Old School

In the 1970s, a new breed of American man emerged from the weight rooms of Gold’s Gym in Venice Beach. Led by Arnold Schwarzenegger, a clique of world-class bodybuilders – muscle-bound, steroid-fueled, bronzed like suntanned gods – pumped iron, chased girls, and changed the world’s exercise culture forever.

Robby Robinson, a wedge of black marble, arrived in Venice Beach in 1975 with one oversize suitcase and seven dollars. That was every dime he had after quitting his job and selling everything of value but the trophies he’d won at bodybuilding shows in the Jim Crow South. He’d left behind a wife, three small children, and a certain localized fame as the best-ever body in the state of Florida, fronting 20-inch biceps, a 28-inch waist, and 205 pounds of peaked, freak muscle on his hourglass, 5-foot-8 frame. But if your dream back then was to make the cover of ‘Muscle Builder’ and storm the palace of giants in your sport, there was one thing to do and one place to do it: Join Gold’s Gym in Venice Beach. With the ocean at its back, the sun through its skylights, and the biggest men on Earth trooping in by the dozen to bench 450 before breakfast, Gold’s was Camelot-by-the-shore. You felt its pull in your hypertrophied heart, deep in the belly of that reckless muscle.

Unrealized Potential: Before Quadzilla, There was Jeff King!

It was still the era of Frank Zane, where the beauty if symmetry dominated over competitors possessing beastly mass. To those that felt uninspired by the beach-bodies in vogue, Casey Viator, Tim Belknap and Tom Platz were exalted as unredeemed heroes ¾ always placing well but forced to look on as the likes of Dickerson, Makkawy and Bannout pranced off with the big checks. It was almost as if the meek truly had inherited the Earth.

The connoisseurs of mass felt that nothing could be more inspirational than photos of Bertil grunting out inclines with 180-pound dumbbells or Plants tensing his ponderous thighs between sets. We thrilled to tales of the Barbarian Brothers; throwing Olympic plates like Frisbees, kicking each other in the face for last rep motivation. Although this type of hardcore attitude was downplayed so that "the sport could reach a wider audience," we were just waiting for another big man to reclaim the Olympia crown and, in so doing, bring our doctrines back into prominence.

The History of Synthetic Testosterone

Testosterone has long been banned in sports as a performance-enhancing drug. This use may soon be accepted in medicine alongside other legitimate hormonal therapies (by John M. Hoberman and Charles E. Yesalis )

On June 1, 1889, Charles Edouard Brown-Sequard, a prominent French physiologist, announced at the Societe de Biologie in Paris that he had devised a rejuvenating therapy for the body and mind. The 72-year-old professor reported that he had drastically reversed his own decline by injecting himself with a liquid extract derived from the testicles of dogs and guinea pigs. These injections, he told his audience, had increased his physical strength and intellectual energy, relieved his constipation and even lengthened the arc of his urine.

Almost all experts, including some of Brown-Sequard's contemporaries, have agreed that these positive effects were induced by the power of suggestion, despite Brown-Sequard's claims to the contrary. Yet he was correct in proposing that the functions of the testicles might be enhanced or restored by replacing the substances they produce. His achievement was thus to make the idea of the "internal secretion," initially proposed by another well-known French physiologist, Claude Bernard, in 1855, the basis of an organotherapeutic "replacement" technique. Brown-Sequard's insight that internal secretions could act as physiological regulators (named hormones in 1905) makes him one of the founders of modern endocrinology. So began an era of increasingly sophisticated hormonal treatments that led to the synthesis in 1935 of testosterone, the primary male hormone produced by the testicles.

How Bodybuilding Has Changed

Bodybuilding has changed--drastically! In fact, just about everything in bodybuilding has changed; from training, to diet, to supplementation, the sport that was once defined by beauty and aesthetics, is now defined by drugs and deformity.

 

So let's talk about what BODYBUILDING actually is. Is it an art? Is it a science? Is it a lifestyle? Is it a sport? Yes, it's actually all us these things, and much, much, more. Bodybuilding can be defined as the deliberate and methodical reconstruction of cells and tissues in the human body, in an attempt to maximize lean muscle mass while minimizing body fat levels. This is not an easy task at all, and requires an intimate and extensive understanding of biology, chemistry, and human physiology.

