I met Smitty at the MA State Strongman Championship last year and he was a great guy. I also have read many of his posts on the Gripboard and some of his articles for the Diesel Crew site. I haven’t read his EliteFTS articles, and they do seem wordy from what has been posted here, but this doesn’t sound like him at all to me.
He was laid back, really friendly, and a monster competitor. He did the medley a second time just so one of the other competitors could have someone to go up against. And this was after (if I remember correctly) having to do the Conan’s Wheel twice because they had loaded it wrong the first time.
He was going to sell me his G-Rex for a really good price but I didn’t have a way of carrying it home since I don’t drive. He and Jedd Johnson invited me to stay around after the meet and try to lift the Inch, have a Rolling Thunder contest, and throw around a big-ass KB.
Anyway, from meeting him that day and talking on the Gripboard, my impression is that he’s a real class-act guy. Same with all of the Diesel Crew guys. And they definitely back up what they say with results.
EDIT: after I wrote this, I realized that there may be another James Smith that writes for Elite. Is that correct?
“Again, my specific preparedness level is what is providing context to this material and through trial and error I have found that making a training directive out of increasing pressing strength with dumbbells is no longer a wise undertaking relative to the lack of transference that I am yielded at this stage of my development.”
[/quote]
Is this a parody of his writing, or has he actually written this?
That’s a hell of a lot of waffling just to say “increasing my dumbbell presses doesn’t seem to help my sports performance”.
“Again, my specific preparedness level is what is providing context to this material and through trial and error I have found that making a training directive out of increasing pressing strength with dumbbells is no longer a wise undertaking relative to the lack of transference that I am yielded at this stage of my development.”
Is this a parody of his writing, or has he actually written this?
That’s a hell of a lot of waffling just to say “increasing my dumbbell presses doesn’t seem to help my sports performance”. [/quote]
No, it is not a parody. I copy and pasted that from EFS. The article is called “Questioning Training Methodology,” and it is in the archives under “Training.”
From his most recent post (self) promoting the conference call:
"I’m sure we would all agree that in order that an objective may be successfully negotiated that our actions must be congruent with what it takes to accomplish the objective.
Well, my actions are those, such as this post and my continual pursuit to perfect my abilities, which are congruent with my goal of realizing this great opportunity."
Another example of the fine communication skills of James Smith.
[quote]specimen20 wrote:
From his most recent post (self) promoting the conference call:
"I’m sure we would all agree that in order that an objective may be successfully negotiated that our actions must be congruent with what it takes to accomplish the objective.
Well, my actions are those, such as this post and my continual pursuit to perfect my abilities, which are congruent with my goal of realizing this great opportunity."
Another example of the fine communication skills of James Smith.[/quote]
Haha, I just read that post, and I thought the exact same thing on the EXACT same part of the post. Incidentally, some people had offered as an explanation the fact that he seems to have learned mostly from russian manuals, and maybe that’s why his writign seems stilted. Well, this part of the post had NOTHING to do with training and STILL comes across like he’s trying to sound smart.