Oldschool Strength Articles: Volume I

If you already know who I am and what I'm all about, then I probably already sent you an email explaining the purpose of this ebook... If you're just joining us, then you'll want to take a quick visit to my websites and check out some of the other interesting strength-related things that I have going on: http://www.functionalhandstrength.com, http://www.oldtimestrongman.com, and my new membership site http://www.ironleague.com

We put this particular ebook together for two reasons: one, to get some really great training information out there that most people would never have access to otherwise, and two, because we are getting into ebooks in a big way, so we made the incredibly cheap price tag to encourage people to take a chance on an ebook if they have been hesitant to do so in the past.

We plan on compiling articles from many different classic strength resources, it just so happens that for "Volume I" of this series all the articles came from classic Iron Man magazine.

I was fortunate enough to be in the once in a lifetime position to be granted permission from John Balik, former Editor-in-chief of Iron Man magazine, to re-print, in digital form, the entire Iron Man back catalog all the way to the beginning

Anyone who was been around the Iron Game for any length of time will tell you that vintage issues of Iron Man are the some of the very best strength articles and resources ever put down on paper. Iron Man was a unique mix of bodybuilding, Olympic weight lifting, classic feats of strength and what would eventually become Powerlifting -- it was a publication the likes of which we will never see again, and these classic issues are like gold.

Unfortunately, few people saved their old issues of Iron Man, and it would take a king's ransom to try to get your hands on these issues now -- if you can even find them for sale at all. All this amazing information would have otherwise been lost, but thanks to the wonders of modern technology, we can now bring you the treasure trove of strength knowledge from these classic issues of Iron Man and other great magazines from strength history.

The following articles will give you a very nice selection of vintage -- but certainly still very effective -- training ideas. We have made every effort to include all the original images and image captions with each article. Sometimes the images help shown a particular technique, other times, they might simply show a point of interest which may or may not even be related to the article topic. Either way, we feel that these articles would be incomplete without them.

The Power Rack training articles by Anthony Ditillo, which leads off the series, are some of the best articles that he ever wrote and the workouts found in the second installment are truly top notch. We've got an interesting "field report" on Isometric training, a useful article on building mind power, and advice on training for the Olympic lifts by Doug Hepburn, who should need no introduction to any serious strength athlete.

Other than the fact that there are only two competitive Olympic lifts today, the training information in the following articles still holds up remarkably well, and should you follow the advice therein you'll understand why the training information from these old "Iron Man" mags were valued so highly.

In time, there will be other volumes in this series, covering a wide-range of useful, interesting and most importantly effective training topics. There will be plenty of other article from the Iron Man archives but we'll have articles from other resources as well. For the time being, the following articles should give you more than enough to work on.