One-Set-Per-Exercise for Strength (complete) - An Interview with Coach Merian Cooper (1936)

 

Coach Cooper with his Star Pupil 

Editor's Note: We are pleased to present this rare and informative Q&A interview with Coach Merian C. Cooper, and hope that you may garner information sufficient to increase your knowledge of both weight training and weight-lifting history.

Coach Cooper, or "Coop" as he is known to his friends and charges, has a vast and varied background in training the movie stars and celebrities you see onscreen at cinemas worldwide. 

Mr. Cooper comes from an extraordinarily varied background, having been an aviator in both the U.S. Army Air Service and the Polish Air force, time spent as a Soviet P.O.W., and as a member of the board of directors of Pan American Airways before settling on a career in film, his strongest love and passion. 

Having trained multiple stars male and female requiring strength as well as a film-worthy "look of power" . . . physique changes for specific roles . . . the entire spectrum of what weight-training has to offer, we feel that he is a man of extensive training knowledge, one we are more than happy to have here, and are grateful for the opportunity to grace these humble pages with his presence.

Our interview with Mr. Cooper, now living in South America while working on a recent film project, was conducted via the wonders of modern telephone communication. The line was at times riddled with static, but the conversation that took place over the great physical distance between Boston and Buenos Aries, on South America's southeastern shore, was no less than a miraculous blessing to be involved in. Modern times, and our civilization appears to be on the cusp of wondrous technological progress. 

We will skip the initial section of our interview with Mr. Cooper and go straight to the Question & Answer portion. Assistant editor Richard Farnsworth is shown as "Q" and did the interview, one in which Mr. Cooper freely offered his training wisdom to our readers. 

Q: Our readers are very grateful to you for allowing them to in some way gain from your experience Mr. Cooper, and I am certain it will be put to use by them. 

A: Call me Coop. It's good to know what I've learned will be further experimented with by them.

Q: Heading directly to the meat, no, the marrow of our query, when you signed on to train King Kong, what condition did he initially present? 

A: Well, that's a funny story, if I may spend a moment relating it to your readers.

Q: By all means, please do! 

A: Well, Richard, at this point in his career, Kong had become accustomed to living in our world, the jungle was a fading memory for him, and he had adapted to city life quite well. Living accommodations were, of course, rather troublesome for the big fellow at first, but seeing the potential value of his singularity a group of "backers" and movie producers footed the bill with a view to the future financial opportunities presented them. 

Kong availed himself of all parts of our world and its conveniences, however, he found he had a fondness for fine dining and good wine, which led to him being in a very poor state of physical conditioning when I first met with him at his home, a city-block long, very strongly constructed single floor dwelling. 

The initial task I was presented with was to get him "up and running" again, off the enormous couch and back into what we might refer to as jungle condition. This part of his total training regimen took about three months, as he had sunken into a quite decadent lifestyle at that point. 

Q: Sounds like a huge undertaking, Coop! 

A: Oh yes . . . it most definitely was. Now, if I may transition to the central issue you've told me via mail that this interview will focus on . . . How did I train Kong to get that look of power so readily visible in his first feature film, was strength a large part of achieving that look, and what methods did I use in order to keep his interest up and motivation high. 

Kong, being of the quick-thinking, easily bored temperament subset of lifters, required a routine that would maintain his interest over the period of months required to achieve our goals. 

Q: Would you mind expanding on the progression of selected methods you tried, Coop? 

A: I'd love to, Richard, and still find it hard to believe there's much interest in this, aside from the few who always seem to seek variations of the old, sometimes seen as new. 

After the initial period of getting the big fellow, oh, incidentally, King Kong is the stage name he uses. His real name is King Cong and his original birthplace is an undisclosed location deep in jungles of Viet Nam. Kong is rather protective of his background, choosing to have his backstory remain private. I'm sure your readers will understand. He is working in Hollywood, after all. 

Q: I am certain they will. 

A: It's appreciated and I will relay my confidence in this to Kong. To continue, Once he was back in jungle condition, I had him transition to the weight-training section of the cycle I devised. 

We tried the Five by Five for a period. His temperament, as I mentioned earlier, was not of that nature by nature. By the second week, and I had him on a three-a-week layout composed of three basic selected movements . . . squat, power clean, and an object pressed over his head. You must remember that his strength, relative to ours, is near-impossible to conceive of. The problem of constructing enormous bars and plates was not an easy task, of course. An army of machinists, building contractors, heavy equipment designers and the like were recruited and in my view they handled the task like champs. A bangup lot of very fine chaps, many donating their abilities freely, just to be a part of this very different project.

Richard, I do hope I'm not going on too long here with some of these details.

Q: Not at all, sir! Do continue, and if needs be we can publish this interview in two parts. Those who seek only the training "nuts and bolts" can easily find them once we complete our interview, but I trust our readership are slightly finer-designed than that. 

A: Seeing as your readers in the main use bars and bells for the most part, I will avoid any of the odd-objects we used in Kong's training, perhaps at a later date when the door of my timeframe is slightly wider and more open, I can return to that factor of his training. 

The 5 x 5. By the second week Kong was utterly disinterested in this method. A fine approach, but not suited to my huge trainee's temperament at all. He became lackadaisical rapidly, and by week three simply refused to show up for his sessions. Understandably, in my view; however, I have trained other film stars who thoroughly enjoyed the format and threw themselves wholeheartedly into the process. 

