As a life long Redskins fan I always looked forward to our showdowns with the Cowboys. Although for the past decade we’ve been getting clobbered I still think we’re on the way up. A couple years ago during a ‘Boys vs. Skins game on Monday Night Football I remember a video of Cowboys players in the lockerroom huddled around Larry Allen on the bench press putting up 700lbs. The next day I went to school and instead of talking about the win, we were talking about how the gigantic lift. It’s been a while since then, but I’ve come across an article written at the time about Allen’s workout routine to achieve his enormous results.
Read also about Kobe Bryant.
(There are a couple copies of this article floating around but for copyright reasons, and since the original article has been lost, I’m going to quote the best part of the article and link to another site hosting a copy):
Allen decided to up his bench press after lifting “only” 635 pounds last year. Although that was his career best, it was only 30 more than he’d done four years earlier. So Allen set 700 as this year’s goal, then had Cowboys strength coach Joe Juraszek help map out a plan to get there.
They came up with a regimen of “supersets” to hone the chest, shoulders and triceps. It included four to five series of repetitions with 500-pound bench presses, 495-pound squats, 405-pound back pulls, 150-pound curls and shoulder presses with 100-pound dumbbells <>
Each end carried seven 45-pound plates, a 10-pounder and a 21/2-pounder. With the bar sagging in the middle, Allen slid under it, settled in with his typical, narrow grip, then pushed until his elbows locked.
A room full of teammates whooped and hollered, but Allen — whose actions always are louder than his emotions — just smiled. He was probably already thinking about going for 800 pounds next summer.
“If I keep working at it,” he said, “I’ll get there.”
Almost a month later, teammates are still amazed.
“He did it with such ease,” Fricke said. “It’s obvious he’s got much more in him.”
“It was awesome,” running back Emmitt Smith said. “He’s not a freak, just a special kind of guy.”
“He did it like it was 315,” said defensive tackle Brandon Noble. “It was pretty scary.”
All the training made Allen’s upper body a bit thicker, but by doing more running in the offseason he’s trimmed his body fat to 11 percent.
“That means he has 300 pounds of just bone and muscle,” Juraszek said. “He’s genetically gifted.”
