Vince Gironda-The Godfather of BroScience

And Right Wing Bodybuilder Icon

This article was originally written in 2013-2014 (I cannot remember the exact year), and published on Elitefts. I have edited it to update for the current year.

In 2025, Vince Gironda has undergone a revitalization to his reputation, his work, and his place in bodybuilding history. For a more in depth review of his entire canon, I would suggest reading Raw Egg Nationalists excellent series.

This article was written at the time I was full time personal trainer, and Gironda was a major influence on my training then and now.

He was the world’s first bodybuilding coach, one of the first recognized personal trainer, and an intellectual pioneer whose perspectives on adaptation, stimulus, exercises, nutrition, and recovery were cutting edge for his time, and only decades later validated by increased scientific research.

I would consider him a Godfather of Broscience. he was scientifically minded, took a holistic approach to bodybuilding and health, sought to integrate multiple fields of study, and over all else was driven for results and application.

His Origins

Born in 1917, his full name was Vincent Anselmo Gironda. Born in the Bronx of New York City, his family moved when he was a toddler to California, where his father worked as a stuntman. Notably his father was a stuntman on the original production of Ben-Hur in 1925.

Vince grew up participating in athletics, and originally had aspirations to be a dancer. He trained for a professional dance career throughout adolescence and into his teens. He had bit dancing roles in a few films, but his father was critical of his dancing aspirations, and rather than be a “sissy” as his father called him, Vince decided to try being a stuntman like his father was.

Vince took up stunt work at the age of 22, but he quickly realized he lacked the muscle for it. He joined a local YMCA, and then after 8 months he went to the Easton Brothers gym to train.

Speaking from personal experience of working in Hollywood, stuntmen are largely under appreciated for their athletic abilities. Most stuntmen are the “ripped” physique bodydoubles for actors, while at the same time they perform extremely coordinated and often dangerous stunt work that requires a unique blend of fight choreography, raw athleticism, and high level technical expertise with everything from evasive driving, rock climbing, explosives and demolitions, parkour, wire work, and many other skills.

The Easton Brothers gym still exists today, and in its day it was one the original “bodybuilding meccas” before Musclebeach and Golds Gym in Venice took that title. It was founded in 1938 by Harvey and Dale Easton, and was a bodybuilders gym before being a bodybuilder was even in the social lexicon. Vince credits his time at Easton gyms for influencing many of training methods and guiding his future philosophies. He trained at Eastons for almost ten years before opening his own gym in 1948.

The Bodybuilder

Vince was alive and well during the classic age of bodybuilder in the 1950s, and he competed 5 times from 1948 to 1962 times. His physique back then was a total outlier; he was always the most ripped and proportionate bodybuilder on stage, had the smallest waist and widest V-Taper (relatively speaking) and he was a master poser, well known for his routines set to music and his precise muscle control. While he never won a competition, he was awarded a “Best Definition” award more than once. He was actually criticized for being “too defined”, something that sounds absurd today, but at the time being extremely “ripped” was very uncommon, and no one dieted that intensely, or necessarily knew how in the first place.

Vince became far more known for his training methods than his physique, and by the start of the 1960s, his gym was considered mandatory visit for bodybuilder in the Los Angeles area.

Vince was the trainer of Larry Scott, the first Mr. Olympia, and he was in fact the first trainer that Arnold Schwarzenegger ever worked with when he arrived in the USA in 1960. He worked on and off with many legendary bodybuilders over the decades. The last “star pupil” of his was Mohamed Makkawy of Egypt, who became one of the top bodybuilders of the 1980s, placing in the top 10 more than once, and being one of the last men to beat Lee Haney in competition before he became Mr. Olympia.

Vince the Personal Trainer

Vince eventually billed himself as a “Trainer of the Stars”. His gym was located in North Hollywood, and was only minutes away from Burbank, the “Media Capital of the World”.

Warners Brothers Studios, Disney, NBC, and Columbia all had studio lots and sound stages in the immediate area. His gym did a brisk business with the film studios, as he became their go to trainer for getting actors into shape FAST. During the peak of his career in the 1970s and 1980s, he had a constant influx of actors, and his gym was covered with pictures of the stars that he had trained.

Vince was an applied scientist, and he was self educated in the areas of nutrition and training. Decades before “broscience” ever came into existence, or the trend of “science and evidence”, Vince was attempting to integrate physiology and nutrition.

Vince realized early on that much of what bodybuilders preached and practiced was purely observational, and based solely upon personal experience. At the same time, he recognized that self experimentation was the fundamental practice of learning about one’s health. Vince also recognized that internal health was the deciding factor in how the stimulus of training was handled.

