For general conditioning, I use a traditional soft bristle brush. Sounds like he thinks it is spring if it is coming out in chunks. Sometimes you can pull out big wads of hair. For major sheds like that, I switch to a wire toothed slicker brush. It looks terrible, but the dogs don't seem to mind too much. Here is a picture of my Aster, the pile of hair I pulled off, and the slicker brush. Not a good detail of the brush, but should give some idea. She does a very efficient job of converting Pro Plan to hair.
Other people have good luck with a brush that has large rubber cones as teeth or a flexible metal saw blade looking thing with 2 handles.