Powerlifting Training Mentors: Ken Fantano - Part 3

Powerlifting Training Mentors: Similarities and Contrasts

Ken Fantano taught me that once-a-week powerlifting training could be far more than maintenance. Done with ferocity, periodization, precision technique, serious training partners, and enough recovery, the body could be trained as a whole and then rested as a whole.

Ken Fantano

In 1989 I moved to Milford, Connecticut to take a job running a steel warehouse. On my first weekend in town my new boss took me to a marina bar in Bridgeport. The bar was dockside and elaborate. A huge 3D replica of the Titanic hung over the square bar that dominated the middle of the large room. It was Saturday afternoon and a reggae band was tearing it up on the deck overlooking the docked boats.

The place was already packed when we walked in at 11 a.m. We were standing and leaning against the bar drinking our first round of Bloody Marys when Bobby, my boss, elbowed me and said, “Hey! You must know that guy!” Before even looking, I thought, that is a hell of a strange thing to say to a man sitting at a bar he had never been to, in a city he had never visited.

My boss pointed to a tall, muscled-up Italian dude wearing an Izod shirt, streamlined black shades, pressed white shorts, docksider deck shoes, and a gold Rolex watch on the left wrist of his 21-inch arm. He was the center of attention in a circle of attractive females and some other barroom satellites. I looked at the animated giant and had a flash of partial recognition. I mentally scraped off the hair gel. What would he look like without the Ray-Bans, the cabin cruiser tan, and the massive gold Italian horn that hung around his neck?

Bang! I had it. I did in fact know this man. We had spent hours together and not too long ago.

Meeting Dino D. and Finding the Muscle Factory

Six months earlier I had coached an up-and-coming superheavyweight powerlifter to a second-place finish at the APF Junior National Championships in Tampa, Florida. The third-place finisher was the gargantuan chunk of man flesh I was looking at: Dino D. My lifter and Dino had a back-and-forth battle for the runner-up slot. Elliot, my lifter, caught Dino from behind with a clutch third-attempt deadlift, pulling 775 pounds to secure second place.

The competition ended on Saturday and on Sunday there had been a massive keg party on the beach for the lifters, coaches, wives, and girlfriends. I drank beer for hours, most of the time sitting next to Hoss the Boss, a Cleveland Hell’s Angel, or Dino. He and I talked and laughed among a gaggle of lifters clustered around the beer keg.

He looked a lot different in his bar garb. As I walked over, he caught my approach. As I got closer, his face morphed from alert tension into puzzlement before a slow, dawning recognition took place.

“Marty?!” he was incredulous. In the next instant he knew it was me and threw a beefy arm around me. It was like being bear hugged by a grizzly.

“What the F@3k are you doing here?”

I explained and asked where the hardcore locals trained.

“Ain’t but one place, Mart…Kenny Fantano’s Muscle Factory in West Haven.”

I got Dino to make a formal introduction to Ken and immediately began training with the Muscle Factory contingent.

Once-a-Week Powerlifting by Necessity

Ken would shut the gym to the public on Sunday. That is when a crew of 10 to 15 lifters would gather to work through squats, bench presses, and deadlifts, followed by some arm work and grip assistance. We started at 9 a.m. and were done at noon. Ken would do heavy 45-degree incline presses two or three days later.

I was putting in six days a week from dawn until dusk, ramrodding a bunch of warehouse idiots who drank bottles of 40-ounce malt liquor for lunch before coming back to work to operate forklifts and cranes carrying 1,000-pound steel beams fifteen feet in the air. I worked ten-hour days six days a week and had neither the time nor the energy to train during the week.

Ken’s would be my first ever experience with once-a-week powerlifting training. I was dubious about even lifting at all, but it was once-a-week training or no training at all. I thought that, at best, once-weekly powerlifting training might be used to maintain whatever strength I currently had. The idea that I could actually improve training once weekly seemed preposterous.

When I took the job, I had resigned myself to giving up lifting altogether. To have fallen in with the Fantano crew, who happened to subscribe to a powerlifting training template that suited my circumstances perfectly, was serendipitous. Perfect timing: the right training partners appeared at the right time with the right template, one that they just happened to practice on the only day of the week I could attend. It was meant to be.

