My First Experience With VRT/DVR

[Greg Newton]

Around 1990 I was preparing to take a grueling black belt test in Hapkido. The six months prior to the test, my instructor emphatically stated - no weight training, and no alcohol. I dropped fifteen pounds to around 160. However, I wanted some type of supplemental exercise.

For the upper body I would do some basic cable exercises with an expander. On alternate days I would do 100 free hand squats on an one inch board. These were not ordinary squats. I would go slowly and with tension as I worked through the 100. Not necesarily the high tension I understand now with VRT, but very similar.

The sqauts were very tough to do like this, but I have to laugh at those workouts then as compared to now, because twenty years later, I can do so much more intensity-wise in a workout and I am in an athletic condition much superior than back then. Whereas the squats did not increase my leg size, they kept them strong, and the thing that has always stuck with me, it increased my kicking speed dramatically. I was on to something then, but never really understood it. I still can't say I understand it completely, but I have to commend Greg Mangan for stepping out of the accepted paradigm for so many years on the benefits of VRT.

[VRT Man]

Thanks, Greg. Not having been a martial artist, and since having realized that VRT is a not-too distant cousin of Qi-Gong from martial art disciplines, I went it alone in the "other world" of bodybuilding, and found skepticism to be real high.

VRT was kind of a freaky new brainchild of some Milwaukee bodybuilder. A little bit of the ancient art of visualization combined with a unique moving contraction. How it shook up some of the old guard in the world of weights. :sidefrown:

At any rate, no one that I knew heard of Swoboda and his methods, nor did I; however, the Russians claimed to be doing something similar a couple years after I started selling the illustrated course. But I had no scholarly group of scientists standing behind me; I only knew my intuition told me it worked, and it was worth marketing.

Since then, and finding John calling it DVR and basing it on John McSweeney's and Swoboda's system of exercise, it's been a real revelation to me as to how many have made the grand discovery that it's as good as weights----and even better.:fingers-crossed:

--Greg Mangan