Westside barbell for rugby

If you’ve ever picked up a barbell, the chances are you’ve heard of Louie
Simmons. His story is legend amongst strength circles. Owner and head
coach of Westside Barbell, he has helped to produce more world class
powerlifters than any other gym in the world. He is responsible responsible
for introducing a host of training methods to the mainstream: bands,
chains, sled pulling, box squatting, the reverse hyper and more. And to a
lot of coaches he’s one of the sharpest training minds walking the planet.

But to some people his methods are just hype, masked by triple ply squat
suits, generous use of performance enhancers and obscure powerlifting
federations. If you’re a world class, steroid using powerlifter with no
concern other than adding lbs to your total, go ahead. But what if you’re a
rugby player, or even just a weekend warrior concerned with all round
health and fitness? Do his methods still apply?

This article is my answer. On 1st May I was fortunate enough to visit

Westside Barbell and spend a day in the company of Louie and the lifters
at Westside. I’m not a powerlifter but a strength and conditioning coach to
professional rugby athletes. My only interest is enhanced performance on
the field, and it is from this perspective that I’ll be sharing what I learned
from our conversations that day.

If you’re an athlete or concerned with all round performance, read on,

because this one is for you..

Louie on elite sports performance

Everyone can get better, but top level performance in any sport is still
about talent. You can’t get a jackass to win the Kentucky Derby.

Strength matters- that’s why we have weight classes in a lot of sports, and
that’s why we don’t have any women playing in the NFL. If strength didn’t
matter, offensive linemen would weigh 130lbs.
Whenever you come to the gym, break a record of some kind. It can be a
max effort lift, a jump for height, a special exercise for reps, or a carry for
distance, but break a record.

Technique is important- that’s why his guys train with an empty barbell the
first time they walk into the gym. But sooner or later technique plateaus
and it’s time to get stronger. This is the only way to improve performance
once technique reaches a certain level.

Training a lift doesn’t necessarily make you stronger at that lift if your
technique is already sound. His analogy:

“If you beat me up, should I go to your house the very next day and
fight you again? Of course not, because I’m going to get my ass kicked
again. What I need to do is go away, find out why I lost, build up those
areas in training, and only then go back to your house to fight you.”

Translated into strength training, Louie thinks that you get stronger by
breaking down a lift or movement into its component parts, training the
weakest link in the chain, then putting the pieces back together for
improved performance. To raise your squat you shouldn’t be squatting, you
should be hammering the special exercises for that lift, like glute ham
raises, reverse hypers and heavy abdominals.

Louie on sports performance training

For the same reason he doesn’t recommend squatting or deadlifting in-

season for field sport athletes like rugby players and football players.
Putting a bar on your back in the middle of a gruelling season is just too
stressful. If you just raise your performance in the special exercises and
keep playing the sport, your power output on the field will go up.

For max effort work his guys use Prilepin’s chart to determine the
optimum number of lifts for a given exercise. He finds that with the
competition schedule and supplement regimes his athletes follow, they can
train week in and week out with 90-100% of 1RM, which means about 7
reps per session divided into sets of 1-2 quality reps.
Prilepin’s table

He believes they avoid overtraining and injury by rotating the max effort
lifts so the same motor pattern isn’t continually stressed again and again.
On the day we visited the guys were hitting a 2 board press against purple
bands. It was the first time in 7 or 8 weeks that they had performed
that lift.

For dynamic effort work he prefers 12 to 24 reps total (higher for the
bench, lower for the deadlift and squat somewhere in the middle) split into
sets of 1-3 reps per set. All dynamic effort work is performed with bands
and/or chains because it increases power output through increased speed
of movement.

He trains the repetition effort method with the special exercises. Based on
where an athlete is weak in the big 3 movements, he will select special
exercises which are then performed for higher reps and volume. Nothing
crazily heavy, just get a pump.

With straight bar weight you could normally expect bar speed to slow with
increasing load, but Louie has found that bar speed remains fairly
consistent even for high percentages of 1RM when using bands. He
believes this is because with bands the only way you are going to move the
bar is by moving it FAST.

He admits that dynamic effort work probably doesn’t have a direct transfer
to powerlifting. Rate of force development has a negligible effect on
performance in a sport that has no time constraints (for sports that do
have time constraints RFD becomes way more important). What he does
think DE work is good for is technique. If you are working at 60% of 1RM
and below, technique should be perfect. DE training gives you an
opportunity to to refine technique that max effort lifting does not.

Strength and technique have to be trained alongside one another year-

round. Strength changes what kind of technique you are capable of
executing, and technique changes how you can express strength. New
strength is useless if you have to spend a month learning how to use
it. Like Verkoshansky has written, speed of relaxation- not contraction- is
the key ability to sport performance. He favours box squats because it
teaches the athlete to switch between relaxation and contraction more than
free squats. The box squat forces the athlete to relax before the concentric
contraction and has the added benefit of forcing consistent squatting
depth, whilst creating less soreness than free squats.

