What is going on, guys? Happy Tuesday. Welcome back to Eat, Train, Prosper. Today is episode one hundred and ninety and Brian and I are talking pre steroid era training protocols. So this was an idea introduced by Brian a few weeks back and it is super cool. And what we've kind of both done is I go down the rabbit hole and it was a little bit of like a little project, you know, to dig up some things. And a lot of this is things that. You know, I've learned through speaking with Brian before little tidbits and stuff, but it was really cool to go back and do some history. There are some parts of this that I think are a little bit more of cooler lore or things that I have seen in the past and potentially, you know, taken at face value before I had been a professional in this space and then revisiting it with a professional. I have been able to be like, yeah, that's absolute dogshit sort of thing. But a very, very cool episode. But before we dive in, as always. Brian, what's going on? Yeah, I'm super excited for this episode. I have always had a passion for this era of training. was, you know, as I've talked about kind of how I got my introduction into training was through a lot of these protocols. And, uh, I found a lot of motivation in my youth through reading a lot of these kind of old time magazines and training manuals and, different things like that. So, definitely something that's been really fun for me to revisit. And I look forward to, to going through this with you. As far as updates, three quick ones for you guys. Just spent the weekend in Moab, which is super beautiful Red Rocks out in Utah, kind of near Colorado, like Eastern Utah. oh yeah, Eastern Utah. So cool. We went on this almost three mile hike with the kids and another family. And it was the first, it was the longest hike that my daughter has ever done. She's five. uh We were doing it with this other family where the girl is in Bryson's class. So she's like six or seven, a little bit older than, Vivi is. And you could see Vivi just wanting to impress her and stay with her the whole time. So while she would usually get a mile in and start complaining that she's tired or her legs hurt, or she needs to sit down and eat or whatever, um, she literally just manned up so to speak and didn't complain at all. And just, you know, trounced across the red rocks and It was really, really cool experience for all of us, incredible pictures and the topography there was just so wild with layers and layers and layers of these red rocks and arches and, you know, a thousand foot falls and all sorts of stuff. So that was really cool. personally, as far as my training is going, everything's been great. Sticking currently with the. abbreviated version of my, you know, legs and abs and calves on one day, torso on another day, and then extremities, shoulders and arms and stuff on a third day. Uh, been great. Given the travel I, uh, and I had another travel the week before where I went to Cancun for our buddy, Pitts's wedding. So I came back from Cancun and, uh, only had a couple of days here before we left for Moab. So I needed to do a leg workout. It had been like, I think days since I had done like a proper leg workout. And uh I did four sets of pendulum squat and four sets of leg curls. And that was on Wednesday, the day before we left for Moab. And it is now Tuesday, and I'm still sore in my legs from four sets of pendulum squats and four sets of leg curls. Granted, the soreness is big is basically gone at this point. But for a number of days there, I was completely crippled and like my knee would buckle as I would walk you know the quads are so sore type thing and I just like it just continues to amaze me like I know I had taken nine days off of legs but it continues to amaze me how little volume is actually needed I did 12 total reps 12 working reps for for my quads like literally four sets of three on the pendulum squat and this is what happened to me so That was amazing. And then on the trip in Moab, I brought my rings, which is one of my favorite things to do to hit an upper body session, you know, with these beautiful expansive views in the background. And I did 12 rounds of five pull-ups and 10 push-ups. So pretty simple, 60 reps of pull-ups, 120 reps of push-ups. It's not like I rushed it. It was, you know, minute and a half breaks between each. It took me 35 minutes to do all of that. My lats and chest and triceps. have been sore to the touch since then. And still now where that was on Saturday and it's now Tuesday and I still have like deep soreness in my like terries and lower lats and the tricep right above the elbow. It just boggles my mind how little really quality volume is necessary to get me extremely beat up these days. And... oh I think that that actually parlays relatively well into this episode where a lot of the training that these guys did was, you know, a little bit lower volume and uh some of them were not, which we'll get into, but I'm always surprised by that. And then the last thing is it is graduation week this week. So I don't remember ever graduating this early when I was in school. It was always like mid June, but this week in late May, my daughter's gonna officially be done with. preschool and start kindergarten next year. And my son is graduating first grade and starting second grade next year. So, going to embark on summer here. End of this week, starting Memorial day weekend. It's summer. We do camps and I'm amped. I'm amped. Like really summer is my, my favorite where I can get up and drop the kids at camp and hit a warm bike ride in the seventies at 9 AM. It's, just perfect. So, really excited for what we have to come these next few months. Aaron, what's going on with you? You know, not much really. I'm living Groundhog Day and I don't I don't hate it. You know, I I really, really don't. I have in here like prep is prepping. I'm getting leaner still somehow. I'm really enjoying the pursuit of something. I'm really enjoying the mornings again. My alarm goes off. I get up. I do my journaling. This is the only time I've ever, ever been consistent with a journal. I'm on day 51. um It really helps me kind of just like set in, set in, you know, kind of intentions for the day, make sure that I'm like really efficient. And I think it's one of those things where. The gift of like time freedom can also become a curse, you know, because you don't have like the pressure to be like in somewhere by some time. So sometimes you kind of feel like I have my coffee and I'm kind of like dicking around on Instagram or something like that. And then it's a poor way to start your day in my opinion. And from what it kind of I never have great days like that, but I don't I don't look at my phone for probably like the first well, like probably 45 minutes after I'm up, you know, until I've like done all my morning stuff, my journal. And then I'll like listen to something while I'm making breakfast. But It's real, I'm truly, truly enjoying the days right now. And I think like that pressure of having to perform so that I'm not gonna like embarrass myself on stage or something like that really just brings out like a better version of me, even with work. My work has been so much more efficient, you know, and I'm really, really enjoying it to the point where I'm trying to like put these thoughts in my head, like, okay, like how do I instate this like after prep sofa? Like what's something else I can like. put pressure on myself to continue this like work efficiency in that sort of thing. But, so far I still feel really good. I'm sure once I get like lean, lean, lean, I'll start to feel like the fatigue and stuff, settle, settling in, but I still don't, I feel great. Honestly, it feels really, really nice. So with the journaling, that's actually one of the things that I don't do in my morning routine. I do a lot of things like breath work and certain other things that I find really