I learned much during this period. First and foremost, I learned that once-a-week powerlifting training was a lot more than just treading water. If practiced with the requisite periodized ferocity, this was a rich vein of progress to be mined. I progressed at an unbelievable rate, given my circumstances. I learned to jettison my frequency preconceptions, I had my intensity benchmarks confirmed, I learned about “fast” peaking and I was dazzled by Ken’s technical wizardry.

Ken was a subtle and intricate technician. His approach, his postulations and strategies worked for the men who used them correctly.

Half a Cassidy: The Fantano Training Template

In many ways, the Fantano powerlifting training template was “half a Cassidy.” Rather than working through all three lifts, plus arms and other assorted assistance work twice a week, as Hugh Cassidy did, Ken’s crew did pretty much the same massive workout once a week.

True, Ken would train the 45-degree incline dumbbell press on the Wednesday following Sunday’s workout. For normal humans not incline bench pressing 400 pounds for six paused reps, it was easy to slip in three or four sets of inclines, with half his poundage, after benching on Sunday, thereby avoiding Wednesday altogether.

The broad template looked like this:

This was not a low-effort minimalist routine. It was a high-intensity, low-frequency power template. Once per week did not mean easy. Once per week meant everything had to count.

The Muscle Factory Was Incredibly Strong

The Fantano crew was incredibly strong. They all subscribed to and practiced the same powerlifting training template. In a gym of less than 100 members, they had three legitimate monster squatters and three massive bench pressers: Gene Donat, Danny D’Errico, and Ken Fantano. The other Sunday lifters were all top state, regional and local contenders.

At his awesome 360-pound bodyweight peak, Fantano performed a 633-pound bench press for a paused double in the gym, by my recollection. Ken also squatted 953 pounds, ass-on-heels, again for a double, wearing knee wraps and a belt. Those are Gallagher-era gym numbers, not official meet records.

Archived meet data confirms the larger point: Fantano was a serious national-level superheavyweight powerlifter with massive official lifts. OpenPowerlifting lists his best equipped competition numbers as an 890-pound squat, 610-pound bench press, 672.4-pound deadlift and 2,150-pound total. The archived numbers do not capture every gym lift, every paused double, or every private Muscle Factory assault.

Danny D’Errico and Gene / Jean Donat were also serious lifters. Archived records confirm D’Errico and Donat posted elite-level squat and bench numbers in competition. Some of the old gym and article numbers differ from the surviving meet tables, so they should be treated as strength-culture recollection unless a specific meet sheet confirms them.

After three months of once-a-week powerlifting training, I entered and won the Connecticut State Championships as a 220-pound lifter. I squatted 660, bench pressed 353 raw and deadlifted 673, this after a 14-week cycle. I started the cycle weighing a light and weak 204 pounds. I had lots of muscle memory and came up quick.

The Rested Effort

I found out firsthand that deadlifting after squatting reduced deadlift poundage-handling ability when done in the same session. However, those who deadlift on a different day invariably lose deadlift power on the day of competition when they are suddenly forced to deadlift after decimating their legs in the squat. They are not used to it.

Men who squat and deadlift on the same day can see their competition deadlifts increase because they are practicing the competitive reality. There can be a three- to four-hour gap between squats and deadlifts in a competition. Training at Ken’s on Sunday meant I had to deadlift 40 minutes after blasting my legs squatting. I pulled 40 pounds more at the competition than in training because I had way more rest and felt fresh.

Ken’s approach, like Mark Chaillet’s approach, created the rested effort. The body was trained as a whole and then rested as a whole.

This is not a universal law that every lifter must copy. It is a powerlifting-specific insight. A competitor who must squat, bench, and deadlift in one meet needs to understand what deadlifting feels like after squatting. Ken’s Sunday template taught that lesson every week.

Ken Fantano and the Bench Press as a Technique Lift

Ken broke bench press technique down to a degree I had never seen before or since. He would create complex, precision drawings to explain his bench approach: angles of descent and ascent, the leg drive, the torso expansion, the creation of a jolt that made the bar fly off the chest.

