Paul Anderson roared out of the Tennessee hill country at the same moment another deep-fried, backwoods southern country boy was roaring out of Tupelo, Mississippi. Both men would forever change their respective worlds. At the same time Paul Anderson was demolishing all strength and power preconceptions, another young man the same age, Elvis Aaron Presley, was doing likewise in his field of expertise: music. Both men emerged from total and complete rural isolation. They mysteriously developed great insight within their respective crafts. Paul and Elvis destroyed every convention, demolished everything “held most sacred,” shattered every orthodox belief, desecrated every ritual and decimated every cherished notion. Nothing would ever be the same after the appearance of these two hillbilly savants.
Barbarians at the gate: into the breach surged battalions of converts,
Emerging from swamps and backwoods,
To blow up everything held most sacred,
They sweated, roared and swaggered to the limit,
They tore down the temple and razed it to the ground.
—Nik Cohen
Nothing would ever be the same after Paul and Elvis. They were cut of the same cloth: backwoods boys, uncouth, unsophisticated hicks, off-spring of honest-to-God hillbillies. Viewed first with repugnance and yawning disdain, later with pure fear and terror, these two evoked vitriolic reactions on the part of entrenched defenders of the status quo. Unconscious revolutionaries operating in different venues, they moved mountains and changed entire worlds.
Anderson shifted the gravitational pull of his world as surely as Elvis Presley changed the musical world…irrevocably, forthwith and forever. Anderson’s world did not have the high societal profile that Elvis’ did—but that was strictly fate and circumstance, the luck of the cosmic draw. Paul had as profound an impact on all things strength-related as The King had on all things music-related. The fact that American society placed a financial premium on pop music and assigned negligible value to strength pursuits was predictable and irrelevant. That was life’s lottery.
Both men died early. I saw Anderson lift in 1966 at the Silver Spring Boy’s Club. He put on a mind-blowing exhibition that changed the direction of my life. Paul began with the power clean and overhead press. He worked up to an effortless 420 pounds. The world record at the time was 418 by Russia’s Yuri Vlasov. The ease and speed of his lifting blew my young mind. His pulling techniques were awkward, yet powerful. Once he shouldered a weight, he simply lay back a tad before blasting the barbell overhead. He used none of the knee jerk trickery that eventually got the overhead press banned from Olympic lifting. Another Purposeful Primitive, Clarence Bass, recalls seeing Anderson lift in his prime:
“I saw him {Anderson} lift in 1958 at the Russian-American match held in Madison Square Garden. Anderson had turned professional by then and appeared as a special attraction. At the conclusion of the contest, the Russian champion Medvedev had pressed about 350. Anderson created a sensation by cleaning and pressing 425 for two reps and just failing with a third.”
At the Silver Spring exhibition Paul wore his combat boots while pressing. Paul shed the boots and performed squats wearing black socks and a bathing suit. He used his special squat bar and wore a tee-shirt. No lifting belt for either lifts. He squatted 900 pounds for 5 reps. I thought it was the most incredible event of my life. His performance was shattering, jarring, disconcerting, unbelievable and done with eerie ease. The speed, the nonchalance with which he handled 900 was science fiction stuff. I never saw a big man squat with that velocity until Shane Hamman appeared on the power scene thirty years later.
Afterwards Paul talked about the Lord to the crowd then headed off to another whistle stop somewhere down the line. I heard he was doing four shows a week and what we witnessed required no real exertion on his part; he had many weekly shows to perform and could not afford to extend himself at any particular exhibition.
Late in his life I had the pleasure to talk with him on numerous occasions at his home in Georgia. He was stricken hard by Bright’s disease and wheelchair bound. I first interviewed him for a Muscle & Fitness feature article. He took a liking to my interview style, my knowledge of him and his career and my serious questions. I called him periodically and he liked to talk about training. He felt that he never reached his potential. During his peak physical years he traveled so much and put on so many exhibitions that he never had the opportunity to settle in and train with singular focus and purpose. He felt that had he had an inspirational goal—like lifting in the Olympic Games—he could have become much better. He applied for reinstatement prior to several Olympic Games and was always turned down flat by the steely-eyed men that ran the AAU. Had he been allowed to compete, he would have likely won the ‘60, ‘64 and ‘68 Olympics. Only the rise of Alexev could have ended his reign. His infractions, taking a few bucks for professional wrestling matches, are laughable by today’s standards.
Born 1932, Anderson won the world weightlifting title in 1955 and Olympic gold medal in 1956. As a member of the first U.S. sports team to visit the Soviet Union during the Cold War, the 5’9”, 360 pound Anderson lifted for 15,000 Muscovites on a 1955 State Department sponsored trip. Anderson shattered the world record in the press by an unprecedented 50 pounds, ramming 402 overhead in a drizzling rain. The Moscow newspapers called him “Chudo Prirody, The Wonder of Nature.” Upon returning home, he was summoned to the White House by Vice-President Nixon.
Randy Strossen wrote that Anderson’s early training was prophetic. “Paul combined short, intense workouts…throughout the day, with periods of rest. For example, he would do 10 reps in the squat with 600, rest for about 30 minutes, and then do a second set of 10. After another 30 minutes rest, he would increase the weight to 825 and do three reps, rest again and do two more reps with 845. Then he would rest again and conclude by doing half squats with 1200 for 2 or 3 reps and quarter squats with 1800. The whole routine took three hours or more. He would sip milk during the rest periods, consuming a gallon or more throughout the course of the day.”
Randy writes that Paul’s purposefully primitive extended training sessions were “Eerily prescient of what would become the structure of state-of-the-art weight lifting programs decades later. Most productive national teams train in a similar fashion, but in Anderson’s time it was unheard of. Paul Anderson’s approach was consciously developed and planned, and taken together, was quite unlike anything seen before—as were his results.”
This typical Anderson workout, circa 1955, required three to four hours to complete.
Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday
Monday, Wednesday, Friday
Andy the Athlete:
Handstand presses: He was spry enough to flip himself upside down and do repetition handstand press-ups
Paul had a 36 inch vertical leap and could broad jump over 10 feet weighing 360. He beat a member of the US Olympic 400 meter relay team in a 20 yard dash. He then placed the man on his shoulder and ran a lap.
Back in the sixties, men who weight trained with any degree of seriousness practiced three separate and distinct forms of progressive resistance training: bodybuilding, powerlifting and Olympic weight-lifting.
Bodybuilding was about building muscle mass while staying lean. Powerlifting was about lifting as much as possible in the squat, bench press and deadlift. Olympic lifting was how much poundage could be hoisted overhead in the press, snatch and clean and jerk. The Amateur Athletic Union ran the Mr. America competition for forty years and controlled most local physique competitions. They awarded athletic points to physique competitors. If you wanted the extra points, you needed to demonstrate proficiency at some sport. Most bodybuilders picked Olympic lifting.
Bodybuilders entered lifting competitions to pick up those invaluable athletic points. Powerlifters of the day often were often ex-Olympic lifters who couldn’t master the subtleties of the very exacting O-lift techniques. Olympic lifters were plentiful in the sixties. Practicing the three overhead lifts produced men with thick traps, python-like erectors and rotund rhomboids. Massive backs were built by pulling on cleans and snatches; thick shoulders were built from heavy overhead pressing and jerking. Pearl came up in this cross-trained era. Genetically predisposed to thickness, he amplified his ample natural gifts.
Multiple-discipline lifting produced outstanding physiques. Men who practiced the three interrelated lifting arts, men like John Grimek, Marvin Eder and Roy Hilligen, developed incredibly rugged and functional physiques. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sergio Oliva and Franco Columbo were later examples of Old School bodybuilders with heavy lifting backgrounds. All three were national or world level lifters before they peaked as bodybuilders.
Nowadays no one practices the three lifting arts and something has been lost. Today is the dreaded era of the resistance specialist. Physiques nowadays tend to have a predictable sameness about them. High-torque power exercises are required to develop mountainous traps, enormous erectors and overall muscle thickness. By becoming truly strong at basic compound multi-joint barbell and dumbbell exercises, muscles develop in a way unobtainable by any other mode.
Dorian Yates and Ron Coleman between them ruled the bodybuilding world for 15 consecutive years. This was largely because of their incredible leg and back development: Yates rowed with 500 for reps while Coleman deadlifted 800 for reps: there is an undeniable correlation between massive strength development and massive muscle development. Strength increases beget muscle size increases.
In the 1960’s two bodybuilders stood apart from the pack. Each was an immortal: England’s Reg Park and America’s Bill Pearl. Reg was God-like, Arnold’s mentor. Bill Pearl was the American Colossus. These two men took the look that John Grimek actualized and epitomized, the power look, to the next level. Both men were big men; thick, incredibly strong yet graceful. They had functional builds and were as powerful as they looked. Both were athletic. Bill squatted 600 pounds when 400 was an excellent lift. Reg bench pressed 500 when 300 was good. While the top physique competitors of the day weighed 170 to 195 pounds, Bill weighed 240 and Reg 245. Pearl’s proportions were eye-popping. Reg, slightly taller, had the shapelier physique. Reg was an Irish Wolf Hound while Pearl was a Bull Mastiff.
I idolized both of these men because they were manly and strong. Bill could tear license plates in half, bend spikes, lift up cars and rip phone books in half. Later in life I had the great fortune of meeting Bill and he was as friendly and open as I’d imagined him to be when I worshipped him from afar as a youngster. Pearl taught me a lot: he taught me there are no excuses. In order to fit training into his hectic life he would get up at 4am to work out. “I got into the habit of getting up early to train because if I waited until the rest of the world got up, there always seemed to be something happening that caused me to miss the day’s workout. I found if I took care of myself at 4am, then I was a lot better as a person when the rest of the world woke up and I had to interact with them.”
Without knowing it, he encouraged me to train early when I still worked real jobs. Eventually he unknowingly encouraged me to leave the city and move to the country. He had opted out of the lucrative rat race in order to seek the elusive, rural, “quality of life.” He was a successful gym owner in Los Angeles before he moved to the bucolic bliss of rural Oregon to live on a farm. That particular city man fantasy took root in my head and eventually I did as he did. I too bailed out of the rat race and relocated to the isolation and peace of the country.
After Bill purchased his farmette, he built an amazing gym in the barn outback. He spent his time restoring antique autos, one of his many hobbies; he was a hobbyist and had innumerable collections of old things. He also had a beautiful wife, Judy, and he was totally in love with his soul mate.
Pearl seemed genuinely happy, one of the few truly happy men I’ve ever encountered. Eventually I followed the path of Pearl, imbued and imprinted with my own subtle variations. Pearl is 20 years older than me and since 1964 he has inspired me. He continues to inspire me. He has been my iron role model and a life role model for 44 years and counting. His training, like his life, has evolved over the years. Pearl embraces change and instead of becoming fossilized and change resistant, as people do as they age, Bill remains fluid. Early on, Bill used bar-bending poundage in basic movements to build his incomparable mass and size. Once he obtained enough beef, he switched gears and concentrated on refining, honing, chiseling and defining his incredible mountain of muscle and sinew.
Always a training innovator, in later years he added the element of accelerated pace to his resistance training. Pearl injects a cardiovascular element onto his weight training efforts; a Pearl version of 3rd Way cardio. Sustained strength/cardio training that builds hybrid “super muscle.” Bill related to me that once he got into the swing of his two hour daily weight training regimen, his heart rate would never drop below 120 and often would spike to 170 or more. His rapid-fire workouts purposefully combine cardio training with strength training to elicit a specific effect. He no longer cared to ride the Brahma bull of huge training poundage, he had enough size. He completely changed direction. Now the name of the game was upping the intensity by moving faster during the workout. He positively devoured the time element of the training parameter. His current approach could be summarized as lots of exercises performed using pristine technique done at a blistering pace. He still burns out young training partners.
Bill is a classical bodybuilder. He is credited as the one of the first bodybuilders to create and utilize the maximum volume training approach. Bill exemplifies one extreme of the bodybuilding training paradigm while Dorian Yates exemplifies the other extreme. Pearl’s volume regimen requires the trainee perform lots of sets, reps and exercises per muscle group. Pearl typically hits a dozen or more exercises per session. He crams as many as sixty sets into each session. He hits each muscle two or three times per week. Bill never goes to failure. He talked of establishing a session rhythm; a momentum, an accelerated pace. The training partners, all following the same routine, would go one after another Bam! Bam! Bam! From commencement until conclusion, the Pearl participants are in continual rotational motion. His boys would join him at the barn at 4:30 am to commence the daily training regimen.
Bill rotated exercises religiously, periodically alternating movements to keep things fresh and vibrant. Technique is approached with reverence; making the mind-muscle connection critical. Bill stresses feel and muscular contraction and trains six days per week whereas Dorian would handle massive poundage in short, less frequent weekly sessions. Bill is a stickler for proper technique. A Pearl workout has a uniform evenness about it from start to finish. Bill wears a muscle down. Dorian knocks it out.
Now that’s one hell of a lot of work! It takes Bill over two hours to wade through this monster routine. This approach stakes out one end of the classical bodybuilder approach: Bill is maximum volume/moderate intensity. The polar opposite is Dorian Yates’ maximum intensity/moderate volume approach. Many individuals thrive using this approach. I strongly suggest using this approach when seeking to shed the maximum amount of body fat. Going fast, using modest poundage, cramming lots of exercises into a single session jives perfectly with a lean-out phase.
“The happiest man connects the morning of his life with the evening.”
—Ancient Hindu Proverb
“Curse ruthless time! Curse our mortality!
How cruelly short is the allotted time span for all which we must cram into it!”
—Winston Churchill
Bill Pearl is still important. Bill has been important for seven decades. Lately Bill is leading the charge in the battle against the ultimate foe: Father Time. Bill is 78 years old. And what makes him still so important is that Pearl is still stretching and expanding our preconceived notions about physical degeneration. Can the Grim Reaper be stiff-armed, held at arms length by a combination of weight training, diet, aerobics and stretching? Bill Pearl says yes, absolutely; and along with Jack LaLanne, he remains the age-defying posterboy.
Bill won the Mr. America title in 1955—when Dwight Eisenhower was President. That’s a hell of a long time ago. Since 1955 Pearl has been the Alpha Male statesman for bodybuilding. He’s now the ultimate tribal elder. Fifty five years ago the 23 year old Native American had just mustered out of the Navy. He entered and won the Mr. America title and proceeded to electrify the bodybuilding world. In the sixties he appeared to us mortals as the next step in the evolution of man. His girth seemed to be the next rung step up the ladder of physical perfection. Bill was thick yet symmetrical, bulky yet shapely, gargantuan yet graceful. Pearl, along with his European counterpart, Reg Park, set the philosophic tone for the sport.