do move the needle. And so for you, 51 days in, you've really found this to be something that really does kind of positively impact your day. Yeah, and I think it positively impacts it, but it also forces me to take some chill time with myself. I wake up, I brush my teeth, I have 20 some ounces of water right away, I get some creatine in, I have a flavored creatine, so it's just a nice flavored drink to have. I make an espresso, I sit down outside on the little patio thing with my notebook, and I just get all my thoughts out and stuff, and have some pure air and time with his mind, sort of thing. Yeah, I love that. I think that that might be something that I begin to introduce this summer with the kids kind of getting up later and camps and stuff. It gives me a little bit more time in the morning. Um, so that might be actually one that I, that I begin to do because it's been on the kind of the front of my mind. And I also find it interesting that you do it by hand, which Kim does as well, because I've done, I've, I've tried the journaling thing in the past. Like when I, when I quit weed for 33 days last year, I had journaled every single morning on how I was feeling about that, but I did it on the computer. And I feel like maybe there's something a little more raw and in touch about doing it by hand. Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't do it if I was doing it on the computer. You know, I would say it's like, I think there's something kind of primitive in it. Even though I can barely read it. My handwriting has become so poor since I never write anymore. And to be completely honest, the first couple of days, my hand was fucking killing me just using it. And like I couldn't even read my handwriting. It was it had become so bad. So it was it's. And like sometimes I'll read like, you know, today, today's like, okay, Tuesday, I might read Mondays, you know, just like a cruise through and be like, okay, or did I stand true on some of these things that I forget about those? But I'm not going like back through it, but it's, it's, I do like it. It's, it's a little simple thing. I keep it right in the same spot. But so far I've, I've quite enjoyed it. Even through like the travel days, you know, in the airports and stuff, it's always like, I have to get it done. You know, first thing in the morning, whether that's waking up on the plane and it's now the next day or something like that. m I've made it a priority through prep. Yeah, I think I'm gonna do that. I'm gonna report back. Yeah, please do. And that's really it. You know, there's not much in my life these days. I'm living Groundhog Day. I'm getting leaner. I'm eating the same. I've eaten the same exact foods for 51 days straight. And I don't I don't hate it at all. Right. Each day I'm like, man, this chicken still fucking hitting pretty damn good. That sugar free ketchup still tastes pretty fucking good. I can't wait for it tomorrow. Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely. well that's great man. And first show is booked for what date? uh June 7th is the first show that is my regional in Pattaya, Thailand. So we booked those flights, Airbnbs and stuff. And then um I'm going to go after the show up to Chiang Mai to meet like uh a business partner, actually someone who's who's helped us with with gym stuff. Meet him for the first time. And then I'm super fortunate. My friend Ben Broughton, who owns Unreal Gym in Bangkok. He's a pro bodybuilder himself is going to help me with the show and like stay with us and stuff like that and be like my stagehand. So I feel rather fortunate to have access to like, you know, really cool people who are willing to help me and stuff for something like this. that's great, man. mean, I didn't realize it was coming up so soon. Like you're literally two weeks away more or less from the show two and a half or something like that. Yeah. is this going to affect our recording of the pod or is that all like kind of weekend stuff? I will leave I believe Wednesday so we should still be good that week. Yes, yep. Yep. All right, well, let's talk about some, let's talk about some priest arrow and arrow training. So we have this big long outline here with all sorts of different things. It's been kind of updated throughout the week with a variety of different aspects of the training that we've discovered and kind of chatted about through DM and stuff like that. just to kind of start, the first thing I think is to talk a little bit about some of the early names that may, may not have an impact on kind of some of the styles of training that we're going to talk about here. But, um, one of the things that, you know, a lot of people may know or not know is that Eugene Sandow is often considered like the Godfather of the early, I don't want to call it bodybuilding per se strength training, something along those lines. Um, Eugene Sandow. Physique. Yeah. was the first one. He used to do these strength feats and then one time he didn't have his shirt on or something like that. And then that was all that people cared about was actually what he looked like, not the strength feats that he could do. Yeah, it was crazy. And this was all like around the 1900 timeframe, like change of the century. So before even World War I, all of this stuff. So Eugene Sandow was like the first guy that actually was able to kind of make a living off of this, like going around performing these strength feats and training with resistance in some way, which was shaping his body. And then, you know, these crowds would gather and watch him do these things. And like you said, there was the time where his shirt was off and that kind of changed everything. kind of set the industry, if you want to call it that at that time, into this direction of pursuing what used to be physical culture now kind of began to transition into the pursuit of physique. um Anything else to add on Eugene Sandow? from what I remember, it was I think that I think he had also was the first one to later once there was like this, this fame and stuff associated with him was the first one to like sell and market programs. Am I making that up? No. So okay. Okay. Yep. so somebody would like write in and request a program and then he would literally mail them the program and they'd get it like a number of weeks later, uh, which is just so crazy how far we've come in a hundred years. But, um, then one thing I found really interesting is I started kind of going down the rabbit hole of, of when did machines and cables become a thing. And so we're actually going to talk about this a little bit more as far as when. people began incorporating these into their training regularly. But I found it extremely surprising that the hack squat was actually invented and popularized in the 1920s by a guy fittingly named George Hackenschmidt. uh So the hack squat was named after this guy. um before he even created this machine, the hack squat machine, which was very rudimentary at the time. He was known for doing a dumbbell hack sissy squat with the dumbbell held behind his body. So think about, you you grab a dumbbell, you hold it behind your legs. So your hands are like behind your butt. And when you squat down, you go into your toes, like you're doing a sissy squat and stand back up, kind of keeping the torso super vertical. So this was like the version of the hack sissy before there was a machine to do this movement. And And this was what popularized him. And you think about it this day and nobody does that movement anymore. Cause we have a hack squat machine and people do sissy squats, but this is such an interesting way to think about loading the movement. And ah I'm actually going to try it on my next leg day, just as I'm warming up to see what it feels like to hold a weight behind my body and do a sissy squat. Cause usually when I do the sissy squat, the weights held like on my front, I'm using a weight vest or