when he was already
light years ahead of the competition in that lift. Due to the fact that he broke his ass at the
deadlift and gave zero shits about what other people were doing, People's pulled a world
record 725 at 181 lbs.

Bob Peoples' Full Body Routine (done 4-5 times per week)
Deadlift- 1 x 15-20, 1 x 10, 1 x 8, 1 x 6, 6 x 1 (10 sets total)

Squat- 5 x 5

Press- 5 x 5
You’ll notice it doesn’t include the bench press, as the bench press was not yet part of all
“odd lifts” competitions when Peoples competed.
Zuver’s Gym
Given that we’re in the middle of
the story of the original Westside
Barbell Club, it seems like it might
be a weird aside to cover another
gym altogether, but this is exactly
the type of place that a weird
sidebar like this gym belongs. Once
Bob Zuver opened his Christian
Disneyland for lifters in 1960,
everyone who was anyone trained
there.

All of the guys in the Westside

crew periodically trained there, in
addition to Arnold, Franco, Dennis Tinnerino, big Lou Ferrigno, Paul Anderson, Dave Draper,
Chuck Ahrens, and tons of strange but rad characters of whom you’ve likely not yet heard
like the mustachioed, arm wrestling, bodybuilding powerlifter Bert Elliott, jacked-as-hell and
strong-as-shit actor Bill Smith, ridiculous gear whore Tom Overholzer, and bodybuilding
author, chiropractor, and powerbuilder Dr. Ken Leistner (seen here dive-bombing 405 for 23
reps on the squat at like 150lbs), Richard Sorin (of Sorinex fame), and a shitload of other lifters,
convicts, missionaries, and every other kind of fringe cultural element you can possibly
imagine.

Zuver’s was designed to be a destination gym. It was, of course, a mecca for anyone with
the ability to tolerate or the inclination to enjoy training in a place with a man screaming
bible verses and blaring religious music at all times, because it seems Reverend Bob Zuver
was a rabid proponent of a racist Anglo-American physical fitness movement called
muscular Christianity (the TLDR is basically the summation of half of Pornhub- black dudes are
the only ones getting laid, let’s get buff to save the white race). If that seems bizarre given
the shenanigans going on nearby at Muscle Beach, it should- this place was an anathema to
the writhing, sweaty, weed and liquor-lubed muscle orgy that seemed to be LA at the time.
The town of Costa Mesa, in which Zuver’s was located, had existed for less than a decade,
however, and was still a community of country bumpkins and Christian evangelicals, some of
whom founded one of the biggest evangelical cultist networks in the world, Calvary Chapel.

Looking deeper, it seems that Zuver and the founder of that church, Charles Smith, were
likely working hand in hand on this, because after his conversion to Christianity inside a
church filled with angry lunatics screeching glossolalia in 1960, the Zuvers became part of
what was then a tiny Church filled with slightly less maniacal Christian maniacs after meeting
Chuck Smith in the mid-1960s.
 “[Chuck Smith] was reshaping American Christianity. He opened the first
nondenominational Calvary Chapel on a Costa Mesa lot with just 25
congregants in 1965. Soon he became famous as the strait-laced pastor who
threw open his doors to the ragged counterculture and baptized thousands
below the ocean cliffs of Corona del Mar. He became Papa Chuck, the
smiling man in the Hawaiian shirt, a staunch-but-benevolent spiritual father to
a generation of end-of-their-rope hippies, dropouts and drug casualties”
(Goffard).

If that doesn’t sound exactly like what Zuver was doing, I don’t know what would. In an
event, whether it be for evil or good, some bizarre Christian stucco applied to a building
made entirely of wildly homosexual bricks (Calvary Church has a serious preoccupation with
the subject of homosexual sex, and a rather amusing scandal revolving around a
extraordinarily gay pastor constantly whacked off his face on hallucinogens in the early
church) or a genuine attempt to help his fellow man, Zuver managed to build what was
simultaneously the coolest gym in the United States and one of the most intolerable training
environments this side of the Lord’s Gym (which is also based in California).

It goes without saying that

most of the Westside crew
likely found Zuver’s to be
intolerable- half the guys
who trained there did so in
an effort to get the hell
away from Bob Hoffman
and his clean living bullshit.
I’d guess that half of the
reason they’d pop into
Zuver’s was the
equipment, which was
unparalleled in the world, and the other half was to see what their competition was doing, as
Zuver’s had the team to beat before Westside started running shit.

“No gym ever provided the variety or uniqueness that Zuver’s did in terms of
equipment, especially in an era when most gyms were little more than
storefront holes in the wall with very basic benches, racks and few specialized
pulleys. When 190-pound college running back teammate Larry Gordon, a
former Teenage Mr. Ohio, left school for a semester to “see what California
was all about” and came back at a ripped-to-the-bone and
twice-the-size-and-strength 230 or so, his two-word explanation of his startling
gains were simply, “Zuver’s Gym!” His description of the available equipment
was almost hard to follow, and certainly impossible to fully grasp.

In conversation, well-known lifting coach, commentator, trainer and former

competitive powerlifter Dan Martin described it well when he said, “To me,
and I’m a hammerhead, Zuver’s was the ultimate homemade home gym,”
and this was an extreme compliment and a statement I fully agreed with.
It was clear I would not “get it” until I actually arrived at the gym. In truth,
when my training partner, Jack, and I made the 52-hour non-stop New York to
Los Angeles drive in my cramped two-door Ford, and eventually wound our
way down the coast to Costa Mesa, I’m not sure we “got it” that first evening
at the gym. ” (Leistner).

As you can see from the pics, I am not overselling this gym when I compare it to Disney, and
upon arriving you’d definitely feel like you stumbled into a Christian redux of Disneyland than
a gym. And walking past the humongous statues and ornate doorframe, you faced a gym
that was at least as much Barnum and Bailey’s as it was Gold’s.

“[The entrance sported a] majestic foot-and-a-half-thick cast stone door

[that] sported a 300lb dumbbell handle. It was cast in a frame in an area
directly in front of the purposely massive door frame. The frame and hinges
were hand cut and carefully ground out of heavy 2″ thick steel. When finished,
every man available hoisted this door up and into its final pivoting position.
Magically, it fit like a door in a bank vault, requiring only a light hand’s
pressure to push or pull it open. Built by aliens? No, by Bob Zuver and his loyal
family and following” (Sorin Part 1).

Once inside, you were in a bizarrely Christian wonderland of homemade equipment and
massive dudes moving huge plates designed by Zuver himself.

“The distinctive barbell plates of the gym were first simply cast by the Bell
Foundry in sizes 2.5 LBS through 45 LBS and resembled any barbell plate of the
day. However, Robert told me the “meatheads” didn’t like adding 45s and
they hated 35s on a 45 LB bar. The early non-distinctive plates were like those
found at any gym, but the Zuver guys wanted things big and simple, so the
second phase was started when an artist friend designed the Zuver Giant for
 all plates 50lbs and above, from a clay rendering into an aluminum master
mold.

The weight amount, which was never really checked, was an approximate
amount since the plates were never machine finished. The barbell plates
ranged from 2.5, 5, 10, 25, 35, 45, 50, 100, 150, and 200 LBS, with the 35 LB and
45 LB being initially used and later dropped from the Zuver scene. In a few
photos, the 35s and 45s are present, but as Robert said, Dad ‘hated’ the 35 LB
plates and mostly used them for decoration. Robert recalled drilling and
screwing a number of them of the 35 LB plates to the walls as pure display”
(Sorin Part 2).

At this point, you might be thinking that this place would have been an awesome place to
train, but most of you are likely far too effete for this place. Unlike the sterile training
environments in modern gyms, this place was gritty enough to have been a set piece in the
Crow. In that gym, the fancy lock you have on your bar would have been cut off with bolt
cutters, and your idiotic pride and joy likely would have been used immediately for rack pulls,
because they would not have given two shits about the state of your fancy barbell.

“Little active maintenance was done by Bob or his employees, so the place
was, to be kind, filthy. For example, on the floor where for years massive guys
did pullovers and banged huge weights on the floor at the bottom of the
reps, the carpet (?) was long gone and the concrete floor was depressed by
three or four inches – exposing the aggregate rock in the concrete mixture. A
jackhammer couldn’t have done a better job. Concrete dust sprayed out to
the sides for a foot or so around these craters. Same thing around the
benches, where plates were thrown on the floor. Before being ground in with
the rest of the dirt and dust, white lifter’s chalk lay heavily strewn about on the
floor around the benches, squat rack, and deadlift platform, as well as on all
of the oly bars and larger dumbbells” (Pearl).

Given the fact that early powerlifting meets often had a serious contingent of women lifters
(the first official PL meet had about a dozen females competing) and odd lifting meets
seemed to boast a pretty popular couple of woman lifters doing various strength exhibitions,
it’s a bit odd that it was a goddamn sausage fest at Zuver’s (Todd).

After doing some serious digging, I discovered that there were limited hours in which women
could train at Zuver’s, in a separate area of the gym set in an addition built a few years after
they opened, but every single description I uncovered of the gym painted it as a bunch of
jacked dudes in various states of undress (and their dogs) throwing around weights to gospel
music played at ear-splitting decibels, and one author was genuinely shocked when he saw
women in the gym after it moved locations. In that way I suppose it was very much like
Game of Thrones- lots of cock and big dogs running around.

Like all of the other hardcore gyms of the area, dudes lived right outside the gym. Guys like
the aforementioned Ken Leistner showered at the gym, then lived in a trailer behind Zuver’s
house that lacked a shower and a toilet, making its accommodations far more Spartan than
even the ones over at the Muscle House in Venice. Guys like that paid $30.00 a month, to live
in the trailer, then helped Zuver accumulate the Mad Max-esque junk he would later turn into
equipment, like the piece of guard rail from the freeway that became the gym’s incline
bench with a little bit of Zuver’s TLC.