The rise of Sergio Oliva and Arnold Schwarzenegger gave Bill Pearl a reason to return to the competitive battleground. In 1971 Pearl, Park and Oliva—along with Frank Zane and Dave Draper—all assembled at the N.A.A.B.A. Mr. Universe contest. Only Arnold was missing. Arnold had every intention of competing, but politics and financial commitments prevented this muscle showdown from being realized. At age 41, Pearl beat Park (past his prime) and the here-to-fore unbeatable Cuban superman, Sergio Oliva. Who would have won had Arnold entered? Pure conjecture, though in all fairness, the then 25 year old Austrian was a few years away from his all-time best condition, achieved at the South African Mr. Olympia contest. Pearl was at his physical zenith.
Pearl was on top of the World. At an age when most international level physique competitors had long since retired and were relating war stories about their glory days in smoky bars to bored bar flies, Pearl had reasserted his world dominance. He immediately retired from competition while on top. He dropped from sight, having moved from Los Angeles to Oregon.
Pearl might have dropped from sight, but he wasn’t about to stop training. Every morning at 4 he famously rolls out of bed and by 4:30 is engaged in a 2 hour workout enduro. He is a lacto-vegetarian, totally eschewing meat, and is happily dependant on eggs, vegetables, dairy and fruit juice for his dietary needs. A competitive bicycle racer at one time, Pearl used to think nothing of jumping on his bike for a thirty mile jaunt. The latest Bill is still my role model. Like a twenty foot high neon sign he projects a simple message, one exemplified by vibrancy and youthfulness that seems to say, “Look at what can be accomplished with diligence, perseverance, tenacity and intelligence. Look at how the aging process can be retarded and held at bay. Look at what is possible!”
Never before in the history of civilization have men so old looked so young. Pearl demonstrates that a man can possess the body of a much younger man if they are willing to still practice the three interrelated arts. As long as the enthusiasm and fire in the gut remains, as long as you continue to train hard and eat with discipline, you are still in the game and can still live life to its fullest. Bill Pearl is showing us how to wring every last drop of vitality and essence out of life before life inevitably expires. Long may he roll!
No athlete was ever as despised by the athletic establishment as Muhammad Ali. No athlete ever generated the venom and pure unadulterated hatred that Ali did. Even before Clay became Ali, even before he stuck his Black Muslim thumb into the collective eyeball of white America, Clay was vilified for his unrepentant braggadocio. His self-aggrandizing rhymes and poetry didn’t sit well with the lockstep white men who wore the blue blazers and ran the Amateur Athletic Union with the brutal efficiency of a totalitarian dictatorship. As the dominant sport aristocracy, they ruled all of amateur sports in this country and it was, in many ways, a reign of terror; one that would have done Stalin proud. Imperious, regal, more important than the athletes, the slightest sass, real or perceived, and the offending athlete were hauled before a Star Chamber discipline committee. Act right, the officials said, or risk suspension or permanent banishment.
Clay/Ali became the antiestablishment sports hero. “Why can’t he be a good example of his race; like that courteous Joe Lewis!” I heard one AAU official say. Worst of all, Clay/Ali began infecting other athletes. Bob Bednarski became infected. The Woonsocket Wonder crept out of Rhode Island. He’d been groomed to perfection by an amazing Olympic lift coach, Joe Mills. Bednarski commenced his rocket ride in 1963 and for five straight years he improved dramatically each and every year. He went from boy prodigy to National Champion to superstar in surreal succession.
Few men were more establishment than Bob Hoffman, founder and 100% owner of the York Barbell Club. An egomaniacal multi-millionaire, Hoffman owned American Olympic lifting. He footed the bill for teams to travel overseas and his York Barbell Lifting Club was the eternal O-lift dominator. His money made him the big swinging dick of American Olympic lifting and everyone bowed and scraped to the uber-leader who signed the paychecks and picked up the various tabs.
Hoffman entered the sixties by bringing onboard heavyweight thinkers, men like Terry Todd, Tommy Suggs and Bill Starr. These men went to work for York in different capacities at Strength & Health magazine, the bible of American Olympic lifting. When Hoffman handed the editorial reigns over to Starr, the perfect Gonzo storm occurred: the emergence of a new breed of kid Olympic lifters coincided with a burgeoning use of both recreational and performance enhancing drugs. In order to secure the talent necessary to ensure that York maintained dominance, Big Daddy had to open his wallet even wider. If they were to entice the new breed to represent York, Daddy Hoffman and John Terpak, the fierce enforcer, would need to recruit counterculture athletes.
The Chicago Y under Bob Gajda’s auspices was attracting talent and fast becoming the “anti-York.” Bill March, Tony Garcy and Joe Puleo were a bit older and already in the York fold. Peter Rawluk, Jack Hill, Bob Hise, Tom Hirtz, Frank Capsouras, Enrique Hernandez, Phil Gripaldi, Rick Holbrook, Steve Zigman, Fred Lowe, Joe Dube, Ernie Pickett and Gerry Ferrelli were on the scene and available. The King of the youth movement was Bob Bednarski. He was simply the best of a great crop: he was the most talented and the most ambitious, he was the Sun God of the new breed. Bednarski dubbed himself the Ninth Wonder of the World. His shenanigans and Ali-like traits drove Hoffman and Terpak and all the York old timers to the brink of insanity. “Why can’t he just shut his mouth and lift!” was the consensus amongst the white-bread establishment.
Bob Bednarski, the lifting Ali, worked for “The Man.” And as good as he was in Rhode Island under Mills, when he moved to York and got on the corporate payroll, he got a whole lot better real fast. They assigned him various factory jobs and asinine tasks such as mixing protein powder and bottling suntan lotion. The immortal Bill March was also a York employee and pushed Bednarski mercilessly on the lifting platform. Plus there were Dr. Ziegler’s magical little dianabol pills. Each week Bednarski grew bigger and better and stronger and faster and ever more self-assured, if that was possible.
I met Bednarski when he lifted at a competition at Gonzaga High School in 1968. Brother Don Dixon allowed me to train at Gonzaga with top local lifters like “Muscular Mickey” Collins. I became a fixture at Gonzaga. The meet turned out to be the start of Bednarski’s rampage and run to greatness. At Gonzaga he set his first World Record besting Ernie Pickett’s 446 World Record press with a 451 pound effort. I talked with him before the meet started and was awed and intimidated. I asked what he weighed and he said, “250! How do I look?!” He was obviously expecting flattery and being awestruck, I flattered until I was blue in the face. He seemed to beam. I hung out backstage, hovering on the periphery. He’d ask me to fetch him cokes. Bill March also lifted and I got to watch both men up close backstage and onstage. Because Bednarski allowed me to hover in his presence, I became a mindless lifelong groupie. I thought he was a God before I met him and after he talked to me, he walked on water as far as I was concerned. When a few months later “My Man” had his incredible lifting day in York, I was there. When he punched his 486 clean and jerk, I went into delirium tremors and almost fainted; I could not have been more affected had the Virgin Mary appeared or had Bednarski sprouted wings and suddenly started flying around the auditorium.
I followed the ever-changing training strategies Bednarski rolled through over the years that marked his tenure at York. He was innovative and hard working and since he was a heavyweight, he sought to grow ever larger in order to move more poundage. In those days, any man who weighed more than 198 pounds was forced to lift as a heavyweight (how ridiculous) and the Soviet sports armada routinely sent 350 pound monsters to do battle. Here was Bednarski, lean, athletic, good looking, brash, cocky and suggestive; doing toe-to-toe battle with the biggest, ugliest monsters the Big Red Machine could cook up in their state-supported sports laboratories. At the zenith of his amazing career he used this training template….all the work sets, top sets listed are done after ample warm-ups. This approach allows for maximum concentration on a lift.
The High Water Mark of American Olympic Lifting – June, 1968
Everything went to hell-in-a-hand basket after that glorious June day in 1968. Bednarski inexplicably didn’t make the 1968 Olympic team when at the Olympic Trials he had an off day and Joe Dube and Ernie Pickett secured the two available spots. Big Daddy pushed through the 242 pound class in 1969 and Bednarski won over a beefed up Jan Talts of the Soviet Union. But wait! After making the winning clean and jerk, the lift was then taken away by a Red Bloc-loaded jury of appeals! What the hell!? Again, bitter disappointment was snatched from the jaws of sweet victory. Eventually, years later, the gold medal was returned, but Bednarski, once again, was left with ashes in his mouth.
He returned to York and competed at the National Championships, winning yet again. The following year he took bronze at the World Championships but it was apparent something was dreadfully wrong. He was fired from York after becoming embroiled in a scandal. The vibrancy and luster was off his rose. He had a few comebacks and went on to win a few more major titles. But his glory days were gone. It was spookily akin to Ali fighting too long. He was, as super-scribe Starr wrote, “a blazing comet.” He died at age 60 of a heart attack. Barski etched a legacy that was impossible to ignore: 1969 World Champion, Silver in 1966, Bronze in 1970, no less than five National Championships, four in a row, fourteen World Records and numerous National Records. He was the Boy Sun King, the Iron Icarus that flew too close to the blazing orb, burned off his waxen wings and crashed to earth…it was one hell of a flight while he remained airborne and I shall never forget him.
The first words Hugh Cassidy ever spoke to me were, “Hey Kid! I dig your squat style!” I was backstage at the first ever DCAAU Powerlifting Championships in 1968. I was 17 and taking my last warm-up. I knew Hugh was a pretty big deal in the then embryonic world of powerlifting. I ignominiously went on to bomb out, missing three squats with 500. I weighed 193 and insisted on starting with 500, though my best at the time was 510. I got bent forward and missed the lift on my opener. It felt heavy as hell and in those days if you missed and no one else took the same weight, you had three minutes before you had to lift it again: bip, bang, boom! Three strikes and Marty was out of the competition.
The next time I saw Hugh was on a road trip to the inaugural National Powerlifting Championships held in York, Pennsylvania in September of 1968. The trip was put together by a mutual friend, the gentlemanly Glenn Middleton. Glenn was an engineer with a huge international conglomerate and a strength aficionado who’d trained with the Schemansky brothers in Detroit. He would act as our tour director for road trips to York.
Glenn was a great lifting referee, tough and able. He was super strict and the lifters took to calling him “Dr. Red Light.” He took a shine to me and always included me in the road trips he would organize to York for the Olympic and power competitions. Hugh once said of Glenn, “The guy is brilliant; so well rounded. He’ll custom load bird shot, shoot a pheasant or brace of quail, then construct the perfect gourmet meal, cooking the birds to perfection”
Two carloads of local lifters left for York for the first ever National Powerlifting Championships; the York Picnic would be held the next day in a local park. At the competition I sat next to Hugh; he was a 242 pound lifter looking to move up to the heavyweight class. I was impressed with his methodical approach to eating. He was determined to push his weight to 300 and see what weights he would be capable of lifting. He carried a giant cooler into the auditorium. In it were a dozen sandwiches and two half gallons of milk. We sat and watched the lifting from great seats down front. Hugh would graze and munch, periodically eating a sandwich, washing it down with milk. We saw Peanuts West miss his squats and bomb out. Later, a triumphant George Frenn lifted and won at 242. During the trophy presentation Frenn physically wrested the microphone from MC Morris Weisbrott and proceeded to call forth a massively embarrassed Peanut from backstage. Frenn then launched into a fifteen minute Castro-like Peanut West soliloquy that no one in attendance will ever forget. At the time the number 1 hit on the radio was “Ode to Billy Joe.” After Frenn’s monologue, Hugh deadpanned, “Ode to Peanuts West.” I was not to see Hugh again until 1979.
Cassidy kept eating his sandwiches and drinking milk by the gallon. His sumo wrestler approach worked: at a height of 5’11” he eventually pushed his bodyweight to 290+ pounds and shocked the powerlifting world by upsetting both Big Jim Williams and John Kuc at the first World Powerlifting Championships in 1971. Hugh squatted 800, bench pressed 570 and deadlifted 790. He lifted equipment-less: no knee wraps, no supportive gear of any type, not even a lifting belt. He injured a knee the following year and retired from powerlifting.
Being a smart man, rather than stay gargantuan, as so many lifters do, Cassidy reduced from 295 to 195 and entered a few bodybuilding competitions. He continued to train on his little farmette located off Highbridge road in Bowie, Maryland. Hugh had many interests; he taught school and had a loving wife and four kids all within a few years of each other. He left powerlifting and never looked back. In the mid-seventies a young, promising lifter named Mark Dimiduk sought out Hugh and began training under Hugh’s tutelage. Dimiduk eventually became a lifting terminator, winning the Junior Nationals, (beating Danny Wohleber) and then winning the National and World Championships. Mark began training on his own.
The hard lessons “The Duck” learned under Hugh formed the foundation for a fabulous powerlifting career. Mark squatted and deadlifted 800 and bench pressed 500 while weighing a lean and shredded 219. In 1978 I decided to begin weight training after a six year hiatus. During that time I had gotten into martial arts and trained at a facility with competitive fighters. I was bitten by the iron bug once again. After a year of generalized training, I saw an announcement in the “coming events” section of the Washington Post, Hugh Cassidy would be putting on a seminar in College Park. I attended and afterwards reintroduced myself. He remembered me. We hit it off and he invited me to train at his home gym. I stayed for many years and made fabulous progress.
Hugh Cassidy’s basement gym looked like something from the TV show “The Munsters.” Homemade equipment (Hugh was an expert welder) was crammed and stuffed into every nook and cranny. The basement of his funky, homey, artist house had a ceiling only seven feet in height, so no standing overhead lifting was possible.
Hugh introduced me to Marshall “Doc” Peck, a semi-pro baseball pitcher who began having arm problems and switched from baseball to powerlifting. Peck eventually squatted 790, benched 530 and pulled 710 weighing 218. Hugh was training with Marshall and asked if I would like to become their third training partner. I accepted immediately.
I found Cassidy a riddle wrapped in an enigma tucked inside a paradox. He was an artist of the highest order, an excellent musician who played great guitar and exceptional bass. He worked in various bands, but opted out of the night club scene on account of his acute susceptibility to cigarette smoke. Hugh was a metal sculpture artist. He started off with simple one-dimensional wall relief tubing pieces, worked through an industrial glass table-top phase before developing refined welding techniques used on his three-dimensional nightmare creatures. Some of his devils and demons were so lifelike that they appeared ready to spring to life. As the ever eloquent Agro-American Peck once quipped, “Freaking Hugh’s monsters give me the hee-bee jee-bees!”
Cassidy might be found in his ample truck garden, grafting pear branches onto apple trees, reading classical literature or welding art. He taught special needs children and had more mental horsepower and artistic creativity than any athlete I ever met, before or since. He was directly responsible for starting me off on my writing career when he graciously consented to co-author some powerlifting pieces. He was tough on me and had trouble with my “bombastic” style. He was on us hard in the weight room. We trained twice a week and slammed down calories to speed recovery on the in between days. Hugh’s approach could be summarized thusly: train like a psycho, eat everything in sight, rest up and grow gargantuan. For young testosterone-laden men seeking size, strength and power his minimalist approach was magical.
