Destroy the Opposition: Programming for Powerlifting
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Contents
Allow Me To Preface Your Face
Those Who Cannot Do, Teach?
What You Can Feel Free To Learn From Others
The Department of Strategery
The Lifts, In All Of Their Glory
Stop Bitching and Start Benching
Presenting… The Bench Form Of The Greats!
The Bench Routines of the Greats
Doug Young
Rick Weil
Jennifer Thompson
Ted Arcidi
Jeremy Hoornstra
Scot Mendelson
Ken Fantano
Bev Francis
Ken Lain
Ed Coan
Jim Williams
What You Should Have Learned About Bench Training
Changes Worth Making To Your Bench Routine
Bench Press Support Staff Worth A Shit
Other Important Considerations for the Bench
Making Your Deadlift Even More Deadly
There Will Be Fucking Murders
How to select the perfect stance for you
The Deadlift Programs of the Greats
Lamar Gant
Konstantin Konstantinovs
Bob Peoples
Benedikt Magnusson
Rickey Dale Crain
John Kuc
Ed Coan
Julia Zaugolova
Tools To Make Your Deadlift Even More Deadly
My Deadliest Deadlift Routines
The Deadliest Assistance Movements
Filling in the Rest of the Blanks on the Deadlift
Basic Tips On The Deadlift Itself
A Note On The Attached Programs
Squatting Like You're The CEO of the Paper Street Soap Company
The Squat Form Of The Greats
Squatting Like A Pro
The Squat Programs of the Greats
Idalberto Aranda
“Mad” Mike Kuhns
Andrey Belyaev
Sam Byrd
Paul Anderson
Phil “Squatzilla” Harrington
“Captain” Kirk Karwoski
Mikhail Koklyaev
My Method For Building a Badass Squat
Persistence
Frequency and Intensity
If You Don’t Know Squat,You Need These Routines
Bringing Assistants Into The Rack
Squat Variants You Should Be Doing
The Jump Squat
The Front Squat
The Partial Squat
Basic Tips on the Squat Itself
Becoming Whole
A Word About Special Snowflake Syndrome
Diet
Mental
Works Cited
Allow Me To Preface Your Face
In the grand scheme of history and in strength sports in general, powerlifting is an incredibly new sport. Man has been testing his strength against man since time immemorial, as testing one’s strength against friends, family, and enemies alike helps determine your place in the general hierarchy, establishes one’s physical dominance, and provides a ready benchmark against which people can gauge their physical mettle. Most strength sports today haven’t required much in the way of technological innovation to enable competition. Powerlifting, however, has. Prior to the advent of the squat rack and the bench press, the only powerlift in which people typically competed was the deadlift. The reason for this should be obvious, as all the deadlift requires is a barbell and a bit of open space. Prior to the advent of the squat rack, squats were typically performed only when the weight had been cleaned or continental’ed to the shoulders, or were performed in a Steinborn squat. I’ll cover the Steinborn squat later, but sufficed to say, the exercise is an unmitigated bitch, and not really anything most people would ever attempt with a heavy weight. Likewise, the closest approximation to a bench press was the pullover and press, which I’ll also detail later as well, though that eventually became little more than a contortionist act and weird hip-thrusting belly lift. In other words, it was far better suited to a party trick at an orgy filled with circus fat men and women than it was a lifting platform.
Owing to this need for technological innovation, powerlifting didn’t really have legs as a sport until the 1950s, and even then it was really only a British and American sport. Initially, the three powerlifts were really just considered to be “odd lifts”— the type of shit you and your buddies would get together and try out on a Saturday afternoon before going to drink your faces off and engage in random acts of wanton sexuality. Eventually, Bob Hoffman, the founder of York barbell, took an interest in the lifts, probably to piss off his nemesis Joe Weider. Hoffman was instrumental, then, in financing the US Olympic weightlifting team’s success through the 1940s, 50s, and 60s, and was the godfather of powerlifting. Initially, the deadlift wasn’t included in these competitions, and powerlifting was actually what most people refer to “power sports” competitions today— the strict curl, bench press, and squat. By the time the first world championships were held in the 1970s, the deadlift had replaced the curl, and powerlifting began to resemble its current incarnation, though there was a total lack of standardization in rules that made comparisons of performances difficult. It wasn’t until the mid to late 1970s that the rules were truly standardized for the sport, making powerlifting essentially a 40 year old sport.