“Everything in it was hand built by Bob: the dumbbells, the chin area, the odd
but wild looking (and sometimes frighteningly dangerous – but thankfully few
in number) machines, and the benches” (Pearl).

Bob Zuver likely didn’t think his equipment was all that dangerous or the conditions all that
Spartan, because the man was on the Underwater Demolition Teams in the Navy during
WW2. You know- the grizzled, salty-dog badasses who later turned into a far more polished,
cuddly and far less terrifying Navy SEALs. Zuver combined that sort of wild-eyed zeal and
zero-shits-given attitude with his love of the nearby Disneyland and lifting and made Zuver’s
one of the premier gyms in the country. Ever tinkering, Zuver made additions onto the gym
almost daily, and was constantly out rummaging through junkyards with his son Robert to find
the scrap to build the next insane strength tester, like the 500lb Blob.

“When Pop finished his 500 LB blob

[pictured above], which looked like a
half of a wrecking ball, it was joined
quickly by half of a metal harbor buoy
modified to weigh a neat half ton. No
one lifted it, but it WAS there” (Sorin).

“Other items in the gym had a

special flair and were chrome
plated. Paramount Co Bars were
replaced by Zuver Bars
machined on large lathes and
made of tough, bend-resistant
chrome vanadium steel.
Epochal equipment was built,
like a train track power rack
drilled on two-inch centers for its
entire length. The racks were
hand-drilled by Robert, Bob and
the denizens of the gym pressed into work by The Boss. A half-inch drill was
used to make each hole, taking hours to drill, and in days — perhaps weeks —
formed each piece of equipment” (Sorin Part 1).

And perhaps I’ve been a bit unkind in my characterization of Zuver, having seen evangelical
kids in Arizona on more than one occasion throw rocks at kids in the neighborhood who
weren’t into snake wrangling and singing in gibberish- there is no denying that Zuver’s Gym
was the most badass spot to train in the world, from an equipment perspective. Zuver’s
attention to detail was completely unparalleled either before or since, and he dedication to
providing the ultimate theme park experience inside a gym, with the most cutting-edge
equipment, for insanely low membership dues, is completely unique. If you’re thinking you
know otherwise, consider that in addition to all of the crazy shit you’ve already seen, Zuver’s
had:

● a “Big Water Barrel” filled 3/4 of the way with water that weighed somewhere
between 200 and 250lbs that was intended to be jerked to get on the gym’s
leaderboard. Scoff if you want, but this was almost 20 years before the first WSM.
● the 500lb one handed deadlift weirdness called “The Blob.”
● the worlds first fixed weight cambered bars.
● dumbbells up to THREE HUNDRED POUNDS that sat on a converted railroad flatcar that
rode on a track beneath the dip bars so you wouldn’t kill yourself moving them to
where you needed them.
● on the goofy circus lifts, bells would ring and lights would flash when they were lifted.

And if that wasn’t sufficient pandemonium, Zuver’s also boasted the the world’s biggest
drinking fountain, which was hilariously constructed from a fire hydrant.

Like anything else, however, the dream had to end. Joe Weider bent Zuver’s ear and
suggested they expand the brand with franchises, taking Zuver’s ministry into the big time.
Weider didn’t give a rat’s ass about Jesus, however, and liked big weights only insofar as he
could sell them. Thus, when Zuver shut his original gym and opened a modern bodybuilding
gym, the wheels quite predictably fell off the Jesus train.

“[By] the late 70’s the winds of change were upon us. Arnold had brought
bodybuilding to the world. There was money to be made in bodybuilding.
Possibly even big money. So, around late 1978, Bob closed the backyard gym
and opened up a shiny new one a couple of miles closer to the beach on
19th Street in Costa Mesa. The place was to have been a “showcase” for
further expansion. A ‘model’ for future investors. Only this gym was geared to
bodybuilding, not powerlifting. Gone was the deadlift platform. All the
equipment was new or freshly painted. Mirrors lined all the walls. Women
(gasp!) joined and trained hard after seeing what Rachel McLish had done
and Cory Everson was doing. No more throwing stuff on the floor, and no
chalk allowed. Real workout clothes and shoes required. A similar gleaming
facility (with a separate “aerobics” area!) was opened in the affluent and
fast-growing south OC location of El Toro. Bob began to gear up to make
equipment in a nearby manufacturing facility” (Pearl).

Ostensibly, the whole thing from there was supposed to be a springboard for a
proposed expansion with Joe Weider to be called “Weider/Zuver’s Gyms.”
Always on the lookout for a buck to be made in the bodybuilding world, Joe
was of course quick to notice the success of Gold’s and World as they
franchised their names around the world. At one point, World Gym tee shirts
were the number two selling tee shirt in the world, behind only the Hard Rock
Cafe megasellers. BIG bucks were being made. Joe apparently wanted some
of this action, and wanted a gym with a track record and name (along with
the gorilla and rhino stuff to market) to go with it. Bob saw an opportunity in
 terms of financial clout he otherwise lacked. The marriage seemed to have
potential.

Although perhaps the thought or dream of owning a gym crosses every

Musclehead’s mind at some point in time, the actual reality of the business of
operating a gym (much less a string of gyms) can be either lucrative or very
cruel. It’s no accident that most don’t make it. Not surprisingly, in a year or so,
and before really getting much past the starting gate, the whole
merger/expansion/franchising thing fizzled and stalled. Something about a
disagreement between the two main players.

By 1981, strapped by the expansion of the two showcase gyms, Bob sold all his
equipment and closed the doors. The gym on 19th Street became a dry
cleaner, then some kind of a graphic arts company. The one in El Toro
became a real estate office. Sometimes, the best investments are those you
don’t make” (Pearl).

As I’ve mentioned, Zuver’s Gym was founded by members of the Calvary Chapel, which was
part of the Jesus People movement. For those who are unfamiliar, the “Jesus freaks,” as they
were known, were a bunch of stoned hippies in buses treating Christianity like Jim Jones
treated normal cult behavior. They tripped balls, sucked in every aimless weirdo they could
find, and managed to turn a commune movement into predatory sheisterism that worshiped
the almighty dollar. They’re also the people who brought Rapturism into Christianity- fans of
Jesus weren’t quite so apocalyptically obsessed prior to the advent of this dumbass
movement and its cult-like offshoots on college campuses, the Campus Crusade.

Zuver’s Gym stands as the most bizarre example of this movement. Designed as a way to
rope wayward youths and hardcore lifters alike into the welcoming bosom of Southern
California’s particular brand of wild-eyed Christian zealotry, Zuver’s was like those nutcases
doubled down on their honey pot recruitment practices. They weren’t just luring dudes in
with the promise of getting their dicks sucked for Jesus- they were luring them in with the
promise of getting their dicks sucked on the low-low with some serious muscular dude sweat
and the occasional glimpse at some sweet buff Christian titties… for Jesus

And that was kind of par for the course at the time, because everyone was on speed and
leaded gasoline meant that everyone had brain damage to go with their extra energy. This
was a time when Jim Jones’ little club was growing rapidly in Northern California, the Manson
Family was running amok in LA, David Berg’s Family International was coming up in
Huntington Beach using flirty fishing to draw in recruits, the goofs from the documentary Holy
Hell were building their idiotic little Buddafield group… the list goes on and on. California in
the 60s and 70s was jam-packed with as many mentally ill people as the country had to offer,
and this gym is just one strange little anecdote in a cornucopia of 1960s and 70s psychedelic
California weirdness that you generally don’t find outside of a Gregg Araki film.

Regardless, Zuver’s would have been the greatest gym on the planet were it not for the fact
that it was part of a movement that preyed on the mentally ill and ostracized. In its heyday it
was arguably the best equipped gym on the planet, and it boasted the best lifters in
America outside of Bill West’s gym and York Barbell. They had a couple of world record
holders, like Tom Overholtzer, and strength luminaries like Paul Anderson and Pat Casey were
fixtures there as well (Anderson was a preacher, so that makes sense).

What we know we know of the Zuver’s training methods comes from the recently deceased
Dr. Ken Leistner, who lived in a tiny camper (only slightly larger than a king sized bed) with
another man for months as they trained at Zuver’s. According to Leistner, a typical program
for a lifter at Zuver’s in the ’60s was insanely brutal. Tons of sets, tons of reps, and tons of
weight. They moved enough weight on a daily basis that they were probably catching the
attention of the Colombian cartels, but luckily Zuver’s members were always heavily armed,
and like everyone else in LA at the time filled with so much amphetamine that cocaine
would have seemed absurdly underpowered.

My puns aside, you natty bros should probably just stop reading here because you’ll find
yourselves overtrained just from reading this, and any Redditors will definitely suffer anal
leakage and possible eye strain from glancing over this volume. Their sessions were longer
than hell due to the fact they practiced the way they played, so there were massive delays
as dudes wrapped their knees with eight ace bandages, mummified themselves in sheets,
and did all of the other insane shit they did to get the effects of today’s gear.
Zuver’s Gym Basic Program
Monday

Bench Press- 5, 5, 3, 3, 2, 2, 2 (adding weight over the sets), then 3-8 singles
Dumbbell Bench Press (palms facing each other)- 4-8 x 3
Dips– 4-8 x 3 (vary hand spacing from set to set)
Squat– 5, 5, 3, 3, 2, 2, 2 (adding weight over the sets), then 3-8 singles

“Once every 3 or 4 workouts, work would be

done in the rack, shortening the range of motion
to 3/4, 1/2, or 1/4 squats, depending on the
weakness of the individual squatter (remember,
we were doing pretty much full squats in
competition in those days). These partials were
done just as the full squats and the emphasis was
on using a ton of weight (a half ton anyway. It
wasn’t that unusual to use 1100 to 1200 for the
1/4 squats)” (Leistner).

