Editor’s introduction:
In early 2002, I wrote an article called, “Eight Sets of Eight: Vince Gironda’s Radical Muscle Building Solution.” The article appeared in the August 2002 issue of IRONMAN magazine and I also posted it to the Fitness Renaissance website article library. It was about one of the favorite training principles of a man who many believe was the greatest bodybuilding trainer who ever lived.

After the article ran last August, the e-mail, postal mail, and telephone calls poured in – and they have not stopped to this day. In fact, I just got two e-mails yesterday about this very topic. In all the years since I’ve been writing magazine articles and publishing on the web, no piece has generated a greater amount of interest and curiosity than the eight sets of eight article.

Many of the people who contacted me had never even heard of Vince Gironda and wanted to know who the heck this training “guru” was and what was so great about his methods. For others, the article merely rekindled a long forgotten interest.

As part of my research, I contacted one of Vince’s closest friends and best students – Ron Kosloff of Michigan. I interviewed Ron at length about Vince and his techniques and he related a lot of great stories and interesting information I never new about the “Iron Guru.”

Since the IRONMAN article was published, I’ve continued to correspond on and off with Ron and he recently mailed me an article he wrote for Muscle Mag International several years ago, shortly after Vince’s death. I don’t know how I missed it when it was first published, because in addition to purchasing and studying all of Vince’s courses, I’ve collected virtually every article ever written by or about Vince Gironda since I was 15 years old.

In any event, because of the amount of interest that’s continued to be expressed in Vince Gironda, I thought you would be interested in reading this emotional and heartfelt tribute to this great man. Knowing how much Ron wanted Vince to be remembered, I asked him if I could reprint the Muscle Mag article on the Internet, exclusively on the Fitness Renaissance website. He graciously and excitedly agreed.

This article does not necessarily represent my own personal beliefs, views and philosophies – especially the nutritional aspects – but it certainly makes you think. It really challenges your paradigms.

To be honest, there are some things Ron wrote, and some parts of Vince’s teachings that I flat out disagree with. However, I don't believe you have to either accept someone’s teachings completely or reject them completely. If you disregard everything someone says just because you don’t like one thing they said, you might be doing yourself a great disservice. A smarter approach is to experiment, test, then decide which parts of the teaching apply to you. Part of my personal philosophy has always been to have a wide-open mind, consider all points of view and learn something from everybody.

Although you may not agree with everything in this article either, there are SO MANY things that ring SO TRUE, you can’t help but nod your head in agreement as you read.

By keeping an open-minded attitude, I have culled many gems from Vince’s teachings. Many of his training methods have become permanent fixtures in my workouts for the last 20 years. While I never adopted his high fat, low carb diet, I certainly learned a lot from my “interesting” experiments with it.

I think the most important reason of all I decided to reprint this article on the web is because the one thing I admired about Vince the most was his commitment to the natural approach. Today, I don’t think there is a single bodybuilding trainer alive who is so vocal an opponent of drug use as Vince Gironda was (although I certainly hope to follow in his footsteps and be as outspoken an advocate of natural training as any human can be.) In fact, many “bodybuilding trainers” these days are more like chemists and pharmacists than fitness and nutrition coaches.

I owe Vince a great debt of gratitude, because somehow, fate saw to it that I stumbled onto his courses at the impressionable young age of 15, and he showed me that I could do it without drugs. He taught me that drugs don’t improve your physique – they ruin it. Who knows – if it weren’t for Vince’s influence, I might have traveled down the “other path” into the realm of anabolic and physique-enhancing drug use. Instead, I've built a physique which, while certainly not massive compared to what you see in the magazines, it's one that I can be proud of because I built it without ever touching a drug in my entire life.

Once again I thank Ron Kosloff for his gracious permission to reprint this article.



Close family members apart, when was the last time you witnessed grown men weeping at the loss of a comrade? Sure it happens, of course, but when the late great Vince Gironda died, the outpouring of emotion was felt from coast to coast and beyond.