Due in large part, I suppose, to the fact that powerlifting is still in its infancy, there appears to be a lot of dispute about what is “correct” in terms of training for meets. A lot of the programs about which you’ll read are the products of people who haven’t been successful in the sport, and still others are simply adaptations of Olympic weightlifting programs, which is somewhat comical given that the two sports bear little relation to one another— one is a demonstration of speed, agility, and flexibility in combination with strength, whereas the other is the truest test of raw, brute strength yet devised by man. I’m giving you this background because it occurs to me that most people have no fucking clue why they do what they do— they simply do it because it’s what everyone else is doing. If you haven’t noticed yet, just about everyone you meet is a half-retarded asshole, and they probably know less than you do. As such, there’s not a reason in the fucking world you should follow in their footsteps unless you’re criminally lazy, or because you just love sucking at things. Given what I’ve seen at powerlifting meets, I’m guessing it’s a combination of the two.
Well, fuckers, it’s time to wake the fuck up, get your heads out of your asses, and start kicking ass in powerlifting. The only thing that’s stopping you at this point is you.
Those Who Cannot Do, Teach?
This is one of the most horrifying adages I’ve ever read, and I could not possibly understand why it’s so widely accepted. I suppose that it makes sense in the United States, where the average score for aspiring teachers on the SAT is 389, but I fail to understand why people accept this (Sowell 335). Why the fuck would you want to be led by someone who cannot personally display a basic aptitude for the thing they’re teaching you? I would no more accept strength training instruction from a fat, weak guy than I would English instruction from one of the aforementioned education majors.
One line of reasoning you’ll commonly see for taking strength instruction from weak people goes something like this, “I know a lot of stupid motherfuckers who are strong, but I would rather take instruction from someone who can tell me why I’m doing what I’m doing.” If you’re nodding your head in agreement, fucking stop it— your argument defies logic. If it’s possible for a knuckle-dragging dullard to get criminally strong with no real kinesthetic u
nderstanding or background in physiology, it would stand to reason that you what you need is motivation, not knowledge. Tookie Williams, for instance, the founder and leader of the Crips street gang, was a fucking moron, but he was huge. His secret? He’s smoke angel dust or PCP before he’d lift weights, then lift with the most reckless abandon of anyone in history since Rowdy Roddy Piper hung up his cocaine straw and got fat.
Knowledge about lifting is nothing without a burning desire to move heavy weight, and the experience of having put that desire into practice successfully is what is needed to be a good coach. Luckily, I can provide you with the latter, because I am so good at powerlifting I make other people abandon the sport altogether, and I’m so fucking smart I make smart people feel retarded. Thus, you can sit back and relax, because you’re about to drink from fire hose of knowledge that will make every previous treatment on the subject of powerlifting look like one of those shitty drinking fountains wherein the water barely dribbles out and you have to lap it up like a Chihuahua by comparison.
In case you bought this ebook on the recommendations of someone else and have no idea who I am, my name is Jamie Lewis, and only one person in history has outlifted me at 181 lbs without knees wraps. Thus far, my best lifts at that weight at the time of publishing are a 633lb squat, 369 bench, and a 661 deadlift, wearing nothing more than knee sleeves and a belt. That puts me 17 lbs off a world record in the squat set in 1974, and 39 lbs off the record total, in spite of the fact that I only started competing in full powerlifting meets within the last two years. In that time, I’ve set the raw record in the APF in the squat and total and posted the only 600 lb+ wrapless squats at 181 since the record was set. Lest you then question my academic credentials, I’ve got two MBAs and an undergraduate degree in history. Thus, I am the perfect storm in terms of disseminating information on powerlifting— I know the science behind what I do and put my knowledge into brutal, unrelenting, dominant action.
What You Can Feel Free To Learn From Others
One thing I have never claimed to be is a teacher to raw beginners in strength sports. Quite frankly, it’s a waste of time. Raw beginners can learn the basics of lifting anywhere. To wite, I learned how to do all of the basic movements by looking at a chart on the wall in my high school weight room and watching other people lift. It’s just that simple. For that reason, you will not find innumerable diagrams explaining how to do shit you should probably already know how to do. I will explain the more esoteric exercises, but you should already know the basics.
If you don’t, there are literally millions of resources at your fingertips that will explain and demonstrate basic movements like the squat and the deadlift. I’ve no interest in reinventing the wheel, and I’m fairly certain the lot of you would prefer that I spend my time focusing on the more important shit than essentially attempting to reteach you how to read. You know the old adage about how you can give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day, or you could teach him to fish and feed him for a lifetime? I’m basically going to teach you people to fish by chumming shark infested waters and throwing you in with a life jacket and a Bowie knife. It’s time to get awesome or die trying.
The Department of Strategery
Before you charge out into the great, wide world with blood in your eyes and dominance of powerlifting on your mind, you’re going to have to engage in a bit of strategery.