Ken felt that the bench press was a technique lift. He felt he built the power and strength for bench pressing by performing 45-degree incline presses with giant dumbbells.

At his peak, Ken was hitting six paused reps with a pair of 200s. “The incline dumbbell press gives me the contraction I am looking for.” Ken’s approach seemed halfway between Chaillet’s uber-minimalism and Cassidy’s uber-maximalism. The Fantano approach taught me that, without a doubt, once-a-week powerlifting training worked.

For more on Ken’s bench-press ideas, see Bench Press Strength Masters.

Once-a-Week Powerlifting and Smelly Little Orthodoxies

Forced into once-a-week powerlifting training by life circumstance, I discovered that less could be better.

Is once-a-week training the end-all / be-all? A training template that trumps all others? Of course not. That is like saying a saw trumps a hammer. If you only have one tool in your toolbox, you are screwed.

The elite trainer has a giant toolbox of battle-tested training tools, strategies ready to select from when the current training program runs out of gas, as every training program eventually does. No matter how sophisticated or effective, every powerlifting training regimen has a shelf life. Use it, squeeze all the juice out of it, recognize when progress stalls, thank it, place it back in the drawer for future use. Rotate in something new and fresh, something vibrant, something that contrasts dramatically to what has just run its course.

To unblock the progress logjam requires doing something different.

Fantano caused me to rethink powerlifting training frequency. George Orwell wrote about “smelly little orthodoxies.” One of my smelly preconceptions was that the idea of strength training once a week and progressing was physiologically impossible.

I found out different.

In 2020, every Sunday morning we ran a two- to three-hour training session that precisely replicated the Fantano template. Only instead of elite powerlifters gathering in pursuit of world records and national titles, regular men gathered in pursuit of radical improvements in physique and performance. We got stratospheric gains in 1989 using once-a-week training and we were getting stratospheric gains in 2020 using once-a-week training.

Get to reexamining some of your own smelly little orthodoxies.

Equipment Notes for the Fantano Template

The Fantano template is simple, but it is not casual. A serious once-a-week powerlifting session requires dependable equipment, enough loading, competent partners, and a room that can handle heavy squats, benches, deadlifts, incline pressing, and assistance work.

For foundational powerlifting equipment, lifters and facilities can review powerlifting equipment, Olympic weightlifting bars, weight plates, weight benches, and dumbbells.

For heavy dumbbell incline pressing, a product such as IRON COMPANY urethane dumbbells belongs in the conversation. For flat bench work, the Body-Solid SOFB250 flat Olympic bench press is one example of a dedicated bench station. For barbell work, a serious bar such as the Iron Grip OB-7 industrial chrome Olympic weightlifting bar can support hard training when matched to the lifter, plates, rack, and facility.

Dynamic work, pulls and training environments that require durable plate contact may call for appropriate bumper plates, such as IRON COMPANY premium rubber bumper plates, used on the correct flooring and platform.

The equipment does not create the template. Ken Fantano, his training partners, and the Sunday culture did that. Equipment simply gives the template a safe and repeatable place to happen.

Safety Note for Once-a-Week Powerlifting

Once-a-week powerlifting can work, but it is not automatically easy, safe or appropriate for every lifter. Compressing squats, bench presses, deadlifts and assistance work into one hard session creates a large training stress. The session must be scaled to the lifter’s training age, technique, strength level, recovery, work stress, sleep, nutrition, and injury history.

Use competent spotters, correctly set rack safeties, secure collars, stable benches and conservative warm-up jumps. Stop a set when technical position breaks, when sharp pain appears or when another rep would turn into a different lift. Lifters with medical concerns, significant injury history or unusual fatigue should seek qualified guidance before adopting high-intensity powerlifting templates.

This article is historical and educational. It preserves Marty Gallagher’s experience with Ken Fantano’s Muscle Factory template; it is not individualized medical, rehabilitation, or programming advice.

Continue the Powerlifting Training Mentors Series

Read Part 1: Hugh Cassidy
Read Part 2: Mark Chaillet
Read Part 4: Ed Coan