10 lessons from the weight training legends

The legendary bodies of yesteryear are still the gold standard of body development. Few of today's bodybuilders manage to combine mass and symmetry as perfectly as these classic bodybuilders did. And today's weightlifting competitions are rarely as impressive as those of the old school strongmen.

History is the best teacher - but only if we are willing to learn its lessons instead of trying to reinvent the wheel. Simplify things with these tried and tested lessons.

George Hackenschmidt

"Health can never be separated from strength."

For decades, fitness focused on jogging, walking, cycling and other methods of improving aerobic endurance. Fortunately, the tide has turned in favor of strength training. Old school wrestler and strongman George Hackenschmidt has emphasized the importance of strength and longevity throughout his 90 years of life - and today, science is finally backing up his words.

One example is a 44-year cohort study of 2239 men that looked at the relationship between grip strength and longevity. For those who lived the longest, grip strength in midlife was in the top third. These men did not smoke, were physically active outdoors and had mothers who had lived a long time.

There is no doubt that biological factors play an important role in longevity. But smart lifestyle choices such as staying active and building strength also provide a protective mechanism against age-related strength and muscle loss. Heavy strength training will lead to a longer and better life.

Reg Park

"Too many bodybuilders spend too much time training the smaller muscle groups like the biceps at the expense of the larger muscle groups like the thighs. And then they wonder why they never see gains in muscle mass and strength."

Best known as the original Hercules and mentor to Arnold Schwarzenegger, Reg Park was an absolute monster in the weight room and hell-bent on building as much strength and symmetrical muscle mass as possible. Today, his simple training style will work for virtually anyone.

Limit your isolation training until further notice. Focus on the basic exercises first to train your biggest muscles. And then aim for stronger muscles if you have any hope of growing them.

Arnold Schwarzenegger

Arnold may be known for his high-volume split training by muscle group, but don't be fooled. Arnold's original training was based on a foundation of heavy weight training and full body training programs, in fact, Arnold only began to modify his training program to focus on the insane volume with muscle group splits that he is known for today when he added performance enhancing substances to his training and began to focus full time on bodybuilding.

Arnold recommends that beginners start with a full-body training program like his "Golden Six" program, which is performed three times a week. This program looks like this:

1. Squats: 4x10
2. Barbell bench press with wide grip: 3x10
3. Pull-ups: 3 x maximum number of repetitions
4. Neck press: 4x10
5. Barbell curls: 3x10
6. Sit-ups with bent knees: 3-4 x maximum number of repetitions

If you're a beginner, it's easy to be tempted to train like a professional bodybuilder's pre-competition workout. Don't. You don't have the basic skills, the banned performance-enhancing substances or the ability to focus your whole lifestyle on your training to cope with the demands of these workouts.

Learn a lesson from history: "Almost every damn legendary body was built on a foundation of heavy full-body training with basic exercises."

Lee Haney

"Stimulate instead of destroy."

Lee Haney, the eight-time Mr. Olympia champion, dominated bodybuilding in the eighties and early nineties. His words "stimulate rather than destroy" serve as words of caution for those who want to build strength and muscle: there is a fine line between training hard with maximum recovery and an increased risk of injury combined with a risk of overtraining with all its negative consequences.

Push yourself hard - but if you notice that you feel exhausted and your training quality is decreasing from training session to training session, then back off a little. Train hard, increase the weight on the bar and feel your muscles doing the work, but don't chase muscle failure as your sole goal.

Sig Klein

"Use the clean and press with two dumbbells."

Sig Klein was known from his twenties to his forties for his Herculean strength. His feats of strength were extraordinary for a man who was just 138 centimetres tall and weighed 67 kilos. Klein performed overhead presses with over 105 kilos and strict form, one-arm snatches with 73 kilos and one-arm deadlifts with 95 kilos.

Klein is known for his love of the dumbbell deadlift - a true total body and power exercise. At his peak, Sig said that fewer than 12 men in all of America could perform 12 repetitions of the deadlift with 35-pound dumbbells. Even today, this is still a challenge: try to do 12 repetitions of the deadlift with 35 kilo dumbbells. If you can do this with good form, then you are one of the chosen few.

During Klein's time, leg training was not particularly widespread. He noticed that most men only trained their upper body and some even only trained their arms (sound familiar?). He is often referred to as the first "fitness professional" to recommend plenty of leg and back training to build true strength.

Eugen Sandow

"Life is movement. As soon as you stop moving, you are dead. Choose to live."

Eugen Sandow, who was born in 1867, is known as the father of modern bodybuilding. The trophy awarded today to the winner of the Mr. Olympia title is a statue of Sandow.

His message makes more sense today than ever: move more. Compared to bodybuilders of today, the old school strength athletes were known for their amazing strength and aesthetic body development, as well as their health and well-being.