We would start our Saturday enduro with squats and work up to a top set. Depending on what phase of the overall training ‘cycle’ we were in, the top set could be 8 reps, 5 reps or 3 reps. 8 rep sets were done for four straight weeks, starting 12 weeks prior to competing. Eight weeks out we’d shift to 5 rep sets. For the final four weeks leading up to the competition, the top sets were dropped to triples or doubles. Ditto for the all important back-off sets: these were done with lighter poundage.
Peck and I would wear knee wraps and a belt working up to the top set. Then take off the wraps and belt for the three back-off sets of 10 reps, 8 reps or 5 reps. The back-off sets were done with a considerably lighter weight than the belt/wrap top set. Pumped to the max after the squat back-offs, we would shift to bench pressing and repeat the same procedure: work up to a top set of 8, 5 or 3, then three sets of back-offs. After benching, our legs and lower back were somewhat recovered, so it was on to deadlifts. Again, work up to a top set, then three sets of back-offs. Hugh would have us do ‘stiff leg deadlifts’ on the backoff sets. Then for desert 3-6 sets of “arms” usually super-setting curls with triceps presses or pushdowns.
For a while Hugh got on a “heave” kick, which was sort of a massive high pull done with a lot of weight while trying to generate momentum at the top. When he’d insert these after deadlifts we’d groan. We would repeat the whole deal 3-4 days later. It would take us hours to get though this workout. Often I’d have to lie down before I had the strength to drive home. Peck and I would stop at the 7-11, buy a half gallon of ice cold whole milk (each) to drink on the ride home. Milk never tasted as good as it did after an August training session in the dungeon with only a single plastic fan to keep us from keeling over. Hugh would tell us when we complained of tiredness to fire down more calories. “Eat your way through sticking points!” He’d say. If the poundage was feeling heavy on Saturday weighing 216, push your bodyweight to 220 by Wednesday and make those weights seem light. This was a man-killer approach: train till you begin hallucinating, eat tons of food, drink four quarts or more of milk daily then rest until the 2nd weekly slaughter fest. This approach worked wonders for aggressive young men intent on becoming massively muscled competitive powerlifters. Hugh was a ‘psyche up’ master and could visibly manifest his internal psyche by the use of what he called “cooling breaths.” He was able to make this happen at will.
“I cannot explain it psychologically, but I have found that if I expel my breath in sharp gasps I get goose pimples all over my body. In this condition I lift far more in meets than in training, averaging 40 pounds above my best training effort for both the squat and deadlift.”
Cassidy was one of a kind: brilliant, moody, insightful, soulful, introverted and sensitive. My time with him laid a foundation of hardcore training that has served me well ever since. Never was the adage, “hard work pays off” more apparent then in his take-no-prisoners, ultra-simplistic, Purposefully Primitive approach that he exemplified and taught. Nowadays most lifters under-eat and under-train: many are vain surface-skimmers with low pain tolerance and lots of self-esteem. The Old School approach of train-till-you-drop is politically incorrect and even suggesting it to the new breed is a waste of breath. I have often thought that if I ever wanted to train a kid powerlifter to become a world beater, I would draft one of those X-Game skateboarders or motocross kids that do those death-defying jumps. I think that powerlifters and lifters of my generation had that same crazed mindset. Nowadays fanatical types participate in other sports.
Going from training with Hugh Cassidy to training with Mark Chaillet was like being paroled from a Georgia chain gang to go live in a luxury spa. Not that training with Mark was easy or breezy, but Chaillet’s Gym was a terrific facility, easily the best gym I’ve ever belonged to. The people were incredible and the place was heated and air conditioned. I made Mark’s gym my second home for six straight years.
Marshall Peck and I were training with Hugh when we got wind that Mark Chaillet, already a power legend, would be relocating back to Temple Hills, where he was from originally. He would be opening a new gym dedicated to power and strength. Marshall and I were ecstatic. We had Hugh’s blessing; we both had worked hard, made great progress on every front in every way, but Hugh agreed: our strength levels were making it apparent that it was time for a change. At Hugh’s we used a 6’ exercise bar and had taken to hanging dumbbells attached with coat hangers on each end of the bar to get over 600 for squats.
Chaillet had been working for power God, Larry Pacifico, in Dayton for the several years. Larry “drafted” the finest young powerlifters from around the country to help him staff his empire of gyms and spas. At different times Larry had Mike Bridges, Mark, Joe Ladiner, John Topsoglu, and a whole host of other young power prodigies working for him. Mark decided to move back home and open a gym. He found a space overtop of an auto parts store. Mark’s dad, Buck, a salty ex-DC cop, helped Mark build out the space and run the gym.
Buck didn’t like too many people but he took a shine to me. I hit it off with the whole family, Mark’s mom, his brother Ray, his sister, his wife Ellen, these were great people, my second family. Mark became as close to me as a brother and I cut my big league coaching teeth handling Mark at National and World Championships. Marshall and I moved to Mark’s and joined up with the most amazing assortment of power athletes I’ve ever had the pleasure of training with, before or since.
Everyone made progress fast training at Chaillet’s Gym. A communal strength synergy took hold and each week we all seemed to get bigger and stronger. Seeing guys routinely squat 900, deadlift 800 and bench press 600 raises your game. Being a big fish in a small pond is illusory and stunting. Chaillet’s was a powerlift reality gut-check: a big pond full of big powerful fish.
It always seemed to me that Mark Chaillet really didn’t like training all that much. Or perhaps to put a finer point on it, Mark didn’t seem to like training in any way other than one way. He stuck with his particular, peculiar style of training for the six years I was his training partner. In a nutshell, twice a week he would have a mini-powerlifting competition. Mark would work up to a single, all out repetition in each of the three lifts wearing all his power gear. That was it. Monday at 4pm was squat and bench press day. Thursday at 4pm was deadlift day. I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times over the years I saw him do any lift or exercise other than the three powerlifts. Every once in a blue moon I might see him perform a set of curls, or do a set of stiff leg deadlifts, but nothing consistent other than the big three.
Typically at the appointed time on Monday and Thursday, a crowd of lifters would show up to train either the squat/bench or deadlift. By crowd, I mean a crowd! Three platforms or benches would all be going at once. Mike Benardon, Don Mills, Joe Ferry, Bob Brandon, Marshall Peck, Jeff Bobalouch, Kirk Karwoski, Frank Hottendorf, Mark Dimiduk, Ray Evans, Ray Chaillet, Bob Bradley, Big John Studd, Graham Bartholomew, Ray Hager, Big Buddy, Noah Stern, Larry Christ, Elliot Smith, Bob Snell, Greg Tayman…on and on… on one Thursday I counted thirteen men in the room, all of whom had deadlifted 700 pounds or more.
The procedure would be as follows: on squat day, the power rack that faced the rear wall would be used by Mark and the four other heaviest squatters in the room. This group would be the 750+ guys. On the second set of squat racks, facing the deadlift platform, the 600 to 750 pound men would set up shop. On a third set of racks, facing the wall adjacent to the bathroom entrance, the smaller guys, the 400 to 600 pound club, would squat. After squats, three benches would be set up, each handling a certain poundage range. On Thursday, deadlift day, the 700 plus guys lifted on the elevated main deadlift platform. The 600 to 700 range men would lift on the adjacent floor area and the up to 600 men would lift in the area by the bathroom. It was the most simplistic power and strength program I’ve ever been exposed to, before or since.
In mainstream powerlifting orthodoxy, making the single repetition the backbone of a training strategy is viewed as insanity. At Chaillet’s the single rep was a religion.
Mark used the classical 12 week periodization cycle that was so in vogue back in the 80’s and so out of vogue today. Typically Mark would take about four weeks to ramp things up. Eight weeks before the National Championships he would get real serious and the weights would start to fly. I was intimately involved in helping him plot out the cycle and in making any in-flight corrections as circumstance warranted. I am going to do this from memory so it might not be exact, but will give the reader a real sense of how a stud like Chaillet would peak his mind and body leading up to a championship. The real work would begin after four weeks of getting into decent shape.
Mark might start the 8 week cycle off weighing a soft 255 and by the competition he’d weigh a rock hard 280 and lift weighing 275. He was a tremendous competition lifter who routinely would come back after being behind 100 or 200 pounds at the sub-total (the combination of a man’s top squat and top bench press poundage) before decimating the competition. He would take a token opener in the deadlift of say 760 then turn to me and say, “Add it up—how much do we need—can we win?” If it was anything up to 860, the leader was dead.
He was the greatest conventional deadlifter I’ve ever had the pleasure of training with. Mark pulled 880 and had 900 within three inches of lock-out. He consistently could deadlift 840 to 860. Mark occasionally would do some stiff-legged deadlifts using 800. One afternoon, I saw him pull 835 standing atop a 100 pound barbell plate laid flat. His minimalist approach worked phenomenally well for him for almost a decade. I think that those who dismiss his approach are short-sighted. Plus, I don’t see very many 269 pound men deadlifting 880 nowadays. Mark squatted an IPF legal depth 1000 in training. By legal I mean deep. I called him up on the depth on that very lift. He officially hit 940 wearing one of those old Zangas Supersuits, no briefs and legal length wraps. When it came to leg and (especially) back power, Mark Chaillet was “cock strong.”
They’ll be saints and sinners,
Losers and winners,
All kinds of people you ain’t never seen
—The Band
The stories about Chaillet’s Gym are so outrageous that they have taken on mythical proportions. I called Mark’s gym “The House of Pain” in a Powerlifting USA article and for good reason; at Chaillet’s I’ve seen beat-downs and sex between patrons, I’ve seen illegal activity and acts of heroism—sometimes all on the same afternoon. I will recount a few that come to mind. The names have been changed to protect the guilty.
The gym had a gun bin and clients were required to pass weaponry across the front desk to either Mark or Buck—no questions asked. A towel was draped over the firearm as it was passed. Serious powerlifting, competitive powerlifting, at least in the 1980s, attracted a large contingent of both police officers and career criminals. Mark’s gym bumped up against a bad section of the city and the cocaine trade was keeping both cops and crooks active. One afternoon, one of the best training partners I ever had, a deep cover narcotics officer, nudged me and gestured towards a good looking young fellow spotting a monstrous man with jail tattoos bench pressing 500 for reps. “That’s _______ ________. He controls the coke trade in all of Southeast DC.”
Interestingly, my cop pal, the coke kingpin, and his muscleman protector/bodyguard, were super cordial to each other. My man explained. “His sources have fingered me. So since he knows I’m a narc, he wants to make nice out of professional courtesy.” A few years later the DEA arrested the young King Pin and found close to three million in cash. He had two money counting machines in his luxury condo. They sent his whole family up the river including his grandmother.
Chaillet’s Gym was like Ric’s Café in Casblanca: beefs and vendettas were usually left at the front door. Once you walked up the stairs and turned in your Glock or Berretta, you were no longer a lawman or lawbreaker, you were a powerlifter. During one period I trained with a DC undercover cop and a Baltimore cocaine ring enforcer who later went into witness protection. Neither knew the others man’s trade. No one asked personal stuff. I overheard the coke enforcer mention he had some fully automatic AR-style machine guns for sale. The undercover cop wasn’t interested in busting the guy; he wanted the rife for his own private collection and didn’t want to go through the legal paperwork. The coke enforcer said he happened to have one in the trunk of his Cadillac and after the workout he’d “front it” to my cop pal and, “since you’re a friend of Marty, you can pay me later.” I stepped in and told each (separately) that this was a real bad idea. Ironically both men eventually landed in jail for long stretches: 20 years apiece.
Doug Furnas was above all else an athlete. He was one of the true strength giants of our time, but being a hall of fame powerlifter was just one aspect of the Ice Man’s extensive athletic career. He had a steely competitive demeanor, a savage work ethic and tremendous genetic gifts. He was successful in every athletic undertaking. Doug never reached his full potential in any one athletic arena because he would periodically spin off in another direction: from rodeo to football to powerlifting to strongman to professional wrestling… he was an athletic Ronin Samurai warrior. “This gun for hire.” He could have gone professional as a teen rodeo rider; he was starting fullback for a high school team that played in the State Championships; he played for the National Champion junior college football team before becoming a starting fullback for Tennessee on a team that included pro football immortal Reggie White. He played in the Peach Bowl. He played pro football for Denver with John Elway before taking up powerlifting.
He set his first World Record within nine months of dedicating himself exclusively to the sport. He ripped across the power skyline for four years before becoming a professional wrestler. He was a veritable wrestling God in Japan. During the late 1980’s he was recognized everywhere he went in Japan and mobbed on the streets like a rock star. He wrestled in the WWF before an auto accident ended his athletic career. Doug was unquestionably one of the most innovative resistance trainers of the modern era. I am proud to call him a friend.
Doug Furnas was sophisticated in his strength philosophies and put theory into practice with incredible results. He had the good powerlift luck to stand on the shoulders of another iron giant, Dennis Wright. At a critical juncture in his multidimensional athletic career, Doug studied powerlifting under Dennis like Luke studied under Obi Wan. When Dennis slipped the leash, Doug squatted 881 weighing 238, using the most awesome squat technique ever seen. His squats were like Raphael paintings, as athletically exquisite as a Tiger Woods golf swing or a Michael Jordon leap-and-dunk. Doug had great mentors at various times in his athletic career, but none were more accomplished than Dennis.
Furnas excelled at every athletic activity to which he turned his full attention. He competed at stratospheric levels in every sport: starting off with rodeo as a man-child, then football, powerlifting and finally professional wrestling. He and wrestling partner Phil LaFon were five time tag team champions in the All Japan Professional Wrestling federation. Later he and tag team partner Don Keffutt captured the ECW World Tag Team title.
Doug’s only athletic disappointment occurred when a hamstring injury prematurely ended his professional football career with Denver. The injury effectively strangled his pro ball career in its crib. He became disillusioned and was relegated to the Bronco taxi squad. For the first time in his life, he was not a starter or a star. His hamstring injury became a chronic injury and he became embroiled in irresolvable conflicts with Denver head coach Dan Reeves. He was trapped in athletic limbo: good enough to be kept on the payroll, never healed enough to demonstrate his wares, increasingly frustrated and disgusted, he headed home to the family farm to reconsider his future and athletically recalibrate. Football’s loss became powerlifting’s gain.
Doug’s love affair with a barbell commenced after he was nearly killed in a horrific auto accident. The Furnas family was returning home from a rodeo competition when their car was run into head on as they crested a hill by a drunk driver speeding down the wrong side of the road. Doug was 16 at the time. His body was completely shattered. Both his legs were broken, his shoulder was destroyed and his spleen exploded upon impact. Doug’s father broke his neck. His girlfriend (who he later married) broke her back. Doug’s mother broke both ankles.
It took him almost two years to heal. Lifting weights became a big part of his recovery and he developed a deep taste for weight training. He recovered enough to go back to school. His younger brother Mike and he were now in the same grade. All through junior high school, high school, junior college and college the two played together on championship football teams. The brothers played on a high school team that went to the Oklahoma High School State Championships. Both were selected as Oklahoma high school all-stars and played against the Texas all-stars in the Oil Bowl. Both played for Northeastern Oklahoma A&M, a junior college squad that won the Junior College National Championship.
