Franco Columbu is the short answer to the long argument about whether natural strength and bodybuilding muscle are the same thing. He was 5 foot 5, weighed around 82 kilos in contest shape, won two Mr Olympias, and bench-pressed 250 kilos at a time when most of his competitors were posing in the same room and could not. He also happened to be a chiropractor, a qualified boxer, and Arnold's best friend.

None of that explains why the 1977 VHS, simply titled Winning Bodybuilding, deserves a place in your collection. What explains it is that Franco, who died in 2019, left this tape as an unusually honest 58 minutes of how he actually trained. No filler. No shadow-boxing for the camera. Just the man in a Gold's Gym t-shirt, explaining lifts the way he did to every client he ever had.

What is on the tape

The structure, in order, from the play button:

Intro, 4 minutes. Franco on a stool, talking about genetics, Sardinia, and why he rejects the cliche that you need to be tall to look good. He is convincing partly because he has clearly said it a hundred times before.
Full bench press sequence, 8 minutes. Four warm-up sets, one heavy working set, one film-school-quality close-up of his bar-path correction cue. The foot position cue he gives at 11:30 is genuinely unusual.
Chest dip and fly circuit, 7 minutes. Supersetted with bench dips. The camera stays on his face long enough that you can read the strain.
Leg day, 12 minutes. Squat, hack squat, stiff-leg deadlift. His squat technique is the part most viewers will replay. It is not the hip-drive style you get taught in a modern CrossFit gym. It is more upright, more quad-dominant, and (he claims) kinder to the knees over a career.
Arm circuit, 10 minutes. Strict curls, seated dumbbell curls, triceps push-downs. Nothing groundbreaking, but the rep cadence is much slower than anyone coaches today.
Back, 9 minutes. Wide-grip pulls, seated row, single-arm rows.
Closing, 6 minutes. Franco talking to camera about diet. The section is old enough that he says things like "I eat a steak, maybe three hundred grams, and some vegetable". No macros app, no protein shake stack, no photo of a meal-prep container.
Credits and a promo for his book.

What holds up

The bench press section alone is worth the price of the tape. His cue for keeping the shoulders retracted ("like you have a wallet in your back pocket you do not want to lose") shows up in every modern powerlifting coaching book now. Franco either coined it or popularised it enough that everyone else borrowed it.

The squat technique will be controversial for modern viewers. He pushes an upright torso and lets the knees travel forward, which is the opposite of the "sit back" cue most people hear now. The research on long-femured lifters has actually moved toward Franco's version over the last decade. If your coach ever told you to "shove the hips back" and you struggled, watch minute 34 of this tape and try it the other way.

The arm work is slower than anything being taught now, and the slower tempo is almost certainly part of why the physique held up. Modern lifters rush curls. Franco does not.

What does not hold up

The diet section is from another planet. Eating a steak and some vegetable was fine for a 1977 Sicilian who ran a mile every morning, but the caloric requirements of a modern bodybuilder training twice a day are much higher, and the protein targets ("I get enough, do not worry about it") would get an eating-disorder referral from a modern sports nutritionist. Skip the diet section, or watch it for the history and then forget everything he said.

The "genetics are destiny" line in the intro is also a bit tired. It was a common framing in the 1970s, and it carried assumptions we know better than to make now.

Is the tape findable

Patchily. Second-hand VHS copies turn up on eBay UK between 15 and 40 pounds depending on condition. The 2005 DVD reissue is cheaper and worth grabbing if you see one. The whole thing has been uploaded to unofficial channels but we will not link to those for obvious reasons, and the unofficial uploads are usually fifth-generation copies with unwatchable sound anyway.

Should you buy it

If you own a bench and a squat rack and you want to understand the golden era from someone who was quietly the best technician in it, yes. Five out of five.

If you want a beginner workout DVD in 2026, no. Watch a modern one. This is an archive piece, not a programme to follow cold.