Working out with weights and maintaining strength is essential for both appearance and longevity, but simply doing four workouts with weights a week shouldn't be all you do. Get outside for a walk. Do the occasional physical work or take part in a competition or challenge outside the gym. Training with weights is great, but as Emerson said, health is the real wealth. Don't just look after your strength and performance, look after your health too.

Ronnie Coleman

"Everybody wants to be a bodybuilder, but nobody wants to move brutally heavy weights!" Even if you don't have to train at Coleman's insane intensity, heed this message: big muscles require heavy weights.

Heavy training elicits an anabolic hormonal response to build muscle while improving central nervous system function and muscle fiber recruitment. This means that heavy training creates the hormonal environment, overload and muscle fiber recruitment needed for maximum muscle growth. The message is that building strength allows you to generate more stress on the body during your training sessions and drive muscle growth.

Vince Gironda

"If you don't like what you see in the mirror, what difference does it make what the scale says?"

Men and women alike are obsessed with the number their scales tell them. However, what they should really be focusing on is their true body composition. The mirror is the ultimate judge - not your weight.

Most men who want to look more muscular should start by getting lean - the ideal would be 10% body fat or less. This alone will make you look better and also make building pure muscle exponentially more effective.

If you are a naturally lean guy, be realistic about your expectations. Can you expect to build the body of an American football player? In most cases, the average 175- to 185-pound man with a body weight of 75 to 85 kilos will look much better with a body fat percentage of 8 to 12% than with a weight of 100 kilos or more, with a body fat percentage of 15% or more.

If fat loss is your goal, measure the circumference of your waist, chest, arms and thighs every two weeks and take photos in your underwear to compare your progress. The scale will rarely cooperate. Most guys end up losing lean muscle mass and fat at the same time. They see that the weight on the scale doesn't change and throw in the towel.

Use other tools to assess your progress - especially the mirror. This may be humbling at first, but you'll be amazed at how little the weight on the scale means when you're transforming your body.

Dorian Yates

"If I'd listened to my instincts, I'd be in a pub picking up women instead of under a barbell doing squats at 200 kilos."

The six-time Mr. Olympia is best known for his HIT style training and performing only one maximum work set per exercise to build his amazing body. Nevertheless, the above quote is important. To radically change your body, maximum intensity in the gym alone is not enough. You need to be extremely disciplined and focused on your goals.

One excellent hour in the gym cannot make up for 23 hours of modest eating, drinking beer and watching TV all night or partying instead of sleeping. For most, the workout is the easy part. But if you want to maximize your efforts in the gym, then you need to focus as much on your diet, lifestyle and sleep as you do on what you do with the weights.

Dan John

"Everything will work - but only for a while."

As important as it is for beginners to master the basic movement patterns, there will come a time for everyone to make changes to their training. For fat loss, the most effective exercises are usually the exercises you are least efficient at. In other words, the exercise you are worst at will generally give you the best results.

But what about building strength and muscle mass? There's a fine line between jumping back and forth between different training programs and making subtle changes to your technique to prevent overuse and generate a new stimulus. If you reach a plateau in your training, try changing your stance, your grip or the tempo of your exercises for a few weeks. This is usually enough to change the neural recruitment patterns in your exercises for a "new" stimulus without having to start a completely new training program.

Or consider a daily undulated periodization (DUP) approach. One such example was popularized by Charles Poliquin in 1988 when he theorized that strength training programs lose their effectiveness after just two weeks. He supported two-week cycles of training blocks, alternating between volume and strength blocks.

Poliquin emphasized that alternating volume and strength blocks eliminates the physiological and psychological stagnation that comes from over-emphasizing specialization in volume or intensity.

While leaving the exercises unchanged, you could simply alternate your intensity and repetition patterns for a new stimulus.

Week	1-2	3-4	5-6
Repetitions	10-12	4-6	8-10
Sets	3	5	4
Intensity	70-75%	82-88%	75-78%
Volume (sets x repetitions)	30-36	20-30	32-40

This fluctuation of intensity and volume is enough to improve strength and mass gains, as well as keep your training stimulus fresh and new enough.

References:

1. Poliquin C. Five steps to increasing the effectiveness of your strength training program. National Strength and Conditioning Association. 10(3). 1988.
2. Rantanen, T., Masaki, K., He, Q., Ross, W., Willcox, B., & White, L. (2011). Midlife muscle strength and human longevity up to age 100 years: a 44-year prospective study among a decedent cohort. American Aging Association, Jun (34), 3rd ser., 563-570. doi:10.1007/s11357-011-9256-y

Source: https://www.t-nation.com/training/10-lessons-from-the-strength-legends

By Erich Bach