That brought dozens of offers from Division I teams. The brothers decided on Tennessee because both were offered scholarships and they could continue to play together. Tennessee won the conference title and went to the Peach Bowl. On New Year’s Day in front of 60,000 people, while millions more watched on TV, Tennessee lost by two points to Iowa 26 to 24 in the last 60 seconds of the game. Though he didn’t know it at the time, that exciting loss would be both the high point and the tragic foreshadowing that the football high times had peaked and things were about to sour. Doug ended up with the Denver Broncos and after a hamstring injury became chronic, he voluntarily opted out. Doug was now free to immerse himself in powerlifting. He had followed the iron sport since his auto accident and dreamed of a time when he could focus on it exclusively. That time was now.
For the first time since third grade, Doug wasn’t participating in a team sport. With powerlifting it was just him and the barbell and the aloneness appealed to him mightily. Now he didn’t have to schedule his life around someone else’s practice schedule. Now he could concentrate 100% of his energies on an individual sport. He would settle in and concentrate on becoming the best powerlifter he could be. His brother joined him. Now they would both commence on the powerlifting path, together once again.
He had followed the sport of powerlifting all through high school and college. He was particularly taken by another amazing athlete turned powerlifter, John Gamble. The monstrous Gamble had it all: massive and lean, John had a ferocious competitive attitude. Gamble was a balanced lifter who at his peak was untouchable. Gamble had an incredible physique and his sheer physical dominance provided Doug with a power role model, someone he aspired to emulate.
Doug compounded his physical and psychological assets with clean living habits; he neither smoked nor drank nor partied. He had a stern, collected, Ice Man demeanor. He seemed aloof because he was aloof. If you were in his inner circle he could be quite open and humorous. He was well spoken, but soft spoken and you would find yourself leaning forward to hear him better in conversations. From a distance he appeared humorless; he was the kind of guy if you were competing against you hated, but he was exactly the type of man you would want in a foxhole next to you. It was easy to envision him as a squadron commander leading a mass assault of M-1 Abram tanks across some desert landscape. After the extreme regimentation of football, dealing with coaches who held scholarships or money over his head, Doug was glad to be free of the smothering, all-consuming commitments of big time football.
He sought to maximize his abilities as a lifter. As a teen he had apprenticed under Okie powerlifting legend, Dennis Wright. Both men lived in the same neck of the woods in rural Oklahoma and it was only natural that Doug and Mike and Dennis begin working out together. Dennis would power through his own sessions and Doug and his brother would “ghost Dennis,” following right behind, performing whatever exercises, set and rep selections Dennis decided upon. Doug and Mike would tackle whatever Wright set in front of them, no questions asked.
In the early days, Doug and Mike would powerlift between football seasons. After pro football, powerlifting was given undivided attention. It was the beginning of a legendary run of the table. Furnas’ power career lasted four short years, but during that time he was a meteor streaking across the dark sky of powerlifting. He redefined the athletic possibilities. He campaigned for a season in the 242 pound class and set his first world squat record, 881 pounds, weighing 239. Standing 5’10” he was actually too tall for that class and really hit his stride when he moved up to the 275 pound class. He had played football weighing a leaned-out, trimmed to the max 225 pounds carrying a 6% body fat percentile. He was a blocking fullback who ran a 4.5 forty and had a 40 inch vertical leap. Adding 50 pounds of muscle caused him to come on strong and fast.
Furnas was the powerlifting equivalent of the perfect storm: great genetics combined with a great work ethic, a high pain tolerance and a hall-of-fame coach. Wright pointed out all the shortcuts and dead-ends ahead of time. Wright’s primordial approach, lots of volume, lots of poundage, lots of sets and long sessions, was Old School all the way. No-mercy power training for those who could hang. The Wright/Furnas brother training sessions were legendary. The Furnas boys had highly developed pain tolerances from all those rodeo bumps and bruises, all those football practices, and before all of it, from the hard farm labor they were required to do as youngsters. Doug and Mike were subjected to the hardening effects of intense manual labor as children.
The family owned a 270 acre ranch and the boys were required to work and work hard. Mike was a year younger than Doug and just as athletic and just as combative. Doug related that as children the brothers were expected to “pull their weight” insofar as chores. When they were youngsters the duo were assigned to work together. The duo was expected to perform the work of a single adult male farmhand. Together they formed a “unit.” Together the two little boys would run along in open farm fields, behind a moving truck, together dragging 100 pound hay bails up to a moving flatbed. They would routinely carry heavy water and heavy feed buckets. They worked long hours at physically demanding tasks. Meanwhile, Doug noted, that “while Mike and I were wrestling steers and each other, the town kids were out playing T-ball.”
The brothers became “real physical” and when the twosome started playing high school football they were way ahead of their teammates. Football, however, was not the first sport young Doug excelled at: the entire Furnas family competed on the competitive rodeo circuit. They paid substantial entry fees to compete for cash prizes. Mom, dad, brother, sister, all rode and roped, competing for money. Hardcore rodeo taught Doug how to fall, how to get thrown and not get hurt; how to get up after being thrown, how to dust yourself off and shake off the pain. He gave serious thought to becoming a bull riding professional; his childhood rodeo contemporaries founded the Professional Rodeo circuit.
Forced to make a choice, Doug choose football. He ended up as a teammate of NFL all-pro and World Champion sprinter Willie Gault. Also on the Tennessee team was future Super Bowl MVP, NFL Defensive Player of the year and Hall of Fame immortal Reggie White. Doug and Mike Furnas effortlessly operated at the highest athletic levels.
Dennis Wright was a hall-of-fame powerlifter who got better as he got older. Dennis started off in the 70’s as a gangly, yet surprisingly powerful 165 pound lifter. I saw him lift at age 50 and weighing 198 pounds. Dennis squatted 800 pounds, quadruple bodyweight, in exquisite fashion. He backed up the squat with a 475 pound bench press. The 800 pound squat was pure technical perfection. After a slow, controlled descent that ended in a precision turn-around, two inches below parallel, the ascent was explosive and crisp. Watching Wright’s lifts that day, I was struck that every squat he took was an identical copy of the previous one or the subsequent one. I was seeing a Samurai master handle an o-dachi long sword.
Doug related that he and his brother always made it a point to arrive for training sessions with Dennis 15 minutes early. They would sit curbside in the car until the appointed training time, drinking coffee. The brothers would fire each other up as they sat, talking themselves into a quiet frenzy, getting psyched for the workout. I asked, why they didn’t just go in early, or arrive on time. Why arrive early? I asked. “We were showing Dennis respect. We made it a point to arrive early in order to show our eagerness and gratitude. Going in early would have been disrespectful.”
Dennis Wright would work the hell out the brothers during a session. A typical weekly squat week would find the men performing four sets of 5 reps on Tuesday with a “static” poundage. On Saturday they would work up to a heavy 5 rep set, then a heavy 4 rep set, then a triple, then a double and finally a single. Not done they would “back down,” i.e., reduce the poundage, and hit sets of either 5 or 7 second pause squats. “Dennis was a simplistic genius. Everything I have ever done was a result of what I learned from him.” More Furnasian deference.
When Doug began concentrating on powerlifting his poundage began to soar and he dropped the twice-a-week squat template. “I wasn’t recovering session to session. I played with a second “light” squat day, but that seemed like a waste of time. Eventually I dropped the second weekly squat day—and that’s when my lifting took off.”
In each session they would strive to equal or exceed previous personal records, though capacity might take differing forms. As a result of all the Old School squatting and pause squatting, done Dennis Wright style, (lots of volume, lots of intensity, lots of poundage) Doug grew gargantuan legs. It was said that his thighs measured 34 inches while his waist size was 34. He refused all inquiries into his girth measurements. Eventually, he weighed 275 pounds, yet was ripped and shredded. Even at his heaviest bodyweight he was always lean and athletic. He bench pressed 620 in training and 600 officially, this while wearing a loose, size 60 inch 1st generation Inzer power shirt. His shirts were so loose I asked why he bothered wearing them at all; he could put the shirt on himself. “I like the way it keeps my torso warm.”
Dennis Wright was a great bench presser and gave the Furnas Brothers a template that mined the same training vein as the squat: work up to the target poundage, always stressing perfect technique. They would perform bench press “assistance work” and followed an axiom Hugh Cassidy passed along to me: the best assistance exercise for a particular lift is an assistance exercise that most closely resembles the lift itself. Therefore the best assistance exercise for the flat bench press would be more flat bench presses using a wider or narrower grip. Dennis passed onto Doug a bench system that Doug modified and eventually perfected.
A typical Furnas bench workout might find him working up to a top set, before cutting the weight and performing two sets of wide grip bench presses using a pause on the chest. Then he would drop the poundage and hit two sets of flat bench presses using a narrow grip. Narrow grip bench presses would also be paused. With narrow grip benches the sticking point occurs as the bar approaches lock-out and concentrated use of narrow grips improves lockout ability. Wide-grip bench presses were purposefully paused to build “starting power.” Triceps would be worked hard after benching.
Doug used a sumo deadlift technique and tried to harness his amazing leg strength in his pulling. He viewed the deadlift as a “reverse squat.” He used a wide stance in both lifts and maintained a bolt upright torso. He never let his hips rise to get the deadlift started and eventually pulled 826. His deadlift limitation was his grip. He had violent allergic reactions to magnesium carbonate, lifting chalk, and this meant he had to pull without it. Doug found that if he successfully pushed his squat upward, his deadlift would tag along. There was a consistent ratio between the two lifts and as he approached 1,000 in the squat, his deadlift rose proportionally.
Incredible Eddy Coan shared training ideas with Doug on a regular basis. The two saw eye to eye on so many areas that they arrived eventually at a power training consensus. Their template was adopted by many of their contemporaries and changed the power thinking of the day. It was an amalgamation, a blending of strategies that amplified results. In person they were impressive: Doug’s persona, quiet intensity, made an interesting contrast to Ed’s Irish fierceness and fire. Like Mick and Keith, John and Paul, Butch and Sundance, they became Iron partners. There was a period of time when the two were inseparable at National and World competitions.
After retiring from powerlifting, Doug kept his hand in the game by coming to the Nationals to work with Ed Coan. I had the pleasure of coaching each man at National and World Championships. It was a white-knuckle, hair raising experience to work with these guys. It was terrifying to handle Doug, Ed and Mark Chaillet—all at the same time! Any mess up and months of work could be destroyed.
What a trio: each man needed special handling. With six months of preparatory blood, sweat, tears and training preparation on the line, coaching these men on report card day was no freaking joke! These guys were all business on game day. They only competed twice a year—at the National Championships and at the World Championships—so there was a helluva a lot at stake. When these big guns, the biggest stars in the sport, were rolled out together, world record smashing was expected and demanded.
My job was akin to that of a NASCAR pit crew chief handing three racecars at once: it was up to me to time the process, ensure that all warm-up attempts were done in a timely fashion, make sure the backstage warm-up poundage was loaded correctly, that spotters were in place and alert. Gear needed to be put on at just the right time: wrap a man’s knees too early and kiss the lift goodbye. The wrap tension will cut off blood circulation and turn a man’s legs blue. Start the knee wrapping procedure too late and the lifter is rushed and hustled onto the platform, deprived of his critical pre-lift psyche-up. At worst, late wrapping causes the lifter to be “timed out,” disqualified from lifting that attempt because he was not on the platform within the allotted time. In addition, there were spectators and well-wishers that needed to be kept at bay during the warm-up procedure. Each man needed to remain psyched, centered and concentrated; a casual backslap or civilian intrusion at the wrong moment could shatter a carefully constructed psyche. It was intimidating and invigorating all at the same time…I would experience pure fear before every attempt; this was inevitably followed by ecstatic elation after some amazing lift.
These guys nearly always made their lifts and they were spectacular to watch, truly electrifying. They routinely shattered world records, one after another, and did so with predictable regularity. I was the crew chief when each of these hall-of-fame men achieved their respective best all-time power performances. Doug was the first man to total 2400 pounds twice and was by far the lightest ever to hit 2400 at the time—until his partner, Ed Coan, cracked 2400 weighing a mere 219 pounds, a few years later. Chaillet was walking drama: with his blunderbuss deadlift he would usually end up the last man left to deadlift, the man who can and did snatch victory from the jaws of defeat repeatedly. He was the definition of nerve wracking.
Then Doug was gone. He quit powerlifting at the absolute zenith of his career. He simply walked away. He had won national and world championships, he had set numerous world records and to continue onward would be mere repetition, improving upon that which he had already accomplished. He turned his thoughts towards making a living and decided to enter the lucrative yet intensely competitive world of professional wrestling. He was accepted immediately and worked his way through the national and international circuit until he was summoned to the highest level of pro wrestling ranks: the WWF. His lack of flamboyance prevented him from becoming a comic-book superstar, yet his amazing athletic ability assured him a place at the table.
In a dreadful dose of Shakespearian irony, yet another horrid auto accident ended his athletic career. A van full of professional wrestlers were driving from one show to another when the driver fell asleep and drove off the road, plunging into a ravine deep in the Canadian wilderness. Doug’s body was shattered yet again. Auto tragedy commenced his iron journey decades before and decades later another auto tragedy ended it; a gruesome set of chronological bookends denoting the beginnings and ending of an amazingly versatile athlete’s amazing athletic career.
Both Doug Furnas and Ed Coan followed a similar training template: we list their collaborative protocol in the section on Coan.
The Greatest Powerlifter Of All Time…
Without a doubt the greatest athlete I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with is Ed Coan. Incredible Eddy is the Jim Brown/Michael Jordan/Muhammad Ali of powerlifting and his exploits are simply astounding when viewed from any athletic angle, be it peak performances or longevity.
Coan’s friend and compatriot, Doug Furnas, was a powerlifting comet: a man who tore through our sport after rodeo, after big time college and pro football and before pro wrestling. Powerlifting, for Doug, was just another whistle stop, an athletic interlude before commencing his decade long journey as a professional wrestler. Doug passed through the strength universe for a few brief years, leaving an indelible mark, before exiting our sphere and heading onto other athletic worlds to conquer.
Ed landed on planet power in 1981 and as this is being written, Incredible Ed has not been beaten in head to head competition since July of 1983 when he took second place at the National Championships to the power dominator of the previous decade, Mike Bridges. When Ed took second place to Mike, in their one and only meeting, it was symbolic: a handing off of the strength torch from the greatest lifter of the 70’s and 80’s to the greatest lifter from that point forward. It was Bridge’s last competition and marked the start of Coan’s utter and complete domination, a reign that is unmatched in any sport.
