Strength Oldschool: Viewing image Thierry Pastel - Strength Oldschool

Thierry Pastel was yet another super shaped bodybuilder from the Serge Nubret school of training. It's interesting to speculate when looking at all the guys who followed Serge's system as to the reasons why these guys looked so good - was it mostly genetics and they just happened to train Serge's way, or was it the training system that was chiefly responsible for their results? I tend to think it was more the result of training Serge's way.

Okay, these guys needed relatively trim joints, narrow pelvis and long clavicles and good muscle bellies, but even so there was a definite type of appearance they all possessed that made them identifiable as Nubret followers. The same shared appearance could also be noticed amongst Vince Gironda pupils - size was not the focus and other than Larry Scott and Don Howorth generally Vince's pupils were not huge but they all shared a similar look with lateral triceps heads very visible and wide flaring pecs as a result of bent forward cable triceps extensions and wide Gironda dips. I did Gironda dips myself and they certainly worked, adding width and flare to my pecs that no amount of benchpressing could do. Also Bob Kennedy had noted that all strandpullers (chest expanders) that were pretty good possessed very well developed lower triceps. So maybe crediting genetics with 80 or 90% of our results is over the top and we should focus more attention on our workouts, and pay very close attention to good form - why waste energy heaving and cheating weights that are too heavy when you can go lighter and stricter, okay it will burn more but you will get much better results and your joints will last longer.

Magnus pecs