Kanter trained at Zuver’s for awhile and apparently scared everyone there shitless. Given
that’s what he looked like at 198, I’d imagine he looked like the Hulk by the time he’d bulked
up to 230 and lifted at Zuver’s. IF you’re curious about his leg workouts, they consisted mostly
of partial squats, according to Leistner.

Wednesday

Incline Bench Press- 6-8 x 3

Deadlift / Rack Pulls (they alternated them week to week)- 5, 5, 3, 3, 2, 2, 2 (adding weight
over the sets), then 3-8 singles
Stiff Legged Deadlifts– 4-8 x 3
Heavy Barbell Curls– 4-8 x 3

Friday

Same as Monday.
The Basic Westside Routine
After the wives stepped in to curtail the utter madness of their training, the Westside guys cut
their workout time down to a mere 8-10 hours a week. Training (officially) twice a week in four
to six hour sessions (along with two optional, shorter workouts), they basically blew the doors
off every goddamn record they touched. Everyone who was anyone wanted to train there,
and they came from all over to do so. As such, the gym was packed and their workouts were
longer than Avengers: Endgame every single time they touched a weight.

Tuesday

Bench Press- Around 12 sets, working up to doubles and triples; then 2 x 10 for a pump

Belly Toss Bench Press- 4-6 x 3

Incline Bench- 12 sets, reps from three to six for around half the sets, then singles for the rest

High Box Squats- work up to a heavy set of singles, using 100lbs over your contest weight.
George Frenn used 1000lbs for singles to set up for his record breaking 853lb squat

Low Box Squats- 4-5 singles with 100lbs less than your contest squat

Rack Pulls/Box Deadlifts- 5-6 singles

Lat Pulldowns- 3 x 5 (seriously heavy)

Triceps Pushdowns- 3 x 5 (as heavy as humanly possible)

Overhead Work- Heavy triples, doubles and singles. Not everyone did these- it was mostly the
Olympian throwers who did this.

Cleans and High Pulls- these were usually done competitively between lifters, for a max effort

Everyone added whatever they needed to onto this workout, as you'll see (and saw in the
George Frenn articles). Whatever didn't get added here could also get pushed to the
Wednesday and Sunday workouts.

Wednesday

Optional light day.

Saturday

At least twice a month, everyone maxed out on the 3 lifts, then went home. This wasn't as
easy as it sounds, though, because twenty to thirty guys would show up on any given
Saturday. Problem was, 20-30 guys would show up, it would take from around noon until
about 6PM.

If the guys weren't having a full meet day, they'd work the three lifts using methods described
below. Either way, once the lifting was done, they started drinking, likely at the restaurant
with the all you can eat prime rib and cheep pitchers I mentioned earlier in the series.

Sunday

Optional light work day.

The Add-Ons
 "The whole idea of assistance movements is to search out weaknesses and
destroy them. The power lifters of the Westside Barbell Club conduct a
constant search to learn more about building power. They are ready to try
any innovation, and always seem to find time and energy for a new
experiment. They are dedicated to making ever greater lifts. " -Armand Tanny

As with any program, nothing should just be Plug-n-Play when it comes to programming.
Every program, no matter how allegedly comprehensive it might, can address the needs of
each individual as they arise. There will always be a need for customization, and as we saw in
the George Frenn series, the Westside crew were more obsessed with customization than a
16-year-old who loves Call of Duty and the Fast and the Furious equally.

The Rack Pull / Box Deadlift

West and the Westside crew utilized this movement to prevent deadlift fails just below the
knee. They did the following program once a month, pulling from an inch to an inch and a
half below their knees during their Tuesday workout, or a supplementary Wednesday
workout.

The "high deadlift" program was basically just a gradual progression toward a max attempt
that must be done with straps. As Bill West put it,

"When you start the pull, nothing seems to happen for several long moments.
You keep turning on more and more power, and then finally the bar begins to
move off the blocks. Without the grip to think about you can pull hard and
long until you are fully erect. In one long big effort like this you have the
equivalent, or more, of a whole set of heavy reps. It builds back muscle."

To give you an idea of the progression, it would look something like this: 550 x 1; 585 x 1; 625 x
1; 660 x 1; 690 x 1 (with straps).

Snatch Grip Deadlift Day

Bill West, like myself and the modern Westside crew, never trained the deadlift in the gym.
Instead, West added a third day of training, doing some snatch grip deadlifting on
Wednesdays.

"By building the muscles from angles, the official movements are improved.
We understand that the high dead lift improves the final phase of the pull.
With the snatch grip, on the other hand, the initial phase is improved. The
back is in a deeper bent-over position, from a full powered standpoint slightly
at a disadvantage, but building strength at this point completes the whole
back picture. Strength exists through the entire range of back lifting. Bill uses
this style for most of his dead lift training. Except for the High Dead Lift day
once a month, he works the Snatch Grip Dead Lift every Wednesday."

Snatch Grip Deadlift- 4 x 3 (increasing the weight on each set); 2x3 (heavier, and with straps).
A typical progression might be 225x3; 315x3; 425x3; 500x3; 525x3 and 550x 3 using straps.

Sumo Deadlift- 3 x 1 (87%1RM) This is (at least for a history nerd like me) fascinating, because I
didn't know sumo deadlifts were even legal at that time. West called it a "close grip deadlift,"
and although Peary Rader claimed in 1976 to have done the lift in the mid-1950s, I haven't
seen a pic of them that predates the 70s.

"Notice that the last three singles are done with a close grip. The elbows are
inside the knees. Actually, the legs are spread wider than normal. Again, this
variation strengthens the leg pull from the wide position. It becomes obvious
that a theory emerges that prohibits the existence of any weak spots. By
closing the gaps, there is no chance for power to leak out. It is like military
strategy: For every man at the front, you have 10 men supporting him at the
rear."

Deficit Deadlifts

Another favorite of West and George Frenn, these helped with breaking the weight off the
ground for big pulls. After having his national record of 713 smashed by Gary Young, Frenn
looked into Young's training and discovered that Young did high rep deficit deadlifts on a
regular. Young had also pulled 685 standing on a low box, so Frenn discussed it with West
and started hammering singles on the deficit deadlift.

It didn't do a goddamn thing for him. He tried more singles, then he tried fewer. Singles
weren't working, so he decided that if he could pull 600 for 10, he'd be able to smash
through the 725lb barrier... which just killed his deadlift altogether. Once he dropped the
weight even further, however, his deadlift blew up. With the program below, Frenn pulled 725
within three weeks, 740 within five weeks, and became a consistent 750-800lbs puller.

Tuesday

Deficit Deadlift- worked up to 3 x 10 60%1RM. His feet just fit under the bar with 45's on it, and
from the side, his chest is just about touching his thighs at the start position.

Saturday

Deadlift Warmup- Triples up to 495.

Deadlift- Singles with 565, 635, then work to a daily max and do three singles with that weight.
No more than three singles with any weight.

High Pulls / Power Clean

George Frenn was an absolute monster on the high pull, but (like me) could never manage
to get his arms underneath the bar for a clean (one of many reasons he chose powerlifting
over Olympic lifting). Frenn believed that high pulls were a fan more effective movement
than cleans for this reason- the brute strength they require translated nicely to the deadlift
and required none of the skill and flexibility that the clean did. If a lifter can do them with big
weights, however, Frenn sees no reason to replace them with high pulls.

Cleans and/or Snatch Grip and/or Clean Grip High Pull- 4-9 x 3-5

Good Mornings

Another great assistance exercise for Tuesday and Wednesday workouts.

Good Mornings- 4-9 x 3-5 (Frenn used about 60% of his squat 1RM for these)
Box Squat in the Power Rack

After nearly killing himself walking out a heavy squat attempt when fatigued one day, Bill
West had an epiphany. The kind of epiphany when one wakes up in the hospital and thinks,
'it's pretty hard to train for 15 hours a week when you're lying in a hospital bed with no beer
and no prime rib." As he lay there, he realized that the typical weightlifting power rack wasn't
up to the task he was about to set before it, because the dimensions were all wrong. As such,
a plan began to form in his mind.

"The box squat required a lot of horizontal movement, so he decided to widen

the fore-and-aft distance between the two crossbars to 16 inches and
lengthen by several inches the three-quarter inch steel bars that served as
elevation pins. In this way he could take the bar from a sitting position on the
bench and come erect with plenty of clearance. With this in mind Bill built the
power rack you see in the accompanying photos. The holes in the uprights
are spaced 1¼ inches between the circumferences. The uprights stand eight
feet high.

His box is a milk crate beefed up with two-by-fours making it perfectly rigid
and still fairly light. It is virtually indestructible. It stands 18-and-a-half inches
high which puts Bill himself (5'8") in a sitting position about 1½ to 2 inches
above a parallel squat. This position seemed reasonable for a good bench
squat."

The whole point of the exercise is to start the lift from a full sitting position. Let
the buttocks roll back, and in a continuous movement start forward and up
again. You lose the effect if you don't settle into it all the way. If you only sit on
the leg biceps, you get too much rebound from the muscle when it contracts.
The spotter, as an added advantage, can help the lifter do forced reps by just
touching the bar. Even where only a regular squat rack is available an
assistant can help the lifter get started on box squats, but extremely heavy
weights would not be recommended."

West had observed that Paul Anderson's squat lockouts, as well as his own, had done exactly
jack shit for his full squat. yeah, they made the walkout far easier, and he noticed more
stability, but the squat itself was unaffected. Thus, he designed the box squat to be a
three-quarter competition squat. Using this as one of his two squat sessions a week, he'd be
able to use supramaximal weights in one and then coast off those weights in the second- his
full squat would feel far easier as a result. After some experimentation he found he was able
to go far harder in both sessions by alternating the two, and began box squatting in his
Tuesday workout and full squatting in his Saturday session.