It is actually difficult to come up with appropriate frame of reference when attempting to relate to outsiders what a phenomenon Ed Coan actually is. In my book on Ed, Coan: The Man, The Myth, The Method, I made some mathematical analogies that bear repeating. At one point in time, 1991, Ed Coan was mathematically 14.5% better than the rest of the world’s top powerlifters in the 220 pound class. The second best 220 pound World Total was 2,100 pounds; a great total considering that the inflationary gear and equipment “revolution” had not hit powerlifting. The Monolift had yet to be invented and bench shirts of the time added 30-40 pounds to a lifter’s bench press, not 40% to 60% to the lift.
To duplicate Coan’s degree of separation from the rest of the field, a sprinter would need to shatter Asafa Powell’s current 100 meter yard dash record of 9.77 seconds by posting an 8.35 time. Michael Johnson’s current 200 meter World Record of 19.32 seconds would have to be bettered with a 16.52 time. The Cuban Sotomayer’s World High Jump Record of 8’ ¼” would require someone to leap 9’2” and Randy Barnes’ 75’10” World Record in the shot put would need to be blasted to smithereens by someone tossing the 16 pound iron ball 86 feet. That was how far in front of the rest of the strength world Ed Coan was at one marvelous point in time.
Insofar as his longevity: consider the fact that he is riding a 24 year unbeaten streak. I will repeat an earlier analogy: imagine if the 154 pound boxer Ray Leonard fought and defeated every ranking heavyweight contender to miraculously secure the Heavyweight Championship of the World in 1983. Now further suppose that Ray remained a 154 pound fighter and fought for the next 24 years and never lost a single bout. That is the greatness of Incredible Eddy Coan.
Irish Ed is no genetic freak. It would be too cheap and too easy to write off his accomplishments as the result of some sort of accident on the part of nature. Ed is an extremely intelligent and conservative individual who was methodical yet innovative. To those who knew him, Coan was regimented and steadfast. He had an amazing competitive psyche that was so fierce it was frightening—but it wasn’t outward and demonstrative. You had to be fairly close in order to appreciate his internal fire. They say “the eyes are the windows into a man’s soul” and Ed’s eyes could burn holes in wooden walls and start fires prior to a world record attempt. If you stood within three feet of him prior to a big attempt, he literally generated intense body heat. I repeatedly felt the air temperature around his body rise appreciably prior to a gigantic lift. I suppose this was an outward manifestation of some unique internal psychological process.
“This boy will consign us all to oblivion!”
—Rival upon hearing Mozart for the first time.
“Well that’s bad f___ ing news for the rest of us!”
—Nationally ranked lifter learning Ed was moving into his weight class.
I met Ed Coan and Doug Furnas in the mid-eighties while coaching Mark Chaillet at National and World Championships. Mark was a force to be reckoned with, and like Doug, moved up from the 242 pound class to the 275 pound weight class. I had shattered my leg in 1983 and was effectively finished as a lifter. I morphed into a coach and traveled with Mark and his ample posse to competitions, acting as his coach.
The most memorable powerlifting competitions of all time were the incredible Bacchanalian power festivals Larry Pacifico ran in Dayton. Ed and I ran into each other repeatedly at these meets and I was dumbstruck with his lifting. He was a 181 pound lifter when I first began seeing him lift up close and personal. One year at one of Larry’s meets I was on my way to dinner at the Spaghetti Factory across the street from the Dayton Convention Center. I happened to cross the street as Ed and his crew was headed in the other direction. He waved me down and got right to the point. “Doug (Furnas) had a last minute emergency and cannot make it to the competition—can you coach me at the competition tomorrow?” Of course. I was flabbergasted and flattered.
So began a long association that allowed me to coach and assist Ed in those competitions where he performed the greatest powerlifting exploits of all time. I coached him when he posted his greatest ever totals and when he lifted his heaviest ever individual lifts. It was a heady and remarkable time. Describing those golden days of yore to younger lifters is odd. The modern powerlifter only knows of powerlifting since “The Great Disintegration and Scattering.” When I speak of the heights powerlifting once attained before the splintering, these lifters gaze at me as Dark Ages men would if I were describing Rome before the Huns sacked and burned the city to the ground….
“…Imagine a time in the obscure town of Dayton, Ohio when, for a brief sliver of time, everyone who powerlifted competed in a single federation. Those who attended these unified National and World Championships, run under the direction of power impresario Larry Pacifico and his brother Dick, saw the very best, all lifting together, using the same rules, before sold-out convention center audiences. We honestly believed that mainstream acceptance of powerlifting lay just around the next corner.
Imagine a powerlifting competition where all the top lifters in the country competed in a single place at the same time. Imagine a promotional genius who had the wisdom and foresight to hold championship power competitions in the same town, Dayton, Ohio, at the same time, year after year.
As a result of keeping the competitions consistent, over time an audience, an educated audience, grew to love and anticipate the Powerlifting Championships. Year after year, locals and visitors would descend on Dayton to attend these power extravaganzas. Eventually, thousands of people would fill the Dayton Convention Center. People would actually scalp tickets to see the heavyweight finale.
A packed house would sit in air conditioned comfort and watch the greatest lifters in the World ply their trade in front of strict judges in a competition run with the smooth efficiency of a Swiss Watch. Loud, vocal, bawdy, voracious fans hollered themselves hoarse when favorite lifters strode to the platform. Looking around the packed auditorium, the audience profile would be very similar to the type of crowd that attends the annual Sturgis Motorcycle festival each year. By keeping the competitions in Dayton at the same time each year, people were actually planning vacations around attending the Powerlifting Championships.
Returning champions had their airfare and hotel rooms paid for. Larry sent courtesy buses to the airport to pick up top lifters and whisk them back to the luxury hotel that adjoined the Convention Center, connected by a skyway. Each year Larry and Dick layered on another new and exciting twist or wrinkle. At its apogee, Larry flew in Klaus, the funky blind organ player from Germany, and between lifts or in dead spots, Klaus would get the crowd going by playing wild dance music.
Larry had a buffet steam table set up in the auditorium, 100 feet from the lifting, audience members could stroll over from their seats, purchase a hot meat loaf platter, perhaps some roast turkey with mashed potatoes, salads, pies, cakes, vegetables and (drum roll) a bottle of beer for a buck! Then walk back to their seat in time to see Hatfield squat 880 at 220 or Cash pull 832 to beat Fred and Larry. How about seeing Jacoby battle Ladiner? Back and forth these two battled, the lead changed hands something like six times. Joe pulled the winning deadlift of 800 only to be turned down in a 2 to 1 decision! Those were indeed the days.
I remember returning from the buffet line and telling my seatmate, Big Bob (an 800-pound raw squatter who had spent time in prison for manslaughter) “Bob, if we died and went to heaven—could it be any freaking better than this!” He shook his massive head clicked my beer bottle with his and said, “Amen to that Little Daddy!”
You might see John Gamble, Terry McCormick, Dave Shaw, Larry Kidney, Tom Henderson, Bob Dempsey, Mark Chaillet, Sam Samangeio and Steve Wilson all doing battle in the 275 pound class—along with a half dozen other heavy hitter lifters. How about watching Ed Coan deadlift or Lee Moran squat? Or the time Fred Hatfield did battle with Jim Cash and Larry P in the 220 class? You could see Lamar Gant pull 650+ weighing 132 pounds. I remember every time Iron Immortal Doyle Kenedy would stride out to lift, some crazed nut would stand up and yell over and over, “MOUNTAIN MAN! KILL THE WEIGHT MOUNTAIN MAN!”
The feeling of camaraderie among the lifters was palpable: I remember Larry Kidney make a terrific clutch deadlift with 780 and then giving John Gamble a heartfelt hi-five as John passed Larry on his way to the platform to pull the 800 pound poundage that would beat Larry—the enemy was the barbell, not each other. After the competitions it was bawdy, wild, beer-soaked reveries at the Spaghetti Factory or the magnificent Sunday lobster brunch in the meet hotel. It was a precious golden time—now gone forever!”
Nowadays you are lucky to get 100 hundred people to attend a power competition. Other than the lifters, their training partners, girlfriends or families, no one comes to watch powerlifting anymore. There are a dozen federations all holding “National and World Championships.” The pre-scattering competitive environment spawned giants like Kaz, Larry, Coan, Ladiner, Bell, Lamar and Doug. As a result of his intense incubation in the undivided pre-scattering times, Ed Coan soared. If you plotted Incredible Ed’s power progress on a chart, it would look like a bullet shot straight up in the air.
He started off at a high level in the early eighties and just kept getting better and better and better…It was one of the most amazing runs in the history of sport. Statistically, the numbers speak for themselves…
Ed and Doug Furnas took training cues from men like Dennis Wright and Bill Kazmaier. They designed a powerlifting training template that became the standardized training regimen for the great lifters of the eighties and early nineties.
Ed would spend the off-season getting as strong as possible in the three powerlifts, or their close exercise variations, wearing little or no equipment. Then, 14 weeks prior to a major competition, he would commence a powerlifting cycle broken into three, 4 week mesocycles. During each four week cycle, a specific rep sequence would be selected and practiced across the board. Rep reductions were coordinated with the addition of power gear: knee wraps, lifting belt, squat suit, and bench shirt.
Coan had a repertoire of assistance exercises he used religiously. His approach was Purposefully Primitive and simplistic: get as strong as possible in the off-season in a variety of lifts wearing no gear whatsoever, not even a lifting belt. Then, when commencing the powerlifting pre-competition cycle, he would add supportive gear, a bit at a time, every four weeks. This kept his off-season interesting. He was a realist: neither he nor Furnas (nor Karwoski at the end of his career) missed reps in training. This was a testament to Ed’s realistic assessment of his abilities. Small incremental steps were systematically taken that eventually delivered him to the predetermined destination.
A typical Coan poundage jump in the squat during the final stages of the cycle would never exceed 20 pounds, a trifling 2% weekly increase for a 1,000 pound squatter. Coan and Furnas were stylistic masters, each developed exercise techniques that fit their respective limb/torso lengths and practiced continually at refining and honing their techniques. They took great pride in technical execution. By staying within the technical boundaries of a lift, by never overestimating their strength levels, by being conservative, both men stayed injury free. This is a classical Coan routine taken from when he was at his absolute zenith. The Furnas template would vary slightly.
Ever see a man wearing a t-shirt bench press 625 pounds for two reps, each rep paused on the chest? Ever seen a man strict incline press a pair of 200 pound dumbbells, creating a 400 pound payload, for 6 reps, each rep paused on the chest? Ever seen a man bench press with such explosiveness that he snaps the rivets clean off a heavy duty powerbelt? The same guy also squatted 953 ass-on-heels for a double.
Kenny Fantano was unique in every way; like Mark Chaillet, Ken was a fabulous powerlifter who wasn’t at all interested in powerlifting-related people, places and events. We spent countless hours in his gym playing cards on the glass-topped counter while a revolving cast of pirate characters would drop by, Fat Pat, Demented Danny, Mic, countless others would rotate in and out of the afternoon pinochle games. Amongst the card players the talk would range far and wide…sports, women, TV, movies, yet when the talk turned to powerlifting gossip Ken clammed up like a Mafioso being grilled in front of a Senate Subcommittee. While the rest of us would babble on about this or that power personality, place or event, Ken would study his cards and stay silent until another topic more to his liking arose. A great lifter, a formidable power theoretician, he was not the slightest bit interested in the politics, personalities or the minutiae of our weird fringe sport.
He stood 5’10” and weighed 365 pounds in top condition. His massive body was tight and taut with not an ounce of flab, his massive gut stretched hard against his skin. To poke or punch that gut was to poke or punch concrete. He was athletic, explosive, nimble and agile. Ken reminded me of the great athletic comedienne Jackie Gleason who could break into a frantic, incredible dance routine and at the end flip himself over. Ken had that same big man dancer-like athletic agility.
Every day when the weather was right, the Muscle Factory gym rats would head out back to the parking lot and play wiffle ball, the child’s game, in savage Rollerball/Thunderdome-like fashion. Monstrous musclemen incongruously playing baseball with a plastic ball and bat, exhorting or damning each other, loudly, profanely, with a streak of taunting nastiness. Neighborhood kids would hear the swearing and commotion and flock to participate. It was a surreal blending of powerlift monsters, thugs and innocent kids, all playing wiffle ball with incredible intensity. Kenny batted “cow-handed.” He was a lefty yet batted with his right hand overtop of his left from a left-handed stance. Once a 12 year old boy new to this game and oblivious as to how powerful an adult with a 600 pound bench press actually is, acted stupid. The kid was playing 3rd base and would continually crowd home plate in a batter-intimidating move. When Fantano came up to bat, Danny D yelled “BACK UP KID!” But the overly aggressive tweeny was looking to impress—CRACK! Too late! The kid ate a 200 mile per hour wiffle ball, a line drive blast right to his skull. He lay on the parking lot pavement, bleeding a little. No one rushed to his aide. Ken got a double out of it and as he stood on 2nd base he yelled at the prone youth, “THAT’LL TEACH YOU! YOU DUMB ASS KID!”
I moved to New England in 1988 to take a job running a warehouse in Milford, Connecticut. It was an 80,000 square foot steel warehouse that had an exclusive contract with the Irish Government to offload and store steel girders. They had continual employee problems with the crew of rough necks that worked in the warehouse. There was a liquor store across the street from the warehouse and at lunchtime half the warehouse workers would walk across the street and buy 40 ounce quarts of malt liquor or pints of Richard’s Wild Irish Rose. They would blatantly sit on the curb across from the warehouse in plain view and guzzle down the booze. After their liquid lunch, they would stagger back across the road to go back to work.
The drunks would move 5,000 pound steel beams using forklifts and overhead cranes. Ever seen a drunken warehouseman operate an overhead crane with a steel beam feebly attached? Quite frightening. The then warehouse supervisor was a politically-correct, politically-connected guy: his brother-in-law ran the largest port in the area. My boss had hired him as a favor. As a foreman, he was nice to a fault. He believed that “what the men do on their lunch hour, off property, was none of our business and beyond our control.” His politically correct stance was heartfelt. He always “stood up” for the rights of “his men.”
The whole enchilada exploded when a belligerent, drunken warehouseman half-ass hooked up a forty foot I-beam and while transporting the monster down one of the bays, had it bust loose and fall 25 feet. It crashed into one of the 50 rows of 12 foot high stacked steel and set off a domino effect that caused one row of girders to crash into the next…and the next…and the next…
No one was killed or injured, but an entire bay was shut down for a month as over 2,000 40 foot steel beams had to be picked up, sorted and restacked, one stinking beam at a time. It looked like a game of pic-up-stix with steel girders. The cleanup required three men working all day everyday. The foreman refused to fire the guy who caused it. “You can’t accuse him of being drunk—you have no proof!” My boss had enough of this jailhouse lawyer and kicked him upstairs. Enter Marty G. and Biggie W. I was brought in along with “Biggie W,” an infamous longshoreman enforcer known around the Baltimore docks as “one punch.” We cleaned house. I got things squared away with Biggie W’s help and now, with a big raise and time on my hands, I turned my attention back to training.
