THE GOLDEN AGE PROGRAMME FOR SIZE AND STRENGTH: PT.1

You asked for it, and here it is: a modern lifting programme based on Golden Age lifting principles and nutrition, in five parts

Reg Park: the man who mentored Arnold; the first bodybuilder to bench press 500lb; and the man who inspired this programme

A number of people have been asking me about how I train and whether I could put together a programme based on the principles I follow. Here it is, in five parts: an Introduction; History of the 5x5; Programme; Progression Guide; and Nutrition and How To Record Your Progress. This is everything you need, as far as I’m concerned, to build a tremendously solid base of size and strength in the Golden Age manner. You don’t have to have one or the other: you can have both.

I’ve written at great length about Golden Age bodybuilders — bodybuilders from the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, roughly speaking — and how they trained, ate and lived their lives. My second and third books Three Lives of Golden Age Bodybuilders and Draw Me a Gironda focus on four bodybuilders in particular: Reg Park, Chuck Sipes, Chet Yorton and Vince Gironda (the man with the laser eyes in my avatar, in case you didn’t know). These four men have determined the way I train more than any others, and I’ve drawn on their routines and principles here, but especially the 5x5 routine of Reg Park. At the same time, I haven’t hesitated to draw on more recent techniques and routines to add some spice and variation to my own workouts and to help me break through strength plateaus.

So welcome to the very first of five instalments, where you’ll learn all about the programme you’ll be following.

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Preliminaries:

WHO YOU ARE: A beginner or intermediate lifter.

WHAT YOU’LL NEED: A minimum of equipment: bench, squat rack, barbell with weights and dumbbells. The programme is ideal for a home gym or you can go to a commercial gym. You’ll also need a journal or spreadsheet programme to record your progress, a camera to take progress photos, and a scale to weigh yourself.

TIME COMMITMENT: All things being equal, the course should be pursued for a minimum of twelve months for a beginner lifter and six months for an intermediate. You can continue the programme for as long as it brings results. You will perform three whole-body workouts a week.

Introduction

Welcome to Muscle Beach in the Golden Age

Of all the eras of modern bodybuilding, it’s the Golden Age that still retains the widest appeal, for a variety of reasons. For one thing, bodybuilders from the Golden Age – let’s say from the end of the Second World War to the mid-1970s – still looked like beautiful human beings. The ideals they pursued were still in alignment with the great aesthetic principles laid down by the ancient Greeks, rather than the absurd principle of “mass for the sake of mass” which has animated bodybuilding in recent decades and produced men whose physiques look like an assortment of tumours grafted one on top of another. Nobody could look at someone like Vince Gironda in his posing trunks and say, “That man had a mental illness”, even if they might question the wisdom or whatever of dedicating one’s life to achieving such a physique.

The Golden Age was important for other reasons as well. The founding principles and practices of bodybuilding were established and codified then — progressive overload, exercises like the bench press, the use of protein shakes, etc. — the great competitions were founded — the Mr Universe, the Mr Olympia, etc. — the hallowed locations were hallowed — Gold’s Gym, Vince’s Gym, Muscle Beach — and, not least of all, the most enduring legends of the sport were created, men like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Frank Zane, Franco Columbo and Lou Ferrigno. No bodybuilder today will ever have the cultural impact these men had.

There is still so much we can learn from the Golden Age of bodybuilding, especially if our goal is to build a balanced aesthetic physique that has the important quality of being strong. While drug use was common even then, the way Golden Age bodybuilders trained will translate tremendously well for the natural lifter. It’s certainly worked for me. The common focus on developing strength as a basis for a powerful athletic physique just works, plain and simple.