"From this mishap he learned one everlasting lesson, and that was never to
take any more steps than necessary with a really heavy weight on the
shoulders."

Tuesday
Warmup Sets- 2 x 7; 2 x 5; 1 x 3

Work sets- 7 x 1; Drop the weight 100 pounds x 10 reps; drop 100 more x 10.
Bill West's Balls Out Bench Press Routine
True to form with the Westside Guys, this didn't fit their typical mold, but neither did that
pastiche of bizarrely lovable weirdos. This routine would be followed twice a week, plus a
lighter benching day thrown into the middle of the week. The crucial point here is to find a
repeatable number for a near max single and pound the hell out of it.

When you're using this routine, make sure you move the bench to the beginning of the
workouts, so you hit it fresh. You'll do this for 6-8 weeks straight, going for a daily max or near
daily max in each workout, then take a week or two off the program, hitting a less intensive
bench workout for a couple of weeks, before resuming it.

The Heavy Days

Bench Press- 1 x 10; 8; 6; 4; 1; 1; 1; 1 (same weight used for each).

The Lighter Day

Bench Press- 1 x 10; 8; 6; 3; 1; 10 (last set is a light burnout/pump set)

The Westside Triceps Slaughterhouse
"The history of weight training has proved to be a constant game of hide and
seek. Truant muscles are no longer safe from the prying efforts of modern
power lifters. In the case of the bench press, the triceps, with its natural
capacity for development, became suspect when it appeared to be riding
on the efforts of the delts and pecs.

At first, no one could say for sure. Maybe it was the delts. So, they tried
military presses. They didn't prove to help the bench a great deal. So, they
tried parallel dips with plenty of weight. Pat Casey did them endlessly,
dropping to an extremely low position, but they ground up his shoulders, and
he stopped. Extreme range of motion like the military and dip was out; the
pecs and delts were out. That left the triceps."

"Thus comes into being the 'Triceps Power Cheats,' a movement that is
spanking the triceps into unprecedented effort and routine [bench press]
records up the line. The movement flanks the regular bench press on the
alternate workout of the week in which the bench press and [box squats]. In
terms of two workouts a week, Saturday (heavy) and Tuesday, the power
cheats fall on Tuesday." - Chuck Sipes

Training with the Westside crew on occasion, 570lb bencher at 220 and only bodybuilder to
defeat Arnold, Chuck Sipes, uncovered two insanely effective bench press assistance
exercises- the Pullover Triceps Cheat and the Power Rack Triceps Lockout. Done twice a
week with one of two methodologies, Sipes and other huge benchers of the time considered
these exercises critical for a massive bench. Depending on your preference, you can use
the Bill West style for this, Pat Casey's style, or some combination thereof. However, you do
them, the best bencher under 240lbs for decades thought both styles had merit.

Tuesday/Friday

Pullover Triceps Cheat (Bill West Method)- 135 x 10; 185 x 5; 205 x 5; 205 x 1; 255 x 6 x 1. West
would put a folded towel on the bench a few inches over his head and do his pullovers from
that point, heaving the weight up over his eyes and then bouncing it off the bench in
between reps so he could handle bigger poundages.

Pullover Triceps Cheat (Pat Casey Method)- 135 x 10; 225 x 5; 275 x 5; 305 x 3; 325 x 1; 340 x 1;
355 x 1; 370 x 1; 325 x 1; 305 x 1; 275 x 8. Casey was the only human on the planet benching
more than Sipes, and he used this method- he'd have the loaded barbell on the floor off the
end of the bench, hooks his feet around the supports for stability, starts the movement as a
pullover off the floor and continues it as an extension to the top. Per the picture it looks like a
pullover and press, but from the description it sounds like you're using lat strength and
momentum to get the bar moving and then finish it like you did a skull crusher from just over
the top of your head.

Power Rack Triceps Lockout (Bill West Method)- 135 x 10; 150 x 10; 170 x 7 x 7. On an incline
bench set at a 60-degree incline, take the barbell out of the rack with a grip about six inches
apart and do short range skull crushers from just above your forehead to lockout. Your upper
arm should stay in the same vertical plane as the bar.

Power Rack Triceps Lockout (Pat Casey Method)- 225 x 6 x 7. Casey did these slightly
differently, setting the pins in the power rack just above forehead level and pressing off the
pins. He did these quickly, for a pump.

Seated French Presses / Overhead Extensions (as a high rep burnout)- 3 x 10. Of note, Sipes
basically thought you were a pink-bitch weakling if you used the cambered bar on tricep
work and that you were basically just wasting your time, so give the Olympic barbell a shot
for these and see how they work for you.
The Touch System
The touch system is the tried-and-true handsy spotter method that all of the world now
decries as useless bodybuilding bullshit, because if there is one thing the internet can be
trusted to do, it's to aggressively arrive at the wrong conclusion about just about everything.
Seriously- partner assisted reps are a great way to get through sticking points if done
correctly, and the Westside club did just that.

According to Bill West, the

"first thing we learned was that the Touch System was ineffective on the
bench press when the lifter used a weight he could not start from his chest by
himself. A sense of defeat is promptly established when the weight is too
heavy to budge. The positive approach must prevail. The bar must be off the
chest at a point where the mind is firing a massive volley of impulses to the
muscles in the attempt to pass the sticking point. There is a moment of truth
where the bar is about five inches off the chest, where the simple touch of a
finger under the middle of the bar acts in some magic way to keep the bar
raising to arms’ length. Of course, there is a good deal more to it than that. For
one thing, it doesn’t work for two strangers. The people using this system must
know each other – their strong points, weak points, sticking points and
idiosyncrasies. An almost symbiotic relationship exists. It gets to where a simple
command, 'Go, Baby!' in the middle of a lift means everything in the world. A
nod, a word a touch – they all mean something. How do they get that way?
By training together, by having a common purpose. They depend on each
other. And more, they’ve got to have that feel of a heavy weight oozing out
to arms’ length, regularly, a compulsive effort that by another expression
means they are 'hooked.'”

In short, this is mostly mental assistance- it's not so much the help the spotter is providing but
the belief in the help they're providing that keeps the bar moving. To use it is simple- you work
up to a heavy single, something the lifter can get for a single or two, and do six singles there,
with the spotter "riding with" the lifter throughout each of the singles. Though in the picture
he's only using a finger, in practice West would grip the bar with both hands and make it look
like he was giving a lot of help, even though he was barely touching the bar. This gave the
lifter faith in his ability to keep the bar moving.

Bench Press- 135 x 10 warmup; 225 x 10; 315 x 5; 355 x 3; 385 x 2; 405 x 6 singles

West's crew used them on the squat as well, utilizing the box squat weight for full squats with
the spotter's help. Frankly, that sounds absolutely exhausting for the spotter, but West insisted
it is what gave the entire Westside crew the ability to break record after record in meets.

"The assistant stands directly behind the squatter and grasps the bar with both
hands. As the squatter begins to come out of the bottom position, the
assistant applies the aid. His hands never leave the bar till the squatter is again
erect. With perfect timing the assistant learns to give a slight tug at the perfect
 moment in coming out of the bottom position, allowing the lifter to build
momentum and pass the sticking point."

Tuesday

Regular Squat- 3 x 10 x 395

Bench Squat- 2 x 15 x 475

Saturday

Squat (Touch System)– 3 x 10 x 475

One of the two spotters is Bill West, though I don't know which, and big Steve Merjanian is the
one inclining 405 (though he maxed at 500 on the incline).
Incline Power Rack Presses

"Power rack training is a cultural necessity. You will be left behind without it. The greats
all employ it at one time or another. It has helped make champs like Bill West.
Leonard Ingro and George Frenn. The power rack is what helped give Pat Casey the
ability to take 590 pounds from the flat bench rack, unassisted, and make a perfect
Bench Press with it. " - Armand Tanny

As I've mentioned in my articles on Westsiders in the past, the incline bench press was the
most hotly contested lift in Muscle Beach in the 1960s, and their numbers should have
everyone this side of Hafthor and Larry Wheels considering seppuku as a result. Due in large
part to the fact gym member and avid incline proponent Steve Merjanian allegedly
invented the lift, the incline bench press was beloved at Westside, and all of the Westside
guys had crazy incline presses. What made them even more impressive is that because of
the lack of stanchions on most incline benches, they either cleaned the weight and fell back
into the bench, then pressed from their chest, or they had the weight handed to them by
spotters and pressed from the chest. That's right- Merjanian did a pre-steroid era bottom
position incline bench press with 500 lbs. And he wasn't the only one moving weight on the
incline.

● Weightlifter Bill March, at 210, could press 375

● Heavyweight Dave Davis did 390
● Olympic thrower Dallas Long pressed 430 at 260
● 245lb Olympic thrower Parry O’Brien pressed 345.
● Pat Casey did 3 reps with 220 pound dumbbells on a 40 degree incline and 7 with the
200s, plus he pressed 385 on an 80 degree incline. He has also done seven reps with a
pair of 200’s.
● Bodybuilder and medical doctor John Gourgott, who took second in the Mr.
America, pressed 325 from chin level off the power rack on the 80-degree incline. at
200lbs.

The Westside guys had another reason to incline press, however. According to Armand
Tanny,

"Incline Power Rack Pressing, then, is another way of intensifying effort. On the
weekly basis of training where the Bench Press flat is done on Tuesday and
Saturday a reserve power can be tapped in a different, and secondary, area
by using the incline. Since heavy flat Bench Pressing two days in a row would
only lead to exhaustion, the idea of attacking the muscles on another quarter
proved to be correct. Intermediate areas in the pressing range of motion are
weak.