For a guy who hated to talk about powerlifting gossip, Ken Fantano had sure as hell thought long and hard about powerlift biomechanics. His treatise on bench pressing was light years passed anything I’d ever encountered, before or since. He’d sit at the glass-topped counter of his funk-a-fied gym, The Muscle Factory in West Haven Connecticut, find a scrap of paper and a pencil and begin a detailed explanation on how and why he and his amigos bench pressed the way they did. He had bear paw mitts and looking at him you would have thought he’d be better suited to use crayons. When he picked up a sharpened pencil, he suddenly exhibited a deftness and neatness in his drawings that fairly screamed art student! Actually, his drawings owed more to structural engineering than art. He would produce a series of drawings, precise little bench press replications, each captured a different portion, a different point-in-time of the patented Fantano-style bench press. He would quickly and expertly sketch a stick figure lying on a bench and as he drew (left handed) he would verbally run down his approach.
His commentary was quiet, yet infused with insight and disconcertingly laced with the expert use of sailor profanity. It was spellbinding for those who understood bench pressing. “First mistake Mart: everyone lowers the barbell way too high on the chest. Way too close to the neck. We touch the bar low—way low—just above where the belly meets the sternum.” He would abandon Stick Man Drawing Number I and start on stick man bencher Number II, this one with the bar halfway to the chest, “All kinds of things happen as the bar is lowered…the legs are progressively loaded with more and more tension; the leg tension maxes as the bar touches the chest. We purposefully let the bar sink into the chest. We pull the weight into the torso, pause the sunken weight and when we hear the referee yell, PRESS! BAM! It’s on!” He zeroed in on the paused bar. “To commence the push, we jam the legs backwards hard towards the torso. The leg jolt continues into the torso, ending in the chest. We purposefully create a jolt. The jolt, timed right and executed with enough power and push, creates momentum where there was none.” He drew my attention to the legs of stickman II.
“A correct leg drive starts at the feet. It travels through the legs and ends up entering the prone torso. This sends a freaking shock wave through the torso Mart. We time the bar push to start at that exact instant when the leg shockwave passes into the torso and up and under the barbell. When the shock wave arrives at the barbell, the chest/shoulder/arm muscles contract explosively. The jolt is combined with an expansion of the chest and waist. As the chest is expanded the muscles of the shoulders, pecs and triceps are contracted. It launches the barbell skyward like it’s been shot out of a cannon Mart.”
Ken had learned how to expand his chest/waist so dramatically and powerfully that he literally ripped the rivets off specially made reinforced powerlifting belts, tearing the monster steel buckle clean off the thick leather. “The leg drive and chest/waist expansion and muscle contractions get the bar moving upward.” He was on to Phase III. “Now that we get the bar moving upward off the chest explosively—if you do it right Mart, the bar leaps off the chest. It all depends on the timing.” He paused to check and see if I was on his wavelength. I was. It was akin to being an actor watching DiNiro on The Actor’s Studio. Assured I was paying attention, he forged ahead. “As the bar leaves the chest and heads upward; we don’t push straight up we use a rearward arc-pathway. We move the bar, started off low on the chest, up and back, in a slow curve.”
Ken would draw a second barbell at lockout; this atop the drawing of the lifter with the barbell low on his chest at the start. He’d then draw a dotted arc line from the low-on-the-chest barbell at takeoff to the bar in the completed position. His explanation was genius to the informed. “The optimal arc should look like this…” He paused to sketch in the arc, “The arc means the angle of the upper arm doesn’t change or straighten through the first 7/8ths of the push. The elbow angle stays intact until the last 1/8th of the push.” Done with the written explanation he’d walk over to a bench and demonstrate. It all made perfect sense. Seeing him bench was pure poetry. His bench press nuances were subtle and teachable: his three training partners all had 600 pound bench presses.
Ken had equally iconic ideas about how to construct a long-range power training template. He took 20-24 weeks, training methodically to prepare for national competitions. Phase I took 12 weeks and was dedicated to elevating the athlete to the highest possible level of strength conditioning before embarking on the final pre-competition push known as Phase II. “We have Phase I goals and those goals are more important than Phase II goals. If you don’t make the Phase I goals, no matter what you do later, it’s not going to work. There’s no trick in the world that if you fail in Phase I you’re going shine at the meet.”
Ken felt heavy incline bench pressing with dumbbells was where he gained “all my muscle and strength for competitive benching.” The bench press, he felt, “is a technique lift. I built my bench press power using paused reps in the incline bench press.” He felt heavy incline pressing needed to be done using a specific procedure: “In the off season, during Phase I, we incline bench press for four sets of six reps.” In order to move poundage up, multiple sets with a top weight were required. “If you did four work sets using 100, 105, 110 and 115 pounds dumbbells for six reps in week 1, in week 2 you don’t get to move up to a pair of 120 pound bells on the top set. You won’t make it. Instead you go 105, 110 and two sets with the 115’s. The following week push the 105 pound bell then do three sets of six paused reps with the 115’s…NOW you’re ready for 105, 110, 115 and 120 x 6. You need to make three sets with the top poundage before you’re ready for the jump upward.”
All of Fantano’s flat benches and incline benches were paused on every rep of every set. Why? “If you don’t pause all the reps, you’re wasting your time. If you don’t have strength from a dead stop, muscle tissue won’t get thicker.” In his Phase I cycle prior to squatting 953x2, Ken front squatted 700 x 6 using a cross-hand grip. This told him his raw leg strength “was there” and laid the groundwork for a successful Phase II squatting regimen. On four successive Sundays leading up to the 1989 APF Senior Nationals he squatted 881x3, 913x2, 931x2 and 953x2. At the actual competition his designs on a 963 squat were derailed when he broke a rotator cuff on his 942 second attempt squat. Severely injured he still bench pressed 606 less than an hour later. His shoulder surgeon later told him he had bench pressed six hundred pounds “using one arm.”
Sunday Phase II training sessions could take four hours to complete. Fantano had specific ideas about rest periods between sets.
“We want to lift everything on a ‘calm heart.’ People don’t realize that to be a super strong person you have to always work in the anaerobic zone. If you don’t have nitrogen in your blood you don’t have nothing! You might as well go home.
To work in the aerobic zone is a waste of time; you want to gas the oxygen out of your system. You want to force your system to burn the oxygen up and force it to store more nitrogen—that’s why we hold our breath during an entire set.
Oxygen can’t help you, anyway. Breathing during a set is just a panic device. You breathe because you are scared or nervous. New oxygen takes 20 seconds to get to a muscle: we hold our breath, let the oxygen burn off, we want to use the nitrogen.”
When the nitrous oxide-infused Muscle Factory Boys rolled into their 8 to 12 week pre-competition Phase II cycle, the weights really started to fly. Prior to bench pressing 625x2 Ken finished his “light” Phase I benching cycle with 500 for 10 paused reps. He blasted up 565x6 paused reps on his heavy day. He was shooting for a 650 bench press at the competition and knew he would need to bench 625x2 in the gym. Normally a 625 double would convert into a 660 or 670x1 bench press; however having to squat 880, 940 and 965 at the meet prior to bench pressing would realistically knock 30 to 50 pounds off his competition bench press.
He started Phase II by bench pressing 500x6 using 5 second pauses between each rep. In successive weeks he pushed 510x6, 520x6, 530x6, 550x2, 575x2, 600x2 and 625x2. Immediately after bench pressing (on Wednesday) Ken performed “light” dumbbell inclines. He used a pair of 150’s and hit 2-3 sets of 10. He would always drive the bells “up and together in order to get the muscle contraction I am looking for.” After bench pressing and light inclines he would perform three sets of 3 reps in the close grip flat bench. He closed gripped 550 for three paused reps in the flat bench in the same workout he doubled 625. The Wednesday bench day workout would be concluded with 3-4 sets of 15-20 reps in the triceps pushdown: high rep, fast pace, complete lockout on each and every set. The Wednesday routine took 2-3 hours.
Jean Donat and Ken would stroll around the gym with their arm warmers looking like deranged street people. Soon Danny and others began wearing arm warmers. I just sat and drank beer and marveled at all the idiosyncratic anomalies. I’d seen a thousand weird things at Mark’s gym and in Hugh’s basement. Hugh once tried training using blue light bulbs for gym light after he’d read something in Scientific American about colored lights affecting athletic performance. I was witnessing New England flavored eccentricities.
Danny once yelled halfway through a bench session, “Hey Mart! Pick up the phone and order us a PIE from next door— that way it’ll be ready as soon as were done.” Mystified, I said, “A pie?! What kinda pie? Pecan? Apple? Banana Cream? The boys thought that was the funniest thing they’d ever heard. Pizza was called Pie in New York/New England. The boys thought I talked funny…which was odd because they talked exactly like the guys from the Sopranos, and this was 15 years before the Soprano’s were invented. Powerlifters spend a lot of time with each other and develop group identities. This leads to group psychosis and mad antics. As Mad Irish I fit right in with the West Haven crew.
Sunday was “Squat Day” at the Muscle Factory: the gym was closed to the public and entry was by invite only. The workouts were deadly simple and decidedly similar to what I had seen at Cassidy’s and Chaillet’s. The squat procedure was to take as many warm-ups as needed. Ken needed a lot: he had old knee and back injuries from athletics and he was guarded in his descents. He might take 10 warm-up sets before he would be ready for the three top squat work sets. The number of repetitions would be dependent on the nearness of the competition: never more than six reps, never fewer than two. The three work sets would be “poundage spaced” to replicate competitive condition.
If Ken, Jean or Dan were working up to 900x2 reps on a particular day, the three top sets might be 820x2, 860x1-2 and 900x2. This would roughly replicate a 1st, 2nd and 3rd attempt squat if they were hypothetically competing on that particular day. Like Ed Coan the Muscle Factory boys never did single reps in any lift. Ken and Jean didn’t wear bench shirts. “Too much of a hassle Mart.” Was Ken’s curt reply when I asked him why he gave away needless pounds to other competitors. The discomfort and aggravation of wearing the shirt was not worth the 30-40 pound bump the bench shirts of the day provided. On Sunday it could take four hours to train.
There was a methodical pace to these enduro sessions. The men would plow through the work using a mechanical approach. They wanted to lift on calm hearts and it might take five minutes or more for 300-plus pound men to recover from a giant weight and achieve the completely revitalized state.
There would be a big crowd, at least 10 guys. The squats were followed by deadlifts. Again the procedure was super simple: work up to a series of top sets, usually 2-3 rep sets. Ken and Dan were in the 700 deadlift club, but Jean had hands the size of Mary Kate Olson and could not hang on to anything past 620. They were serious about improving this obvious weak point and they worked the deadlift hard. The Sunday session took forever and it was all solid work. All were athletic and they pushed each other mercilessly. It was a great core group and a great lifter auxiliary. Crazed Dan wore a suit, wraps, and a belt on every single squat set, 135, 255, 345, 455, 545, 655, 745, 835 and 900. Why? “‘Cause I don’t want to use a single extra ounce of my available strength until I get to 900+.” Okay, but a 900 pound squat guy wearing knee wraps and squat suit on 135?! It smacked of psychological illness. Ken overheard me and said, “Don’t bother trying to talk no sense to him Mart—he’s got cement for brains.”
Dorian Yates marched to the beat of a profoundly different drummer. Aptly nicknamed, “The Diesel,” Yates was iconoclastic in the truest sense. During his formative teenage years he was swept up by the street turmoil of the English punk rock scene. Fueled by reggae, The Clash and the youthful nihilism and disen-franchisement of the era, he became “a troubled youth” and was actually introduced to weight training in reform school. He was the embodiment of the classical English Hard Man and grew up wild; the archetypical alpha male, cruising the tough streets of Birmingham. He and his street mates might engage in soccer hooliganism or become embroiled in “dust-ups” with rivals or civilians that didn’t demonstrate proper deference. As Elton wrote,
I’m the juvenile product Of the working class, Whose best friend Floats in the bottom of a glass…
Somewhere along the way Dorian found physical and psychological solace in the intense solitude of intense weight training. He began redirecting his incoherent rage from the street to the gym. He discovered he possessed an uncanny ability to effortlessly impose rigid self-discipline. He became an Iron Monk. He immersed himself in the fringe sport of competitive bodybuilding and discovered he was genetically and psychologically predisposed towards it. He melded and shaped his body with an ease that flabbergasted his gym peers.
Isaac Stern once said of Mozart, “In a single nine month period at age fourteen he composed five violin sonatas; the maturity between the 1st and 5th represented thirty years of growth.” Dorian Yates underwent a bodybuilding version of Mozart’s musical metamorphosis. He rose from obscurity to world class in an amazingly short amount of time. In 1991 he took second place at the Mr. Olympia, bodybuilding’s Superbowl. In 1992 Yates’ reign of utter and complete dominance commenced. Dorian won the Olympia title six successive years starting in 1992.
From the start he stood defiantly apart from the bodybuilding establishment in every aspect of his life, training and approach. The epicenter of the bodybuilding universe was, is, and forever shall be, Southern California. While the Southern California scene provides a terrific environment for those who want to center their entire existence on bodybuilding, that which makes it attractive also generates sameness in terms of the final finished physical products. Most of the top SoCal bodybuilders used the same nutritional and training methods and for this reason the top pros tended to look pretty much the same. As a result of this physical echo chamber there emerged a definable group with no major physical differences. This coterie of physique champions clustered together and became infected with inside-the-box group think. There was one glaring exception: the super symmetrical Flex Wheeler. He was awesome and formidable.
Dorian Yates was the antithesis of West Coast bodybuilding. He lived in dreary, overcast Birmingham, England ensconced in a dank dungeon. He trained and ate in a radically different way; completely counter to California bodybuilding. As a result he built a body unlike anyone else.
When Dorian took second place to Lee Haney in 1991 he weighed 239 pounds. He made his bones by coming in large and in “ripped” condition. He likely carried a 4% body fat percentile. Yates’ symmetry and shape, while good, was not great. What set him apart that night was excellent size and astounding muscular condition; the best in the competition. In 1992 Dorian captured his first Olympia title weighing 242 pounds. He was infinitesimally better than the previous year. He had the same great condition with a few added pounds of muscle and it was a nice win.
The California professionals were uniformly unimpressed and began making disparaging remarks about the new Mr. Olympia, stating that his reign would last a single year and he should be grateful that he had won a single Sandow Statue. The following year, the intellegensia concluded, the competition would be held stateside, in Atlanta, not in some gawd-foresaken dump like Helsinki, Finland where Dorian had won. Then the rightful reign of the West Coast men would commence.
Yates heard the smack talk back in Birmingham and used the disparaging remarks to generate a cold fury that fueled his training sessions. He went deep into the proverbial Iron Woodshed. When he emerged, he had transformed himself from a large, extremely well conditioned bodybuilder into a gargantuan, ripped-to-shreds mega-monster. He was huge, bigger than anyone when viewed from front, side or back. He was now the biggest and the most muscular bodybuilder in the world. The moment he strode onstage at the 1993 Mr. Olympia contest, all the other bodybuilders knew that the only battle was for 2nd and 3rd place.