Q: What method, what "combination of methods," perhaps, did you try next? 

A: Kong's attention span, even though he is a very quick-witted and creative individual, as are many of the non-human people I've trained in the past, demanded variety in order for him to put out, to throw himself into the program fully with all his massive energies. 

I realized that Kong found the counting of repetitions to be tiresome and rather childish for reasons he did not explain to me. The big fellow was what I call  a "by feel" individual. Therefore, I next experimented with single repetition training.

A warmup process, and I am certain your readership are fully aware of how to perform that, and have individualized the process to suit their bodies already. If not, perhaps they are not yet experienced enough to engage in this form of training, and, once more experience is gained, could return to this form of training. 

Kong is a true natural athlete, and owing to that did not require any technique training, aside from a quick view or two of a seasoned lifter performing the movements. He near-immediately altered the movement performance on his own, over the course of a few days, and soon was capable of smoothly moving huge poundages within the pattern of many exercise movements. 

Next, I experimented with multiple single sets of four movements. 

A basic back squat . . . Kong found that a "moderate" bar placement suited him. Not a high-bar location (his enormous neck structure quite simply would not allow it), not a low bar location; he settled on a bar-position somewhere just above the top of his rear deltoid area. We chose not to endlessly agonize over this in an anal way, of course, being sensible beings, human and not-human persons. My work with members of the animal kingdom has shown me much in the way of how I perceive my fellow beings, but forgive me, Richard, I've gotten of the topic here, and shall continue with the training end alone. 

It was really quite natural for Kong to find his appropriate movement patterns, grips, bar placements, etc., and I am very grateful he had the common sense and body-connection to do this; otherwise it could have been another nightmarish, under-the-microscope event, and Kong would have simply walked away from such nitpicking nonsense. 

I had him perform a form of "high pulling" movement, and he found this to be his favorite exercise, in all its variations, choosing a version of this glorious multi-headed movement that suited him on that particular day. The myriad of variations to this exercise, even when limiting our consideration to the use of a barbell and not the multitude of other objects available, is nothing less than staggering! 

Here we are, Richard, alive in 1936 and, honestly, I predict that these multiple alterations, iterations and slight variations of exercise performance will likely be given many names in the history of lifting to follow. Credit will of course be taken by some seeking profit, others will simply pass on their knowledge freely, sidestepping the mire of monetary gain, wanting only to advance the progression of weight-lifting itself. Might I, may one be so bold as to term these multiple and everchanging names given old and very basic methods a "conjugation of con games" and hopefully not offend? 

Q: Absolutely, Coop! Do continue. 

Mr. Cooper had to step away for a moment to deal with Buenos Aires-based business on another project. A short intermission:

Goof Troupe

It is a walk.

A performance.

A slope-shouldered

simian affair.

In front of the mirror-like window

of a gym. A reflection of something

not art.

A tightly clad puffer, a dumbbell

lover's delight in a tight T.

Apelike, swelled, swollen-

ego and shaven, one-centered

brain

dead

to all other things but

this mirror and view of it.

A grace-lacking gannet.

Devourer in-and-of many wheys

day and night.

A feeble-boy's not-strong way to plug a leak

self-constructed, imaginary, destructive.

Waste of space, face intent,

checking, ever-checking.

Big yet small.

Tall but short

on all but this

one

singular

expression

of life.

Obsessive.

Another follows.

It must have a mother.

They all do.

Crude tattoos, similar

view.

A plague.

A disaster.

Someone's son.

Oh, Brother, where art thou now.

Q: Welcome back, Coop, I hope that business of yours was handled well.

A: Nothing major, Richard, all nipped in the bud. I see you used poesy to pass the time and fill the gap, so to speak, while gone. 

Q: I hope you enjoyed it.

A: Yes, quite did, and, poetry always reminds me of something John (Ford) taught me about framing a scene, movement vs stillness, in his own way, of course. 

Q: The man shows great promise as a director. 

A: Most certainly. He and I are planning to open our own film company, Argosy, in the near future. It appears to be a very promising avenue that may well lead to our independence from the big studios. John's view of true freedom .  . "the sweetest freedom is an honest heart" . . . certainly applies cleanly to Kong.

Would you mind if I commented on the poem and relate what I saw in to weight-lifting?

Q: Not at all, Coop!

A: Well, what I see here, and I don't know who wrote it, is the way the white of the page is broken by the black of the words. The spaces and words being equally important. 

Richard, we can easily translate this same concept to our training routines. The breaks and rests between exercises are of no less import than the exercises themselves. 

I applied this same knowledge to Kong's single-repetition sessions. 

Complete. It should be simple enough to figure out the rest of the training end of this without any of the rest. My readers are now in good hands. It was a good ride, this blog and the lifting thing. Moving on away from it for good and feel better without it the last couple of months, much better physically, mentally, spiritually and creatively. 

It was a hella long run and a good one, this and the lifting while it lasted! I hope I've added something to your enjoyment of the hobby, and best to you all. Anyone near me here in Vancouver, check the bins for mags and books and the second hand gear stores for some nice stuff.  

Enjoy Your Lifting!