[quote]frankjl wrote:
[quote]animus wrote:
Remember that Westside was designed for equipped lifters (and looks like he’s doing Westside). I’m not saying that it won’t work (although I’d keep lifts in rotation for longer than a week as a raw lifter), but raw lifting requires more practice on the competition lifts.
Think of it this way… On the competition lifts, you are training the skill. Your accessory work is what builds the lift / gets you to lift more. Either alone will not be enough. ME variants are useful at times, but if you’re only doing the strict lift 25% of the year and compete raw where the variants have significantly less carry-over than to the equipped lifts, then chances are you will be ill-prepared for the meet.[/quote]
In the beginning, gear wasn’t as extreme as it was now. It was like a tight pair of sweat pants. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen an Inzer Z Suit, but lifters would literally never train in them and just throw them on at the meet and get 60-100 lbs out of that and their knee wraps. The old Inzer blast shirts were closed back. It might take 20 minutes to get one on and you might get 15 pounds out of it. There wasn’t really a ‘groove’ to the shirt, so nobody bothered to train in them.
This was the context in which the West Side method was created. While gear had been invented, it was very much an after thought. I don’t understand why people think the West Side method was invented for equipped lifters? Raw or equipped, the principles are the exact same. Your exercise selection may (and should) differ, but the principle of conjugated periodization still exists. Max effort, dynamic effort and repeated effort, waves, switching up ME movements, etc, etc. The West Side method threads on this forum are gold.
I very much disagree that raw lifting requires more practice. But regardless, in the West Side method that’s one of the reasons for the DE work. However, I will say that one thing I wish I had done more when I was training for raw meets was actually do the competition lifts every now and then. If I had it to do again, I would just work up to a heavy single or double on DE day every 2-3 weeks if I were feeling good that day. This is especially important for those who haven’t figured out correlations between their ME lifts and their competition lifts.
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Westside was not developed for equipped lifters, that is a false statement.
The competition bench movement gets trained every week on DE day. Do 12-15 sets of 3 reps moving that bar as fast as you fucking can and that 50% starts getting really heavy. Then as Frankjl had stated, every couple of weeks, work up to a heavy double, maybe even a single. The conjugate system is a pretty damn good system, I honestly dont know why people are constantly saying, “it doesnt work for raw lifters”