Interview with Larry Scott
by Steve Cotter
The importance of strength training is a controversial issue among martial artists. Like many martial artists before me, I got disillusioned with bodybuilding. In martial arts, speed and power is developed through coordinating all the muscles of the body together in fluid movements. For strength and conditioning I choose kettlebell training because of its striking similarity to martial arts techniques. While I was flattered when our Russian Kettlebell Challenge TM team was invited to give four exhibitions at the Mr. Olympia, I did not expect to learn anything useful. Then I met a one of a kind bodybuilder whose awareness of the human body is up to par to that of a top internal martial art stylist. Ladies and gentlemen, I am honored to introduce Larry Scott, the first man to win the Mr. Olympia title.
SC: Larry, I was very impressed when I met you at the Mr. Olympia expo, in particular with your abdominal training system. I am a strength coach professionally, and have an extensive background in Chinese martial arts, with 20 over years of training, and 2 full contact titles in the sport of Kuoshu. I'm always looking for more efficient ways of training the body, and I have never seen anything like your Ring of Fire exercises. Could you tell us a little about how you got started in bodybuilding?
LS: It was a long time ago. I was always smaller than average and I just wanted to be loved, appreciated and those kinds of things. I saw this magazine at the dump that was a muscle magazine — the first time I had seen one. It had a picture of a popular bodybuilder and it said "You, too can have an arm like this in 30 days" and it showed the exercises. "Man" I thought, "I could do those exercises". I had a chinning bar at home. It was a big, thick tractor axle and I improvised so I thought, "I'll tear that down and I'll use that for a barbell." And so I did. It was all triceps exercises, and I started doing them. This was between junior and senior year in high school, and I started to grow! I felt myself getting a pump for the first time. I couldn't believe it! It was summer vacation and by the time the senior year rolled around my arms were pumping 12 1/2, pretty impressive for me (laughs).
SC: Were you always athletic or was pumping iron your first taste of athletic success?
LS: I wasn't really athletic. I wasn't really very good at team sports. It just took me a long time to get on to it. By the time the season was over I was just starting to catch on. When I found bodybuilding I found, hey I can do this on my own. I can put out my own effort as long as I want. I could focus on this, I'm not going to be dependent on anyone else, and I found myself beginning to excel. By the end of the senior year I was in the running for the best built senior and man. I'm telling you I was off and running. There was nothing that was going to turn me back. I was so determined that, I would never miss a workout. It was impossible to even consider missing a workout.
SC: You have always been known and respected for your level of focus and of course focus is always something that martial artists are interested in. I read a quote attributed to you that said "every rep is a set and every set is a series" and that you always use maximum intensity and concentration on each and every repetition. Could you comment a little about that and how you came to take that attitude in your training?
LS: Well, I found that we generally have a teacher or some exercise that we grew on that can teach us lessons about all the rest of our program, and I learned that concept on the Preacher bench. That if I was going to get maximum growth from it I had to focus on what I was going to do that day before I ever got there — the weights I was going to use, and the reps I was going to use, and the actual form I was going to use. So I would plan a weight that was really hard, that every rep was really — wasn't just to get through the last one, but that every rep was focused, really focused. That way I got absolutely the most out of every repetition, from the bottom of the movement to the top of the movement. By using that kind of focus, then I began to think you really have to focus on every rep as if it was a whole set, and every set of it was a series. It really seemed to help me to describe when I was writing articles. People would say "how do you do this" and I would say, "here's the kind of focus you've got to have". So it was just a good little catch phrase to help people to understand that it did take a great degree of concentration in order to help make your best progress.
SC: Vince Gironda, the famous Venice Beach trainer, commented that you never missed a workout, so to me that really speaks about your level of discipline, which is something that is integral to the study of martial arts. Another thing is that when people are starting out in training, whether it is bodybuilding or martial arts or anything athletic in nature, so many are always looking for "the secret". They want to know what the secret to success is. What would you say that secret is, if there is such a thing?