The power rack acts as a sort of a booster station. The initial impulse to boost
the bar off the chest was suspected of weakening as the barbell went up.
Why should the bar rise, say five inches from the chest, from an initial
maximum explosion to come toppling back? If it went up five inches, why
couldn’t it have gone up all the way?
 Over at the West Side Barbell Club in Culver City, California, not too long ago
they began to suspect this common condition. They were losing too many
presses after getting the bar halfway up. Down it come, a total loss. A flaw
existed in the machine. To repeat the process meant only to be practicing
their mistakes. There was no margin for error. They could raise their butt off the
bench and complete the lift, but that meant practicing another mistake.
What then?"

What they came up with was ingenious- incline bench pressing at three different angles, off
the pins. Form on these were insanely strict- no bouncing off the pins, no lifting your ass. This
exercise was the closest thing on Earth to sacrosanct to the Westside crew, save for perhaps
beer, and they treated it with the utmost reverence and respect.

Incline Bench at 50 degrees, with the bar at chin level in the power rack (about 5 inches off
the chest)- the sets and reps varied, but it was something like 135 x 10; 185 x 5; 225 x 3; 270 x
4; 295 x 1; 315 x 5 singles

Incline Bench at 50 degrees, with the bar at eye level (about 7½ inches off the chest)- No
warmup; 5 singles with 300

Incline bench at 80 degrees, with bar at chin level- No warmup; 220 x 1; 235 x 1; 245 x 1; 255 x
1; 2 singles with 270. They would also occasionally end with three sets of ten with varying
weights on this incline and level for a pump.

And like with any other method, the Westside Crew's only rule was that there are no rules.
They adapted their training to their time constraints, energy levels, and mood on any given
day, which was a far cry from the ridiculous adherence to programs and dogmatic defense
thereof you'll find out of "lifters" who can't lift but two things- jack and shit. And Jack left town.

"The procedure on these exercises is not necessarily rigid. Remember, these

are supplemental exercises to be varied to suit your private stamina. If you
happened to work extremely hard on positions 1 and 2, nothing says you
can’t ease up on the third position by simply doing a light 4 sets of 10 reps.
Also, you may prefer to limit this routine to once a week. A lot depends on
your time and energy."
As a bit of a postscript, I thought I’d show you the dude who was arguably Westside’s most
jacked member, 6’4” 250lb Dan Vadis. This dude is reputed to have destroyed strength
legend Chuck Ahrens in arm-wrestling around the same time that Ahrens was defeating
entire professional football teams, in a row, in that sport. Vadis was one of the many jacked
dudes to play Hercules over the years, and he starred alongside guys like Lou Ferrigno in
bunches of Italian films. Both guys in the following story trained with the Westside crew at
times, as the "Ashman" mentioned is Dave Ashman, who was a member of the US Olympic
weightlifting team with Ike Berger (who started Bill West in odd lifting), and it gives you some
insight into exactly how insane these guys were.

"Doug Jamey, an Ashman contemporary weighing 165, did what was considered the grittiest
display of back power ever made. Using wrist straps, you might say he was literally welded
to the bar, he did three repetitions [in the deadlift]with 700[pounds]. He hunched each rep
every inch of the way. It looked like pop art in motion, the way his skeleton stretched and
bent, a living impossibility. As an encore, he stood in front of the bar and did three reps from
behind. At a bodyweight of 159 he did a continental clean of 400, inching it up his front in the
same fantastic, drawn-out display of power. Theatrics of this sort naturally invited a bit of
upstaging. Dan Vadis, now starring in European movies, challenged Doug to a finger
twisting contest. It broke Doug's finger. Shortly after, Doug decided to walk to Alaska. With
full pack and barefooted he said goodbye and started walking north up the beach from Santa
Monica. No one has heard tell since, but no one doubts he made it."
Westside Offshoots
Pat Casey
Nowadays, it’s not uncommon to see a lot of guys
weighing in the 200s benching 600+ lbs, so you’d
think that a guy like Pat Casey would fall by the
wayside in a discussion on big benchers. That,
however, is because most people wouldn’t take
into account the fact that triple-ply bench shirts
can double your bench, and equipped guys often
can barely handle half their opener in a warmup
without their shirts or suits. Casey, however, was
the first guy to ever bench 600, squat 800, or total
2000, and he did like a beast in a tshirt, shorts, and
a thin leather belt, with ace bandages for knee
wraps. Casey wasn’t a steady member of
Westside, but he trained with them periodically.
The rest of the time he trained at home or at Vic
Tanny’s “Dungeon” Gym or Redpath’s Gym
(which became Bill Pearl’s Gym), and usually with two other guys mentioned in this book-
Chuck Ahrens and Steve Merjanian.

Casey had insanely good fortune to live in the mecca of US lifting culture, so he received
schooling from the first guy to officially bench 400lbs (Gene Mozee) while a member of
superstar vaudevillian handbalancer George Redpath’s gym, which he joined at 15 as
Mozee steered him out of the street gang life Casey was in. This badass East LA street
gangster must have gone wild lifting and doing handbalancing with Redpath and his
acrobatic partner, Mr. America and 400+ bencher Bert Goodrich.

After training with those three strength luminaries for a couple of years, Casey was a
yoked-ass teenager who showed up Bill Pearl in a strength exhibition. Right from the
beginning, Casey was consistent as hell with his training and never missed a scheduled
workout, so he became well known for being able to repeat his performances over and
over, without any special preparation.

According to Bruce Wilhelm, “he did not have to check his bio-rhythm chart, or to be totally
rested or to have his own equipment to do his best lifting on.” He was incredibly consistent in
his training and because of that, he was always prepared to put on a show.

Consistency was the ultimate key. Through wind, through sleet, through rain or snow, bitch
betta have his money, and he was going to the mothafuckin gym. Well, that and having the
first three people who give you lifting advice be two of the only 400+ pound benchers on the
planet and the other being one of the world’s most talented and strong gymnasts. When you
put those two things together, it’s almost impossible to fail, and Casey proved that- he
basically quit because there was no competition.
Casey trained in marathon sessions on a regular basis, occasionally doing crazy shit like 7-8
hour sessions of weighted dips. Once, at a bodyweight of 300, he did a single with 308 lbs
hanging off him. Additionally, he’d occasionally bench with no spotter in a shed without
electricity, by candlelight (and nearly killed himself doing so on at least 2 occasions). This
wasn’t uncommon for him, as Casey trained by himself, reading magazines to motivate
himself, and then just busting his ass for endless hours doing the most ridiculous shit of which
he could think, like a neck bridge pullover and press with 405 lbs.

According to the man himself,

“At a bodyweight of 300 and using a 250 pound dumbbell I did 200
repetitions. I started with sets of 5, then 4, gradually descending all the way
down to singles. I did this over a 7 hour period of time and I can readily attest
to the fact that I was totally thrashed. I felt shot for the next two weeks. But for
some reason at that time I felt that they helped. On several other occasions I
did over a 100,000 pound workload dipping, working over a period of 8
hours.”

Casey credited his massive benching power to his marathon dipping sessions, in addition to
having done thousands of bench press lockouts in his homemade bench in the
aforementioned shed. He mentioned that he got the idea from Marvin Eder, another
bonafide badass who lifted insane poundages prior to the advent of lifting equipment or the
prevalence of gear.

A Sample Pat Casey Workout Routine

Monday
Bench Press Lockouts- Singles from 4 inches off chest. 3 singles from 7 inches off chest. After
lockouts, 2 sets of regular benches with 405 x 3.
Dumbell Incline- 3x5 warmup. 120x10, 200x3x5
Best: 220 x 6 @ 285 bodyweight.
Lying Triceps Extension- 5-6x3-5
Chins- 2-3x8-10
Curls- 3 x5x100lbs

Tuesday
Squats- Work up to near max; 5x1 at that weight; then backoff set with 515. 135 x 5, 225 x 3,
315 x 2, 405 x 2, 585 x 2, 650 x 5 singles, 515 x 10.
Leg Extension- 3 x 20
Leg Curls- 2 x 12
Deadlifts from below knee- (working on sticking point) 315 x 5, 405 x2, 515 x 1, 565 x 6 singles.

Wednesday and Thursday

Rest

Friday
Bench Press- 135 x 20, 225 x 10, 315 x 5, 405 x 5, 515 x 1, 560/570 x 5 singles, 405 x 10, 315 x 20.
Seated Military Press- 135 x 10, 225 x 5, 315 x 3, 400 x 1, 315 x 5, 225 x 8 (he noted he had to
turn his head to the side to get the barbell past his face because the equipment sucked)
Dips- Bodyweight x 3x5, then 10x5 with 205lbs

Saturday
Lockout Squats- above parallel, squat down and stop on pins. Dead stop. No bounce at the
bottom. 135 x 10, 225 x 5, 315 x 3, 405 x 2, 515 x 1. 585 x 1, 650 x 1, 750 x 5 singles, finish with full
squat – 405 x 5 with a pause at the bottom. These lockouts were mainly for the feel of
handling heavy weight.
Leg Extensions- 3x20
Leg Curls- 2x12
He would also throw in some bodybuilding movements and neck work.