I'm putting it on my shoulder or something like that. ah because it also takes away the, you don't have a balance component when the dumbbell's held behind your body. Like usually I'll hold one hand on something to balance me. He had to both balance and work through the resistance range of motion with that dumbbell held behind his body. So I just thought that was really interesting and unique and something I'm kind of looking forward to trying. I have done them with a barbell before. He also had his like barbell variation of the hack squats. And I mean, they made us do them in high school. It was, it's horrible. Like the bar, the knurling literally just rips the back of your calves apart. Yeah, but you weren't doing it as a sissy, right? You were keeping your legs fully planted or your feet fully planted on the ground. Yeah. So like that that version of it, which I would not recommend anyone ever do to be completely honest. Yeah, I feel like going onto the toes might ease that that grinding on the back of the leg a little bit through the changing of the the plat the plane of motion. But yeah, I thought that was interesting. And then he was also George Hackenschmidt, also the first one to popularize the floor press. So there was no bench press at the time, because there was no bench. uh Like, the first benches you see are these rudimentary, you know, very wooden, it's like a wooden plank built on two by fours and that would be the first bench that came later. But George Hackenschmidt used to do floor presses where he would have these elevated platforms, almost like what would be like a jerk block that wasn't elevated. It would be like a jerk block put on the ground. So you're maybe three, four inches off the ground. And he would just kind of slide in underneath the barbell and do his floor presses from the ground that way with the bar slightly elevated. So that was like the first way that you could actually really train a pressing motion with a weight in that manner. ah So that was that was kind of cool as well. What I thought was particularly interesting, as I was doing some digging, one of the things that I was most interested is like, do they have photos of these guys, you know, as as long ago as it was? And of course, you've seen the Eugene Sandow photos. George Hackenschmidt was fucking jacked like genetic freak jacked. If I remember correctly, one of the things I had read in the picture I saw had him at five foot nine, 220 pounds lean. yeah. not not like stage lean, but like a solid 10 % abs. Like he's big, very big. I was like, wow, that like he of that early era, his physique was by far the largest at a relatively low body fat. Yeah, I mean, that's crazy. 220 is really large. I was gonna mention that I think 10 or 12 % body fat was kind of the norm in those days for guys. Like when you look at even like Reg Park or John Grimick or those guys who were considered, we're gonna talk a lot about them in this episode, but those were kind of considered the premier like strength and physique athletes of the time. And I would say I never really saw a picture of them where they were much less than 10 % body fat at any point. Yeah, there was one like one of the guys I can't remember specifically the one that was more interested in like a lot of them like the physique and aesthetics were like an element of their training style and he was more just like pure kind of strength and he was like a bigger, you know, guy, uh probably 20%, something like that. But now all those early guys like they're lean, they're for they're about as lifestyle lean as you could ever hope to be. Yeah, yeah, for sure. uh Okay, well, jumping into kind of some of the basic structures of the training style is, uh you know, they were pretty much all full body. And it's, I had a number of conversations with people back and forth, because I posted a few questions over the last week on my DMs, asking people what they thought of the training to DM me any, you know, thoughts or questions or anything like that. And we had a couple of questions that kind of got to that point, which was, you know, one, did they all just train with full body routines or did anyone do split training? And as much digging as I could possibly do, it really seemed like 98 % plus of the training in that day was full body. Um, even for the people that eventually moved into split routines, it seemed like they didn't do that until the 60s and 70s where steroids began to become more prevalent. So when you think of the pre-steroid era, think, know, the 1960s is beginning to tread that line where steroids are starting to come. So I usually say pre 1960 is kind of like the pre-steroid era. And then as we get into the 1960s, it's a little bit more nebulous. But it really seems like the majority of these guys. didn't even begin to touch anything that would resemble a split, even like an upper lower split until those days into the 1960s and everything prior seemed to be uh in the full body realm. And so when I queried chat GPT about this, they were like, yeah, everyone trained full body with the exception of maybe Vince Garanda. And then I looked up Vince Garanda and I was like, dude, he came of age in like the eighties. Like this dude, I don't even know why chat GPT is assuming that he's a pre-steroid era guy because his whole training protocol, which we can get into later. But he was he was more a steroid era guy. And so uh he either really wasn't nobody was doing it. Is that kind of the same that you found as well? Yeah, I think I don't remember Vince was that late into it. I don't think the 80s. um I have it somewhere, but I don't want to throw the podcast. But that was like the only one that I found. And it was his like later stuff. A lot of his early stuff was like a lot lower volume. But everyone knows Vince Drana for his like eight by eights and six by eights with the 30 seconds rest. But that was like apparently pretty late in his career. Actually, I have something up right here. um he trained in the 1950s and 1960s. I think he became uh more famous for like his uh supplement company a little bit later, NSP Nutrition. So that's where I'd heard of him more. Yeah. But here's another one like the photo I see here is like in the 50s. Pretty fucking jacked and was really lean, right? It's a very like he would have a very, very good like natural bodybuilder physique. um But I think it's. Those workouts that he popularized his like eight by eights and stuff, if you actually read through them. They're hellacious. It's effectively a conditioning workout with just so many sets in close proximity to failure because of your reduced recovery time. Well, what's interesting is that's exactly where uh Cass and N1 have gotten that idea for their kind of local metabolic training is they advise you taking about a 15 rep max weight and then doing six sets of eight. So kind of based off of that Garanda model with only 30 seconds rest in between. And that's what Garanda was popularized for was that eight by eight where he would, I think it would be even two or three different exercises per muscle group that he was doing eight by eight with. So when we talk about, like we're going to talk about the different volumes that these guys used, but something like that is way higher volume than what anyone else was using at the time. So, so there certainly are outliers and people that did incorporate higher volumes and split routines. But like I said, about 98%, it seems, or more of the trainees in that day were using these kind of three times a week, full body approaches. Yeah. Now, look, a couple of questions I have for you, Brian, is what are some of your thoughts or maybe because I was never able to find too much reasoning why it but it's I mean, a lot of these guys, they're at the forefront of a we call it a revolution in physical culture. Right. It's kind of like, hey, this is working. That's what I'm that's what I'm going