THE DINOSAUR TRAINING STRENGTH ARCHIVE (Book I): THE REVOLUTION CONTINUES! (Brooks Kubik Training Series)
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THE DINOSAUR TRAINING STRENGTH ARCHIVE (Book I): THE REVOLUTION CONTINUES! (Brooks Kubik Training Series)
Hail to the Dinosaurs!
These four words opened the first issue of The Dinosaur Files, a uniquely informative and inspiring newsletter that I edited and published from August 1997 through August 2002, and again from May 2010 through April 2012. A total of 85 issues, totaling close to 2,000 pages in an information-dense, two-column format – the equivalent of at least a dozen detailed books on Dino-style strength training, old-school muscle-building, physical culture and Iron Game history. Each issue was a goldmine of training information, and the entire set is literally an encyclopedia of real world, no-nonsense strength training.
That's great for those Dinos who have the entire set of back issues – but bad for those who don't. So I've decided to help share the best of the The Dinosaur Files for those readers who missed them the first time around. We'll do it in a series of books, beginning with this one. Be looking for other books in the series in the near future. We'll try to release one every month or two.
This book collects many of my favorite articles from the first year of The Dinosaur Files, and introduces each article with a short review written especially for readers of this book. I've edited, updated, expanded, and revised the articles and the workouts to make them as helpful and result-producing as possible. I've also added some brand new material, including a terrific power rack program to build Herculean muscle, bone, tendon and ligament strength.
The introduction to each chapter places the original Dinosaur Files article in its proper context and gives you some background about why I wrote it and how it ties into the progression of my thinking and my training over the years.
And also, since Dinosaur Training is such an important part of my life, I'll give you some background about various things that have happened in my life that affected The Dinosaur Files and my training at different times. If you pay attention, you'll find me reporting on workouts I did in the original Dinosaur Dungeon, and a few years later, on workouts I did in an old, hole-in-the-wall gym in Louisville. I'll try to put that in context without boring anyone with too much in the way of personal biography. (Short version: I got divorced, moved out of the house and into a small apartment, and the old hole-in-the-wall gym was the only available place to train. Later, I met Trudi, the current Mrs. Kubik, and I now train in our garage, a/k/a the new Dinosaur Dungeon.)
Much like the book Dinosaur Training, The Dinosaur Files happened more or less by accident. The genesis of The Dinosaur Files was as follows. I wrote the manuscript for Dinosaur Training over the course of several years back in the early 1990's, and self-published the little monster in March 1996. That was before the Internet and e-books, and self-publishing was a daunting and expensive undertaking. It took every penny I had to get the first edition of the book printed. I ordered 3,000 copies and hoped I'd sell enough of them to cover my expenses. I remember one well-meaning (or not) colleague who said, "If they sell, that's great, and if not, you'll have a garage full of books to burn in the winter if you ever run out of firewood."
Luckily, things worked out. Dinosaur Training took the weight-training world by storm, and suddenly I was getting letters from readers around the world asking questions about Dino-style strength training and muscle building. Yes, I said letters. This was before email, and people communicated the old-fashioned way – on paper, with words they wrote by hand or typed on a typewriter – and then sent to one another in a little thing called an envelope, with something called a stamp on the outside to cover the postal service's cost of delivery.
The flood of feedback and the barrage of training questions prompted me to consider doing something that, in retrospect, was totally insane for a man who worked 50 or 60 hours a week at his day job,