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Vince Gironda Copycats
People who advocate Vince and Vince’s methods, including myself, are always
alluding to the fact that he was so far ahead of his time that it wasn’t even funny.
We always like to use the term “A thousand years ahead of his time”. He was
talking about things in the Fifties, Sixties, Seventies and Eighties that people are
just now starting to grasp and accept. There was no such thing as Kinesiology
years ago and when Vince started to talk about Kinesiology, he’d say if you don’t
know how a muscle works, how are you going to work a muscle!
A customer of mine called one day and told me about this new terminology called
X reps in a magazine. I asked him what X reps were and he told me that at a top of
a movement, when your done with the movement, you do quarter movements, five
or six times and then I knew what he was talking about. This is just another thing
being copied by people that Vince advocated years ago. X reps are nothing more
than “burns”! When Vince had you on the definition diet and you were strictly
shaping your muscle, he’d have you do five or six quarter reps at the end of the
movement and called them “burns”. Well, now somebody comes along and calls
them X reps.
And then there is this person I see on TV all the time named Tony Horton who has
an exercise program that he sells to people. Well, Tony likes to talk about muscle
confusion and that’s nice Mr. Horton but you know where you got the terminology
from…Vince Gironda! Vince talked about muscle confusion back in the middle
and late Fifties. And then of course, Vince talked about bodybuilding being 85%
to 90% nutrition in the middle Fifties and people just laughed at him and said, oh
no, it’s the lifting of the weights and that you can eat anything you want. Well, he
made a science out of nutrition and bodybuilding and that is just another thing we
owe to this great man.
I had also heard about a man advocating the term “tempo” in a magazine. Vince
talked about tempo in numerous publications and writings of his. Tempo to him
was something of an old hat and of course this man now uses tempo as his
discovery. Tempo is a progression in your workout that should not be broken.
Vince had always talked about digestion and now there are a lot of people saying
that if you don’t digest your food, then you’re not going to build muscle tissue.
Larry Scott used to say every time he came up with something he thought was
new, Vince thought about it five years before he did! Vince is the first one to
influence all these bodybuilders with concentration, stressing the value of talking
to your muscles through autosuggestion. This is yet another thing that people are
now starting to advocate.
In the early Fifties he was talking about minimizing carbohydrates when he said
carbohydrates never build muscle, they build fat because all carbohydrates are
sugar (the caveman diet). Carbohydrates should be kept to a very minimum with
the use of vegetables and some fruit. So this reiterates just how far ahead of his
time this man really was, and we will never stop saying this.