Monday
Wide Grip Seated Presses- 1x10; 10x5; 1x20
Cheating One Arm Lateral Raises- 5x5; 1x20
Cheating One Arm Front Raises- 5x5; 1x20
Dips (with body leaning forward)- 5x5; 1x20

Wednesday
Handstand Presses Against Wall (With hands on boxes)- 10x5. If you cannot do a complete
press-up from the position, do a half press until your strength increases enough to do full
movements. You can add weight by tying a plate around your waist.
One Arm Lateral Raises (On incline bench)-. 5x8; 1x20
Bent Forward Lateral Raises- 5x8; 1x20
Dumbbell Shrugs- 10x10; 1x20

Friday
Seated Press Behind Neck- 10x5; 1x20
Dumbbell Shrugs- 5x10; 1x20
One Arm Dumbbell Presses- 10x5; 1x20
Strict Standing One Arm Lateral Raises- 6x10. Alternate arms without rest.
Roger Estep
If there has ever been a single better quote from
a lifter about his methodology, I have no idea
how it could be better than Estep’s, which was
“Train hard, party hard- makes the body hard.”
This ranks right up there with Carl Panzram’s last
words for utterances of badassery. Roger Estep
has existed perennially as the low key, full-homo
man crush of muscle hustling powerlifters for forty
years, and as such is considered to be the best
built strength athlete of all time. What people
seem to have forgotten, however, is that Estep
was one of the most brutally strong 198 pound
powerlifters in the history of the sport, in addition
to being the first elite powerlifter the world saw
who relied almost entirely on the power of single
rep sets

And when I say the muscle hustling has been

going on nonstop for 40 years, consider this
article from Powerlifting USA in 1980. It was typed
in caps like the author was channeling Greg
Valentino through his right hand while furiously masturbating with his left, but I’ve removed
the caps because I’ve no interest in forcing you to be screamed at in a “no homo, bro” sorta
way. The misused ellipses, likewise, were not mine, but as I’ve no idea what his intended
punctuation is I left them in place.

“Roger Estep got a letter the other day…. In it was the statement that, if he
became a full-time bodybuilder, “I’m sure you could make $100,000 a year.”
The letter was from Joe Weider…. He’s got a nice framed picture in his
apartment from Frank and Christine Zane… it’s signed… “to the most beautiful
body in powerlifting” … some strong support for the claim that Roger Estep is
the best built man in powerlifting, but Roger doesn’t make that claim himself…
he doesn’t have to… he carries the evidence around with him every day of
the year. As you can see from the cover photo, he possesses tremendous
thigh mass… same for the delts and arms… and in between, a narrow waist
and trim hips… especially for a man weighing 205 lbs. It wasn’t always that
way though….” (Lambert Roger)

That sort of unbridled man-love is typically reserved for gay dating sites and anything
involving Zyzz or Calum Von Moger, but it’s been going on for four decades with Estep
because not only did he look like the ultimate man to slap on a leather codpiece and do
some seriously bloody anal punching, but he was so strong he pulled off a raw 815lb squat
and 670lbs for 7 reps at 203lbs in knee wraps, two weeks out from breaking the world record
in the squat.
Hilariously, this sort of behavior extended even to the legendary George Frenn, who took
Estep under his wing after seeing one of Estep’s first meets.

“‘What is it?’ …. ‘What do you do?’ The questions must have seemed most
strange to young Roger Estep, who was simply wandering around, having just
bombed out of the 1974 National Collegiate Powerlifting Championships in
Long Beach, California. His effort to drop to a lower weight class had been a
disaster and he was seriously occupied in considering just what kind of
all-around fool he was… but the stranger, and fate, persisted. ‘What do you
do for your legs?… How did you get them that big?… With legs like that you
ought to be abusing those weights!’ The man with the questions was George
Frenn, one of the greatest powerlifters of all time… an Olympic hammer
thrower, Pan American champion, and much more” (Lambert Training).

By way of explanation, Estep was born in Kentucky, the son of a coal miner, and moved with
his family to Michigan to follow his grizzled badass of a dad in search of work and the black
lung. Presumable having single-handedly battled an avalanche or some other
preposterously testosterone laden misadventure, Estep’s dad broke his back, and the family
then settled in small town Ohio for Roger’s formative years. It was there that Estep blossomed
as a burgeoning badass, going all state in both football and baseball as a 150lb running
back and outfielder, respectively. It was then that Estep was recruited hard as hell by the
legendary Woody Hayes, one of the top ten winning-est coaches in NCAA football (and a
coach who repeatedly fought opposing players on the field during games), but with the
Vietnam War going Estep passed on a full ride and became an Army Ranger instead.

Having a man of that caliber attempt to recruit a wildly undersized white kid (the starter on
the team at that time was future NFL player Jim Otis, who dwarfed Estep at 6′ 223lbs) to play
running back in a run-first offense like the late 1960’s National Champions Ohio State would
be like having Leatherface recruit you to join a team of cannibalistic lumberjack hitmen, or
Snoop Dogg go to great pains to bring you aboard an all-star team of pimpin’ chefs. It’d be
like Quentin Tarentino choosing you to star in his next massive blockbuster after having you
ring his groceries in a supermarket, yet Roger Estep said, “nah, bro- I’ma go peel some
Vietnamese caps back.” Thus, Estep skipped the NFL and joined the US Army Rangers, picked
up a couple of medals, lifted at every base at which he was stationed, and brought
powerlifting to small town Ohio when he returned.

Estep first competed in the 1973 Junior Ohio State meet at the ripe old age of 24, going 1520
at a bodyweight of 193lbs, then finished second at the Senior meet later that year. The
following year he bombed out of the same meet on a 500lb squat attempt, having cut to
181 and then been a pile of soggy dogshit thereafter. 1975 saw him improve to second in the
nation in the Collegiate Nationals, and in 1976 he took the crown. He then proceeded to be
three time YMCA national champ, snagged two golds in the Pan Am Games in 1977, was the
West Virginia athlete of the year in 1977, and then grabbed the top spot in the world in 1978
by beating bench press god Larry Pacifico with a world record squat (769.5), second place
all time bench (490) and total (1944).
The question, then, is how in the hell did a
guy manage to put 424lbs onto his total in a
matter of five years? Having set a world
record myself after putting 120lbs onto my
total in three years, that type of progress
seems fantastical to the point of being
bullshit- we’re not talking noob gains, after
all, but 85lbs a year consistently for five
straight years by an advanced lifter. For
those of you who are going to just scream
“steroids” and “meathead” through this
article, let me fill you in on a secret- Roger
Estep was no dummy. He graduated from
OSU with a pre-physical therapy degree,
working with a physiologist who coached the US Olympic rowing team and did work with
NASA.

This in turn led to Estep and his mentor, the aforementioned professor who was also an avid
marathon runner, being used as a muscle biopsy donor for the initial scientific examinations
of the difference between fast and slow twitch muscles. After using a pencil size plunger to
extract muscle from his quad, it turned out that Estep’s fibers were four times the size of the
control group’s and marathon runners’, which seemed to be a direct result of his steadfast
devotion to training with heavy singles. And if that’s not enough evidence of his intellectual
credibility, Estep went on to become a millionaire as a nuclear medicine technician and
owner of California Medical Imaging Registry of Orange County, and when he died it was of
brain cancer, not complications from steroids.

The answer to the question of how in the hell he did it is easy- it was a combination of
psychotic devotion to lifting and the guidance of the best lifters on planet Earth. After seeing
the raw potential Estep possessed, George Frenn talked the kid’s ear off until they formed a
friendship, then sent him a program so he could train the Westside way. Estep used the
program for a year but was nursing a couple of injuries, so he took 2nd at nationals and
decided to call Frenn to find out what he was doing wrong.

After a lengthy conversation, Estep asked if he could spend the summer in LA, training with
the Westside guys and learning their methods. Since Bill West was fanatical about keeping
their training methods a secret, but Frenn was insistent that he wanted the methods shared
so that he could beat all comers even if they had his methods to use against him, it took a bit
of convincing to bring West on board. West finally acceded, however, and Frenn called
back Estep with the message, “Sure, Rog, come out for the summer. We’ll train HARD!”
(Fernando).

When Estep flew out to Cali, he was hitting 600 for two on the squat. After five weeks of
sweating his ass off in the LA heat and Bill West’s un-air conditioned garage gym, however,
Roger was squatting 680lbs, and all of his other lifts went up accordingly. As was his habit,
Estep basically entered every competition he could, but the first one he entered put
everyone on notice, because he squatted 630, 660, and 690, following himself after every
attempt, in his first meet after training with the Westside guys. As the record was 710 at the
time, no one knew what to do about Estep or his ridiculous leaps in his total. The dude was
already a legend even if no one had even heard of him two years prior.

From there, Estep absolutely killed himself in an effort to break 2000 at 198. And I mean that
very literally. Estep completely ignored the light days in the program and started training to
max with singles at every session. If something started hurting he’d just pop a shitload of
painkillers and train through it, “even if it meant screaming out in pain before, during, and
after a set. If he was supposed to handle a certain weight on a certain day, he did it, no
matter what” (Fernando).

His solution to every single issue in his life was more weight on the bar, no matter what he felt
like, what his injuries were, or anything else- if he was breathing, he should be moving sick
weights.

Though that method yielded massive results in the form of a world record and some seriously
impressive and consistent numbers in 1978, he was spending half the competitive year
injured because he refused
to listen to his goddamn
body. Though he eventually
learned to tone it down
when he was in agonizing
pain and knew training
would just exacerbate the
problem, he was never able
to beat his top marks from
1978. Nevertheless, the
man’s strategy going into
1978 was sound as hell (he
just happened to get
carried away thereafter in
an effort to crush his already
outlandish numbers, so those
methods definitely bear a bit
of investigation.

If you’re curious about his diet, especially because he looked practically stage ready in
every pic of him anyone’s ever seen, you’re about to be disappointed. “His diet is mainly
meat, vegetables, milk, and a shitload of Pepsi. Ate three to four meals a day, nothing
dogmatic or rigid, and wasn’t big on supplements” (Lambert Built). Thus, Estep’s training
seems to have been the key to his physique, though his mentality seems to have played a
huge role in his physique as well, because it enabled him to handle the massive training
weights he used on a regular basis.