I’ll never forget the day of October 20th, 1997. I was at my desk when Ray Raridon, owner of NSP West in Los Angeles called me at three p.m. and asked if I was sitting down. After I said yes, he conveyed to me the sad news that Vince Gironda had passed away. We spoke for a short time, both extremely very sad and extremely stunned. After I hung up the phone I was in sort of a mental daze as my 25-year association with Vince literally flashed before my eyes. I remembered all the good times and the bad times. As I sat there for about a half-hour I began crying profusely. I’m a grown man, but this news did affect me very, very much. I called my friend Chris Aragona. Chris is a personal trainer and former owner of a health-food store in the Long Island section of New York. We’ve been friends and business associates for about 20 years.

Chris teaches Vince’s method’s as I do. We talked at length about Vince, and he too reminisced. I mentioned that I had seen Vince about a month before he closed his gym, and to my way of thinking – just a personal opinion – Vince Gironda probably died of a broken heart simply because his gym was his whole life. To my knowledge, he never did anything else. From the time he was a young man until he really got into the gym business – I think it was 1946 – he had worked or been in the fitness business most of his life. So you can see what a dramatic effect the gym closing must have had on him. Bodybuilding meant more to him than anything. When he would train someone who became successful, this was his personal reward. Chris agreed with me that there was a lot of heart and honesty in Vince. As long as I can remember, Chris has advocated Vince’s methods. He is a personal trainer. I believe he has done that exclusively since he got out of the health-food business. On many occasions Chris and I have shared stories about our personal training experiences and one point we always agree on is that anyone who follows Vince’s methods is sure to have great results. I personally have never failed if my student follows Vince’s principles. (Vince actually wrote a book on his training principles. It is titled, “The Wild Physique.”) After Chris and I spoke, I put the office recorder on and reminisced for about two hours.

I recalled our first meeting. I had a consultation with Vince, and while we were talking, he excused himself, got up, took some money out of the register, gave it to a member, and promptly threw him out of the gym for doing situps and leg raises. I was shocked, of course, but when I found out Vince’s reasoning I understood. Situps and leg raises don’t reduce the size of your stomach, as Vince discovered about 40 years ago, so the student was just wasting his time. He really wasn’t listening. Vince had previously told the student not to do them because he was personally training the guy. Along with everything Vince taught me, I realized then that he was probably far ahead of his time. In retrospect, I believe most people didn’t even know what he was talking about. I learned that 95 percent of what Vince told me simply worked. Chris made the same discovery. When I train people, they quickly realize just how great his simple, intelligent methods are.

Dr. Clifford Ameduri called Vince a gifted person and a genius. When I spoke with the doctor years ago, we both marveled at the fact that Vince was the only man we had ever seen who could point to every muscle in the human body, name it, plus tell you how it functions. Now that’s brilliant! We were also awed by Vince’s knowledge of nutrition. After 25 years, people are discovering the truth about this “complex carbohydrate b.s” as I call it. Vince would yell in the gym, “But they’re inferior proteins, just lots of sugar, you jerks!” He was always outspoken and controversial, the type of man who built this country. True individuals like him are now a dying breed.

As a kid I would go to all the contests. Vince would turn out champions the way a baker turns out cookies. The MC would always say, “representing Vince’s Gym, from North Hollywood, California”… introducing Larry Scott, Don Howorth, Bill McArdle and a host of others. I seriously doubt that Larry would have been a success if Vince hadn’t taken him under his wing, since Larry wasn’t that genetically blessed. To me a truly beautiful physique combines shape, symmetry and cuts. I knew Gironda was onto something because he assessed his type of physique. I also knew that eventually I would go to him. But first I ordered all his courses. When I read them, I said, “This man is brilliant!”

The first time he trained me, he told me I was the only guy who ever did the precise movements the correct way. That acknowledgement really, really felt good. When Vince trained me, I stayed in California for six weeks, renting a motel room just down the block from the gym. I trained very hard and made more progress in that six weeks than I had in an entire two-year training period prior to that time. When I came back from California to the YMCA gym where I regularly worked out, people were in disbelief at how good I looked after such a short time. I was stunned myself that I was looking 90 percent better doing 90 percent less. But I trained with great intensity! Vince first applied that word in bodybuilding, not Mike Mentzer as many believe.

I continued the rest of the evening thinking back fondly on the times that I was fortunate enough to have spent with Vince. I finally realized all the lessons I had learned from him, how he had a tremendous effect in turning my life around and pointing me in the right direction. I am now a nutritional consultant. Because of him I got my degree. I work at the Grosse Pointe Alternative Health Care Clinic outside of Detroit. I also own NSP East and Research Nutrition. I’m on staff and I do all their diet consultations.