In his experiments with the Tendo Unit he discovered that maximal power
output occurs at roughly 35% of maximal movement velocity. That is why
he prefers loaded to unloaded jumps- they shift you closer to the point of
maximal power output.

Maybe this is the reason why Olympic lifts are touted as the king of power
development exercises. Perhaps there isn’t anything special about a snatch
or clean and jerk per se, just the velocity that a heavy O-lift variation moves
at?

This is something that I can definitely attest to with an athlete of mine

from the Sydney Roosters. For 2 months he did no Olympic lifting
whatsoever, but did perform banded speed deadlifts at 0.8 metres per
second (textbook Olympic lifting bar speed). The end result was a 5kg
personal best when he next performed a power clean.

He loves jump training because it forces you to keep accelerating

throughout the whole movement, just like lifts which incorporate
accommodating resistance like bands, chains and pneumatic equipment
Keiser pulleys.
His guys perform 80 jumps per week split over 2 days per week, and he
prefers jumps performed starting from a seated position because- again- it
forces relaxation prior to concentric contraction: static overcome by
dynamic contraction.

When does he schedule jumps in a training session or training day?

“Whenever the f**k we want, so long as it gets done.” A lot of coaches may
balk at performing jumps at the end of a session, but Louie feels that it
teaches athletes to exert maximum force even when they are starting to
become fatigued- a big issue in powerlifting towards the end of a meet and
in the later stages of a competition in all sports.

The hips are the centre of human power development. Try to perform any
skill on a sporting fieldjumping, cutting, tackling, kicking, throwing, you
name it. You can’t NOT use your hips. Louie’s latest way to develop the
hips? Walking in a belt squat. Strap up and pace back and forth on the
belt squat for 2 minutes straight. It will light you up.

He loves loaded goblet carries because they train a ton of things at once:
shoulder packing, torso stability and conditioning. What is more he thinks
they expose weak links in your chain. If you do heavy carries and the next
day your lower back is sore, guess what? It’s time to start training
your lower back a lot more.

He’s also a fan of sled pulls/pushes, the strongman yoke and heavy wheel
barrow pulls/pushes, even for endurance athletes. It supports strength and
size development, builds connective tissue strength and conditioning all at
the same time- just pay attention to your heart rate to make sure you
are training for the desired energy system or adaptation that you want.

Another bonus to carries, pulls and pushes is the minimal eccentric

component. It reduces soreness which is important in-season for athletes
and it means you can perform them more frequently even if you aren’t an
athlete.

So what do I think?
I think Louie Simmons is a mad genius. He talks a mile a minute and he
stores every single one of his athletes’ meet and training records in his
head, along with a library’s worth of training information and he has
invented more training equipment than I care to mention.

If you look at what he is doing with his athletes, there is a ton of value to be
had. He has trained 14 men to deadlift over 800lbs and yet none of his
athletes ever deadlift more than once a week for speed pull percentages.
When I visited I witnessed a 5 foot tall female lifter perform a standing
box jump of 43 inches, and a high school linebacker bench press 225lbs for
29 reps. There is something there. He is definitely doing great things.

The difficulty in appraising his methods lies in the esoteric nature of the
powerlifting world. He and his athletes are very open in their use of
steroids. To them it is just a part of the sport. What happens if you choose
not to juice? Certainly there are a ton of natural athletes who have
anecdotally excelled by using a Westside approach. My guess is that they
just have to be a little more judicious with intensity and volume than
assisted lifters.

Likewise powerlifters only train for a few meets per year, at which they
only have to perform up to 9 maximal efforts over the course of several
hours. This is worlds apart from traditional field sports where athletes
have to perform every explosive movement under the sun, for an hour or
more, over a 30 to 40 week season. Is it possible to train using a Westside
template when you account for everything else an athlete has to train like
skill work, team practices and conditioning? Again, I think the answer is to
apply the principles but keep an eye on the volume and intensity of what
you are doing. Remember that you cannot add to a programme without
first subtracting something else.

Even with all that considered if you have a guy who back squats 600lbs raw
and box jumps 50 inches at 250lbs (a common feat at Westside), if you give
him a year of intense training in the sport of your choice, you’ve got a hell
of an athlete on your hands. Just look at the waves Carlin Isles has been
making in Rugby sevens for the USA. Less than a year ago he was a fairly
good national level sprinter. Now he is making some of the best sevens
players on the planet look average. That is the value of strength and power-
something Louie Simmons’ athletes have in abundance.

Should you be training like this?

I think they can be of great value to anyone wanting to increase their

strength and power, but my advice to is to take them with a pinch of salt.
Understand that if you’re a natural lifter or field sport athlete,
implementing Westside methods verbatim is probably going to
compromise your ability to recover. Start light, use the minimal volume
and intensity that still gets your 1RM and the scale moving in the right
direction, and then progress from there.

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