Episode 38: Where the mind goes, the body follows

I hadn’t seen much of my client Jared’s father, Jeff, in a long time. Aside from passing him driving around town and waving hello, we hadn’t had a conversation since he witnessed in horror as I inhaled several large cups of ice cream smothered in sugary toppings following my last contest over six months ago. Jeff was 53 years old and had competed a couple times in 1978 and 1979, right around the time the movie Pumping Iron had inspired a whole generation of Arnold wannabes to take up bodybuilding. Until that landmark movie, the sport was literally so underground that men were about as ashamed to buy a bodybuilding magazine as they were a porno mag.

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Episode 34: Loosen up, or keep it tight?

It was arm day. This was a very recent change to my training program. My arms, as any of my longtime readers are sick of hearing about at this point, have always been a source of immense frustration and disappointment to me. With any other muscle group, my hard work has always eventually translated into growth, sooner or later.

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Episode 25: Contests are won in the off-season

It had been right around three months since teenage Jared had torn ligaments in his shoulder while being brutally tackled in a high school football game. But as I have said before, the resiliency of youth is a wonderful thing. These kids can bounce back from almost as much physical abuse as Jason Voorhees from Friday the 13^th. Jared had cautiously taken it easy and used volume and hellacious pumps in place of heavy weights for a few weeks, then gradually worked his way back to the point where he was now very close to handling the same resistance on upper body movements as before. Jared’s weight on every single leg exercise had actually gone up fairly dramatically. Being a competitive kid by nature, he took full advantage of the fact that he could hit legs with more energy and intensity while his shoulder healed up. We weren’t in the habit of taking measurements, but I would hazard to guess that he had probably added around an inch in circumference to his thighs. His arms also appeared to have become bigger and fuller, a result of the volume training and the effect that new type of stimulation had on his biceps and triceps. It reminded me of something IFBB Pro Ed Nunn, owner of a pair of legit 23-inch arms, told me about his arm training. Though he was capable of curling some truly heavy weights, he credited ‘21’s’ using a very mortal 25 pounds on each side of the EZ-curl bar with most of his biceps size. This does not compute to the average knucklehead slinging too-heavy

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Episode 24: Reaching Your Boiling Point

 

  Bodybuilder Is Born: Generations
By Ron Harris

Hundreds of millions of years ago, when the earth’s atmosphere had twice as much carbon dioxide, giant reptiles ruled the world and the seven continents were still one solid land mass called Pangea, there was a 1976 movie called “Network” that won four Academy Awards. The most famous scene was when a deranged news anchor urged the people of the nation to throw open their windows and unleash their frustrations at anything and everything they were upset about with this battle cry:

“I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!”

Recently I did something similar, though it was too cold to open my window, on top of which there is a screen that prevents me from actually sticking my head, or anything else larger than a fruit fly’s leg, out of it. But still, I was so upset that I did feel like screaming,

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Ron Harris > The Power of Focus

Old Man Winter is one miserable S.O.B, I tell ya.  On the last weekend before Christmas the bitter New England skies had opened up and dumped well over a foot of snow on us, just when I thought I might be able to escape off to my vacation on a cruise ship without having to deal with backbreaking hours of shoveling. As a kid I used to go ballistic with joy whenever it snowed. That was years before I had to do anything but sled down hills on it and make snowmen. Now my reaction had drastically shifted from “Yippee!” to “Dammit!” whenever the forecast called for large quantities of snow.

 

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Pump up the volume for new gains > Ron Harris

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