Let’s face it. At around 40 we all start to see signs of aging. It can’t be denied any longer at that point. You aren’t ready to be old. Some of us have been athletes all of our lives and are not ready to be fat and happy sitting in a sports bar watching ball on a wide screen. You want to keep going. So you seek a reason why you feel sub-par. Finally after seeing about a dozen doctors you run into one that tests some endocrine values and low and behold you find that your testosterone has tanked. You are told a normal 30 year old athletic male might test at 700 ng/dL and you are something like 220 ng/dL. Not only that but your IGF-1, a marker for GH release is in the bottom of normal range. So the doc asks have you used and anabolic steroids in the past? Have you had a blow to the head? Are you exposed to any toxins at your job etc etc. Oh shit!! Your manhood is diminishing. No wonder you look at young women like they are all your daughter and the wife just seems to nag at you without even speaking. You’re turning into an old man. You want to chase pkids out of your yard and keep their football. The doc says there is a number of treatments and he rattles off a bunch of antidepressants, a few vitamins, Cialis and then mumbles something like testosterone injections and crèmes and your ears perk up. Hell no you say to yourself. I’m not growing old just yet, at least not while there are androgens that come in little bottles.

Paleolithic diets

Do you want a bigger bulge in your biceps but no bulge in your belly? Take an old-school concept and apply it to your diet Do as that sage Greek suggested: Learn one subject through the study of another. Eat the way people used to eat before the advent of farming. Embrace old-school eating.

Along-gone, sage Greek said wise men can learn about one subject by studying a seemingly unrelated topic, and guess what? He was right. You can learn, for instance, how to get ripped and how to keep muscle by studying the lessons and lingo of basketball. Players who make no-look passes, ankle-breaking crossovers and 360-degree dunks may make the highlight reels, but these athletes don't necessarily make their teams winners. The guys who set back screens and cut back door, collect floor burns and floor-boards, take charge and charge at you are the ones who determine the outcome of games. One phrase, of high praise, is reserved for and best describes these hyperkinetic hoopsters: old school. This moniker means they play the game the way it used to be played years ago before the game went Hollywood.

According to Ray Audette, author of NeanderThin: Eat Like a Caveman to Achieve a Lean, Strong, Healthy Body and possibly the most radical proponent of what's known as Paleolithic nutrition, old-school eating means eating meat, fish, vegetables, fruits, nuts, berries, seeds and little else. No grains, beans, potatoes, dairy products or sugar are part of the caveman diet. Sound extreme? A bit excessive? Your reaction depends on your understanding of genetics and your opinion of obesity and modern disease. Most geneticists agree our genes have only been altered about one hundredth of one percent since the development of agriculture transformed the masses from hunter-gatherers to farmers. In other words our genes are 99.99 percent the same as they were 10,000 years ago; yet paleontologists know obesity and diseases such as atherosclerosis, hypertension, diabetes, osteoporosis and cancer didn't afflict hunter-gatherers, a pattern still true today in the few pockets of the world where people still subsist on the hunter-gatherer diet.

Many experts also believe an even more dramatic change in the industrialized world's eating habits 200-plus years ago -the reliance on highly processed, nutritionally compromised, packaged food rather than fresh foods - has exacerbated the above health problems. Perhaps eating like a hunter-gatherer isn't such an outlandish idea after all - especially when eating in this manner allows weightlifters to swap fat for muscle in a way not as impractical as Audette makes it seem.

How to Eat Like a Hunter-Gatherer

Audette's aforementioned advice is, without a doubt, as hardcore as a 100-rep set of full front squats. He also advocates eating raw meat (if obtained from the wild and not from a supermarket), limiting consumption of fruits and vegetables, and no cheating whatsoever. "If you can't stick to the diet religiously," he writes in his book, "you are better off not adopting it at all. "He claims that once on his diet, treating yourself to a forbidden food will have an even more deleterious effect than when you ate the food regularly. His logic: "Because the immune system responds to even small doses, the smallest amount of the forbidden fruit may produce weight gains far out of proportion to their size" and make you ill. However, other proponents believe you can derive benefits from Paleolithic nutrition without being so extreme.

PRIMOBOLAN (Methenolone Enanthate)

If ever there was a steroid that can be considered “perfect” (or as perfect as can be), it would be Primobolan. It’s considered to be the safest and least suppressive anabolic steroid, has few side effects and is extremely effective. So why isn’t Primobolan used by everybody? The reasons may lie in many of the misconceptions surrounding this incredible drug.

Primobolan does not give fast gains, or more accurately, does not cause a quick increase in water retention, therefore it’s considered “weak”, yet in terms of building solid muscle, it’s one of the most effective steroids available. Because Primolan has little to no side-effects it is also used by older athletes and females. This also ruins its reputation amoung hardcore bodybuilders. Primobolan comes in a low dose mostly 100 mg/ml and isn’t cheap. It was also one of the most counterfeited steroids and then the active ingredient Was mostly a low dose of deca (around 20 mg/ml). This was also often the case with many UG products. And I always meet guys that honestly believe that the high dosages on the label compare to the real content. Primobolan is a very expensive compound to buy , the API (raw powder) costs around 14.000 euro. Even then you have to wonder what the quality of that API is. Luckely we have the ability to analyse. What also was feeding Primobolans bad reputation of being weak and expensive is the fact that (just like Growth Hormone) you have to use it for a considerable cycle length, 18 weeks at least and if possible even longer then 20 weeks. And at least 800 mg/week, because it is so mild you can easily use over 1 gram per week of it and not have any issues with bloating - destruction of your lipids - thicker blood etc.