to do. And a lot of the early guys were all like protegees of one another. Right. There was like Sandow and then one of the other prominent guys was like a Sandow protege You know there was they all really cuffed were cut from like a few select people at the very very beginning in your first probably like 30 people were a lot of like maybe two or three different camps, right? So it probably took a while for people to kind of branch out But were there any any thoughts or you know speculations theories you have as to why why maybe things were so I don't want to call them rudimentary, but you know lower volume full body lower frequency from my understanding from everything that I've read recently, and then, you know, in the past, when I was really deep into this 20 years ago, it seems like the two main reasons were a deep understanding of the need to recover in that nothing good happens if you're not fully recovered. And that they all had to work regular jobs as well, like there were very, very select few of them that were able to make a living through their work in physical culture. So most of them were like accountants or car salesmen or, you know, gym owners or whatever it was. And they had full lives and businesses that they had to run to the point that training just couldn't be the same priority that it is now when you're a professional bodybuilder or an influencer or something along those lines where your entire life is based around the amount of training that you're able to do. So These guys really prioritized getting in there, working super hard in one to one and a half, sometimes two hours. They do that three times a week. And for the most part, like some of them did cardio. I'm not super keen on exactly what that looked like, but most of what I came across was, you know, eat big, train big, and then diet when you need to get leaner. People didn't talk so much about. cardio or its ability to help you lose weight via burning calories. Like that just wasn't a thing back in the day. was manipulate your diet. And so one of my favorite resources for this era was John McCollum's keys to progress, which actually was published in strength and health magazine in the 1965 to 1972 range. But those articles were all written prior for about a prior time. So John McCollum came up of age during the pre-steroid era and he just happened to publish those articles in the more steroid era. Hold on one second, let me show you guys a magazine. this is a Strength and Health magazine. I have about 15 of these that I bought off eBay when I was in high school or early college and it has I mean, it's just, I mean, all sorts of all sorts. Obviously these guys are, you know, funny looking dudes compared to these days. But, it was really cool to be able to look back and see some of this culture as it was happening instead of reading about it on the internet. It's like to actually have these magazines with me. have, you know, I don't know, 10 of them, 15 of them, something like that. And I'll even go back through and kind of read them in retrospect and then find it super interesting. these ones that I have are old enough, like I bought ones from the 1940s. So none of them actually have the articles from keys to progress from John McCollum. But in that book, and by association, his article series, he talks about how there's like a um lean diet, or I forget exactly what he called it. uh A health diet, it was something along those lines, it was like a get healthy diet, or a healthy lean diet, or something like that. But basically the advice was just cut carbs. Like whatever you were eating before where you're having like the go mad diet, which is tons of milk and tons of meat and just basically eating everything in sight. they just go to the, the get lean diet, which is just stop eating carbs. So now, I mean, that's keto, like that's literally what it is. And they discovered that 80 years ago as a way to help them get lean. And that would literally just take them six weeks. They'd be like, okay, it's time to get lean. I got to clean myself up a little six weeks, no carbs. Boom. and then back to the gaining death. I'm curious around what fat intakes were like, not relative to today, of course, but like relative to like the common places we get fat from, right? Like I wonder at what point it, from an agricultural standpoint in the United States is like, hey, if we get these cows like really fucking fat, we can make a lot more like money off of them and stuff like that. And how much of it was like, I want to know like if you're eating. you know, whatever the standard typical American families eating in the 40s, like of whatever that is like beef, chicken, I don't fucking know, you know, potatoes, like how much fat is really in those foods at that time relative to how much fat is in those foods kind of closer to today. Yeah, I'm not entirely sure. That's a good question. uh I guess the idea would be like when you look at the way keto is currently portrayed, you want what, 80 % of your calories from fat or something along those lines? Yeah. So I mean, you want a high fat diet in that case. And I don't know if that was the same back then. Yeah, no idea. Yeah. All right. Well, as we're kind of moving on here, we briefly touched on the free weights and machines piece. But what I just wanted to kind of further explore that because. Cables were something we haven't mentioned yet, like we talked about the hack squat with George Hackenschmidt, but cables were something that was actually apparently invented in the early 1900s, like. I had no idea. was obviously, keep using the word rudimentary, but it really was, that's really what it was. It was these pulley machines, they called them, not cables per se, they were pulleys. And then they also had something called chest expanders. So I think we've actually seen Alex Leonidas use one of these things, if you follow him at all, on his YouTube channel. But it takes this big spring looking structure and you try to close it by doing what would be kind of like a Peck fly motion, but it like expands out and then it has springs and you try to squeeze it together. So think of like a hand gripper, but for your chest instead of for your forearms. And so that became a pretty popular tool that people were using uh as like kind of the first, I don't know, you can't even call that a machine, but something that was other than free weights, right? uh And then they did have these pulley machines that, were not common, but some people did have them. And it seems as if in the 1940s, Jack Lillane was the first one to actually really popularize machine training. And he invented several exercise machines and filled gyms. Like he actually started entire gyms in the 1940s that only had machines. So in my mind, I'm thinking that like, you know, you have these hardcore gyms where guys are lifting barbells and dumbbells and doing mostly stuff like that. And then you have something that I can only associate with being perceived as like Planet Fitness is these days, ah where you walk in and you're just like, what in the heck is this? Like he's trying to create health club culture instead of creating bodybuilding culture. And so in the very early days, most of these guys kind of food, the machines, because they were perceived as more of that health club culture and not something that could actually be used to help. refine or build their physique. And to be fair, that ideology really stayed around for a really long time. I would say up until, I mean, that was pushed in various circles probably to like 10 years ago, 12 years ago, something like that. It's been pushed, but I think that it reached a tipping point of sorts with Nautilus. Nautilus and Arthur Jones came in the 1970s, and Arthur Jones with Nautilus, he created these routines around the equipment that he invented. And so all of his training routines were also built around machines, but it was