Marty Gallagher
Above - Hugh Cassidy locks out 775 pounds
Cassidy's Lair - The Eternal Solution for Forced Evolution
Saturday, July 1980
For five years, in the late 70s and early 1980s, every Saturday, weather permitting, I would drive my 1966 Nassau blue fastback Corvette on the 35 mile high-speed run to Hugh Cassidy’s rural home on Highbridge road in Bowie, Maryland. His house lay fifteen miles outside the Washington beltway, taking the route 450 exist. I had a primitive radar detector that I thought made me invisible. I would zip in and out of traffic on the beltway portion, the growl of the macho 327 overwhelming the pathetic Delco radio.
The car really showed its mettle on the twisty two-lane road that headed due west once I got off the superhighway. The solid axle, pre-1963 Corvettes rode like stagecoaches. My 66 had more power, less bodyweight and independent rear suspension. I liked to push the car hard on these Saturday runs, it was a thoroughbred racehorse that needed to be taken out of the garage and rode hard.
On the 40 minute ride over, I would practice Soviet autosuggestion: I would run movies of my top set efforts in the about-to-happen workout, over and over…squat, bench press, deadlift…I didn’t bother visualizing the “back-off” sets or the “assistance” exercises. By the time I took the final left turn off Highbridge and into the secretive entrance that led to the long driveway leading up to the Cassidy’s house, I had run thirty visualizations on three different exercises.
There would be a half dozen vehicles already parked, I would park at the end of the long line, grab my gym bag, and start walking towards Hugh’s foliage-obscured brick cottage. The house sat on several wooded acres and was overgrown with vines, ivy, and assorted vegetation. I loved it: green and serene. Among his many interests, Hugh was an amateur botanist. He created a garden/orchard. Once he showed me how he had grafted a peach branch onto an apple tree. In later years (I trained at Hugh’s for five years) Hugh constructed a separate building, a good-sized garage located on the downside of the left-hand twist in the driveway. This was Cassidy’s metal sculpture workshop.
Hugh Cassidy was a world champion powerlifter, a superb musician (bass, cello, guitar,) a fantastic writer (my first published articles in 1978 were coauthored with Cassidy) he spoke fluent German, worked with troubled children, and was an elite metal sculpture artist. His creations were inspired: birds of prey, glass tables, relief sculptures, freaky HP Lovecraft 3-D nightmare creatures, all created under his artistic Nome do plume, Fitzhugh.
In later years, after the shop was built, I would always check to see if he was working in the workshop. If he was, I would walk in and wait respectfully until he finished whatever weld he was working on. He would flip up his mask and turn his attention to me. I would involuntarily gush over whatever project he was working on. His metal sculptures were insanely good and like everything else he did, the deeper he got into it, the better he got.
He would shift the conversation to what I expected to do in the training session. He always would end the conversation with, “I’ll be down later.” Down would come the mask. End of conversation. And he always would wander downstairs at the opportune time to catch the guts of the workout.
After consulting in the workshop with the Grand Maestro, I would get my game face back on and head from the shop to the rear entrance. When you made the right-hand turn to access the back wall of the house, you saw Cassidy had raised the rear roof of the second floor and created a glass-walled room. A rustic home improvement that stood out like a shimmering, sparkling diamond in a sea of lush dark green vegetation and ancient brick.
The Basement
You opened the backdoor with no screen door and could either head into the kitchen (to the right) or down the steps into the always dark basement. The first harsh lesson of training at Cassidy’s was the low sharp-edged beam that greeted many an unexpecting skull at the bottom of the stairway. It cracked open many a strongman’s forehead. Hugh would say, “You really need to pay better attention.” As you stepped into the basement the first thing you noticed was the dankness. This was an old home built atop roughhewn cross beams. The walls were unfinished, crumbling, always moist.
The ceiling was low: a claustrophobic six foot four inches. The room was L-shaped. To the immediate right was a twenty square foot open area; every square inch filled with raw metal: beams, rods, sheets of metal of various thickness, chains, metal already in other forms, this was the warehouse for the raw material needed for future Cassidy metal sculpture projects. The area was dark and ill-lit. I always thought how easy it would be to walk down the narrow rows of jaggedness, stumble, trip, and get skewered with rusty rebar. I could hear Cassidy say as he dialed for the ambulance, “You really need to pay better attention.”
The basement was ancient and spooky. Its only natural lighting came from two small window, slits, that created intense sunlight that cut across the darkened gym, rectangular laser beams. They gave the room the ambiance of a Mexican prison cell.
The homemade squat racks were of a fixed height and sat facing the left wall. The squat bar was a six-foot exercise bar. Cassidy, a national and world powerlifting champion, did not own an Olympic barbell or Olympic plates. Deadlifts were done on the floor in front of the squat racks. Rubber Welcome mats were placed on the always moist concrete floor when we deadlifted.
