Rules? There Are No Rules! - Part I

By Zach Even-Esh

I will never forget those days! I was 14 years old and it was the summer before sophomore year in high school. I was training at the YMCA in the neighboring town. I rode my bike there 5 or 6 days a week and was addicted to training. The place was a dark dungeon and I loved it.

There couldn’t have been a better place to get stronger.. I visualized Dave Draper, Arnold, Franco and Ken Waller while I was there. I know that I am a little strange but I was obsessed with bodybuilding and wished I was actually in the Golden Era! I got all my routines straight out of FLEX magazine.

You know the routine, twenty sets of chest, supersets, drop sets, “feel the muscle” and all that other good stuff, or good shit…which is it anyway, stuff or shit?

The YMCA was a small dungeon, one of which today’s Darksiders would have loved to have. But in 1994 they revamped the dungeon with pretty walls, carpeted floors and machines everywhere. I much rather see the brown rusted equipment and old York plates that scattered the gym floor. We had a small radio and always had some rock station on. I was the youngest and the guys liked the fact that I brought in tapes of Metallica and AC / DC.

I read Arnold’s Encyclopedia of Modern Bodybuilding every day and looked at the old black and white photos of training in the “Golden Era” to get me motivated. I rode my bike to the YMCA, 5 miles in each direction; most teens nowadays would need oxygen after this bike ride. It’s sad that so many kids are out of shape, but that’s an entirely different subject that I will delve into in a future article. Let’s talk about George. I think that was his name, it was almost 16 years ago so the name slips my mind but the training I enjoyed there seems like it was only yesterday!

Let’s take a trip back to 1990 shall we? Come on, you wont regret it and it might even motivate you to stop crying about your shitty gym and get you to create your own dungeon!

No doubt about it, Geroge was jacked! From my recollection he looked to be a solid 250 or 260. He didn’t have a routine like most of us did. I supersetted chest and back, did legs alone and did shoulders followed by twenty supersets for arms. George obviously knew back then that routine was the enemy, and heavy free weights ruled if you wanted to pack on the size and strength needed to bust through your clothing. I don’t recall him being all that redundant with the exercises he chose.

For the most part, George did one to three heavy lifts (spending 30 – 45 minutes on most exercises) followed by some lighter work with higher reps for about 10 minutes. His basic lifts were also way beyond the normal three or four sets that FLEX magazine described.

He would spend a minimum of thirty minutes on each exercise and often times it was more. It wasn’t odd for me to complete an entire workout (which was usually a good 90 minutes) while only seeing George do the Flat Bench and Parallel Bar Dips with a 60 lb dumbbell. I would watch him do set after set with 315 lbs on the flat bench, ranging in reps from two to 8. I don’t know if he had his own system floating around in the back of his head or he simply did what ever the hell he felt like doing. He also moved the weights faster than all hell.

What in the world is wrong with this guy anyway? The magazines and pros always said lower the weight slowly. I was ready to tell him how things should be done! He lowered the bar quickly and exploded the bar off his chest like it was gonna go through the ceiling!

After he spent a good hour on the flat bench killing the weights, resting as he felt, he cranked out heavy weighted dips in the same high speed fashion. His reps were in the 5 – 10 range. Up and down fast like a piston, His triceps were busting out his t-shirt. He had a 60 lb. dumbbell and hooked it to a belt and cranked out set after blistering set.

The rest of the gym members did dips with bodyweight, and watched George in awe. He finished this workout with cable pushdowns with the stack and a 45 lb plate attached to the front and the back of the weight stack. He did these with no problem and spent a good 15 minutes blasting away here.

The rest of the gym always watched George and dropped their jaws. No one was brave enough to get under heavy weights like George. Isolation exercises such as flys, laterals and concentration curls were way too common in that gym and Louie Simmons would have slapped us all silly if he saw this type of training going on. Back then, the information came from the magazines and unfortunately, I saw this style of training in a high school weight room last year. By the way, that football team holds a state record for most consecutive losses; 30 in a row. We didn’t know any better back then and neither do a lot of young kids nowadays.

Another workout that stands clear in my mind is where George spent his workout doing RDL’s for set after set mixed in with heavy lying extensions. I remember the RDL’s were done with 315 and the lying extensions had 50 or 60 lbs on each side of the curl bar. It was as if he was doing some sort of active rest in between his heavy posterior work but he didn’t even know it was active rest. To him it was all work and fitted in just fine with his “No rules” philosophy of training.

Once again, the sets were endless and these two exercises lasted the duration of my full workout. Most of the time George was there before me and was still training after I was finished! He did 4 – 6 reps on the RDL’s and did 6 – 8 reps for the triceps. Very explosive and very fast, rep after rep, set after set.

George probably never picked up a magazine and was lucky enough to avoid the poison that filled our minds back then. He followed a simple rule, there are NO RULES! You can over analyze if you wish and demand that indeed there are rules to training.

Sure, training is a science and there are percentages and an optimal number of lifts to be performed per month as well. But the beauty behind these days in the dark dungeon of this YMCA was that George broke all the rules and he was light years ahead of any lifter in that small room as well as lifters outside that room!

In fact, I can safely assume he broke all the rules with regards to nutrition as well. While everyone was busy eating cans of tuna George was surely chowing down on steak and potatoes every single day of the week.

While we all did our 3 or 4 sets of 25 lb concentration curls George probably did 150 – 200 reps of dips with a minimum of 60 lbs strapped around his waist. While we wasted time doing the machine leg press George was busy doing RDL’s for 45 minutes, set after blistering set. While we were incline pressing 95 lbs. on the bar for incline benching, George was doing flat dumbbell benching with the 90’s pressing them up like they were cake for a half an hour. Once again, he moved the weights fast and explosively.

There is always a Darksider somewhere and George certainly was stuck in a different time zone. So the next time you start analyzing how to incorporate your optimal number of lifts per month on the bench and which bar you should use for each squat workout, it might be high time to take a trip way back and start simplifying your program. I’m not telling you to do exactly as George did, but if you can use your creativity with the basic lifts you’ll be back on the road to progress in no time.

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