This John Balik photo of Mike Mentzer is insane—serious freak on the beach and one of the best pics of Mike we’ve ever seen…
Mike was 5’8” and competed in the late 1970s at around 220 pounds. He won the 1978 Mr. Universe with a perfect score of 300 points, but the Mr. Olympia title eluded him. He did place second to Frank Zane in his first attempt in 1979, only to place fourth the next year when Arnold made his comeback in Australia. Mentzer retired after that contest…
Interesting that the above beach photo was taken during the same shoot that produced a poster Balik sold through the Weider publications—and Steve had it plastered on his wall in his early college days. Then years later, in 1987, Steve went to work for Balik at Iron Man magazine as the Editor in Chief.
But back to Mentzer. He died in 2001 of a heart condition at the age of 49. But even today in 2020, his Heavy Duty training is still very popular in the bodybuilding world, with its short, intense, brutal workouts. Sets were taken to failure and beyond with forced reps and negatives.
While Mike was all about using heavy poundages and going past positive failure, he and his brother Ray, 1979 Mr. America winner who also died in 2001 of kidney complications two days after Mike, had ways of making lighter poundages feel heavy to produce results.
That’s key right now, as most people are training at home due to the coronavirus pandemic. Steve attended one of Ray’s seminars in San Antonio, Texas, in ’79, and Ray commented that he could make a 30-pound dumbbell feel like a 60-pounder. He said control and feeling the muscle contracting and elongating all the way through the stroke did amazing things for his mass gains.
We just expanded our Quick-Start Muscle-Building Guide to a 2.0 version with many of those mass tactics infused into complete home workouts in a big, updated section…
The workouts are tailored to build muscle in a bare-bones home gym with only moderate poundages—all you need is an adjustable bench and dumbbells (we each have a PowerBlock set, and they’re working great for us, which is why we updated this ebook)…
You can add this newly updated ebook to your mass-building library by clicking the cover above or HERE.
Till next time, train hard—and smart—for BIG results.
—Steve Holman and Jonathan Lawson
www.X-Rep.com
Mass-Building Lessons From the Master Trainer
Vince Gironda was the Iron Guru, a bodybuilding legend ahead of his time. His most famous pupil in the bodybuilding world was the very first Mr. Olympia Larry Scott, and he also trained many Hollywood stars back in the day, like Clint Eastwood, and even Arnold consulted with him and was a fan (even though Vince told Arnold that he was a “fat f**k” when he first arrived in the U.S.).
Many of Vince’s mass-building tricks and methods have been forgotten, buried by information and misinformation overload on the Internet, but now you can find them all, his true methods, in this must-have, 330-page Vince Gironda e-book anthology…
You get everything from “Train 21 Rest 7” to 10-8-6-15 to Vince’s Stone Age Nutrition, the 8×8 method and program and much, much more (remember, it’s 330 pages). And it’s on sale at a discount for a limited time: Simply use the code GIRONDA20 at checkout for an extra 20 percent off.
Vince Gironda: Legend & Myth (300-page anthology + many bonus gifts and programs) HERE