[quote]Paul33 wrote:
[quote]trivium wrote:
[quote]StrengthDawg wrote:
[quote]trivium wrote:
Your attitude about your lifts suggests that you value other’s opinions of your lifts. If you were really a secure human being, you wouldn’t be upset if someone called you weak because your own opinion of them would be enough.
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I lift in my garage and I rarely if ever, speak about lifting to anyone. Even when people ask me for workout advice I say very little. My point was that I bust my ass for every ounce on the bar, for my own benefit. I care not what other lift or do. I just get tired of people bashing geared lifters and I get tired of the fucking raw only camps.
But I hear ya man. Sorry for my attitude, and it wasn’t directed at you per se’. This raw vs geared shit really gets under my skin. FWIW I haven’t been i a bench shirt or squat suit in 2 years. It’s just people who have never lifted equipped need to keep quiet about such things because they have no fk’n clue. Their uneducated “opinions” mean shit, because they cannot speak from first hand experience. They might as well give tactical advice to Special forces because they have played call of duty or some shit.
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Well there is nothing wrong with being in the Clint Darden camp (garage gym, geared box squats, etc), but my big thing is that there is no “Raw vs. Gear” as they don’t compete with each other in the same meet.
I do believe that Raw guys can learn from geared lifters. The more I read and explore programming, the more I believe that westside might be one of the best training methods ever made for both geared and raw lifters.
Understanding why someone would use a band, chain, box, board, etc. can add valuable training information to any lifters basic understanding of the sport.
For example, looking at weak points with creativity can be eye opening. I listened to Dave Tate talk about assistance for a stalled bench press. The guy said that he was stuck in the mid range. Dave just started spilling knowledge of elbow positions (rotation, flexion, and angles relative to torso/shoulder, levers), assistance in those positions, and selecting the one with the most carryover to the individual asking the question.
Even though I have never even put on a weightlifting belt, all of these things can add valuable tools to my repertoire.
Even if I never use this information, knowing it exists can change how I make my decisions.
An example of this in my own training is that I have a few rowing movements I love. They are Kroc rows, t-bar rows, Pendlay rows, and chest supported row. I was doing Kroc rows, Pendlay rows, and chest supported row for ever. They stalled. I kept doing them for the next several months. No progress. One day I decided I would give swapping them out a shot. I moved to Kroc rows and t-bar rows. I started light, focused on form and progressed. After several months, I stalled. Last week I decided that I was bored of them and pissed that they weren’t moving at all. I ended up doing a set of Pendlay rows with 50 more lbs than I stopped doing them with. Better form, better range of motion.
Didn’t Louie Simmons say that “Everything works, but nothing works forever.”?
I guess I just want people to realize that everyone can learn from one another. There doesn’t have to be a this or that.
If you are raw and you use a slingshot, you didn’t bitch out. You just used a tool.
If geared guys drop the bench shirt for a few weeks and it helps them, then so be it. They didn’t bitch out or turn into one of those awful raw lifters either.
My only gripe with each camp is the judging seems to be a bit less strict with squatting in geared competitions for various reasons, some of which are understandable, some are not. Both sides of powerlifting are guilty of chest thumping.
I am also willing to bet a substantial amount of money that if there were a 6 lift meet consisting of raw s/b/d and geared s/b/d that we wouldn’t learn anything about who was actually the strongest because the geared guys would almost without a doubt win the geared event, and the raw guys would almost without a doubt win the raw event.
It would literally take years of training in each discipline to sort all of it out.[/quote]
that tate elbow comment was fucking hilarious. i mean i like dave, but that is the definition of overthinking things. powerlifitng is not rocket science or quantum physics. guys half his weight have been benching more, since benching was invented, raw, without ever going into that much detail on their fucking elbow angle and whether they should have reverse band nipple clamps. i used to think like you, that westside was da bestside, and then realised id wasted about 2 years of my life fucking around with stuff that made minimal impact.first in learning the system,and yes i catered to my own needs, picked lifts that all built my main lifts, etc.[/quote]
I don’t think you read my post as thoroughly as I wrote it.
For the record I don’t currently run westside, but I do try to incorporate the relevant methodology to my training.
I do believe that everyone’s westside is supposed to be different, and that is why it works. Westside, I am finding, is more like guidelines and principles. Not a program per se.
As for the Dave Tate comment…you can take it and write it off as overthinking and ignore it, or you can look at what he is trying to tell you and try to understand what it is he is getting at. I don’t think that you will ever get weaker from understanding multiple ways of doing things. And, who knows. You may need that information later on down the road.
From what I hear advanced lifters talk about very often is that you will constantly be learning a lift throughout your career. Several people have said that their form even changed as their body weight changed.
You can always learn. Even if the person is telling you things that you know are dead wrong. Look at it as learning how to not do things.