LS: I've been asked this question a lot of times you can imagine, and I generally tell them to take lots of Vitamin P. They say what is that and I say Patience. It's a natural process and your body grows at its pre-determined rate, and you're not going to speed up the process. Most of the fellows that don't make it in bodybuilding, it isn't that they don't have a lot of potential, they just get so impatient that they over train. They're so anxious about it that they burn energy and calories on their anxiety rather than using that whole force inside the gym. I used to say, in order for you to make your best progress, you should have somebody wheel you to the gym in a wheelchair and train your best and then have them wheel you home. That way your focus was totally just on your workout and that kind of focus helps you make much better progress.
SC: Yeah, that's real commitment and that kind of focus is necessary, I think, for all things.
LS: I think so, and it's probably even more so for martial arts, because you folks really spend, probably a half what you're doing is the focus of the mental imaging. In bodybuilding, you can do quite well without really getting that degree of purity in your mental focus.
SC: I agree with you that focus is at least half of what we're talking about. Speaking of martial arts, I understand that you were actually influenced by a Tai Chi book you read that talked about the breathing component of training. Would you comment a little about how much of what you read affected your training approach and what you learned about breathing, related to bodybuilding or physical training in general?
LS: Well, I learned as I stumbled on this Ring of Fire concept that it was helping me as much mentally and emotionally as it was physically. Something was happening that I felt more alive from it. Not like I did when I did just a normal white muscle fiber, like chest or arms or legs. But when I was working the midsection, there was something else going on, there was a component there that I wasn't aware of, that actually made me feel younger, and I was trying to figure out what that was. I had an employee that had some familiarity with Tai Chi and I was telling him about what was happening, trying to find a description for it and he said, "That's a lot like Tai Chi". So I went out and got a book by Master Huang and I read through it. In one particular area he was suggesting that when you flex the midsection you sort of semi-massage those filtering organs, which gets rid of toxins and frees the filtering organ to bring in new, fresh nutrients. So that could be why you're feeling this extra Chi or Ki. I was satisfied with that answer because that was their field, it wasn't mine. So I decided to use that description to describe what was happening. When you talk to a Western mentality, they are a little reluctant to move into that area, but at the same time, there is a great deal of strength in that area and we need to at least have some vernacular that we can use to explain what is happening. Because when you use the Ring of Fire, it definitely makes you feel younger and makes you look younger. So there is something else going on besides just the muscular activity.
SC: It's interesting that you comment about that. I think that people generally connote bodybuilding as just being a physical training, but the way you describe it, it sounds like you have more of a holistic approach, almost more or a mind-body integration the way you approach your training. Is it accurate to say that?
LS: It is; it is very accurate. I think it's especially true the more you get into the training. For example, when you're younger, everything is for size in bodybuilding, you worship at the alter of size. Then as you get older you begin to look at things. Gradually, a trim, hard midsection is as important as big arms were. When you were younger, big arms are the thing, because the midsection comes anyway. Then as we get older the midsection begins to leave and we don't know what to do about it. So the whole idea of virility and vitality begins to be more of a focus around the midsection. And as we focus on the midsection we uncover a whole new area of "holistic" as you say, that helps us to feel not just trim and hard and virile in the midsection, but we feel more alive, more alert. We just feel younger, and it's especially compounded when everyone around us is falling apart so fast.
SC: Yeah, just speaking to you I can see that there are so many parallels between what you've discovered through bodybuilding and what we study through martial arts. Obviously, developing strength throughout the midsection is really a key to developing force in one's movements, and as you say the vitality and the virility. So, it's very interesting that you've come to the same conclusion, but through a different path. You mentioned the Ring of Fire exercises, and the readers are not yet familiar with this. This is something you've developed. Could you tell us what the Ring of Fire is, and how you came to discover this exercise?
LS: Originally, at the time I first began to be familiar with it, I was working as a consultant for an equipment manufacturer. We were in the process of seeing if we could design a piece of equipment that worked lower abdominals. There were many of them out there, one of which we had developed, that were great for the upper abs. There was the popular notion at the time that you can't work upper abs, or lower abs, that it's all one long stretch of muscle and when you flexed any part the whole thing flexes. That's not true, we knew that you could work lower abs and we were going to design a piece of equipment to do it.
SC: How did you go about doing that?