I use the principles Vince taught me regarding liver tablets, glandulars and amino acids to keep your endocrine system strong and your immune level high. He told me to eat a high-protein meal after training as the muscles need the amino acids to grow and, most important, to recuperate. I see that some college just proved him right again. As soon as you’re done with strenuous, physical exercise, eat a good protein meal because the branched-chain amino acids will quickly repair, nourish and return the muscle cell to its former strength and more, and it will get bigger. They just proved that. Just goes to show you how brilliant the guy was.

He taught me about hydrochloric acid and that the amount of food you digest is the critical factor, not how much you eat. He would always stress these concepts to me. Now I’m helping other people and I realize it was Vince who taught me all this. Take liver tablets for example. Right now in bodybuilding, they’re out of style because bodybulding is like America, a fad country where things are in style, out of style, in style, out of style. Whether we like to admit it or not, we are all controlled by Madison Avenue and big advertising from what we eat to what we drink and what we smoke. The whey-protein powders and MET-Rx are in fashion today. Amino acids, glandulars, hydrochloric acid and digestive enzymes are out.

I am a severe hypoglycemic, and Vince taught me that I had to control my hypoglycemia. Every three hours I eat, and I keep my diet low in carbohydrates. I use liver tablets because there is no finer blood builder than liver. Its B12 and amino-acid content nourish the liver. It contains a substance called P450, which he taught me detoxifies the liver of all poisons, toxins, drugs and alcohol. Every time I have a physical, my doctor marvels at the function of my liver. So, of course, every three hours I take my liver tablets.

Vince taught me the importance of chromium picolinate and minerals to regulate my pancreatic functions and insulin secretions. I guess what I’m doing here is paying homage to him. Maybe I never realized before what a controlling factor this man was in my life. He taught me the importance of eggs, and what a powerful, powerful substance eggs are. He showed me how important eggs are to bodybuilding and the very best hormone precursors.

My routine for the last 25 years has not varied. When I get up, my high fat jump-starter is four or five eggs, depending on how hungry I am. Eggs don’t cause heart attacks. Some people take the yolk from the egg and eat just the egg white, but that’s wrong. Eggs are whole food, the greatest food you can eat. It closely matches the human anatomy. Eggs are the finest protein, along with liver and raw milk. That’s been proven over and over. They have the highest PER (protein efficiency ratio) rating.

Sugars and starches cause heart attacks. The average American diet includes pancakes, ice cream, cookies, pies, cakes, candies, pretzels, doughnuts, pizzas, slurpies, Pop Tarts, Sugar Frosted Flakes, bologna sandwiches, bagels and pastas. White-flour bagels and pastas are garbage! Then you have all the useless fast foods! But the egg is a perfect food. You see, God is the greatest chemist in the world. He created the egg. A drug company created the medical doctor, and all medical doctors do is write prescriptions. Nothing more, nothing less. They tell you what is wrong with you and then write a prescription for a dangerous synthetic drug!

If you separate the white and yolk of the egg, you get an isolated protein. Any time you separate the white and the yolk of an egg, you get an isolated protein. Any time you separate protein from fat you’re left with an incomplete food. The manufacturers of protein powders tell you to mix them with juice or water. Well, let me tell you, folks – you can’t digest protein without fat. Vince taught me that and he was right. When you swallow an egg white, it goes into your stomach and your stomach says, “Hey, where’s the fat?” The white, which is protein, has no vehicle for conversion, so it’s converted to sugar.

The same thing happens when you use protein powder. They say to mix with juice or water because they’re made of ionized whey protein, which is the skim of cottage cheese. It’s not biologically superior to eggs, liver and milk. These powders make you feel good because they’re carbohydrated sugar. Sure you’re going to put on weight, but it’s not going to be muscle weight.

You cannot digest protein without fat, and it must be digested to be converted to amino acids. Once it’s digested it goes through the liver and is converted to amino acids. If it’s not digested the liver can’t do its job. If eggs or fat cause heart attacks, I want someone to tell me how my grandmother and grandfather, who were both muscular people with beautiful skin, lived on a farm, consumed raw milk, natural eggs pork sausage and butter (my grandfather died two months shy of his 98th birthday, and my grandmother died when she was 101.

