IOL Strength and Conditioning

Bob Simpson is a name that isn’t real well known–that is, unless you were a fan of the power rack and strength in the middle ’70s. Bob Simpson was quietly working out during the 1970s and handling world record poundage. He didn’t train for competition, or for physical beauty. He simply trained for the joy of moving heavy iron. Bob recently joined the IOL–much to my pleasure and he and I have been corresponding for a number of months. His is a story worth telling–so without any further fanfare, here is an interview between Bob and myself. Hope you enjoy it.

[This has been minimally edited--so as to not lose the flavor of the interview or glimpses into Bob's personality. W.]

Wicked Willie – When and where were you born?

Bob – I was born in Memphis, Tennessee Nov. 20, 1937.

WW – So, that would make you 69 now. Do you remember what motivated you to start training?

Bob – My uncle trained with weights when I was pre-school age and I looked at his magazines. Later, when I was 13, my father was stationed in Anchorage, Alaska with the Air Force. I had a paper route and was standing waiting on the bus to take me to my route. There was a newsstand there and I picked up a Strength and Health with George Eifferman on the cover. I bought it and read it and some of Weider’s mags as long as we were in Alaska. When we got back to Memphis—at 14 years old I got a Weider weight set with money I saved from the paper route. I soon had to add to it with additional weight.

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Have you ever heard the phrase “You can’t serve two masters at one time”? I think for the most part this is true, especially for those who have been training for an extended period. Beginners can make gains simultaneously in many areas of fitness: strength, cardio-vascular, flexibility, endurance – for untrained individuals it’s not uncommon to see results in all areas at once. When you hit a certain level of fitness, however, achieving goals like gaining muscle while losing fat or increasing strength while eating below maintenance calories become difficult if not impossible.

I read about an event called “Volkslauf”, which is a 10k obstacle course set up by a Marine Corps unit in Bakersfield, California, and decided to take on the challenge. The course has 75 obstacles which include mud pits, hills, ropes, walls, culverts, monkey bars, belly crawls, and a half mile trench filled with knee to waist deep water.

My conditioning level going into this was pretty solid, but I knew that in order to cover over six miles in one event I would have to adjust my training. The focus needed to be on endurance, but I also needed to maintain my base strength level in order to tackle the obstacles.

The first thing I did was recruit a virtual training partner, Leo Rios, known as Diablo on the Iron On Line (IOL) message boards. Leo and I each mapped out our own training strategies, but we had a common goal – take on the Volkslauf challenge and have as much fun as possible. In the end, we met our goals and surpassed our expectations.

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Muscle and Fitness, a colorful and energetic riot of musclemen and musclebuilding information, isn’t a recent publication that gained popularity overnight. It has gone by a variety of names over half a century and was reared by a guy named Joe Weider. Joe, dubbed the Trainer of Champions, dragged it from the ink-smeared pages of a manual printing press in his grandma’s Montreal apartment and gave it dramatic life based upon his vision of muscle and might.

I was one of the characters who played a role in his elaborate vision, a Mr. America and Mr. Universe in the dream he presented to the world. Appearing on the scene in the early ’60s, I filled the pages of his magazines, adorned their covers and, through inspiring pictures on California beaches, conveyed stories of delight, promise and hope to the young and young at heart.

I smiled broadly, flexed my muscles and frolicked with beach bunnies on lazy, crazy sunny afternoons. The blue Pacific rolled in mightily, billowy clouds with silver linings caressed the horizons and dogs playfully chased seagulls along endless sandy shores. Hop in. The water’s fine. Life is grand.

Hold it there. Back up twenty feet and take another look. I see a distressed cameraman and his elaborate gear in a heap of cases, containers and bags; I see a guy — that must be Joe — in half a suit with his sleeves and trouser legs rolled up; off to the side a group of sticky, uninterested bystanders mope about, kick sand and suck on water bottles. These must be the delighted characters in the delightful pictures awaiting a moment of delight.

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I love Google; couldn’t live without it and I’m sure you’re the same. But often — too often — pages and pages go by before the right site pops up, and sometimes I give up too early and start jumping around to the most likely sources. Quick scan, read a few interesting but un-related pages, click off to another site, ditto action, until an hour’s slipped away and I’m late for the gym.

Yeah, I know that’s what the web’s all about. But still.

Today I’m here to tell you I love Google even more than yesterday because they’ve given us the tools to create our own search engines. You heard me: We get to google only the sites and pages we choose — so far about 150 sites have been selected by the IOL team for our search page. It took about a day to set up, and I’m sure there will be further tweaks over time, but man, oh, man is it worth it!

Here’s what it looks like. It’s operational; give it a shot and see what pops up.