in a significantly different way, I think, than the Jack LaLanne model, because the Arthur Jones model was about... getting you big and strong and working to failure and, you know, basically dying on the machine. Whereas I think the, Jack LaLanne model was a little bit more about just like getting people into fitness culture, which is great. Like I think we needed both of those, but, but it is interesting that even though these things were available in the 1940s, there wasn't really anyone using them. And you'll see this as we kind of go over some of the typical routines that people did back in the day in the pre-steroid steroid era. there really weren't any machines included in those programs. One of the things that I wanted to say, and I asked you your thought, and then I kind of completely forgot the whole reason why I wanted to say it. So in the early routines like that, where we have these full body routines that are typically lower in volume, fewer exercises, you said that lifestyle and demands of family life, home life, providing for your family, where are these obvious time implicators on it? Another thought that I had, and again, speculation, is just There wasn't that many exercises to do, you know, like the things equipment was rudimentary with if if you're training with a barbell, you can squat. You can do a form of like a hip hinge already. I'll sort of thing. You can overhead press. You can row. You can do some sort of like floor press. There's not that many other variations that I would imagine were around back back in the day. And unless you're going to do the same thing every single day, which I'm sure they probably figured out pretty early on was not quite productive. I think that does contribute to it, because there just wasn't that many options. Mm hmm. Yeah, I mean, that's definitely possible. I I found a mix of people that were basically doing the same training all three days. And those that would change it up so that Monday was different than Wednesday, which was different than Friday, and then they would come back and repeat Monday again the next week. What did you find as far as that as you were looking at? I didn't find as much of that. Most of the samples and stuff were pretty different except like some of course are going to have certain overlap, but I only saw I think one person who had like a AB workouts and then like workout A would be Monday and then like Friday again, you know. Yeah. you found more people doing the same thing every day or not doing the same thing every day? not doing the same, but there was like there were minimal variations per se, again, which led me to this, the thought of my previous statement. Right, right. So it'd be like the, the, the modification, the, changes are very subtle in that one day it might be like a bent over row with torso parallel to the ground. And another one might be bent over row with torso slightly elevated or something like that. So there's like very slight variations. One's a floor press. One's a bench press type thing. Um, yeah, exactly. No, I agree. I kind of found more or less the same. And one question I want to pose to you that we got from DMS that I thought was a really interesting thought experiment is why is the sort of structure considered a beginner routine these days when it made champion physiques back in the day? in think the same reason why we have like these a million offshoots of nutrition, and everyone trying to reinvent the wheel. I think it's differentiation for the sake of differentiation, potentially, it's it's ego, you know, thinking that there's this this, there's this really good quote, right? What is it? born too late to explore the earth, born too early to explore the stars. know, like every crevice of earth has already been like found or discovered, but we haven't made it to like the universe yet to go explore like more or Mars or whatever. I think it's one of those things like all the answers, they're already out there, you know, in fit in getting strong, getting jacked and in nutrition, right? For these things. I think the true frontiers that are left, I was speaking with someone, admittedly, I know absolutely nothing about this. It was a brief conversation. Apparently the new hot thing, it's not a hot thing, a new very early on stage thing is being able to modify your genetics for hypertrophy and bodybuilding. That's supposed to be like the potential thing in the future, being able to edit your genes so that you can get bigger and stuff. Right. But it's like we're still, you know, not to derail the conversation around pre drugs, but we're still using the same drugs that were made in the 40s and 50s. And it's 20, 25, you know. So I think in that, I think it was just they figured it out already. And to try and make things different or make a name for themselves, like people add shadows to things, make it seem more complex. I hate that. That is what I think the answer is. But. but that's just me being honest. Yeah, so then I guess just to throw it back at you, why do you train in the way that you train and not three times a week full body? Because what else am I going to do with my time? Yeah, yeah, No, totally. I agree 100 % with what you're saying. I think that there's some complexity that's born unnecessarily out of just trying to optimize everything. I think a lot of it also has come out of the idea, the notion that, you know, we're not living life the same way that we did back then, where we have all of these things pulling us in a thousand different directions to the point that we can't train more often. It's like, let's, if you can create a way where you can be a little bit more optimized, then people are willing to take that gamble because like they know it works the other way. I think most people inherently understand that that's the case. but maybe we can tweak it just a little bit and get an extra few percentage points. And so I think that's also an important note for anyone kind of listening to this is like, these guys made champion physiques training three times a week, full body for decades and decades. You can too. uh You at a minimum, like even if this isn't the absolute most effective way to train and maybe there's a few percentage points you could get by doing things a little bit differently or more modernized. you can get to 95, 97, 98 % of your potential simply by training hard three times a week, full body with big basic movements and potentially being a little bit more nuanced with any of your, your like exercise selection, your split, um, you know, different recovery curves, things like that. are potentially just adding like a little bit of percentage points on top of what you would get by just, you know, hitting the basics, training hard, eating enough and recovering. I agree. I also think it's worthwhile that we also throw into the fire the other impacting factors of the time. These guys went to bed when the sun went down. They probably had very regulated circadian rhythms. Their diet was what's available, which is very clean, purely by what's available at the times, right? physical activity outside of there was there. I mean, there was a lot of other impacting factors that I think positively contributed during those years, like the pre-steroid era years, just because there wasn't enough like... the modern day life to to ruin these basic human tenants. Right. Yeah, no, that's a really good point. And another one that I think, you know, just bears mentioning is that these workouts are really fucking hard. the part, part of why people I think gravitate towards split routines now is because doing full body three times a week for 60 to a hundred minutes is really, really, really hard. I mean, I have gone back to this approach many times in my life and almost always I get about six to eight weeks in and I'm like, what in the? buck. Like I do not want to show up at the gym and do this again, because every