Road to Westside

As I mentioned before, I was a little bit concerned about the effects of my body weight on my health. If I had not taken up weightlifting and instead done another sport like swimming, I would probably weigh around 170lbs, rather than 240, which is where I'm at now. Of course, I am a lean 240, but still, I assume that nature created me with internal organs designed to support a 170lb man, and the extra 70lbs would place a strain on my organs regardless of whether it was fat or lean.

I have been training with weights for over 20 years. I started when I was 17 and weighed about 150. By the time I was 19, I had gone up to around 170-180, despite very intense weight training in college. I read many of the bodybuilding magazines, which recommended stripping, supersets, giant sets, double-split routines, forced reps, negatives, and other common bodybuilding tactics of the late 80s that are still more or less around. Unfortunately, none of them really worked all that well, or rather, should I say at all, because despite pushing myself to the wall in every workout (remember, "no pain, no gain"), all I got was pain, without the gain. This eventually became dull and I moved more into martial arts and ring fighting, lifting weights enough to prevent loss of strength, but really making strength training a secondary priority. Twelve years later, I was burned out on the martial arts: I didn't like the other athletes with their tough guy attitudes and having boxed and kickboxing very seriously for several years, I wasn't getting any better at it. Progress I knew could come from getting stronger, faster, having better endurance, or being more coordinated. In short, I had felt I had learned what there was to learn and it was no longer interesting. On top of that ring fighting can lead to brain damage over the long haul, and although I hadn't been KOed a huge number of times, the risk of senility later in life should not be ignored. So, I had my last kickboxing match at age 34. I won by points.

I returned to just being a gym rat for a year or two. I looked at being a powerlifter, but I wasn't all that strong. I dabbled in power contraction training, which is a special isometric program focusing on holding extremely heavy weights, also I tried high-intensity training (HIT), which is one set to complete failure for each body part, only training about once every four days. Static contraction training worked well for squat and in about eight weeks I was able to support over 700lbs on the top position of my squat for around a minute. That being said my full-range squat didn't go up a gram, staying at around 330lbs.

I cannot overstate the impact that the Internet has had on strength training. Until the Internet came around, gym rats basically had Weider's magazines, which frequently gave training advice that was really counterproductive, along with Iron Man, which wasn't great, but had workouts that were interesting, even though they never worked for me. Powerlifting USA and Hardgainer were available by subscription, but they weren't on the magazine rack. They were both all right, but they seem like the dark ages compared to the information circulating now. Maybe the guys at leading strength training gyms in LA and New York might have figured out superior training methods, but for regular gym rats training on their own, after the first couple of years, gains tapered and continued gains seemed to be reserved for the genetically gifted and those using anabolic steroids.

I started dabbling in Olympic weightlifting. I figured I had been lifting weights long enough that I should at least learn how to do the two lifts, the clean and jerk and the snatch, with the idea that even if I couldn't be a great strength athlete, I could have a well-rounded iron education. The two lifts are VERY difficult technically. Particularly, the clean was hard to learn, especially since I was training by myself and trying to learn from books. Eventually, I found a guy in SF who was peddling a videotape on Olympic weightlifting. I bought it, and like every weight training video I've ever bought, it's really poorly made and overpriced, but at the same time, really quite helpful. I found Olympic lifting to be a pretty fascinating sport, and I think I could have fallen in love with it.

However, it was not to be. It was around this time that I started working as a translator, which is significant, because it meant that I started sitting in front of a computer all day moving text from Japanese to English. It requires a lot of concentration to do, so when my brain get tired, I surf the net for a few minutes as a break. This gave me the opportunity to read quite a bit about strength training, and to discover that common wisdom had taken a 180 and now forced reps were no longer productive and in fact, actually impede progress. After so many years of using training methods predicated on pushing to and past failure, internalizing that training should stop short of failure was indeed a leap of faith. It seemed like such a training method would be ridiculously easy. That being said, I gradually eased into it, and discovered that for the first time in around twelve years my bench press was moving up and I could do 225lbs--something I had never done before. This shattered my assumption that my body was simply not designed to exceed a bench of 205, a squat of 330, or a deadlift of 405. With this, my Olympic training went out the window. I wanted to compete and competing in Olympic weightlifting without a coach seemed much harder than powerlifting. Also, most gyms in Tokyo do not have bumper plates, which are necessary for Olympic lifting, nor do they have adequate space for Olympic weightlifting, since the athlete needs enough space in front and behind him to fall forward or back without hitting anything.

After awhile, a friend tipped me off to the Westside system of training. I read up on it, and although there was a huge amount of material for free on the Net, it seemed to raise more questions than it answered. The guru of Westside is Louie Simmons, who had a huge number of DVDs he had produced, but they were around fifty bucks a piece and there were so many of them and learning the system seemed to entail buying all of them, and so I solved that problem by not buying any of them at first (I have a couple now). Complicated by the fact that the system stresses exercises that require equipment costing over $1,000 and produced only by Louie didn't help. Still, at the core, the system isn't that complicated, it's just that the leading advocates don't really explain what it is very well. That being said, the time spent learning it was well worth it, because it is about the only training method that I have found that works at all. Basically, it involves doing a heavy exercise for either squat or deadlift once a week, a heavy bench press-related exercise once a week, then a speed exercise for squat or deadlift once a week, and a speed exercise for bench press once a week. Aside from that, it is crucial to do assistance work to address specific weaknesses in your lift. If you think about any given lift, when you go above your 1RM and fail, there is a specific reason for it. The athlete has to then figure out that reason and select exercises that will correct the problem. This is of course, easier said than done because the reason for failing is seldom obvious.

Still, even with these challenges, the Westside system works well; at the last meet my squat was 528, my bench was 330, and my deadlift was 572 (IPF rules). Not elite class, but respectable. That being said my body weight is around 240. I can't climb more than about four flights of stairs without stopping to catch my wind, which at a body weight of 180 I used to run up 10 flights of stairs. So, my gripe with Westside has come to be that while it has worked to make me a competitive powerlifter, it has also made me bigger than I want to be. Unrelated, but worth noting, it has become really difficult to buy pants in this country.

To be continued...