LS: In order to get as much help as we could, we went to a local university and we talked to a Dr.Garth Fischer, who was the resident expert on exercise physiology. He said in order to work this part of the abdominals, you had to do this movement right here and he had me get down on the floor and got me in a position. Then he said ok, just move your body in this way right here and that will work lower abs. Well, I couldn't move at all! I was embarrassed! I mean, here I was Mr. America and I should be able to do anything. So I went home and I started working on those and got to where finally I could do it. At first I couldn't do those at all. I didn't know how to actually flex lower abs. I could do leg raises, and I thought that was working lower abs, but it wasn't. That was only isometric, it wasn't isotonic lower abs. So, once I learned how to do that I thought, man, if I could learn how to do that with lower abs, what are the other muscles around the midsection that I don't even know how to work?
SC: Please elaborate?
LS: For example, I can do a side bend, but how do I actually flex that muscle independent of the weight, actually speak to it, to make that muscle respond, as I could say with a bicep? I began to experiment, and before I got done I had found that there are 9 muscle groups around the midsection that were equally responsive to concentrated effort, just as the lower abs were. And I said, "Man, it just feels like fire all the way around the midsection, you can feel the heat in it and it felt great. Let's call it the Ring of Fire". And we did. And since that time, I have never heard anyone talk about that. They do sit-ups and leg raises and still today I look at the exercises they are suggesting in the latest physique magazines and I never do any of those things. They are a waste of time compared to what you can get out of the Ring of Fire.
SC: What interested me about the Ring of Fire is that they really improve the midsection awareness for martial arts. I mean, it is identical to the perfect chamber for a roundhouse kick, or the finish position of a back kick. It really develops great control over these muscles that are so involved in powerful kicking. Why is the abdominal training that you get with the Ring of Fire superior to sit-ups and crunches?
LS: One problem people have with the midsection is gravity, which is pulling down on the internal organs, which sit like a sack full of wet clothes on the pelvic floor. Because of gravity they're trying to spill out over that pelvic floor, and they begin to spill over the front side. They can't spill out over the back, because the spine is there, so they spill out over the front side. And as they tip over that front part of the pelvic bowl, it pulls the pelvis down. As the pelvis dips down it gives excessive curve to the low back so that's where we get all that excessive low back pain that we always have. It isn't because of having weak backs at all. What happens really is that the spinal erectors get too tight, and so we have to stretch the spinal erectors and find a way to lift the front of that pelvis. And the only muscle that can do that is the lower abs. So we have a problem and that is that the lower abs just isn't toned well.
SC: So what happens with Ring of Fire training?
LS: You see your waist change, in like 3 or 4 days, you're pulling your stomach in flat and it starts to get rid of that fat and you can see a real change in your waist. My waist went down to what it was in high school, and I don't do any sit-ups and leg raises. I do maybe 3 minutes of Ring of Fire each day and that's it. It keeps my waist hard. Not as hard as you guys (laughs), but it keeps it hard.
SC: That's a great explanation. As a martial artist I'm always looking at exercise from the perspective of how it can help my training. I think the Ring of Fire is really a great exercise for martial arts because, first of all you are doing them from a standing position which is much more specific to the demands of the arts, and you load the hip in a manner that is very similar to throwing a punch or a kick, or absorbing impact to the body. In addition, you are training the whole ring rather than just the "washboard" muscles. Do you have any experience teaching these exercises to martial artists or other athletes?
LS: I have taught this to a lot of different people and I find that athletes have better control over their hip than those that are non-athletes. You're trying to get your midsection to go into the same kind of cramp your calf does in the middle of the night, in each muscle section. Once you get that cramp then you just stretch it out to get rid of the lactic acid and move on to the next one. It's more of a matter of lifting the hip then it is crunching down over it. Women are better than that than men are. They can really lift their hips real well. The secret to that whole thing in all 9 sections of the body is the lifting of the hip. If you can lift it high enough, you can get it to go into seizure just by the lifting.
SC: There is a tremendous amount of muscle control required to do this, isn't there?
LS: The wonderful thing about that is that once you enter into that arena, you begin to discover more and more ways in which you can make that synapse even more profound and more pronounced. You start out where you can barely get one area to flex, then you move to the next one and that one doesn't even seem like it has any muscles there. Before long, then it starts to flex. Then after awhile you get to where you can flex two at a time, then you get even better and you can flex all one side at a time and all the other side at a time. Then your control gets so good you can run it up to the middle of your back and down the other side of your back.