Mestanolone (STS646 )

Methyldihydrotestosterone (methyl-DHT; 17alpha-methyl-17beta-hydroxy 5alpha-androstane-3-on (mestanolone) is a steroid that has characteristics similar to those of DHT (dihydrotestosterone), but unlike DHT is orally bioavailable [1]. Methyl-DHT was the second most commonly used steroid by German athletes in decades past, who were among the best in the world largely because of widespread steroid use [2]. There is comparatively little information, either scientific or anecdotal, on methyl-DHT, although there is a wealth of information on DHT. This article will discuss the information on methyl-DHT and what can be expected from this compound.

One common way of characterizing steroids is by their relative anabolic (muscle-building) and androgenic effects. Androgenic effects refer primarily to secondary sex characteristics: increased body hair, deeper voice, balding, and so on. Androgenic compounds characteristically also have strong psychological effects, such as increased aggressiveness and concentration. Among bodybuilders, highly androgenic compounds are commonly used pre-contest or during cutting cycles for increasing muscle hardness and decreasing water retention and also to provide stimulation and increase concentration and performance in the gym. They also typically have anti-estrogenic effects.

The anabolic and androgenic effects of methyl-DHT were compared to testosterone and methyltestosterone in some early animal studies [1]. In tests of its androgenic potency (total of five tests), methyl-DHT ranged from 20-255% as androgenic as testosterone or testosterone propionate, with a per study average of 70%. In terms of anabolic effects relative to testosterone, the range was 25-105% with an average at 55%. One study also compared the effects of methyl-DHT to methyltestosterone, and it measured as ~60% as androgenic and 25% as anabolic. The large differences in these values are due to multiple differences in experimental design, not to mention the problems with extrapolating animal research to humans, but this research does give a general idea of what the potency and effects of this compound might be.

Arnold talking openly about sex and drugs to Playboy magazine

Body building has come a long way since the day an immortal bully kicked sand into the face of Charles Atlas. Consider Arnold Schwarzenegger. At 6'2" and 240 pounds, he boasts a 57-inch chest, a 31-inch waist and 22-inch biceps. For six years running, he was voted Mr. Olympia, the supreme title in Professional body building. Now, at the age of 29, Schwarzenegger wants to become a movie star—a superstar, to be precise. He has already appeared in two movies: "Stay Hungry," an underrated Bob Rafelson film that starred Sally Field, and "Pumping Iron," a semidocumentary about the 1975 Mr. Olympia contest, which was Schwarzenegger's final championship. He made the film to dispel the talk of homosexuality, steroids and obsessive narcissism that comes up whenever body building is mentioned. Most critics liked the movie, some didn't, but on one point all the critics agree: Bodybuilders may come and go, but there is only one Arnold.

     As a kid in Graz, Austria, Schwarzenegger played soccer, ran and wrestled. He always seemed to have more energy than his friends, and at the age of 15 he had a vision—as others might see Christ—of himself standing on a stage, winning the world body-building championship. Against the advice of parents and peers, young Arnold devoted his life to that goal, training an unprecedented six hours a day. At the age of 19, he moved to Munich and won the European body-building championship. He turned pro in 1969 and was runner-up for the title of Mr. Olympia. The next year he won and was never thereafter seriously challenged.

Giant legs

If you have been around the Iron Game for a while, there is one name that comes instantly to mind when people discuss leg training. That name is Tom Platz. “The Golden Eagle” is widely regarded as having the most massively muscular legs in the history of bodybuilding. His thighs measured a whopping 35 inches and were shredded to the bone. Tom’s muscle building program that created those unforgettable wheels revolved around one exercise and one exercise only; the barbell squat. If you want to add some serious mass to your legs you had better familiarize yourself with this exercise in a hurry.

Since the quads typically have a very wide variance of muscle fiber types you can use a great range of reps in your quest to build pillar sized legs. Often times, Tom and other lifters with notoriously huge legs, would go as high as fifty reps per set on squats. When I was young and painfully skinny, high rep squats were one of the most effective discoveries I ever made and helped me and my brother pack on size faster than anything we had ever tried to date. The old 20 rep squat programs from the golden era of the Iron Game made a massive man of many a skinny boy.


Although high rep squatting leads to massive and rapid gains, I usually recommend starting with a few heavy sets in the 4-8 range first. Sometimes I even add in a set of 10-15 after the heavy sets, and finally finish with one all out set of 20 (and sometimes 30-50). When you use this rep scheme you ensure that you hit all fiber types and stimulate the greatest amount of muscle growth possible.