If you look at the best lifters in history, they all had one of the two big movements as their pet lift, and they specialized in it to achieve total dominance in the sport. Ed Coan and John Kuc focused on the deadlift, for instance, while Fred Hatfield and Kirk Karwoski relied on the squat to get their totals up. Recently, we’ve had guys like Andy Bolton and Konstantin Konstantinovs blow people away with their deads and put in passable performances on the squat, while guys like Sam Byrd and myself use the squat for dominance.
You’re not going to be insanely dominant in both— there’s just no way to pull it off. As such, you should focus on one and beat the living hell out of it, and the strength you build training your specialization will carryover into the other lift enough to allow you to embarrass your competition. Clearly, a passable bench is important as well, but it’s rare that someone has a bench so impressive that he or she can pull out enough ahead to clearly establish himself or herself as the dominant lifter.
The squat and the deadlift, being the bigger lifts, are going to need to be the focus of your training to ensure victory. Thus, treat this as a Choose Your Own Adventure book and pick one on which to focus.
The Lifts, In All Of Their Glory
Stop Bitching and Start Benching
As I mentioned in the introduction, the bench press is a remarkably modern lift. Lifters of the late 19th and early 20th century lacked an apparatus on which they could bench- unfortunately, Da Vinci and his fellow savants stuck to devising things that would allow Venetians to kill people with only the tiny bit of effort Italians are capable of exerting in war, and American scientists were busy figuring out electricity, while everyone else pretty much sat around with their thumbs up their asses praying the Americans would invent the modern world so they could stop sleeping in manure. Thus, it was only after automobiles and electricity and computers and space flight were in full swing before anyone turned their big brain to lifting and decided to add uprights to a sturdy bench to hold a barbell.
Prior to that invention, you had two options if you wanted pectoral hypertrophy- parallel bar dips or the predecessor to the bench press, the pullover and press. For this, the lifter would lie on his back on the ground and do a barbell pullover, then press the bar from his chest. This was, at least initially, a strict lift, and George Hackenschmidt simplified it a bit by using plates large enough that he could simple roll the weight into place and then do what you and I would refer to as a “floor press”, setting the record at 361 lbs. lifting in that fashion in 1898 (Gentle). Not to be outdone, Arthur Saxon eventually began doing what amounted to a back bridge to press more weight, and ended up hitting 386 for a single.
The lift then continued to evolve as lifters would arch their bodies explosively into the bar to give it momentum, at which point it became the “belly toss” of which you’ll occasionally read. The belly toss was eventually banned for the reason I mentioned earlier- it had become a contortionist act. One lifter, Billy Lilly, eventually slow-bridged 484 lbs. to arms length to his “extreme flexibility” (Katterle), giving him what was nearly a three times bodyweight pullover and press (Ibid).
As sch, Bob Hoffman made a move to get that form banned, and the lift languished in the shadows as people argued over the proper execution of the modern lift in the late 1940s and early 1950s. In fact, the exercise didn’t gain wide acceptance as a competition lift until Joe Weider promoted the modern bench press as “the greatest exercise of all” in his magazines in 1957 (Gentle), four years after Doug Helpburn set an unofficial record in the lift with a paused 502 lb. bench press.
Thus, the bench press has been the most maligned and simultaneously ballyhooed exercise on the planet since its invention, and the invention of its predecessor. I've taken a steaming shit on it over the years for one reason— I fucking suck at it. I'm fairly certain that is the reason most people trash talk the bench— it sucks to be so bad at the one exercise virtually everyone does. As such, you simply sidestep the conversation by decrying it as a pointless and useless feat of strength fit for naught but bodybuilders and sundry gym dilettantes. In the end, however, the people who yell the loudest about the uselessness of the bench press are usually the same guys masturbating to it like a pedophile at a McDonald's PlayPlace. They're looking at great benchers in the gym with the jealousy generally reserved for flat chested gold diggers when they spot a big-tittied woman working a guy with an AMEX Black. They hate the fuck out of themselves for sucking at the lift but not enough to get fucking good at it, so they make excuses not to do so. It's time, however, for that shit to end— everyone needs to sack the fuck up and admit that if it's good
enough for Olympic weightlifting phenom Dmitri Klokov, it's damn sure good enough for them.
I suppose a great deal of most peoples' frustration stems from the fact that benching seems to come easy to some and not to others. I've come to the realization, however, that like everything else in the gym, big weights come to those who break their asses for them.
If you suck at benching, it's your own fucking fault. I was a disgrace to my lineage at the bench press until what I thought was a shoulder injury (which ended up just being knotting) forced me to change my bench press style to the reverse grip, a style only the inimitable Anthony Clark ever used with success in competition. I worked hard at learning the new form and experimenting with it because I had to, and I've become considerably less of an embarrassment to family and friends at the bench since I did so.