Yates was striated and defined; every tiny muscle visible beneath what appeared to be translucent skin. He was now the biggest and the most fat-free bodybuilding in the world. Yates had added 20 pounds of pure muscle in twelve months, unheard of at these stratospheric levels where men are already at 99% of their genetic capacity. Dorian blew up to just under 300 pounds in the off-season while not allowing his body fat to rise above 10%, even at his heaviest bodyweight. He carved that massive mound of muscle into a 260 pound piece of human marble.
At the professional level, bodybuilders are already at the peak of their awesome genetic potential and improvement is measured in tiny steps. A bodybuilder might be able to lean out a bit, or perhaps over the course of a good year add 3 to 5 pounds of muscle. This would represent a significant bodyweight increase if muscular clarity and crispness were maintained. For an Olympia winner to add twenty pounds of lean mass while actually improving muscular delineation was unprecedented.
The shock waves first hit when the December 1993 issue of Flex Magazine appeared featuring photos of Yates weighing 271 pounds. He displayed definition nearly matching what he had exhibited in Helsinki weighing 239. He whittled down to 257 pounds for the Atlanta Olympia and pounded the competition into dust. The Diesel ran over the competition with such yawning ease that no further smack talk was heard from the West Coast elite. Another reign was underway. Lee Haney managed a record eight straight wins and Dorian Yates picked right up where Lee left off, racking up six straight Olympia wins.
Film noir literally means “black film” in French and features themes that are uniformly negative. The feel is always dark and shadowy and purposefully filmed in black and white. Most noir stories feature main characters who find themselves embroiled in hopeless situations, fighting against forces that threaten them.
In 1999 Dorian Yates made the greatest bodybuilding training film of all time, appropriately named Blood & Guts. It was unintentional film noir at its best. Dorian and his savage training partner, the incendiary Leroy, video taped their exact workouts, exercise by exercise, set by set, rep by rep, for an entire week of training. Not a word of commentary or explanation from Dorian. No charts, no graphs, no product whoring, no nothing other than the indomitable Dorian powering through four workouts. The stark black and white photography is crisp and grim. The setting is Yates’ infamous Temple Street Gym, a claustrophobic downstairs dungeon with damp walls, cracked plaster, ill lighting, musty old exercise machines and tons of free weights.
Silent, stoic, stolid, grim and intense, Yates plowed through these brutal workouts. His workouts more resemble an Ed Coan power training session at Quads Gym in Chicago than a Southern California pump & preen session using pee-wee poundage. This is grim stuff; Yates pushes 425 for 6 reps in the incline press before Leroy steps in and provides an additional agonizing forced rep. Watch as Dorian does arms curls. Watch as Leroy provides barely enough impetus to keep the final reps moving. In another snippet, Dorian readies himself prior to pulling 400+ in the barbell row. He chides himself, saying out loud “It’s a big weight—for a little woman!” With that he strides forward and pulverizes the poundage. Leroy, a former army drill sergeant, screams at the top of his lungs in indecipherable military profanity using a street-seasoned cockney accent that would scare the shit out of Tony Soprano.
“Let’s get Nasty! C’mon Mr. Yates, the one who’s in all the BLOODY MAG-A-ZINES! Pull and squeeze. DIG DEEP! LET’S GO!— MIGHTY PULL! AGAIN!! ALL YOU—NOW ANOTHER—PULL! ONE MORE! MIGHTY PULL! AGAIN!!!”
Spittle flies from Leroy’s mouth as Yates inhales the exhortations and uses pent-up psychological fury to finish rep after rep. It is chilling, terrifying, painful and inspiring to watch…see Dorian finish the 12th rep with 1265 pounds in the leg press, then cry out in pain as Leroy blows off Dorian’s “Sissy talk!” He exhorts Dorian to do yet another. Watch as Yates throws caution to the wind. He let’s out a war whoop, unlocks his quivering legs and in fact does do yet another rep, barely locking out even with Leroy’s help.
My friend, muscle writer supreme, Julian Schmidt, major domo at Flex Magazine, told me that during the filming the camera crew told Dorian that they had inadvertently messed up filming a top set of a particular exercise. They asked that he stage a re-shoot; he told them without hesitation, “Well I suppose you’ll just have to return next week when I do that exercise again because I don’t stage anything!” And so they did. Dorian weighed 295 pounds in the film and was so gargantuan that he appeared inhuman. His technical execution was beyond reproach.
Blood & Guts is pure genius: why talk to death that which can be far better understood by watching? Why spend 20 minutes talking about how to do a proper 70 degree barbell row when everything can be made clear by watching the perfection master perform the 70 degree row? Why talk about workout pace, show it. Show full range-of-motion, show technical subtlety, show good spotting, show the meaning of true workout intensity, show the meaning of the teeth-grinding effort required to trigger muscle hypertrophy.
Everything can be communicated so much better by showing: demonstrate how the real deal looks when done by the very best in the world as they actually ply their trade. You could watch Blood & Guts with the sound turned off and come away knowing every important lesson there is to know about building gigantic muscles. You come to understand that in order to build muscle you must work hard enough to trigger muscle hypertrophy. Going through the motions builds nothing of any consequence.
In 1996 I was the lead correspondent at the Chicago Olympia for Muscle & Fitness Magazine. I sat in the front row and would write the competition coverage and additionally interview the winner the next day to write a body part training article. I watched with glee as Dorian crushed the competition yet again. I wrote the feature lead on the competition in about 20 minutes and was really excited about the next day. I would be with a guy I really admired and was doing the body part feature article on what I considered his greatest physical attribute, his back. This was gonna be great.
After being put up in a penthouse suite; after seeing the prejudging and the Olympia finals from the front row; after having walked backstage into an atmosphere so strained and tense you could cut it with a knife; I would get to meet with the champ Sunday morning. I would be with Dorian for a lengthy photo shoot; interview him, write up a back training article and catch a plane home later that day. I made a lot of dough that weekend for the privilege of grilling one of my idols on what I wanted to know about most: how in the hell did you build a back like that? Dorian’s back training photo shoot began at 10 am and went on for for hours. It was obviously draining but important: the two articles would be multi-page magazine feature pieces.
I was fortunate enough to see him in tiptop shape that morning, up close and personal, he actually looked better than he did the previous night. After winning the Olympia the previous night, he could not party. If he had eaten or drank anything he would lose his perfect condition and ruin the back-to-back photo sessions scheduled for the next morning. As soon as he was finished with the back body part photo shoot Dorian had to roll right into another body part photo shoot with a different photographer. I actually felt sorry for him.
I arrived early and he invited me to sit with him as the camera crew set up. He munched on a dry bagel and looked drawn and very tired. It had to be torturous to win the Olympia and not even be able to drink a beer or have a good meal afterwards. We would talk between exercise shots about his training. Leroy and Steve Weinberger were there to assist. Yates was very short and obstinate towards the photographers, but exceedingly nice to me. They were trying to get him to lift gargantuan poundage to make the photos look more dramatic and he was having none of it. A lone 45 pound plate on each side of the barbell or machine was all he would allow. The photographers were being pressured by headquarters to use massive weights and were tearing their hair out in frustration. Dorian also insisted on wearing the elbow warmers that he always wore for every single workout.
He told me he weighed 261 and standing 5’10” with an incredible tan, his skin appeared transparent. Every time he lifted his arm to take a bite of bagel, muscle and sinew shot across his forearm, upper arm and deltoids in waves. When he chewed, all the muscles of his face were visible and rolled in syncopation with every bite. His lower back and glutes were so stripped of fat that with every step cross striations appeared. He was at once, the most muscular and most defined human I had ever seen, before or since. He liked the two articles I had written about him in the past year. One article discussed the similarities between his training and that of Ed Coan. The other article talked about how he was whipping West Coast ass. He found the Coan article “fascinating stuff.” He later gave my book on Ed Coan a great endorsement. My article on Dorian’s back attack “wrote itself.” I finished it on the plane ride home.
His body on that day was pure perfection. To see this great champion up close and personal after a steamroller win was fabulous. Yates was known for his single-minded dedication and would famously duck out of social events early saying, “I hate to part good company, but tomorrow is leg day and I need to go home and rest.”
During his reign Dorian was the antithesis of a glad-handing ego maniac craving attention. Quite the contrary: he was a man of few words and at competitive events was ominous and unapproachable. One year I was at the Olympia and as I sat eating lunch with Julian Schmidt, The Diesel and his posse strode through the restaurant. They stopped for no one; they were on the move. The eatery, crammed with elite bodybuilders, came to a complete halt for “The Man” and his Praetorians. No back slapping or greetings were offered or given. He avoided eye contact with everyone. He happened to glance in our direction and saw the two of us. He stopped and his crew pulled up. “Jul-eye-an…Martee.” He said. He gave the two of us the slightest of nods and the faintest of smiles then wheeled around and his muscle armada continued onward. One boneheaded bodybuilding pro card holder yelled over at us, “DAMN! I have been saying hello to that big bitch for five years and he’s never so much as smiled or acknowledged I existed! Who in the hell are you guys!”
It was a scene as I imagined it might have been in feudal Japan when a Shogun Samurai chieftain passed through a village. He had far more detractors and enemies than friends within the cloistered world of bodybuilding. Many bodybuilders are narcissists, adulation junkies that crave attention and applause. Not the iconoclastic Yates. For Dorian Yates the process was the reward. Competition was the requisite report card. In a sea of sameness, he stood out like a unicorn amongst a herd of sheep.
Dorian Yates trained four days a week. He would hit each body part once a week hard and heavy and allow that body part to rest for a full week. He worked up to one all-out set, usually in the 6 to 8 rep range before having Leroy step in and administer additional forced reps.
Prototypical Purposeful Primitive
Kirk Karwoski captured seven straight National Championships, six straight IPF World Powerlifting titles and got bored with it all. One evening at Maryland Athletic Club at about the time of year he would normally need to start serious preparation for the upcoming National Championships, training partner Bob Myers, and I reflexively tried to convince Kirk to mount yet another assault. We wanted him to win a eighth National and seventh World title. He informed us that he was bored to tears with the entire process and would not mount another campaign. It was final: he was “all done.” The title was his for the taking. He had built up such a huge cushion over the rest of the world-level lifters that the “flee” phenomenon was occurring.
The flee phenomenon is when a particular lifter becomes so dominant within a weight division that the other contenders within that division “flee” to the next weight class either up or down to avoid the dominator. At that time, the only other IPF lifters in the world that inflicted the flee phenomenon were Ed Coan, Dan Austin and Gene Bell. Kirk was causing 275 pound lifters to add a few pounds and become heavyweights or drop down to the 242 pound class.
I suggested that Kirk might spice up the process by lifting at the World Championships wearing no supportive equipment. “What if you won the World Championships wearing no squat suit, no knee wraps, no bench shirt, and just a belt? Hell, you could still squat 850, bench 500 and pull 775 for 2125!” He steadfastly refused.
I had another idea. “What if you won the World Championships without training for it?” Kirk looked puzzled, Bob too was puzzled. The three of us stood in the main weight room at Maryland Athletic Club in winter of 1997. I related my “No Training” angle. “Has anyone in the history of the world ever won a National or World title in any sport without training for it? I think NOT! In other words, without any training at all you could still squat 825 wearing gear—am I right?” Kirk thought a minute and nodded. Encouraged I continued. “You could certainly bench press 475 using a shirt? Hell, you could roll out of bed in the morning and do that—right?” Kirk nodded. I delivered my closer: “And you can certainly deadlift 750 anywhere, anytime! So why not skip training! Take off completely! Show up at the Nationals, total 2075, win and get selected for the World Championship team! Now that would be a freaking first!” I was fired up and I loved the pure gonzo weirdness of the idea. I wasn’t done. “Then…still not training…show up at the World Championships, total 2100 and win a world title! All without ever setting foot in the gym!” Bob and I hi-fived each other: Genius! Become the first National and World Powerlifting Champion to win without training for an entire year!
Kirk had had enough of our hair-brained ideas. Big Bob looked like Bluto trying to cheer up Flounder in Animal House by breaking a beer bottle over his head. Karowski got hot. “No, No, NO FREAKING WAY! NO!” I’M ALL DONE! Look: I’ve had it! I can’t stand the idea of training—or not training—I’m sick of powerlifting and want out. Why am I going to go through all the trouble and aggravation? So I can do this?” Kirk took his left hand, licked his index finger and made an imaginary line on an imaginary chalk board. He wanted no more notches on his pistol handle. He left and that was the end of his complete domination of national and international powerlifting in the 275 pound class.
As this is being written, ten years after his retirement that night in MAC, Kirk still holds the IPF World Record in the squat at 1,003 pounds. His 2,306 World Record total was only recently exceeded and that was completely attributable to the allowing of bench shirts that inflate bench presses by 40%. In Karwoski’s day, his bench shirt added 40 pounds to his bench press—not 40%. Had he worn the shirts allowable today, his 595 pound bench press would have turned into 700 and his total would jump for 2300 to 2450.
I worked with Kirk from the time he was 18 years old and over the subsequent decade helped guide him from being a really good lifter to a hall of fame power immortal. My role was that of a strategist and coach. When I started helping him, he was a tremendous squatter, albeit wild and inconsistent. He was not dropping his squats deep enough. Over time we developed a squat style that fit his unique proportions. I took him to bench press master Ken Fantano for help on his lagging bench press. Pre-Ken, Kirk was a 440 pound bench presser and had been stuck there for almost two years. Ken showed Kirk the Fantano technique and Kirk took to it immediately. He eventually bench pressed 600 using the patented, low touch-point, integrated leg drive style.
He worked the hell out of his deadlift and despite having the smallest hands I’ve ever seen on a big time lifter, he eventually pulled 800 for a dead-stop double and 825x1 without straps. He never duplicated these pulls in competition: his humongous squats affected his deadlifts to such an extent that he was unable to register more than 771. (He pulled 777 at 242 after a relatively light 826 squat.) His 950 to 1000 pound squats wreaked havoc on his pull power and 771 was all he could manage after walking out and squatting 940+ three times, as he would do in a competitive powerlift competition.
Kirk Karwoski succeeded because he had a fierce single-minded focus and a maniacal determination to be the best. He had a demonic work ethic and was a smart trainer. For ten years he centered his entire existence on powerlifting. His laser-beam focus paid huge dividends. Kirk totally revamped his physique.
At one point early in his career he was so disproportional and bottom-heavy he was called T-Rex. With huge thighs, huge calves and huge glutes, he had a smallish, underdeveloped torso and short arms. He looked as if God had accidentally grafted a 190 pound bodybuilder’s torso onto a 350 pound football offensive tackle’s lower body. Kirk looked like one of those mythical creatures, a half man/half horse Satyr. It was obvious why he was a great squatter and equally obvious why his bench press was okay and why his deadlift lagged so far behind.
He was his own worst critic and had a gift for seeing things as they truly were. It took five years to bring his torso into proportional balance with his massive lower body. Most men continually play to their strengths and avoid addressing weaknesses. Not Kirk, he ultimately achieved muscular balance because he steadfastly attacked his weak points. His approach towards training stayed basically the same throughout his career.
