THE OG: Gironda's 10x10

You may know it as "German Volume Training", but the truth is it was invented by an Italian...

Welcome back, my friends, to the OG, my series on all things Vince Gironda. I sat down over Christmas and really had a good think about everything I could say with regard to the great Iron Guru. Turns out, there’s a lot.

We’ve already had Vince’s biography and two instalments laying out the principles behind his approach to bodybuilding, in both practical and more theoretical terms. Then we looked at Vince’s 8x8 workout, otherwise known as the “Honest Workout,” and how proper breathing technique is essential to being able to perform this workout.

Now we’re going to talk about another one of Vince’s workout routines, one that’s actually attributed to German strength coaches in the 1970s…

---

I’m not one of those people who likes to claim that his idol — in this case, Vince Gironda — invented everything that’s worth knowing or doing in his particular field of endeavour. Vince Gironda didn’t invent Crossfit, for example. (Although, now that I mention it, he did invent the principle of “muscle confusion” which many people take to be the main rationale behind the infini-WOD method of training popularised by Crossfit…)

But Vince Gironda actually did, as far as we can tell, invent the 10x10 routine, which means he invented what is popularly called “German Volume Training.”

The name “German Volume Training” was actually coined by the Canadian strength coach Charles Polliquin in a magazine article in 1996, and ever since then that’s what doing 10 sets of 10 reps, however they’re performed, has been called. German Volume Training is often held up as the ultimate “compromise” or even “best of both worlds” routine: you get conditioned and you get big. German Volume Training is a routine for “rapid size gains”, as this piece from T-Nation puts it.

The Germans or rather German of the name “German Volume Training” is Rolf Feser, who trained the German national weightlifting team in the 1970. There’s actually very little information about the man and his methods to be found on the internet, but it’s generally agreed, thanks to Charles Polliquin, that Feser was the originator of German Volume Training. According to Polliquin, Feser discovered that the routine was “so efficient that lifters routinely moved up a full weight class within 12 weeks.”

While there can be little doubt that German weightlifters were doing 10x10 workouts, to great success, in the 1970s, the truth is that Vince Gironda was writing about 10x10 in the 1960s. Whether he actually invented the routine himself, or whether he was simply taught it, we’ll never know. But since Vince is as far back as we can trace the ancestry of the system, it only seems fair that he gets to be called the creator of 10x10 or German Volume Training or whatever you want to call it.

Italian Volume Training? Why not?

10x10 training featured in two of Vince’s early pamphlets: “Definition” and “Vince’s Corner.” It would appear that Vince used some 10x10 training as well as 8x8, in conjunction with his “Maximum Definition” diet (a.k.a. the steak-and-eggs diet), to get in killer shape for the 1962 NABBA Mr Universe competition, which he narrowly missed out on winning.