SC: Sounds like making a major mind-muscle connection.
LS: Yes, you get to where you really do develop a personal relationship with those muscle fibers, not at all akin to like when you're doing a deadlift. You're lifting the weight but you have no mental-muscle connection to those lower spinal erectors. You're just telling them to lift the weight, and it does. But when you start getting that actual mental connection to those muscle fibers, an absolutely wonderful thing begins to take place. You begin to bring your body to life consciously and you understand the enormous gift you have been given in this body. That it really wants to be in great shape — it does. It has a will of its own and it is just thrilled over the fact that you are actually talking to the muscles themselves. It's almost like they have little voices and they celebrate over it. They say, "This is great. I'm hearing from Steve, this is wonderful!" The adjoining muscles fibers say "Aw, he never talks to us". "I'm telling you, I heard him, I heard him, I really did!" "You actually heard from him?" "Yes, I did". So, before long, they start listening and they join in and it just becomes a celebration of the midsection. So, when you're working the midsection it's not like working muscles for size — it's a party.
SC: (Laughs) That's a great analogy. When you first taught the Ring of Fire exercises to me you commented that I was able to learn to contract the muscles much faster than most people are. How large of a role do you think that muscular control plays in the exercises as opposed to just raw strength?
LS: A much greater role than raw strength. Raw strength doesn't seem to help at all. Most people do not have the muscular control at all. They have to learn it, just as I did. As a matter of fact, when I spoke to you 3 fellows that were there (author Pavel Tsatsouline, strength coach Brett Jones, and myself), and I had you go through the Ring of Fire, you had better response to the Ring of Fire than I've ever seen with anyone. (author's note: Larry increased his deadlift by 18% following the program outlined in Pavel's classic strength training book Power to the People!, a remarkable improvement for such an advanced lifter as Mr. Scott)
SC: Hmm, that's interesting.
LS: As a group, you were the best. And is it Pavel?
SC: Yes.
LS: He had it. He had it nailed, and you did also. Most people do not have the muscular control at all. They have to learn that, just like I did. I did not know it at all. I had to learn every one of those things. You guys were already there; you just need the names of what you're doing, because you already know how to do it.
SC: When is the appropriate time to practice the Ring of Fire drill and how often?
LS: I always like to do it at the end of my workout, just before my aerobics. You're only doing it for 3-5 minutes and red muscle fiber recuperates so fast you could do it 3-4 times a day. The only problem with working red muscle fiber or any fiber by the use of the synapse is the nervous system. It's kind of like a battery. You keep draining current from a battery and before long the battery gets discharged. It takes time to recharge the battery, so you have to pull away just to let the battery recharge. Because you can't get as strong a synapse, until your battery recharges.
SC: This is incredibly valuable information. To bring this conversation full circle and emphasize the similarities between your style of training and martial art training, I want to read a quote by you. You have said that, "Humility, not arrogance is the true mark of a champion". Would you comment on what you mean by that and how that attitude relates to training?
LS: Well, there is nothing as ugly as somebody that becomes the champion and takes all the credit themselves. I mean, you see the guy walking around, strutting around and nobody looks at him. Everybody pulls their eyes away because they don't want to give him any more attention than he's already got on himself. But when you see somebody that is a real champion, that is the best at his sport, and he gives credit to a higher source, that's beautiful — it's beautiful. So that's a real champion because then you can not only appreciate what he's done, but you appreciate his wisdom of knowing that it really wasn't him, it was all a gift.
SC: Wow, that's great — that's really well said. Lots of very useful information here for martial artists and anyone that's interested in developing their body and their self to higher levels. In closing Larry, Joe Weider has said about you that you are the most loved and idolized of all champions. After speaking with you, and sharing in your wisdom, I can understand why you are called the Greatest Bodybuilder of All Time and I appreciate your generosity in taking the time to educate the readers in your fantastic training methods.
LS: Well, thank you, and by the way, of any interview I've done, the questions have been the most interesting. Most of the times the questions have been pretty boring.
SC: (Laughs) Well, you made it very easy for me, so thank you very much.
LS: It was my pleasure.
For those of you interested in becoming a Larry Scott certified trainer, call (800)225-9752 for more information and visit www.larryscott.com