An Indian who worked for my grandfather for food and shelter would eat only meat. We kids on the farm used to give pears, peaches and apples, and he’d say, “Oh, you kids crazy!” He wanted meat. Grandma and Grandma would butcher a hog or a steer and put it in the cellar (the cellar was like a fridge back then), and he would go down into the cellar and eat meat. Meat was all he would eat, and I mean the whole animal. So how did this man live to be 113 on a high-fat, high-protein diet? I’d like a medical doctor or so-called dietician to explain that. Vince was right again!

I am now realizing how I carried these ideas of Vince’s through my life and taught them to other people. They have been a blessing for me. When I do consultations I put people on glandulars. I know some say glandulars and liver are not good food, but I tell you folks, that’s where the energy is. The first thing a carnivore eats when it kills another animal is its glands and intestines.

I remember one time while I was working at General Motors, they took a blood test and the color of my blood was far superior to their color chart. The nurse asked me, “How do you do that?” and I said, “I take a lot of liver tablets.” Being a medical nurse, she said, “Sure, sure, sure,” and looked at me as if I was crazy. Unfortunately we are putting our lives in the hands of these people I recommend two good books about the medical profession: Silent Violence-Silent Death and The Drug Lords. They’ll scare the hell out of you!

Vince taught me about nutrition, hydrochloric acid and eggs, and folks, they just plain work. The man was so far ahead of his time it was almost a joke. Speaking of jokes, he was a real comedian and his jokes in the gym kept everyone loose.

Bob Kennedy of Muscle Mag International was a good friend of Vince, and Vince used to write a regular column for his magazine. After Vince died, I called Bob and said, Bob, I’ve known Vince for 25 years, and I’d like to continue his column because I know his methods backward and frontward.” Bob replied, “Ron I would love to have you continue his column, but you know what?” I was getting complaints that Vince was too old. People complained, “Who wants to listen to what he has to say?” Well, that struck a nerve, and I would like to address those folks who felt that way.

In America, today, we have one horrible agenda that we practice. Madison Avenue has created the youth culture. It wants to sell things to young people with money. It wants to ignore older people, and of course, this is our culture… money. If you’re over 50, even sometimes over 40, no one wants to listen to you any more. It’s really a crime. Look at how the American Plains Indians treated their elders. They treated them with dignity and respect. Nobody wanted to listen to Vince because he was old, but nobody stopped to think that what Vince had was wisdom, knowledge and experience. If you go to any other country in the world and you are over 50, by God, you’re put up on a pedestal. People come to you for advice and knowledge, and you’re revered. But not in America. Vince was a tragic example of this shameful phenomenon. He went out of style.

Whenever an older, wise, intelligent person offers advice, you should listen to his wisdom. He’s only trying to save you a lot of heartache and grief. Certainly Vince Gironda did this for me. Take Heed. What happened to Vince should not have happened to him. He was a victim pure and simple of our culture. I was disappointed, Chris Aragona was disappointed, but that’s the way it is. For years, I’ve been saying that in the future, Vincent Van Gogh will have nothing on Vince Gironda because one day Vince Gironda will be the Vincent Van Gogh of bodybuilding.

In another 15 years, you’ll be reading what Vince had to say. Everything he said 50 years ago is now coming true. Don’t overtrain. Work out like a sprinter, not a long distance runner. Bodybuilding is 85 percent nutrition. Always use muscle confusion. Don’t do situps and leg raises because they make your stomach bigger, not smaller, and they curtail lean muscle gains because your hormone level drops. He said all this years ago after going through trial and error. He discovered it was true. Slowly, but surely his methods have been proven, and they have stood the test of time. Unfortunately some authority has begun to take credit, and you see a lot of copycats who are stealing from Vince, and that’s a fact. You know who you are and you should be ashamed of yourselves.

Two or three years ago some idiot wrote to a magazine and asked, ‘If Vince Gironda was so great, how come he never won a major contest?” Well the simple fact is that back in his day there was a different style to bodybuilding. Either you looked like John Grimek – bulky and smooth – or you weren’t a bodybuilder. Now, the authorities might not want to recognize this fact, but Vince Gironda is the father of modern bodybuilding. He created definition. Hell, in the 40’s he was ripped to shreds. He never placed higher than second or third in a contest. They looked at him and said: “What is this? Who is this? What kind of physique is this?” Some winced at his incredible muscularity.