As he was a trainer first and foremost, he always had clients to test out his theories and methods on.

The following is not a comprehensive list, but it gives you an idea of how innovative Vince was, decades before the current fitness industry coalesced

Vince Innovations

-The importance of digestion for muscle growth and overall health

-Metabolic typing, that there was no “optimal” diet and everyone had varying needs and preferences

-The importance of liver health for bodybuilders

-”metabolic” training, circuit training, and Peripheral Heart Rate Training

-Rapid weight loss through low and zero carb dieting and high frequency training

-15x4 “cluster training” for size, strength, and a conditioning effect

-The recognition that different rep ranges had different effects on hypertrophy

-Cycling rep ranges (undulating periodization) to maximize hypertrophy

-8x8 training for hypertrophy

-10x10 training, originally conceived as a way to train while CUTTING, due to the lighter weights used and the high metabolic cost (and relatively short training time)

-strength being joint angle specific

-organizing exercises based on which section of a muscle they emphasized, and realizing that hypertrophy (muscle growth) was also joint angle specific

-Hypertrophy being the result of sustained intramuscular tension, peak contraction, muscle lengthening, and blood flow, and not only dependent upon the external load used.

-Recognizing the individual structure (anthropometrics) guided how an exercise should be performed for maximal stimulus

-Advocating that bodybuilding followed mathematical principles of structure and aesthetics, and that physiques could be developed according to these principles

-Recognizing that there was an dose-response relationship and adaptation curve between training volume, intensity, and frequency.

Does any of the above sound familiar? The concepts are still studied and discussed in modern times, yet Vince was practicing and experimenting with all of the above over 50 years ago, before there was ever any “studies” to support most of it. The man was a savant, and up until the late 1980s, his writing was prolific.

The Disappearance of Vince from the Bodybuilding Scene

While Vince peaked in popularity in the 1980s, as the decade came to a close, his stardom began to fade. This was for a few reasons.

-Vince hated steroid use, and was vocally against it. He also hated the trend towards “mass monsters” that started in the 1980s, and considered the look to be hideous. This didn’t endear him to the bodybuilding community and he was sought out less for his training expertise.

-Vince was, by many accounts, extremely abrasive and difficult to get along with. His gym mirrored his personality. It was dark, had no music, and all the equipment was custom made. He also was fond of throwing anyone out who disrupted his sense of ambiance. During a time when “big box” health spa gyms with the latest equipment and sexy 80s aesthetics were taking off, Vinces gym was a comparative dungeon.

-A Nautilus gym opened up across the street directly from his gym, and it hurt his business immensely.

-Vince had one son, Guy Gironda, and his son had drug addiction issues that required Vinces attention. Accurate info on this is scarce, but in the final years of his life Vince was preoccupied with his sons health, and the gym was no longer a priority. It steadily lost members and was shutdown in 1995.

-While many people read Vince’s work, the only way to save it was to hold on to magazines and courses. Unless you were training in the 1980s and saved the magazines, by the 1990s he had fallen out of the bodybuilding discourse.

-Vince published only one full length book his whole career, Unleashing the Wild Physique, which came out in 1984. Original copies today are very rare, and cost hundreds of dollars.

Despite this, Vinces work did live on in the form of library microfilm and scanned PDFs, and this is what kept his underground reputation alive. Those trainers who were studious would find his work passed around online, and thankfully one of his final students, Daryl Conant, preserved his courses and book, as well as his exercise equipment.

Daryls youtube channel

Additionally, during the late 1980s he filmed some exercise tutorials, and we can see his coaching and execution of various

Vince demonstrates Incline Curls

Vince coaching proper barbell drag curls

Thanks to the internet, Vince is now Immortal for all time

Vince died at age 79 in 1997. Vince relatives claim he was originally hospitalized for an blood infection stemming from a leg injury, and this led to a clot that lead to heart failure. At the time he was living the life of a pauper, with his bank account was withdrawn -$100. Vince was survived by his 3rd wife, Madeline, and his son guy.

-To note, Vince never got divorced from his prior wives. Rather they both died tragically, his first wife Peggy passing from a brain hemorrhage. His second wife (and mother of his son) Barbara Anne, she died from a stroke.

Thanks to the internet though, his legacy, once stagnant, has exploded. His writing, photos, and programs have brought him life to millions of people. And he has become an iconic figure in the Right Wing Bodybuilding sphere thanks to Raw Egg Nationalist.

You cannot go wrong following the advice of the Iron Guru

“If you want to look like the average guy in the gym, do what everyone else is doing.”