Three Types Of Workouts
Reside on the Westside
Most of us go to the gym and do some sets and reps. Some of us even have the wherewithal to add load each time we are successful at getting all our reps and thus get somewhat stronger. But in the world of athleticism, there is more to transferring this strength than just doing your standard five or eight or 10 reps per exercise. One of the great lessons that we can take from the legendary Louie Simmons of Westside Barbell is that there are different ways to behave with our exercises in the gym.
Anyone who is experienced in the weight room knows about power training, isometrics, and the like. Even using the same exercises, we can have profoundly different outcomes depending on what we do with that exercise during each set. Simmons outlined three primary ways that his athletes trained in the gym. These three workouts have been so effective and so profound for his powerlifters that they are collectively understood to be the “Westside Method.”
The first of these is what they call the repetition method. This style of training is akin to the training most of us do in the weight room. Exercises are done at a normal tempo, are done for several repetitions, and the outcome is to generally fatigue the muscle groups. At Westside, they used these as supporting sets after using either of the two other protocols noted below.
Very little of what Westside athletes do is addressed via the repetition method. This is because this method plays out fairly quickly for a high-level athlete, and because the nature of the sport that they were training (powerlifting) didn’t require several repetitions done up and down with a moderate load.
The second method that we can learn from the Westside program is what is called the Maximal Effort Method. Using this method, the Westside lifters would spend one day each week focus on taking a single exercise to its max. Athletes would still do a couple of other exercises, but most of those were done on the repetition method or as assistance exercises at high loads.
One of the critical components of using maximal efforts is to teach the central nervous system that the body “wants” to lift more or has to be able to create greater strength, tension, or power. If we continually train at bodyweight-only or at moderate loads, our body never gets the message that it needs to be substantially stronger, and thus pure strength improvements suffer. It is scary to lift to your maximum, so we should take our time in wading into maximal lifting.
The third Westside method is called the Dynamic Method. This method is used to increase the rate of force development and explosive strength in athlete. It ends up taking advantage of what you might call a “Goldilocks zone” of training load, most likely in the 40 to 60% range. A good way of looking at this is to imagine throwing a wadded up ball of paper. This implement is to light to fly very far, and thus the athlete does not develop any power. In contrast, if the athlete tried to throw a bowling ball, it would be far too heavy and would also only fly a few feet.
These two balls represent the extremes, and something like a baseball would probably be in that Goldilocks zone. A person can throw a baseball a long way because it is heavy enough to require high power, but light enough to actually move. This is the essence of the dynamic method. The general idea with these workouts is to lift as quickly as possible. Each and every rep, whether it is moving quickly or not, should be imagined to be moving as fast as possible. Speed, speed, speed is the key.
For a non-powerlifter on a strength program designed to support something like climbing, an austere recipe might be to do maximal lifting one day a week, to do a dynamic method session one day a week, and to support these two workouts with exercises done in the repetition method. Two or three days a week of focused, intense, lifting should be more than enough to support the needs of almost any activity we participate in. Beyond this, almost all of our preparation should be sport specific.
Naturally, just getting to the gym and lifting, at all, is the first step. If you’re an adult, there is overwhelming evidence that this practice will extend life, reduce injury, and enhance sport activity across all domains. If you’ve been at it a while, though…consider trying to tweak your training a little and see what going heavy, or going faster, might do for you.
If you’re interested in how such a plan might work for a rock climber, I wrote the Juggernaut Training Plan with the Westside principles in mind for just such a purpose. I love the variety and the quick progress people see on this plan. It’s flexible, directed, and it churns out results.