Nowadays, if you’re not defined and shapely, you might as well just go on home. Again we should all pay homage to Vince. He invented definition. He invented the beautiful physique, the shapely physique. DO you see what I’m saying? The guy who asked that stupid question really doesn’t know much about history. He’s probably a drug user anyway.

Of course, most of the physiques now are drug physiques, and they don’t have any real relation to natural bodybuilding. Vince used to call bodybuilding contests “pharmaceutical conventions” whenever someone would ask why he didn’t attend them any more. He was right. You could never create that kind of physique naturally. Some of these guys I see onstage look to me like Gorgo. Vince used to call a lot of Mr. Olympia competitors Gorgos and freaks, and that’s what they are. They are sacrificing their health. Vince was the first one to state that some bodybuilder was going to die on stage, and it’s happened more than once.

Vince created the anti-drug movement in bodybuilding. He hated drugs with a passion. Drugs came into the picture in 1963, and they completely defeated natural bodybuilding. All you had to do was pump some Deca-Durabolin in and you got a physique. I’ve seen guys at the local hard-core gym use drugs and in 30 days, my God, you couldn’t believe what they turned into, gaining 10 to 15 pounds overnight.

For ten years, I owned the Powerhouse Gym in Center Line, Michigan with my partner Paul Dudgeon. We had a member who was a top area bodybuilder and a drug user and he used to belittle Vince’s methods. He said that on Vince’s system you didn’t do enough and you didn’t do weightlifting exercises. I told him one time that if they ever took his steroids away from him, he would just be an ordinary Joe, and his so-called wonder method that he got out of the magazines wouldn’t work any more.

As events came to pass, being on drugs for so long began to affect his marriage. His wife said, “Look, it’s the drugs or me.” He quit the steroids because he didn’t want to lose his family. Everyone around the gym started to notice he was shrinking like a prune. One day to my surprise he came to me and said, “I use to think you were a real screwball and your methods were really goofy, but now I realize what you said was true. My methods don’t work anymore. I was overtraining just like you said.” This guy today is a natural bodybuilder, he’s still married, and he’s got a heck of a physique. When I see him at the gym we talk a lot. I still do my training at Powerhouse in Center Line, so if you want to get a hold of me, you can call there. The number is 810-755-5330. Later, I’ll give you my office number.

I’m training a young fellow at the gym who’s been working out for a couple of years now. He wasn’t getting anywhere because he was overtraining and he didn’t have any knowledge of nutrition. He was eating a high carbohydrate diet, which is ridiculous because carbohydrates are just sugar. I tell people not to believe all this crap about carbohydrates building muscle tissue. Muscle tissue is not made of sugar. It’s made of protein. I told the lad I would improve his physique in about three months 15 to 20 percent.

I stress very clearly that Vince was a bodybuilder and a bodybuilding trainer, not a weightlifter or weightlifting trainer. He taught isolation exercises for the muscles, not group exercises for the muscles. For example, you do a strict bicep curl, no cheating, with a 25-pound dumbbell and isolate the muscle, so that only the bicep does the work. Don’t use 60 pounds and jerk, tug, pull and swing the weight. You ultimately must decide if you want to be a bodybuilder or a weightlifter.

I love to intimidate big cheaters by asking them if they can do 8 sets of 8 reps with a 25-pound dumbbell for the biceps Vince’s way. First they laugh at me. Then they proceed to make big fools of themselves when they can’t even do 2 sets and I yell at them, “You’ve got 6 more sets to go!” There is a winner of many titles at Powerhouse Gym who calls Vince’s methods too hard. I want somebody to hand me a violin so that I can play him a tune. He would be 10 to 15 percent smaller using Vince’s methods, but you have to sacrifice something to get something. Ultimately, he will look a thousand times better in shape, definition and symmetry, and that’s what we really want, isn’t it?

Look at the way Frank Zane looked – and he wasn’t a big man. He just happened to have a beautiful, beautiful physique. When it comes to strength there are two types; group strength and individual muscle strength. A bodybuilder cannot work out like a weightlifter and a weightlifter cannot work out like a bodybuilder. Vince would stress that to people. While training in Vince’s Gym over the years, I saw him make fools of many people because they couldn’t work out the way a bodybuilder should. They couldn’t do it. Ultimately that failure was a blow to their egos. People are always asking me and my students, “How much can you lift?” We glare at them and shoot back, as Vince did: “We are not weightlifters. We are bodybuilders.”