day is a soul crushing beating to the point that like, even even if physically I could recover between the sessions, which I think is reasonable, three times a week, you have a full rest day in between each one, like mentally or psychologically, it's really hard to get yourself up to do it in that manner every single training session where you know, you have a heavy squat. One day you have a heavy RDL or a deadlift another day, and you have lunges or front squats on another day. mean, every day that you're in there, there's some really hard leg stuff and that's even before or after, but you still have to hit your upper body as well. And so there's, there's a huge training day in there. And I think that a good argument for why maybe these three times a week full body training programs are being pushed away now is simply because every day being that hard. maybe detracts from consistency over I would agree. Like every, every time I've tried to realistically stick to a full body program, I just fucking hate it. I'm like, it's just, it's hard. It's hard to train legs every single day in a capacity, right? Even if like you have like, let's say it's your, it's your full body unilateral day. Great. Your options are like a Bulgarian split squat, a heavy dumbbell reverse lunge, or like some bastardization of the two of those. That's the like easy day. That's not easy. That's my least favorite part of my one leg day I have per week right now. uh It's hard. It's really challenging. Yeah. It takes a lot to, to show up and give it your all to those full body sessions. And three times a week is a lot. Like even me personally, when I tend to do these full body training, which I still love, like I told you guys, I spent a whole year doing full body training, uh, you know, up until I just decided to change to the split six or eight weeks ago, but I was doing it twice a week. And that seems to be. what now has sort of become the way that people do these programs. Like at least in the community that I'm part of online, which has kind of evolved from the pre-steroid era of training, you know, it's this group abbreviated training. comes from the hard gainer model. It's all based on the same kind of training model from this pre-steroid era. The majority of the people that are training on the abbreviated model now are training two times a week, full body, not three times a week. You still obviously you do see some some people that are able to handle that three times a week but through these discussion forums and conversations I've had with guys that have been doing this as long as I have the majority of them find that three times a week is just overkill at this point. So twice a week like a Monday, Thursday type thing seems to be more what I'm seeing around the industry these days with this type of focus. Yeah. All right. Well, I want to get into one of the most my most favorite parts of this discussion, which is focusing on three specific uh athletes from the pre-steroid era and some of the variances between their different training styles because I think that's pretty much why everyone's here anyways. So uh the three people I wanna focus on, which are big names and most of you guys have probably heard of them if you've done any sort of research into the pre-steroid era is John Grimick, Reg Park and Steve Reeves. They kind of went in order, like they all were training around the same time, but I would, think Grimmick was a little bit before then Park kind of came at the end, middle of Grimmick's time and kind of expanded into the Steve Reeves time. And then Steve Reeves kind of continued a little bit longer after those guys had finished. So I think it goes Grimmick, Park, Reeves, and they all had kind of unique, interesting ways in which they took the same model of this three times a week full body. but kind of made it their own. um So I kind of separate this out into volume, rep schemes, failure and effort and exercise selection. So when we look at John Grimick being the first one back in the day, um John Grimick was known for being a power strength athlete before really becoming a physique athlete. And He's also one that seemed to really incorporate a blend of all of, of multiple different training modalities into his program. So he would have Olympic lifting, power lifting and bodybuilding all kind of hodgepodge together. And so like a sample routine from him had a three to five sets of back squat. three sets of overhead press, three sets of barbell row, three sets of bench press or dips, three sets of curls, two to three sets of dead lifts and some hanging leg raises or something for the abs. And that's a relatively typical kind of full body routine. But because he was also pursuing Olympic lifting on top of this power lifting, bodybuilding strength training approach, he also would include things like hang cleans, power cleans, clean and jerks, stuff like that. uh Also noting that a lot of these guys initially, so the squat rack was invented, like guys created ways to elevate barbells and begin to squat definitely before this time. But in the earlier days, these guys like Grimick before he popularized into the athlete that kind of made him famous. he was part of the group that would have to clean and jerk a barbell onto their back to do their back squats. And so that just reminds me of the CrossFit days where it'd be like, you know, there was a, what was the name of that? The bear complex, right? The bear complex where you do like a deadlift, a hang clean, a squat clean, a push press, a back squat and a back thruster or something along those lines. I can't remember exactly what it was, but. I remember just having to get a barbell from the ground onto your back was not an easy feat. Like I think 275 or 285 was like the most I ever hit for that. And it was scary dropping that bar onto my back. I can't imagine what these guys were doing. uh But John Grimick was also one. So one of the questions we got on the DM was about whether these guys manage fatigue in any way. And so we'll get into that a little bit more later on how they manage fatigue. But John Grimick was one of the early ones that realized that there was a benefit in alternating heavy and light days. So he would have one day that was more like strength focused, heavy, closer to failure. And then he'd have a day if he was feeling a little bit beat up, he would kind of auto-regulate. And he would decide to have a lighter day where he would mix in more RIR, do more isolation movements, or any other sort of uh modifications that would help him recover and then continue to progress. uh What have you learned about Grimick specifically, anything that comes to mind? Nothing outside. mean, everything that I dug up was pretty much just what I could find on this program example that you have. Yeah, cool, cool. ah And so like this this routine listed is obviously just one day of training, but it's very um emblematic of kind of what a typical day would look like for him. And like Aaron alluded to, it's likely that he would be alternating movements in some capacity day to day. So, you know, it says like benchpress or dips. He probably did benchpress one day and dips another day. uh You know bent over barbell row or pull ups like one day he's doing a pull up one day He's doing a row kind of hitting the same muscle groups But through different planes all pretty typical approaches to this kind of stuff, but as far as volume If we count up the total number of sets here listed. It's It's about 20 to 23 sets or so on a day for him for work sets Which is a pretty robust day like it exactly sits in the realm of, know, oh shit, I have a really big hard day of training to do, and I have to do this three days a week. Like that is not an easy day of training. And so even if you look across a week of how much volume he's doing per muscle group, even if he's only doing three to five sets for a muscle group on each