Remembrances of days pastSaul on Ken Fantano
9 November 2005If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
Kenny Fantano weighed 360 and stood 5-10. He was thick and powerful and athletic as hellbefore and after training the boys at the Muscle Factory would kill time by either playing pinochle at the counter or playing wiffleball or stickball out back in the parking lot. They played fierce: Danny D had been a really good baseball player (550-bench, 950 squat) and Jean D played in the minor leagues as a catcher up until he weighed 350. If the game was tight and the boys had a few bucks riding on the outcome, it was nothing to see them slide into a base or dive for a ball this on concrete. I taught them how to play the card game Casino and I would love to drink beer and play cards for hours after our crushing power sessions. Kenny never ever wanted to talk about powerlifting it really didnt interest him he was like the great Mark Chaillet in that: just because he was really, really good at something didnt necessarily mean he liked itKen and Mark liked the training part but as far as personalities, politics or power-related events Forget about it! as all the West Haven Italianos used to say. Saul knew Ken well and bought out some great points about Kennys engineer approach to lifting technique. Ken would take a pad of paper and with his perfect left-handed handwriting would start diagramming proper bench mechanics while verbally relating in his heavy New England-infused patois monotone the subtleties. Ken benched 640 in a tee-shirt and could incline press 500. Ken was no one trick pony; he squatted 940. Saul, a great lifter in his own right, was dead on in his retelling of Kens sophisticated approach.
Marty,
As strong as Kenny F was he was super technical in his approach to lifting. He first introduced me to “athletic benching.” Benching like an athlete involved a complicated system of recruitment…He found a way to recruit legs, chest, & arms in that order. It was so subtle a sequence that it appeared everything pretty much fired at once. More specifically: he’d sink the bar below the pecs, then with his feet forward & in jump position width, hed drive with his legs then chest and finally his arms. He would also use a wide thumbless grip with his little fingers internally rotated so as to allow his elbows to make contact with his lats. This was the opposite technique to a bodybuilding bench which traditionally isolates upper body. He taught this technique to Danny D, Jean Donat, & the rest of us at the Muscle Factory. I don’t remember anyone not improving their bench numbers under this system.
I summoned up to West Haven an up and coming young lifter who had been stuck at 420 in the 242 pound class for two years for a one-on-one Kenny bench press seminar. The kid took to the system immediately and eventually bench pressed 600 at 269-bodyweight in a bench shirt so loose many asked why he bothered to wear it at all. It was Kirk Karwoski and to this day Kirk uses the Fantano bench technique. Ken would incorporate a slight arc when pressing the barbell upward and would show you how using an arc when resistance was encountered allowed you to extend the arm lever without actually straightening the arms. This allowed the triceps to achieve a more advantageous lifting position. More Saul
Speaking of Jean Donat, I remember him being a great guy. Once we were all playing stickball after a workout & my son Ari, who was 12, hit one in the direction of Jean. If you remember, next to the Gym was an auto body shop & on this day a beautiful, newly tuned truck was parked in BIG JEANS path. As he ran backward following the path of the ball over his shoulder, he crashed into the truck! The impact knocked Jean down, popped the hub caps off both front wheels & pushed the whole front end of the truck in. Jean got up, still holding the ball & shook it off.
Saul, Cape (Cod, Ma.)
Jean was a great athlete and weighed 400-pounds standing 5-8. He was able to leap up onto a 36-inch picnic table, anytime. Jean moved to Florida to be with his Haitian mom and sister and began training with the great Willie Bell. Jean could squat 980 and bench 600; this in the prehistoric days of crummy suits and worthless bench shirts. Jean didnt wear a bench shirt either. I cant remember if Danny DArrico didThe basic Fantano bench press was drop the bar low onto the sternum, let it actually sink into the ribcage and at the referees command push down and back HARD with the feet! When that sonic wave hit the torso, expand the chest and waist outward in all directions violently Ive mention this before I saw Ken snap the buckle clean off a power belt, literally rip the half-dozen rivets clean off the belt with the instantaneous expansion of his waistline in conjunction with his chest/waist expansion. This happens a lot. said Danny D of the broken belt. This sudden chest expansion would blow the barbell off his chest and because he was strong as hell and used the max-width grip, hed blast that sucker though the mid-stroke range no problem. When the triceps began to encounter resistance hed start the patented power arc back towards the rackpure power poetry if you knew what you were looking at.
Saul, is it true you were the personal trainer for the Aerosmith drummer? Joey Kramer?
Do you remember how Ken used to love to go tuna fishing? If they caught a really nice fish the Japanese sushi scouts would buy it right off the dock and have the entire fish shipped UPS overnight to Japan: Ken and the boys could make enough dough off the sale of a single tuna that they could pay for the entire days tripin Japan, Otoro tuna (the fillet of the finest tuna) sells for $800 a pound!
Tags:Popularity: 1% [?]
Related Posts:
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