I broke my leg in 1983 and turned my full attention to coaching. I had been working with Mark Chaillet, Ed Coan and Doug Furnas when Kirk approached me. He was a kid that I had first met at Marshall Peck’s basement gym in rural Forestville, Maryland. At the time Kirk was a very junior guy among a crew of hard-ass men…. Joe Povinale, Joe Ferry, Jeff B., Frank H, Pat Brooks from Baltimore, Pete Lumia…we’d gather and train all three lifts on a single day in long extended power sessions. Kirk was there, and already had a reputation for being a good squatter and not much else. Had someone told that crew back then that this kid would become one of the greatest powerlifters of all time, he would have been laughed out of the room.
Kirk could squat, though not as much as the guys at Marshalls. Jeff B for example could double 550 in the bench press without a bench shirt weighing 265. Lots of us had dead-lifted 700-plus. We continually goaded and challenged Kirk. Marshall bet him he couldn’t squat 500x10 without gear and within a month he did it. Even back then he rose to challenges. After we all gravitated to Chaillet’s Gym, Kirk dropped out for a while to play college football and while he liked playing ball and the college coeds, he couldn’t get his head wrapped around the books.
He got a great job as a Union Pressman and settled in. He bought a small condo and worked his union job. He’d get off at 4 every day and stayed in this groove for the next decade. Kirk wanted to lift in the Big Leagues, the USPF/IPF. I told him his squat depth wasn’t near low enough. He held all kinds of records in the fledgling ADFPA, but in the USPF squats had to be unquestionably below parallel. Plus the level of competition in the 242 pound class was stratospheric: Thor Kritsky had played football at Virginia Tech with Bruce Smith; Dave Jacoby was the dominant 242er in the World; Willie Bell was a stud with an 800-plus deadlift; and Joe Ladiner was positively frightening…the 242 pound class was a meat grinder.
Still, he was the hottest young prospect on the scene. So we went to our first USPF nationals. He promptly bombed out: three straight squats, nine reds lights, and bam! He was gone! The next year the same thing: another bomb out! The following year we yet tried again. He was insistent about starting with 804 in the squat, a Junior World Record. I tried to talk him into starting lower, but he would hear none of it. His first attempt squat was turned down 2 to 1. Still, he had gotten one white light. His second attempt was turned down 2 to 1. He flipped out and threatened mayhem. He told me point blank that if he missed his third squat and suffered the embarrassment of bombing out in his third straight National Championships he would quit powerlifting forever. He was super serious and I believed him.
As we stood at the chalk box prior to the do-or-die attempt, he chalked his hands. I chalked his back to keep the bar from slipping and happened to notice Ed Coan and Doug Furnas sitting in the front row. All of a sudden they started laughing about something totally unrelated, I quickly jabbed Kirk, hard in the ribs, and said, “LOOK! Look at Furnas and Coan—they’re LAUGHING AT YOU!” He looked over at his idols and instantly morphed into a demon. He finished chalking his hands and continued to glare at the dynamic duo of Doug and Ed. As they finished laughing at their private joke, they coincidentally happened to look at Kirk and I at the chalk box, their smiles still lingered on their faces, their shared joke must have been a funny one. The look on Kirk’s face went from nervous, disjointed and apprehensive to a look of pure evil. Hatred cubed. “I’LL TEACH THOSE SON-OF-A-BITCHES NOT TO LAUGH AT ME!!!” He yelled. With that he stormed to the platform in front of a packed house and attacked the 804 like a maniac.
It would be nice to say he slaughtered the poundage and made it look easy…but I can’t…it was absolutely agonizing. Kirk did something he had never done before; he took the barbell all the way down to parallel, his usual turnaround point…then he took the poundage down another 3-4 inches—way below parallel—before he began an ascent that was so slow, so horrific, so excruciating, so intense and torturous that the jaded, seen-it-all Mike Lambert, powerlifting’s major domo and guru, later called this particular attempt, “The single most difficult lift I have ever witnessed in my entire life.”
Finished, Karwoski collapsed coming off the platform. The judge’s lights came on…one white…one red… (“Oh SHIT! I heard him moan) then…a second white light! Pandemonium ensued! The auditorium went nuts! He had set a Junior World Record, stayed in the competition, placed third at the end of the day and went on to become one of the greatest powerlifters in history. We came within one red light of having him quit the sport altogether. Later on Ed came up and asked, “What the hell was going on with The Kid on that last attempt? He looked insane!” I shook my head and said, “I owe it all to you and Doug.” Ed looked baffled. “Call it elemental child psychology.” I said. The boy became a man that day.
Kirk was a methodical, determined, patient and intelligent trainer who took a long-term approach and never went crazy in training. Towards the end of his illustrious career, he never missed a rep over an entire 12 week cycle in any lift. Can you imagine? A man sits down with a pencil and paper four months prior to a National or World Championship, writes out the projected poundage, reps and sets for every single session for every workout for the next twelve straight weeks then never misses a single predetermined rep!
His prognostications were so realistic, his self-assessment abilities so accurate, he was so devoid of training ego and wishful thinking, that in each and every one of his four weekly workouts for each successive week, week in week out, he never missed anything. And it wasn’t like he was handling pee-wee poundage and yawning his way through the workouts. Prior to his World Record squat of 1,003 his last five successive training weeks produced the following top squat sets: 900x5, 940x3, 960x2 980x2, 1000x2.
Interestingly, he used virtually the identical training template as Ed Coan, at least insofar as the workout structure. He was not near as comprehensive in his attention to the assistance exercises as Ed was, still Kirk’s similarity to Coan’s training template was no accident. I conversed weekly with Ed for years and purposefully infused Kirk’s training template with Coan’s ideas and strategies.
Kirk would take 12 weeks to prepare: week 1-2 he would work up to one top set of 8; weeks 3-8 work up to a 5 rep top set; weeks 9-12 a 3,3,2 and 2.
Ed, Doug and Kirk all felt that the 5 rep set, be it squat, bench press or deadlift, was the key to power and strength success. Each of these men sought to become as strong as possible in the key lifts in their 5 rep sets. Initially, each would use as little equipment and gear as possible, then as they moved deeper into the power cycle, they would add supportive gear in conjunction with dropping the repetitions. Each man felt that the key was becoming strong as possible in 5 rep sets without gear. When it was time to power train, they would be perfectly positioned to exceed previous bests. This love of 5 rep sets resonated with what I learned from Iron Scribe John McCallum, and later in my power apprenticeship with Hugh Cassidy. Hugh, Doug, Ed and Kirk all loved the 5 rep set. Ed, Doug and Kirk had squat “bests” of 900 x 5.
I’ve seen a lot of great strength feats in my day: I stood twenty feet from Lee Moran when he squatted 1000 at a Pacifico competition in Dayton. Lee had a disastrous previous attempt when he came within an inch of being blasted in the kneecaps by five hundred pounds. A collar had not been tightened in the rush to get the weight ready for the World Record attempt and as Lee stepped back and set up, his side-to-side movement caused the loose collar to break away and the weights slid off one side of the barbell before anyone could do jack about it. The heavy left side, suddenly without equal counterweight, whipped downward around Lee’s neck, a stumpy 22 inch fulcrum. The net effect was pure chaos and I had the perfect vantage point.
After a 25, 45 and a gold hundred pound plate fell to the ground, the imbalanced barbell, way heavier on one side, spun around Lee’s neck and slung gold plates slingshot style over Lee’s head. In rapid succession 100 pound plates were catapulted in the general direction of the audience. You have never seen people scatter so fast. By the time the 1st hundred pound plate landed there wasn’t a human being within thirty feet. The 330 pound Hell’s Angel leapt backward with the agility of Mikhail Baryshnikov executing a leaping twirl during the Nutcracker. He had to or he would have been slammed in the knees with the still secured 500 pounds.
The 45 pound bar whizzed around his neck and grazed a spotter’s head. After the pandemonium died down MC Tony Carpino said to the packed auditorium, “WHAT THE F*&K JUST HAPPENED!” Lee composed himself and came back and made the lift on his subsequent attempt. I worked with Doug Furnas on successive occasions when he became the 1st man to total 2400 twice. At the first competition we basked in Maui and at the second we froze in Minnesota. I worked with the incomparable Coan for a decade and assisted him in whatever way he deemed appropriate. We worked together at National and World competitions.
You ‘assist’ you don’t ‘coach’ men like Coan, Furnas, Chaillet, Karwoski, Jacoby, Lamar or Mike Hall. I assisted Ed when he posted the highest total ever (at the time) regardless of bodyweight. Ed was the greatest lifter I have ever seen, with the possible exception of Paul Anderson. I have assisted all-time great lifters like Lamar Gant, Dan Wohleber, Dan Austin, Joe Ladiner, Mike Hall, Dave Jacoby, Phil Hile, John Black and Bob Bridges during national and international competition. The point is—I’ve been around. I’m grizzled and tough to impress and I thought my time was over insofar as bearing witness to truly amazing strength occurrences. I was wrong.
Through a weird combination of chance and circumstance I bore witness to yet another absolutely incredible, all-time strength feat. It was an amazing display of pure hellacious strength. On December 9th, 2004 I assisted Kirk Karwoski when he totaled 2066 in the three power lifts wearing nothing, but a lifting belt. It was a retro-throwback powerlift festival staring Captain Kirk Karwoski in his first public lifting appearance in eight years. Physically he had never looked better: he lifted in the 242 pound class and was shredded and ripped. Through a combination of muscle maturity and low body fat, his arms and legs rippled and roiled with every step. Like a lifting Ulysses, Kirk had been away from power-lifting for nearly a decade and everything changed in the interim. At this competition, the AAU World Championship held in Laughlin, Nevada, Kirk went backwards in time. Rather than ‘gear up’ he decided to ‘gear down.’ He made eight out of nine lifts and started things off with a squat exhibition.
In staggering succession he made squats of 749, 804 and finally an explosive 826 pound effort. He wore a loose tee shirt and a wrestling singlet. Kirk experienced a severe thigh pull on his final squat with 826. On the previous 804 he barely averted a total wipeout. He lost concentration and tension on the descent for a split-second and his lapse caused him to be pushed downward way past his normal turnaround point. He caught himself and through sheer willpower and guts pushed 804 to completion. His post-lift analysis was that he had ‘set up’ with his feet slightly narrow. This gut-buster lift took a lot out of him and the selection of 826 pounds on his 3rd was conservative. Had the 804 gone the way it should, 840 was to have been the 3rd attempt. The 826 actually went a whole lot better than 804.
As Chuck Deluxe would say using another of his endless football analogies “Kirk ‘jus needed to get the snot knocked out of him to clear his head.” Karwoski took the 826 down quickly and exploded it upward from 3 inches below parallel to ¾’s erect. As he pushed through the sticking point, the vastus internus on his right thigh tore. He actually heard a noise. He recalled that, “I heard it {the thigh muscle} go ‘pop,’ but I was through the hard part and I was not going to lose this weight after getting 2/3rd erect.” This lift was a thing of beauty; pure athletic poetry in motion, 8-and-a-quarter squatted deep and explosive by a guy weighing 239 in a lifting belt and nothing else. This was as fine a lift as I’d ever witnessed by anyone anywhere.
In the bench press Kirk made an explosive 446 opener and a fine 463 second before experiencing his only miss of the entire competition: a 479 3rd attempt bench press. He had trained hurt. “I had been nursing a torn rotator cuff for the last ten weeks. It was a work-related injury, nothing to do with training, and before injuring it I had bench pressed 500 with a pause without a shirt.” Kirk said. “Even injured I had hoped for a double body weight 480 pound bench press.” This was not to be.
The deadlift would be touch and go on account of the thigh injury. He decided to dramatically curtail the number of deadlift warm-ups. Julie Scanlon, Kirk’s Lady, and myself, were his only handlers. We applied ice to the injury, but it would be anyone’s guess if he would be able to deadlift effectively. He felt confident of being able to pull 705 regardless how bad the leg hurt. The competition was dragging on and on and on, and fatigue was becoming a real factor. His opening 705 deadlift “felt ok.” His second attempt with 749 felt better than 705. The thigh injury was not a factor, but fatigue might be his undoing. Kirk had taken his first squat at 10 am and pulled his final successful deadlift, 776 pounds, at 7pm, a full nine hours later.
I remember way back when Kirk was campaigning as a kid 242 pound lifter, going against hall of fame guys like Dave Jacoby, Willie Bell and Thor Kritsky. Kirk was a young man trying to break into the ranks of the true champions and we were in shock-and-awe over the poundage these men were lifting. Clean, legal lifts wearing single ply squat suits, standard length knee wraps and single-ply bench shirts. That was twelve years ago. Kirk was now matching those awesome lifts made by those awesome men without wearing any supportive gear! At age 38 Karwoski’s lifting was truly transcendental.
While still a young lifter, Kirk had been campaigning as a 240 pound lifter. He let his bodyweight increase to a full 275 pounds and really came into his own. When super-heavyweight champion Mike Hall unexpectedly dropped out of the National Championships at the last minute in 1990, Kirk and I thought our chances would be better in the super heavyweight division instead of lifting against Calvin Smith, the National Champ at 275. Karwoski captured his first National Championship as a super-heavyweight. At the 1990 IPF World Championships, Smith and Karwoski switched classes and Kirk lifted against The Fearsome Finn, three-time World Champion, Kyosti Vilmi. Karwoski electrified the crowd in his true coming out party.
US head coach Sean Scully called Karwoski’s battle with Vilmi, “One of the most exciting lifting performances I’ve ever witnessed.” Vilmi pulled his final deadlift to beat Kirk by a scant 5 pounds. I kicked myself in the ass for not having made the trip. As his longtime coach I felt my presence would have certainly been good for 5 pounds. I vowed to make the trip the following year. In Orebro, Sweden the very next year, I was present as a US team coach when Karwoski easily captured the first of six straight IPF world titles, including one at 242. The other five were as a 275 pound lifter. Kirk won seven straight national titles, including one at 242 and one as a super heavyweight. I was his coach at every national championship, including his final when he squatted 1003 and totaled 2303. Both were world records.
After winning his sixth straight world title, circumstance and boredom caused him to retire from powerlifting. He went into business with his parents. He had worked a union job for nine years. He leapt into the private sector and the 60 hour workweeks that go with it. In the subsequent years he contented himself by training and coaching. I saw him at a party and thought he looked really good at his reduced body weight. I suggested that he consider posting a ‘raw’ total. The idea of lifting raw intrigued him, but he did not want to compete. “I have zero interest in competing against others or winning titles or trophies. I would like an opportunity to lift in front of strict judging without wearing power gear of any type.” Karwoski came through in the clutch per usual. Let us hope that we haven’t seen the last of Karwoski’s exploits. Regardless, 2,066 weighing 239 pounds without any gear is one hell of an accomplishment.