day, that gets him into the nine to 15 set range per muscle group per week, which fits directly into our kind of current. evidence-based research on 10 to 20 sets being kind of the ideal number. So it continues to make you realize that there's multiple ways to skin the cat to get to kind of those goals. And these guys in some ways figured it out a long time ago. Yeah. Yeah, which is still so wild to me. It's like, I like it. But at the same time, it feels like almost a little bit like disheartening, you know, like, I mean, we're talking literally 100 years ago, 100 plus years ago. Yeah, yeah, I mean, Grimmick was 80 years ago, 85 years ago, but yeah, I mean, that it's crazy. uh So yeah, if we move on to Reg Park, Reg is kind of one that I've always really found myself kind of attracted to because he was huge. His physique was amazing. But also he had a number of different styles of training that he used and they kind of evolved over time. So in his early career, he was known for the five by five. Like he is the guy when you Google the early implementation of five by five, Reg Park is the guy who always will come up. And he was known for doing two warmup sets and three work sets of five by five. So as an example, if he's doing a back squat, he might do 200 pounds for five, 300 pounds for five and 400 pounds for three sets of five. And that is his back squat. Um, he trained with a bit lower volume. remember reading a really cool piece in strength and health about, that the author was saying he went to, uh, to a reg park training session and he was there with, uh, with a guy from his gym, a young guy. And the guy was like, just wait, he's going to do like his arms are insane. His arms are his best body part. He's going to spend so much time on his arms. Just wait. And so, you know, They watch the workout and he does his back squats, then he does his bench presses and he does his bent over rows. He does his overhead press behind the neck and he does like two sets of barbell curls. And then he packs up his stuff and walks back and the guy's like, just wait, he's going to come out and he's really going to attack his arms now. You know, and then the author looks at me goes, no, I think he's done. I hear the shower going on in there, you know, and the guy's like, but how do you, how do get his arms so big? You know, and it's just like, he's really strong. Like you do presses behind the neck with 315 pounds for reps. You do bent over rows with 315 pounds. Like you're not gonna be lacking in your arm size. And so I think that's just a funny lesson in some of this stuff where again, it takes you back to that idea of you can probably get 95 % of the arm growth that you're ever gonna get by just getting really strong on basic movements because your arms are extending and doing the, I mean, they are part of. each compound lift that you do. It's not like you're going to do a bent over row and just your back is going to get big or you're going to do a bench press and just your chest is going to get big. mean, the arms are actually the muscle that's likely going to fail before even your big muscle groups do. So plenty, plenty of arm volume even without having to train arms. But um yeah, anything to say on that? No, I mean, I think what's so cool about this one is like, I mean, I've done five by five so many times in my life. You know what I mean? And it's cool to finally see like, this is where that actually comes from. This is the person who did this. I mean, any lifter at some point, you come through the various progressions like you're going to land on a five by five program because it's it's very rare that someone like gets into lifting and they only care about hypertrophy and they never kind of like veer towards strength or whatever. But if you've done like any even the most like basic of strength program, like five by five is probably the one that you start with. So it's really, really cool. Yeah, exactly. No, it's super effective and it works really well. So he would use five by five like this in his early career. And he also used it as part of what he would call like his strength phase, but he would oscillate uh over time. Like even the way he did his five by fives would change. sometimes like if he was feeling beat up instead of three sets, three working sets, he might just build up to one top working set. It might go like 150, 250, 350, 400, 450. And so there's really only like one really hard top set of five reps, know, auto-regulate that as far as how he's feeling and how his progressions are going. We have a whole section in here to talk about progression models. So I'll save that for a little bit later. And then Reg Park, uh as he moved out of the forties and kind of into the fifties and sixties during the period of time where he was starring in Hercules movies, he shifted his routine a little bit and he was actually one of the first ones that incorporated a split routine in the late fifties and sixties and it was an upper lower. Um, and so an example for him, he would increase volume. So what the reason he, he made the change to the split routine from the full body five by five approach was so that he could get a little bit more specific volume for his upper body. So he kind of looked at this split as a way for him to specialize in his upper body more to kind of bring out the muscles that are gonna be needed for him to be Hercules on TV or movies or whatever he was doing. So a typical routine here would have him doing incline bench press for five sets, dips for four, barbell row for four, pull-ups for four, seated dumbbell press for four, curls for four, and tricep extensions for four. So now we're looking at four, eight, 12, 24, five, 29 sets it looks like in this upper body workout alone. and I'm guessing his leg days probably weren't quite as robust as that, but you can see that now he's really starting to increase volume and his rep range has changed. So he's now into kind of that eight to 12 rep range for hypertrophy. And this amount of volume is insane. like, I mean, when you look at it, it's extrapolated across a week, it still fits into the 10 to 20 sets. Like if you look at his chest and back work, it's eight or nine sets basically for each of those in this workout. So if he does that twice a week as part of an upper lower split, what's he at 16 to 18 sets right in there. But in one single training day, you look at 29 sets and you're just like, wow, like that is a lot of volume to do in one day, which still pales in comparison to what we're gonna see from Steve Reeves during some of his training. So, let's see, what else do we have from Reg Park before I move on? generally took one to two minutes rest between sets, lift heavy to get big, but don't neglect form. He recommended eating up to 6,000 calories a day during building phases. And remember this was during the period of time where Go Mad, the gallon of milk a day diet was really the thing. Like all these guys, like if you read Keys to Progress with John McCollum, like in Strength and Health Magazine, that was just what you did because there wasn't really like protein drinks that, maybe there were protein drinks. John McCollum writes it. like very rudimentary, very rare in these days. m John, John McCollum writes about the get big drink. And he has a recipe for the get big drink in his book. I'm sure you could Google it. But it is so much food in there. I mean, it's like raw eggs, gallon of milk, peanut butter scoops, like like a whole jar of peanut butter, bananas, like ice cream, they would just throw like anything they could into this thing to create calories. And so I think it was It's not like it was, you know, a great uh ratio of protein to fat and carbs, but it was certainly getting you a lot of protein, which, you know, is the most important thing. ah So then Steve Reeves, as we're talking about volume here, I had to do a lot of digging with Steve Reeves because I