THE OG: Vince Gironda

A new series begins, on the man they called "the Iron Guru". Let's kick things off with his biography, before we examine his routines and nutritional theories in depth over the coming weeks

Welcome to the beginning of a new series on the Iron Guru himself, the bad boy of Golden Age Bodybuilding, the eggfather Vince Gironda. The OG.

Over the coming weeks I’m going to tell you everything you might want to know about Gironda, his diets, his exercises, and his routines, as well as a lot of deep lore and trivia. You’ll learn about the Gironda 8x8 and 6x6 routines, his bonkers “liver pill” diet and the “hormone precursor diet” (a.k.a. the 36-eggs-a-day diet), why he hated the bench press, why he hated back squats, why he hated music in the gym, why he hated… everything. Vince could be a cranky git, sure, but he was a man ahead of his time, a visionary who wasn’t afraid to forge his own path, regardless of what others had to say and regardless of where the dominant trends of the day were heading.

What better way to kick things off than with a biograph of Vince? Here you’ll find out everything you need to know about his upbringing, how he became a bodybuilder and how he trained a who’s-who of lifters, celebrities and film stars at his gym — Vince’s Gym — on Ventura Blvd. What follows is an exclusive extract from my third book, Draw Me a Gironda, which is available in paperback via Amazon.

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On Twitter once I referred to Vince Gironda as the ‘Nikola Tesla’ of bodybuilding. If you know anything about Nikola Tesla, the great inventor and futurist, you’ll understand what I’m getting at. Tesla was a brilliant maverick whose contributions to the furtherance of knowledge and indeed the human spirit have been unfairly overlooked, even suppressed; a man well before his time (they say the Trump family knows his secrets). So it is for Vince Gironda too. If a lot of what I am going to say to you seems familiar – about ketogenic dieting and fasting, for instance – that’s because Vince was talking about and advocating such things decades before your favourite Instagram or YouTube fitness ‘expert’.  And if, as T.S. Eliot wrote, ‘the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time’, a proper account of the development of bodybuilding and of fitness culture more generally will have to recognise the contributions of men like Vince Gironda. Many paths that could have been taken, weren’t.

Vince embodied a truly experimental approach to bodybuilding, one that was informed not only by his own personal experience of developing muscle for aesthetic purposes, but also by the latest scientific and historical papers of his time. He was also famous for his frank speech, and his refusal to praise the unpraiseworthy – an admirable trait which in any age never fails to go unpunished. Indeed, one of his most famous workouts is known as the ‘Honest Workout’. But for every Arnold who was spurred to train harder and achieve more by being called a ‘fat fuck’ by Vince, there must be dozens who weren’t; many were expelled from his gym simply for asking why there weren’t any squat racks or why there wasn’t any music playing. Bodybuilding changed massively in his lifetime too, from the classically proportioned physiques of men like Steve Reeves and Vince himself, to the mass monsters of the early 1990s, like Dorian Yates.

So, for many years, Vince fell by the wayside, his ideas about diet and his routines were forgotten, or claimed by others as their own. In recent years, however, he has enjoyed something of a revival, especially due to the fast-growing populist movement known as Raw Egg Nationalism, which has harnessed Vince’s famous 36-eggs-a-day diet to an anti-globalist political stance. Here is Vince’s story, in my words – and with a few of his own thrown in for good measure.