My young friend started on Vince’s routine and a superb nutrition program that I laid out for him. Three months later he is happy as a lark. His buddies all tell him how good he looks. He’s done learning now. I’ve taught him everything that Vince taught me. He’s on his own and he’s only going to get better. He came to me in the first place because someone told him I trained Ron Love for the 1988 Junior America. He was trying to get cut and I put him on Vince’s meat an egg diet with cream and protein and, or course, all the supplements. Ron won hands down. Bodybuilders all over America were calling to ask how he did it. Ron said he would like to give me a kiss, but he couldn’t because I was a guy!

So this young man came to me for help. He had weak upper biceps, and he asked me how to develop them – not the middle biceps, but the upper biceps, by the deltoid. I’ve asked probably 50 people, including Mr. America’s, Mr. Universes, and many other supposedly knowledgeable people, but they couldn’t help. I always tell people that the worst person to ask for advice is the biggest guy in the gym with the best physique. All he can tell you is how to overtrain, and he won’t tell you he is taking steroids. To help the young man increase his upper biceps I showed him Vince’s drag curl, and in about six weeks he was showing fullness in his upper biceps. Most of your Mr. America’s and Mr. Olympia’s don’t have the slightest clue how to bring that muscle out. When I ask them about it, they only give me stupid answers. Vince was the only guy that knew how to isolate and work that muscle.

When I told this young guy about liver tablets and fats and proteins, he said, “My doctor told me I should eat carbohydrates and remove fats from my diet.” I asked him, “Young man, do you know what substance manufactures every hormone in the human body? It’s called cholesterol, and if you have a low natural fat intake you’ll have low cholesterol – that’s HDL – and you won’t be able to gain size. That’s why I’m going to get you on glandulars and liver tablets, amino acids, and mil-and-egg protein.” The guy has since done fabulously. Medical doctors don’t know anything about nutrition. As I told you, they’re prescription-writers.

Let’s look at the book, Protein Power. The guy who wrote that book copied from Vince. They all do. In his book he lists five tribes that exist on a high-fat, high-protein diet. These people are perfectly healthy. If they don’t starve, they lead long lives. Number one is the Eskimo. He eats fat, blubber, protein, fish, heart, liver, kidney and spleen. Eskimos never eat any vegetables, and lo and behold, they are slim people. Number two are the Rocky Mountain men. They ate what they killed – there are no fruits and vegetables in the Rocky Mountains. Third is the Plains Indian. His whole life was the buffalo. It was his food, his weapon, his clothing, his shelter. That’s why the white man killed the buffalo – to starve the Indian. Indians didn’t eat corn until we put them on reservations. Indians were very muscular warriors. The Union shoulders called them the finest light cavalry in the world. Then consider the Bolare of South America and the Masai of Africa. For the Masai, cattle were a prized possession. They were basically meat eaters and protein eaters. The people of all these tribes were highly sexed because they had high natural hormone levels. Moreover, they all had cholesterol levels of three to five hundred with no arterial sclerosis or heart attacks whatsoever.

The medical profession tells you what it wants to tell you. It creates a drug after your bad diet has caused a problem. All you have to do is go to the library and get a medical dictionary – Tabor’s 16th edition, page 1909. I’ll tell you in essence what it says. When you ingest an excess amount of carbohydrates (sugar), it is converted by the liver to triglycerides and diglycerides, which are a sticky form of fat that the liver pushes into the bloodstream. Your LDL level goes up. Your VDL level goes up. Your triglyceride and diglyceride levels go up. You have a heart attack. What you want to do is keep your HDL level very high, and you do that by eating fats and proteins like the American Plains Indian. So you see, medical doctors are wrong again. They usually are. They don’t know how to prevent diseases. They just write prescriptions for the ones you have.

