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TP: Well, I don’t want to say that no one else is capable of that. I’m sure there are people who can do that and there are people who can do that now. I just want to say that that’s what I was doing back then, and that’s what was most important to me back then. And it took me a lot of years to develop that kind of intensity. It wasn’t something that I read about in a bodybuilding magazine and just started doing right from the outset.
You know, I wasn’t capable of actually pushing my body and my mind that far at the beginning of my career. It took 15 years for my body to be trained to that point, for my nervous system to really be trained to that point. I mean, after a squat set like that, I can remember my back bleeding. The bar was real heavy and I think I had a heavy scab on my back from squatting previously and the scab broke open. I remember blood going down the shirt. I mean, it’s crazy stuff we did, but was just the feeling . . .
And one time at Armento’s Gym back in Detroit when I was doing an intermediate workout, I remember my nose started bleeding – there was blood all over the place – but I kept on squatting.""