“You have to MAKE YOURSELF BELIEVE IN YOURSELF. You’ve got to set a goal
and think to yourself, “If so-and-so can do it, then I can do it.” When Roger first
 went to West Virginia, Luke Iams was handling around 700 in the squat. Later,
when he started believing that he could do 800, his squat shot to that mark
and beyond. You can not let the weight intimidate you. This is even more
important in powerlifting than it is in Olympic lifting, but the perception of
David Rigert on the state of American lifting tells a tale: ‘You have many
strong lifters, but few brave ones'” (Fernando).

To that end, Estep threw everything he could at himself to condition the fear out of himself
regarding big weights, acting like he was a shaky-cam horror film director trying to cure
viewers’ chronic anxiety with more jump scares than Paranormal Activity. First and foremost,
meant tons of rocking box squats, which he learned from George Frenn, done with 50-75lbs
more than his max. His thinking was that if you were used to doing ten reps with 820 on the
high box squat, 780 for a full single would feel like nothing. It also meant forced reps like
you’re trying to be the second coming of Jimmy Pellechia– the negative is “all you, bro!” and
you get some help on the press itself. Again, it conditions the fear out of you, and science
has finally caught up to the lifters of the world to prove that eccentric overloads confer some
serious size and strength gains to those brojobs in the gym everyone’s been told don’t know
their ass from their elbow when it comes to training do (Friedmann-Bette, Norrbrand). The
final part of Estep’s mental side to training is believing you are the absolute, unmitigated shit:

“Another part of mental attitude is what might be described as “inward

conceit.” You don’t have to go around talking about what you’re going to lift
to everyone you meet, but deep inside, you have to feel that you are the best
. . . and if you should be defeated, you have to feel that it’s simply a matter of
time before you emerge victorious, because the other guy is simply not as
good as you are” (Lambert Training).
Roger Estep’s Basic Routine

True to what he learned training with Frenn and OG Westside crew, Estep and the lifters with
whom he trained in West Virginia (who called themselves the “Wild Bunch”) had a basic
program they followed, but unlike the modern obsession with bare-bones bullshit, they went
full ham sandwich after getting their mainstays in because they loved to train. I also have the
sense that like myself, these guys weren’t busy recording every goddamned thing they did,
so what follows is a general guideline rather than a set in stone program- Estep apparently
did 12 sets of singles on major lifts on a regular basis, though here you’ll see far fewer sets
listed.

Monday

High Box Squat– Light warmup, followed by 90lb jumps to a work weight that is 50-75lbs over
his best max squat. He’ll use that weight for a single set of 10 on a high box, though if his
knees were giving him shit, he’d cut that to 7. After a light warmup set he takes 90-lb. jumps
to a poundage 50-75 lbs. over his best max squat single and goes for 10 reps.

Low Box Squat– Using a box height that put him 2-3 inches below parallel he’d take 100lbs off
his 1RM and rep out.

Bench Press– 4 singles followed by an AMRAP pump set

Good Mornings-3 x 10

Leg Curl– 3 x 10

Random Bodybuilding Shit

Wednesday

Squat– Work up to a max set for ten reps. Later on in his career he’d just work up to a single
rep about a hundred pounds off his max, to grease the groove, as Pavel put it.

Deadlift– Work up to a max set for ten reps, without straps.

Leg Curl– 3 x 10

Random Bodybuilding Shit

Snatches and Cleans (On occasion)

Friday

Squat– Four singles, competition style, treating each attempt like it was a meet.

Bench– Four singles, competition style, treating each attempt like it was a meet.

Deadlift– Four singles, competition style, treating each attempt like it was a meet.

Leg Curl– 3 x 10

Random Bodybuilding Shit

On selecting poundages for meets and training:

“Selecting your poundages for a meet is based on a percentage concept

Your opener should also be a lift that you have 100% confidence in making . . .
after that you go to something that you might have 80% confidence in. Say if
you had handled 800 or more 4 out of 5 times in workouts, then that would be
an 80% lift, and, depending on the competition, that might be what you
would want to take” (Lambert Training).

As I mentioned above, Estep and the Wild Bunch all believed that using forced reps would
make them harder than HR Giger watching tentacle rape/Transformers mashup porn, and
they used them pretty religiously. This was one of the things Frenn and West imparted on
Estep, and all of the Wild Bunch used them to impressive effect- OG Westside might have
been the West Coast powerlifting juggernaut, but the Wild Bunch were the East Coast crew
to beat. As such, forced reps should be a intensity multiplier that we all use on a regular basis,
rather than one we eschew because it’s been a Weider favorite for half a century, especially
since the idea actually comes from the 1932 German Olympic weightlifting team’s ideas
(adapted by coach Mark Berry for use in the US). Beyond that, it’s hardly broscience- I threw
a couple of studies into the sources if you want to look, but there is a psychological aspect as
well:

“During a maximum attempt almost all of the muscles and nerve endings are
‘firing’ simultaneously in order to achieve the lift. If there is a psychological
barrier due to a prior injury or because the weight is now in a ‘magical’ area
(usually the even numbers such as 300, 400, 500 etc. are responsible for this),
signals from the stress receptors will be allowed to overload the ‘system’, like a
common circuit breaker, and shut it down; and the lift will be missed”
(Fernando).

This method will beat the ever-loving shit out of you, and can’t be used year round. Estep,
Frenn, and friends all cycled this method throughout the year to bust plateaus and beat
staleness, but even as crazy as Estep was, he didn’t try to use it nonstop. As Ron Fernando
hilariously put it, “one can not, in my estimation, use the Hands On method for 365 days of
the year and certainly not for 465 days a year, except in rare cases involving mirrors, reality
cracks and/or long, late-night mental battles with tortured terrorists posing as people made
of provolone” (Fernando).
The Hands-On Method

Monday

Light Squat– 135 x 10; 225 x 8; 315 x 5 x 5

Bench (assuming 300 max) -135 x 10 x 2 sets; 225 x 5; 250 x 3; 270 x 1; 285 x 1; 295 x
1; 305, 315, 330 x 1 (Hands On); 290 x 1 (paused); 240 x 10 (touch and go)

Notes: The 270 x 1 should easier than a crack whore on payday, and basically be
an opening attempt under any condition. The 285 and 295 are heavy core sets,
which should be tough but workable. The hands on sets are over your max, and
the spotter should keep the first two fingers of each hand on the bar throughout
the duration of the lift.

“This is important because a lot of people literally ‘dump’ the weight on a lifter
and then come to their rescue with the forced reps. From my experience
training with Roger, it is very important for the lifter to feel that he or she is in
CONTROL throughout the whole lift. The eccentric or negative phase of the lift
is, therefore, important. Another method we can use can be called the ‘fist’
method where the spotter lifts the weight off with the fists close together so
that when the lifter comes down the spotter’s fists actually make contact with
the lifters chest. I like this method because it imparts an even greater sense of
psychological confidence in the area of ‘uncharted waters’. As Roger is fond
of saying, ‘Don’t let the weight control you . . . be aggressive at the bottom‘”
(Fernando).

Wednesday

Deadlift (assuming 520 max)- 135 x 10; 245 x 8; 335 x 5; 415 x 1; 465 x 1; 495 x 1; then 525, 545,
560 x 1 (Hands On)

“In the deadlift, I feel that this method has the most applicability. Spotting for
the big pull is a bit trickier, so careful attention to detail is important.
Regardless of which style (sumo or regular) the athlete assumes, the spotter
should stand behind, literally crowding the lifter. By placing the hands – one at
the base of the sternum and the other at the tailbone – an extreme feeling of
tightness is imparted. However, the lifter will be doing the pulling. Additionally,
this will keep the lifter in the groove and prevent any old injury from cropping
up if the body gets out of place. If one feels really brave, don a pair of straps
and try the Hands On with the deadlift. I guarantee that you will pull weights
beyond your wildest expectations” (Fernando).

Friday
Squat (assuming 500 max)- 135 x 10; 225 x 8; 315 x 5; 375 x 3; 405 x 1; 445 x 1; 475 x 1; then 505,
525, 540 x 1 (Hands On)

Light Bench– 135 x 10; 225 x 5 x 5 or 250 x 5 x 3

And with that, you have all there is to know about Roger Estep without digging up the man’s
corpse and attempting some serious necromancy. Frankly, a hyper-jacked zombie with a
penchant for maniacal training and one hell of a 40 time sounds like what would be the
worst possible case scenario involving sprinter zombies, so I’ll leave that to a far more
accomplished occultist than myself. It sucks that Estep isn’t around to tell us himself, but
according to his obituaries he fought brain cancer to the bitter end, going under the knife
ten times before dying of complications of the last surgery. What everyone should gather
from his story, however, is that the man was far more than the brawny, glistening physique
everyone’s been slobbering over for 40 years- he was an innovator who experimented like a
crazy and trained like an utter psychopath until he stood atop his weight class like a god
among mere mortals.
Estep’s Three Days a Week Beginner Program

Leg Raise- 50

Crunch- 50

Jackknife- 50

Squat- Two warmup sets (1x15; 1x8). Work sets: 3 x 8, then add weight and do 2 x 5

Bench Press- Two warmup sets (15 reps and 8 reps). Work sets: 3 x 8, then add weight and do
2x5

Seated DB Curl- 3 x 8

Incline Tricep Extension- 3 x 8

Deadlift- Two warmup sets (15 reps and 8 reps). Work sets: 3 x 8, then add weight and do 2 x
5

DB Row- 3 x 8

Behind the Neck Press- 3 x 8

Shrugs- 4 x 6

Calf Raise- 3 x 12
Phil Grippaldi
Though strength sports rarely have
child stars, those youthful stars are
certainly not immune to this issue
either- that’s why when Phil Grippaldi,
former protege to a lifelong criminal,
bouncer, and bodyguard to
supermodel Twiggy, got arrested as
the world’s oldest crack dealer at age
61, exactly no one was surprised.

