He is a part of an article of:
that is also in the
www.regpark.net forum, that tells some points in the life of the young Reg Park before heenter full time in the world of BB:
http://www.yulisgym.com/enblog/wordpress/?p=243Reg Park before the bodybuilding
Reg Park was born June 17, 1928 in Leeds, England named Roy, but he adopted the name of his father, Reg Park Snr. who was owner of a local gym and a barbell company. As a boy Reg competed in various amateur track events: he was a decent sprinter with 10.3 second time on the 100 yard distance, a discus thrower and a long jumper. Although his passion was the football and he played for Leeds United Reserve Team.
During one of the football matches he injured his knee, which ended up his dreams of becoming a professional footballer. At the hospital he did some rehabilitation exercises for his knee with weights. The leg extension machine wasn’t popular at this time so he used an iron boot and made extensions with increasing number of repetitions, uncapable of adding weights (in his case this would mean to get a heavier iron boot).
After the knee accident he started reading “Health & Strength” but was more interested in gymnastics that in bodybuilding. For him to do more than a hundred push ups was as easy as pie. But then fate intervened and while browsing the new issue of the “Health & Strength” magazine he stumbled upon a pic of Vic Nicolette – an American bodybuilder, who had just won the title of Mr. New York City. The idol of Arnold Schwarzenegger has just found his own idol.
Aside of Vic Nicolette, Steve Reeves and John Grimek ispired Reg park too. Steve inspired him for his attractive and well-proportioned phisique and John for his athletic skills and mass. Both Reeves and Grimek played again a role in Reg Park’s path to glory, but you’ll read about that later.
One more bodybuilder influenced Reg Park. In 1946 he was struck by the impressive physique of Dave Cohen, which had 17 inch arms, a 17 inch neck and 17 inch calves. Reg went to Dave and spoke to him. They became friends at once and upon the supervision of Dave Reg started lifting weights.
At this time Dave Cohen was visiting his training partner’s…front room where they were equipped a gym only with a barbell and a pair of dumbells. Reg’s initial workout routine consisted of standing barbell presses, barbell curls, squats, pullovers and floor presses on the wooden floor – all done in three sets of 10-8-6 reps. His first “records” were press and curl both with 40lbs.
Reg Park traing three months with Dave and then joined the Army for two years, most of it in Singapore. As he was a physical training instructor he was doing exercises with different classes from nine to five. But there were no weights so he trained only with freestanding exercises for that period.
