Westside becomes a bit monotonous

With Westside, gains are slow and steady and seem to mirror increases to body weight to the point that you can pretty closely guess how much your squat, BP, and DL will go up for every pound of weight gain. Also, I have always been skinny, but Westside has changed that, and now I have a powerlifter gut. It's not fat and every time someone says it is, I challenge them to touch it, at which point, they are surprised how hard my stomach is. That being said, my physique is more lumberjack than bodybuilder.

About a year and a half of training squat/DL and BP for 3-7 reps @ 90% max and 20-25 reps @ 50%-65% for speed once a week each, it became a bit monotonous. I also felt that this volume of the three big lifts was not enough to really feel comfortable with the motions, which seemed like a real weakness to the system. Baseball players, golfers, boxers, and other athletes all practice their basic motions pretty religiously, whereas Westside seemed bent on keeping its athletes from doing the lifts they'd be competing in hardly at all.

I heard about the Smolov squat routine requiring fairly heavy squatting four times/week for a pretty high volume of around 30 work reps for each workout. The program was introduced to the US via an article by Pavel Tsatsouline in Powerlifting USA around 2000. I didn't take a look at it until several years after that, but I was familiar with Pavel. He peddles really overpriced books with wide margins, huge fonts, lotsa pictures, little information, and further pads his books with several pages of advertising for his other books. I have Power to the People, which the combined total information is on par with an ordinary magazine article. It prescribes training several times a week with two lifts, the deadlift and an old school strongman move called the side press, gradually working heavier and heavier, then when it gets too hard, taking a few days off and repeating the program from a slightly heavier starting point. The book promises to teach how to develop strength without developing muscle, but when you buy the book, the big secret is just to minimize the negative portion of the lift. This "secret" is such common knowledge among powerlifters, I would make an analogy of a famous chef writing a cookbook promising to teach how to make the best coffee in the world, and then the book just saying to put milk and sugar in it.

In short, this book was very damaging to my view of Pavel, although I have noticed that he seems to have advocates that I feel very comfortable describing as zealots. Also, some of the big names in the Westside crowd pay him lip service. I am still basically convinced the man is a scheister. I have seen hoards of them in the martial arts: yo-yos with delusions of grandeur who claim to masters of some esoteric system that there is little evidence that it actually exists (check out the George Dillman videos on youtube). Now, such charlatans have penetrated the strength training world too. The fanaticism that his defenders seem to embrace this man with is also disturbing. Still, why people in Westside, who consistently diss training routines resembling the ones he hawks, would speak of him with respect is perplexing.

Still, a fair number of people have blogged and posted that Smolov really raised their max, and I particularly thought that the high-volume training would help my CNS adapt to perform the squat more efficiently, while at the same time making my muscles overtrained so that I wouldn't gain weight, hence strength without the commensurate muscle gain I was seeing with Westside. I learned from the martial arts that a lot of instructors will give you advice on what you're doing wrong. However, such analysis is pretty difficult and most instructors can't do it very well regardless how many years they have been training and teaching. In my years of experience as a fighter, I wasn't remarkably good at doing it either, but I learned to distinguish when the instructor was giving me good advice and when he was talking out of his boomski. The Smolov routine was just like this: it made sense as a routine. Irrespective of my distrust of Pavel, the reasoning was sound enough and enough successful trainees had come forward to believe that it might work. It also helped that Pavel did not take credit for this program, but said that a Russian trainer invented it. That being said, this Smolov fellow remains a black box and nobody seems to have met him or know anything about him.