Born in 1946 in New Jersey, Grippaldi

started training at age 14 under the
watchful eye of a massive 6’4” 250lb
amateur, non-competitive bodybuilder,
bodyguard, possessor of 23” pre-Synthol
arms, and low-level gangster Mike
Guiblio. Guiblio had little Grippaldi
trashing his arms for three hours a day in
the company of like-minded
spaghetti-gobbling benchbros, and by
age 16 all of his hard work paid off. No,
the kid didn’t end up in a cemetery from
doing hours of curls and close grip bench
presses every single day- he ended up a 16 year old kid with 19 inch arms weighing under
190 lbs, and likely more sopping wet vagina thrown at him on the street on a daily basis than
most of us will see in the span of our lives (Everson, Gallagher “Phil” 2).

Shortly thereafter, Grippaldi met the coach of the legendary Keasby Eagles weightlifting
team, which churned out badass American Olympic weightlifters throughout the 1960s and
1970s. In his weightlifting debut, Grippaldi smashed the Junior World Record at 90kg by 35
lbs, then entered the Senior Nationals for his second meet and placed second to world
record holder Bill March with another Junior World Record in the press with a 348 lb attempt.
The following year he switched coaches and broke his own record again with a 352 press. At
this point, the dude with arms so big that he was studied by Soviet scientists seemed like he
was on the verge of bending over the Eastern block and making it his punk bitch all by his
lonesome. That, however, was not exactly how things would play out.

“The grimly serious Grippaldi’s arms were so hypertrophied from bodybuilding

done in his teens that the Russian weightlifting experts at the Soviet Academy
of Sport—in an article translated for American magazines—diagnosed those
prodigious arms as the cause of a technique problem that inhibited his
ultimate success. Phil may have been okay with that. He didn’t get Olympic
gold, but a silver medal and a band of worshippers is not too bad” (McKeen
87) .
In 1968, Grippaldi beat weightlifting legend Bill March in the national championships like he
was a 20 year old Mike Tyson going up against an aging Joe Frazier, clocking a sick 1,055 lb
three lift total. Grippaldi went on to be a sensation on the international circuit, racking up
some incredibly impressive finishes for an American whose nation had turned its collective
back on weightlifting 20 years prior.

Working as a teacher by day and putting in 20 to 30 hours of training a week, Grippaldi

continued to log massive numbers, even after his pet exercise, the press, was discarded like a
used condom to cut down on duration of weightlifting meets (Gallagher “Phil”). In spite of
his nearly legendary success, however, an elbow injury sustained in competition in 1980
destroyed Grippaldi’s Olympic
gold aspirations, although he
attempted an Olympic
comeback utilizing nothing but
thousands of 1,000 pound-plus
leg presses, and that attempt
predictably went nowhere
(McKeen 93).

One would assume that’s

where the slide toward crack
dealing started, but given the
fact that his pre-Frenn mentor
was a low-level mobster and
lifelong criminal, it was probably
unlikely that this washed up
strength phenom could have
ended his life any other way.
No one’s quite sure how a
teacher consumed with lifting
could only have an ending
crazier than the beginning, it seems, but it seems only fitting looking at the way he lived.

Phil Grippaldi’s Relevant Stats

Height: 5’5″

Weight: 195 lbs.

Arms: 20″-22″ (depending on the source)

Best Lifts

Clean and Press: 396 lbs

Clean and Jerk: 451 lbs

Snatch: 341 lbs

Competition History

1st- 1967 Pan American Games, 90k

2nd- 1970 World Championship, 90kg (160kg Press, 140kg Snatch, 190kg Jerk)

1st- 1971 Pan American Games, 90kg

1st- 1975 Pan American Games, 90kg

By all accounts, Phil Grippaldi’s training methods ranged from “jesus christ, he’s a maniac” to
“my eyes are bleeding watching this guy.” According to Jeff McKeen, a light warmup prior
to pulling consisted of 5 totally cold reps with 495 on the squat, at which point he was ready
to rock. The guys around him considered him to be a demi-god, so Grippaldi was always the
one setting the pace for their marathon workouts. Though the workouts varied widely, their
mainstay lifts almost never changed.

Phil Grippaldi’s Basic Workout Routine

Monday, Wednesday, Friday

Front Squats

Back Squats

Snatch

Power Clean

Tuesday, Thursday

Press

Snatch

Clean and Jerk

Bench Press

Power Rack: Four 10 second holds in full extended position

Saturday
Total on all three lifts

Unlike most Olympic lifters of the time, Grippaldi absolutely refused to quit curling and
benching, and for that reason often had trouble making weight at meets (Charniga).
Though most Olympic lifters though bench pressing would impede their shoulder flexibility,
Grippaldi just knocked out shoulder dislocates before, during, and after benching to
maintain a full range of motion. Additionally, Grippaldi was famous in his gym for breaking
lifts down into their component parts and training his weak points doing that. This is how he
build his press to such prodigious poundages- he’d identify component parts and use
unrelated lifts to strengthen different parts of each lift, rotating the assistance work on a
weekly basis (Gallagher “Grippaldi”).

To make his sick overhead press so disgusting it caused nubile women to spontaneously
ovulate in his presence, Grippaldi did the following three things:

1. Blast his body with a wide array of non-shoulder specific assistance exercises
2. Focus on press-related assistance exercises
 3. Refine his technique like a hipster refines his palette for wine tastings

In regards to the first point, Grippaldi identified his abs and intercostals as incredibly
important factors in his press. Just as it’d be idiotic to build a house on a sinkhole, it’d be
stupid to attempt and overhead press with a weak midsection. According to the man
himself,

“A lifter must have excellent abdominal and intercostal strength and to that
end it is imperative that the lifter employ some of the following abdominal
exercises in his routine. Ab work aids in creating the ‘giant spring.’ During the
Olympic press the abs and hips must be coordinated to create the initial
thrust. On a related note: remember to drive the hips forward as the weight is
being pressed. A lifter must isolate and work on his thrust” (Gallagher
“Grippaldi”).

Everyone’s heard about the exercise du jour in that era for abs- guys like Serge Nubret and
Frank Zane were famous for building their shredded midsections with thousands of
unweighted Roman Chain situps. While Grippaldi gave no shits about stepping on a
bodybuilding stage, he did take a page out of the bodybuilders’ book and start doing
Roman chair situps holding a 20kg plate either behind his head or on his chest. Unlike Frank
Zane, who would do sets of over 50 reps, Grippaldi held his shenanigans to 20 reps or less
(Ibid).

After he knocked out abs, Grippaldi would flip over and do weighted hyperextensions to
build thick spinal erectors. This was the exercise of the Russians and powered some of their
most famous lifters to greatness just on the strength of their spine. Though some Russians did
these with a 220lb barbell behind their neck, Grippaldi stuck to a plate behind the neck or
held to the chest and kept his reps
between 5 and 15 (Ibid).

Grippaldi’s direct shoulder assistance work

was pretty conventional. It consisted of:

70-degree Incline Barbell Press– 6 x 5

Seated Overhead Dumbbell Press– 6 x 5

Push press– 5 x 3

Isotonic/isometric rack pressing– 4 x 3. This

bears some explanation, as this was incredibly popular in the 1970s but has completely fallen
out of use, likely because racks only come with a single set of pins. Should you have access
to two sets for a single rack, here’s how these are done- break the lift into thirds. Set one set
of pins at the bottom third of the rep and the other set at the top, then press the barbell from
one set of pins to the other, holding the third rep against the top pins for 3-5 seconds.

Unsurprisingly, it’s with the world’s oldest crack dealer that we see the first echoes of the
modern Ohio Westside, as Grippaldi shared their penchant for pretending that lifting was
more important than living life, and I’ll point out this was not shared at all by the other
Westside guys (recall that the original Westside guys were mostly real athletes from real
sports).

“There was something wrong with us. We chose a sport with no pot of gold
and no rainbow. Weightlifters didn’t get appearance fees or product
endorsements, do commercials or interviews, and most spent their entire
income on their training and travel to competitions. Some lifters got fed up,
and turned pro wrestler, or switched to the new sport of professional
strongman competition; the strong legs and backs of Olympic lifters made it a
natural transition.

And we usually passed on fun. Fun was tied to spontaneity outside of the
weight room. Skiing for the weekend? Might get injured. Trip to the Outer
Banks? Where should I train? “You are going to the gym on Christmas Day?”
my wife demanded, incredulous.

“It’s Wednesday. Wednesday is jerk day. I’ll just be a couple of hours,” I said.

“It is Jerk Day, isn’t it?” She turned away. Why the turn wasn’t permanent, I’m
not sure.
All that for the possible reward of respect by a few thousand or so Olympic
lifters in the country, of being a Grippaldi. We few, we slap-happy few”
(McKee 90-91).

So, he might not have ended up a world champion… and he might have ended up a piece
of shit slinging crack rock on the corner, but for a decade, Phil “The Man With Four Legs”
Grippaldi was the baddest man under 200lbs the world had ever seen, and was regarded as
a god. He represented everything awesome about an entire generation of lifters to that
generation. For ten years, no one looked back to the past for inspiration- they just looked
across a dimly lit shithole of a gym to a dude with sides of beef for arms and an abject
hatred of being a mere human.
Closing Remarks
There you have it- all of the shit Louie should have taught people but didn’t. This is the real
Westside, their methods, and their basic story. If you cannot succeed in strength sports by
applying the principles within this book, you cannot succeed at strength sports, period.

Periodization can eat a bag of rancid dicks- that shit is for lames who are trying to look
scientific instead of being strong. Let’s stop playing pretend and actually go chase some real
weight, shall we?
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