The family lived upstairs, so no one dreamed of dropping a deadlift or creating any other noise-generating mistakes. There was no loud psyching or cursing. The equipment was sturdy and homemade. One exercise bench had a tractor seat and was for sitting on while overhead pressing. The ceiling was too low to fully extend the arms while standing erect. Hugh built a simple, Fred Flintstone-like, two-pulley lat pulldown/tricep pushdown device.
There was another area Cassidy used for kneeling on the floor and doing “rollouts,” a hideous exercise using the little wheel with a handle on each side. While on your knees, Hugh had us roll outward, touch our nose on the concrete floor, then come erect. He was able to do this for reps wearing a 50 pound weight vest. He felt it built muscle and coordinated power from “crotch to traps.” No doubt. We still hated it. These workouts were marathon. There was a never-varying workout template….
Squat
Work up to a top set, almost always between 1 and 5 reps, usually wearing a lifting belt and knee wraps
Strip 50-90 pounds off the bar, take off belt and knee wraps, hit a 5 to 10 rep set - two sets, static weight
bench press
Work up to a top set, usually 3-5 reps, touch-and-go style
Strip 20-50 pounds off the bar, hit a set of 5 to 10-reps paused – two sets, static weight
deadlift
Work up to a top set of 3-5 reps
Strip 50-90 pounds off the bar, stiff-leg deadlift, perform a set of 5-8 reps – two sets, static weight
This ended the formal workout, at which point the half dozen or so session participants would break off and individually or in small groups perform arm work, pushdowns, curls, rollouts, seated dumbbell overhead pressing, and “heaves,” another horrific Cassidy invention. Heaves were designed to dramatically strengthen the hip-hinge and build “python-like” erectors.
If a man deadlifted 600, he would use 405 in his heaves and seek to accelerate the 405 as fast as possible and pull each rep as high as possible, this for 2-3 sets of 5 reps. After squats and backoff sets of squats, then deadlifts and backoff sets of stiff-leg deadlifts, the last thing Marshall, Joe, Dan, Marty, or any of the regulars wanted to do was heaves.
At the end of our five-year collective tenure at Hugh’s, we grew so strong that, passed 600 pounds in the squat, we had to hang wire coat-hangers on the ends of the barbell, to which we attached dumbbells. Cassidy’s 100 pound plates were hand cut from the same piece of steel. On one plate was written in magic maker 97.5 on the other 102.5. if you grabbed one of these “100s” aggressively, the jagged edges would cut your fingers.
We should have had had the presence of mind to photograph the five of us clustered around the six-foot exercise bar, loaded to 605-pounds, with another 80 pounds dangling in the form of two 40-pound dumbbells off deformed coat-hangers. We learned to time our rebound out to the hole to coincide with the coat hanger give and rebound, we sought to catch the bounce back upward, like a surfer catching a wave.
Hugh would always venture down and always give solid feedback on technique and programing. The first few years we trained there Hugh trained with us. As he aged, he decided to strike off in different lifting direction. He trained on his own – but still coached us and advised us – and we followed his protocols and adopted his technical archetypes as our own. We were very much Cassidy acolytes. His basement was powerlifting’s version of the Shaolin Temple. It was a long-ass apprenticeship.
At the end of the session, we would struggle up the stairs. You would step out into the sunlight and wince, then stumble to your car where you had an ice chest with a cold quart of whole milk. Post-workout we would cluster in parking area, leaning against our cars, sitting on lowered tailgates, drinking our quarts of milk, commiserating for the next half hour as we got our shattered bodies together. The milk replenished our traumatized bodies. Physically, it was if we had been in an automobile wreck. That cold milk never tasted better.
Post-Workout
Post-workout, getting into the car and leaving was problematic: your key hand shook so badly that you would have to grab the shaking right hand, the key hand, at the wrist with your left hand – this to steady the shaking right hand enough to get the key into the ignition.
Often, as a group, we would head to the Horn & Horn, a very good buffet in a shopping center a few miles down the road. We would descend on the buffet like a plague of starving locust, or perhaps more accurately, a herd of marauding rhino or water buffalo. Every single one of us was intent on pushing bodyweight upward. Slamming calories was a prerequisite for surviving this type of brutal training. Because every man amongst us was seeking to add mass, each was a practiced eater.
Anytime a group of alpha males gather, be it for miniature golf, bowling, gambling, or eating, one-upmanship occurs. Take a pack of famished, just trained lifters to a nice buffet and watch as a predictable outbreak of show-off gluttony occur. I saw men routinely consume six plates of food, likely oxidizing 7,000 to 10,000 calories in a single sitting.
After a body-shattering training session, followed by body-stuffing gluttony session, it was hard to stay awake on the ride home. Once home, a long, deep, narcoleptic power nap completed the growth equation. For those young enough, hungry enough, those with the situation and the fanaticism, this approach created fantastic gains in muscle size and strength. This was a one-dimensional, tunnel-visioned existence, dedicated to forcing the body to adapt and grow. Blast the body, stuff the body full of food, sleep like a hibernating bear: this was – and remains – the eternal solution for forced evolution.
Check out the links below for profiles on other remarkable men I have met in my almost 60 years of training. Each have influenced me in different ways over the course of my strength career.
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