If you want to read a good book, get Not By Bread Alone. It’s out of print, so you’ll have to look in the public library. It was one of Vince’s bibles. The author was a man named Stephenson, who in the middle to late 1800’s lived with the Eskimos for 20 years and ate exactly what the Eskimos ate. When he returned to Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center in New York City, they couldn’t find anything wrong with him. He was normal and he was healthy. See what I’m saying? The real culprit in disease is processed and refined foods. The reason Americans are getting so sick is that they’re eating so many carbohydrates.

In your body, carbohydrates create a condition called alkalosis. All protein foods are digested in an acid base, all non protein foods are digested in an alkaline based. The balance of the human body should be an acid base, so if you create an alkaline state, you cannot digest your food. If you stuck your finger down your throat into your stomach you should burn the end of it because the stomach should be full of hydrochloric acid. Once you eat a high-carbohydrate diet, your body says, “Hey, why should I bother to manufacture hydrochloric acid?” The word protein means “most important.” Hippoctates named it 2,500 years ago. So how to you create an acid state? As you get older you’re going to have to use a little apple cider vinegar, lemon juice or hydrochloric acid tablets. When you’re younger, just eat good protein food, take a B-Complex vitamin and zinc because they work with your stomach and create hydrochloric acid. You always want to keep those levels high.

Vince taught me the importance of hydrochloric acid because it digests protein. Regardless of how much food you eat, the important factor is what you digest, assimilate and absorb. That’s the key. Vince said that 85 percent of bodybuilding is nutrition.

Hippocrates laid down ten rules 2,500 years ago that the medical profession has ignored because what he said doesn’t make money and, as we know, the medical profession is all about making money and lots of it. In the USA, 1.4 trillion dollars a year is spent on health care. Health care, folks, is taking care of sick people, and as I said, there is no such thing as diseases. Nutritional deficiencies cause most medical problems. Americans are very sick people – the sickest in the world – and 45 percent of our people are obese, all from eating refined carbohydrates!

Here are the ten rules of Hippocrates:
1. The natural way is the only way
2. Treat the cause of an illness, not the symptoms
3. Throw away your drugs and heal the people with food
4. Look to the spine for illnesses (Hippocrates was a chiropractor, by the way)
5. Natural food can prevent diseases
6. Do no harm to your patients
7. The word protein means most important
8. Do not perform unnecessary surgery for money
9. A healthy colon is essential
10. Do not administer dangerous and harmful drugs


These rules are very, very important. Most doctors take the Hippocratic Oath. That’s where it came from.

Vince taught me all these truths. Now I’m teaching people, and they’re getting results, just as I did.

When I started to train the young man, he asked me who Vince Gironda had trained. I told him, “Only practically every top bodybuilder in the world.” They would come to him, but unfortunately none of them ever gave him any credit. Most people don’t know that Frank Zane was a key-club member at Vince’s Gym. He had a key to the gym and would go in at night anytime to train. Arnold Schwarzennegger was sent to Vince Gironda for two years. Here’s an interesting story you might get a chuckle out of concerning Arnold.

Everybody assumes that when he came to America he trained under the trainer of champions, Joe Weider. Nothing could be further from the truth. Weider just promoted Arnold and made a lot of money. Actually they both promoted each other and made a lot of money. Arnold’s German industrial sponsor sent him to Vince. Of course, Arnold had a pretty big ego, although he was not that good when he started, being rather on the fat, fleshy side. He walked into Vince’s Gym (John Balik, the editor of IRONMAN can substantiate this story as he was standing right there) and said, “I’m Arnold Schwarzennegger from Austria and I’m Mr. So and So.” Vince looked up at him through his granny glasses and responded, “You’re nothing but a fat you-know-what.” For two years, Arnold spent time at Vince’s Gym Then, after Joe Weider signed him, he went on to become a movie star and multi-millionaire. Years later, Arnold told Balik that was the best thing that ever happened to him because he thought he was king of the world and Vince brought him right down, shattered his ego. That about sums up Vince and says a lot for Arnold.

In part two, I’ll tell you more tales of the man who was perhaps the most knowledgeable and colorful of the muscle gurus. Stay tuned.

Note: Vince passed away in 1997. If you want to learn more about Vince and his unique training methods, I recommend all of his training courses and his full-length book, "Unleashing the Wild Physique." You can purchase these hard-to-find collector's items at very reasonable prices from Ron Kosloff, a long time friend and student of Vince's. Ron has the exclusive rights to Vince's courses and you can reach him in Michigan at (313) 372-1807