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.