have this book. I'll show you guys. This book is, this is called uh Building the Classic Physique, The Natural Way by Steve Reeves. And I remember reading this book when I was younger and I haven't looked at it in probably 20 years, maybe 15 years. And I remember this being an extremely high volume routine. And when I got on chat GPT and started Googling Steve Reeves training, that wasn't what showed up. What showed up was a very typical two to three sets per muscle group per workout done three times a week. And so I was like, that's not extremely high volume. That's pretty much in line with what Grimmick or Park was doing in his early days, not extremely high volumes. So what gives? And that's why I queried and I re-read my book. And after reading the book, what I noted was that he had nine sets per muscle group, per workout, per session. So over a typical day, this is what his typical day looked like from his book. He would start with shoulders and he'd do a lateral raise, a bent lateral raise and an overhead press, nine total sets. His chest was incline dumbbell press, flat bench and flies, nine total sets. Chins, barbell rows and pullovers, nine total sets. Squat, hack squat, calves, nine total sets. RDL leg curls, six plus total sets. Curls and tricep extensions, six to nine sets of each. Leg raises and sit ups, three to nine sets. Um, so I mean, nine times, nine times six, 54 sets, nine times seven, 63 sets, something like that. So Steve Reeves was doing this three times a week. He was well above the recommendations of the current day as far as evidence-based practices. But Steve Reeves did something that was unique and different from all of the other guys, which was that he took extremely short rests between sets. and he left one to three RIR on every single set. His whole notion was that he never ever prioritized progressive overload over feeling the muscle. So I think this in many ways flies in the face of what we see currently in the evidence-based space. I think that Reg Park and Grimick both were guys that really focused hard on, know, training close to failure, progressive overload. beat the log book, all that sort of stuff. And then you have Steve Reeves come in who has an incredible physique of his own, right? And in some ways more aesthetic than the other guys. And he cared very little about whether he ever got stronger. He writes that he more or less just used the same weights all the time and tried to improve his connection with his muscles or the way that the movements felt for him. And uh he cared so much about symmetry that he would... constantly measure his body and he would gravitate more volume and energy toward muscle groups that he felt were needing to be built up to make sure that his symmetry was perfect to exactly the specifications that he believed he needed. And he has a whole guide in his book about like what your ratios of everything to everything else should be for optimum aesthetic physique. So it again, like when you look at the lessons of the time, What it tells me is that there's so many different ways to skin the cat. Like you can take the Grimmick and Reg Park approach, which I think is more typical of the era, or you can sort of, I mean, it's like, he's sort of focusing on the pump and on metabolic stress more than he's focusing on mechanical tension because he's not caring about progressive overload at all. And so like he even notes in his book, he's like, what I would typically do on an upright row, is I would do my first set at 120 pounds and then the next set at 110 and then the next set at 100. And you know, I'd go until I feel the muscles burn and feeling like I was getting the stimulus in the muscle that I was looking for. And that was like pretty much it. Like I don't think he really increased weights much. He just used the weights as a tool to literally like form his physique out of clay, so to speak. mean, he, just, it really is interesting to me because There's a part of that that's intriguing. Like, I never really have to go to failure. I don't really have to hurt that much. I don't really have to focus on progressive overload. I can just show up at the gym and do the same thing every time, but over the period of time, it just works. it just like develops my physique. And obviously there's a genetic component to that too. But I find that very interesting how his training differs so much from the other guys. Yeah, think. I mean, one thing is certain things that we we we have seen is. How real the genetic component plays into it, and it's something that I. I honestly do hate to admit, but I am a benefactor of that, you know, and but what I will make no mistake to say, like I work harder than everyone else and stuff like, no, the fuck I don't. I do not. um And I think like that is where we get into so much of this variation of sorts, because it's like different strokes work for different folks, but how much of that is due to like literally genetic variation and certain things that may work for someone else may not work for you, right? So like, let's say for example, Steve Reeves, right? We know that there's people who are more like um inherently like sympathetically driven than others. So that person who's like kind of just purely sympathetic driven by lifestyle, psychological, know, neurotransmitter things or something like that, maybe they can't handle that full body training, training the legs hard like that because their CNS is like too close to being overloaded too frequently. But if like there's someone else who doesn't have that, they're more parasympathetic in nature. They get that par, that sympathetic drive during training. It comes back down after. Like they can handle it. And then there's like these, these variations are real. And that's probably why people end up eventually gravitating towards what they find works best for them because of those. Yeah, no, I think that that's right. um And like one of the things you kind of mentioned to or alluded to was the lifestyle outside of the gym too and what the impact is on recovery. And Steve Reeves was known for taking care of his body probably better than any of the other prior guys where I, to my understanding, you know, he moved, he got steps in, he really tried to focus on quality nutrition and not just like hounding calories for the sake of calories like some of the like more strength based athletes did prior. Steve Reeves is different in that his pursuit was always aesthetic based. He never had that like strength powerlifting Olympic lifting background like some of the other guys. And you can kind of see that represented in the way that he trains and stuff like that. So his sessions were two to two and a half hours long each three days a week, whereas I think some of the other guys were more in that like 60 to 75 minute range, you know, get in, hit the sets, get out. Steve Reeves definitely had more like probably double or more the volume like what would I say 54 to 63 sets in a session? He also is known for doing a bunch of like tri sets and super sets and stuff like that So I will leave it there and tease that for for next time Because we have about half of the content from this episode still to go So Aaron suggested we split it into two and that's exactly the way it's looking right now So I think that's a that's a good place to stop Perfect. So this has been super fun from my standpoint, right? I guess I had a lot of fun looking through that some of these things, because it's, I don't know, it's, it's physical culture history, right? For people like, you know, Brian and myself are probably a lot of people listening to the podcast. It's the early days of this thing that has ballooned into what so much of us spend so many years of our life, you know, chasing and uh dedicating time to so This one's really fun. I'm excited for next week as we dive further into it and we'll be back for part two. Yep, catch you guys then.