THE OG: Getting Kicked out of Vince's Gym

There were many reasons you could get kicked out of Vince's Gym, all of them informative for our purposes

Welcome back, my friends, to The OG, my series on all things Vince Gironda. I sat down over Christmas and really had a good think about everything I could say with regard to the great Iron Guru. Turns out, there’s a lot.

We’ve already had Vince’s biography and two instalments laying out the principles behind his approach to bodybuilding, in both practical and more theoretical terms. After that we looked at Vince’s 8x8 workout, otherwise known as the “Honest Workout,” and how proper breathing technique is essential to being able to perform this workout. Since then we discovered that Vince actually invented German Volume Training (no, he really did), and we looked in detail at his plateau-busting 10-8-6-15 workout.

After that I talked about a little titbit of advice Vince gave about building bigger arms, and then we looked at how Vince used to train the many Hollywood stars and other celebrities who were sent to him to be whipped into shape.

Next we looked at two routines about which there isn’t a lot of readily available information: the 6x6 and the 15x4.

Now we’re going to have a lighthearted, but nevertheless educational, interlude about all the ways you could get kicked out of Vince’s Gym.

Quotations, unless otherwise stated, are from The Wild Physique (1984).

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There are many occupational hazards associated with being a member of a gym, some of which vary with time and place. Training at Westside Barbell with Louie Simmons, for example, was a different proposition than training at your local Planet Fitness. The environment itself, the equipment, the people and, of course, the omnipresent Mr Simmons, making sure everybody was training the Westwide way. After all, if you didn’t want to train like a Westside lifter—if you didn’t want to go all out, blood and guts for glory—why would you drive several hours or maybe even make a pilgrimage from another country to be there?

The same was true, of course, of Vince’s Gym in North Hollywood. It was in the name: Vince’s Gym. Vince’s gym—Vince’s rules. If you didn’t like that, the door was over there. Don’t let it hit you on the way out.

I think Vince’s singlemindedness has become something of a meme, and I’ve done my best with this series so far to try and bring to the fore the nuances in his approach to bodybuilding and, above all, the extent to which the Gironda principles were derived from experience and trial and error. Even so, Vince really could be a cranky bastard, and he wasn’t above kicking people out of his gym when they did stuff he didn’t like. And there were lots of things he didn’t like. Here he is in The Wild Physique:

If a guy is really keen on getting the most out of my bodybuilding methods, the least he can do is turn up for his training in reasonable shape. It is an insult to me for a serious bodybuilder to arrive at my gym for advanced tuition and be fat! It's like reporting for ski-jumping classes without being able to ski!

I keep a congenial atmosphere in my gym, but I must admit that I don’t have time for smart alecks. There are various reasons why I have requested members of my gym to partake of their leave—but fast. Occasionally, I have been inflamed to the point of expelling certain types for trying to propagate their pseudoscientific methodology. The following is a partial list of reasons for expulsion… (WP, p.16)

Now I’m going to provide some notes on each of the 12 reasons he gives. Some are more obvious than others, but each one individually, and all together, illustrate the Gironda principles. Not one of them is arbitrary. In your travels around the internet, especially the old forums like Dave Draper dot net, you may find other reasons, with amusing anecdotes.