I’m sure anyone who follows the bodybuilding/fitness world on social media knows where I’m going with this, but to others,… Social media is an interesting thing. It allows people to exaggerate, even fabricate pretty much anything. This can be done for
Respect on an online forum, or even in an attempt to create a brand and make a living.
Lately, a number of very well known, yet always questionable, individuals hVe had their “games” blown open. From exposing insane amounts of Photoshop on their everyday physiques, having their assistants who did all the work designing client plans and answered their emails fess up, to even having parents and past spouses contacted to expose outright lies about their past histories.
I doubt any of this would fly in a real sport/industry. So here we are,… Was this all just inevitable?
P.s. I’m intentionally not dropping individuals’ names.
Earlier today I Saw the unearthing of previous criminal records just to blow open lies mentioned in a certain I do individuals YouTube videos.
The extent some people seem to be going is pretty extreme, but like I was alluding to, people will only take being lied to for so long, and As easy as the Internet makes it to be completely full of bullshit it’s simIlarly easy to confirm.
The saddest part is there are some very smart and humble guys busting their arses running gyms and setting up local comps to promote the sports they love and doing it off the smell of a oily rag.
Meanwhile, some muppets who arent very clever and with egos as fragile as glass whose interest in community extends to their reflection in the mirror are getting a very handsome income from google and facebook for this crap.
Somehow, no matter how much i lament it, the Age of the Salesman keeps on truckin’. I hope it all explodes but it will likely just deliver more ad word clicks.
So this last week we’ve seen a supplement company throw one of their top “athletes” under the bus (“we honestly didn’t know he was doing this…” -lol), cutting all ties and publicly denouncing him, and we’ve seen one of the more prominant (I’ve personally never been a fan and can’t for the life of me understand how he achieved any following at all) youtube “experts” start losing subscribers by the hundreds if not thousands.
I always used to joke with my friend Brad that on web forums everyone doling out advice and constantly criticizing others was a huge and ripped mofo in real life, but I really do thing we may be seeing the downturn in the fitness trend of keyboard experts here.
After watching/listening to that a few days ago I had to run down the blaha rabbit hole to see how he has come along. Its amazing in some strange, morbid way to see him get flushed out of one niche, only to create another persona, and get flushed out of that too.
It is addictively insane. Sort of like watching a train derail in super slow motion, all while the conductor keeps telling everyone that things are just fine.
Cliffs notes- the guy is a fake s&c coach/tattletale of bodybuilding. Not happy with that, he launched a personal crusade against a real one and got sued, then lost.
He is also a fake tactical shooting instructor or something, but when he associated himself with real SF and black ops people, they turned on him and exposed his whole completely unspectacular life history.
He has also been accused of stolen valor, and his response to the accusation was off the charts. No one likes the term “full retard” anymore, but it totally fits.
I personally like his style and panache with that fancy flashlight. I have one that I use sometimes for inspecting welds and checking surface finishes for flatness, but had never previously thought of clipping it on like that. Now I can be all milspec tactical & stuff.
I haven’t been really into it for a while, but Louie Simmons is great. “Itallgoes backtoZazyorsky…speedstrengthreactivestrengththenworkonyourancilliarys!”. How can people not love him?
I am fairly certain that Louie Simmons learn how to speak and write by reading MadLibs that were filled out by schizophrenic Soviet prisoners.
After reading enough of his interviews, I figured out the pattern to him answering any question was something like this.
1 non-sequitur
Unrelated story about an unrelated athlete
Story of someone overcoming a ridiculous injury but utilizing a metric that no one could understand to explain it
An actual answer to the question that had nothing to do with any of the previous information.
Example
“Hey Louie, what would you like for breakfast?”
“Well, whose to say we even need to eat breakfast in the first place? Evander Hollyfield would only ever eat banana flavored pez for breakfast, and he went on to become the undisputed featherweight champion of the galaxy. 4 days ago, I ruptured 14 disks in my back and the doctor said that I was injured so bad my parents would never walk again, but yesterday I squatted an upside down buffalo bar onto a 27” box with at least 17,000 tons of band tension. Toast and juice."
I am not a powerlifter, but from what I’ve read about powerlifting, Louie Simmons confuses me, and it seems that Westside training has resulted in a hefty amount of injuries for those who’ve used it. I don’t know if it’s the training that does it, or it just happens to be that those who’ve used it have been downright fanatical and have trained unsafely, Dave Tate being one of them.
I remember Dave Tate repeatedly saying and writing that he had injuries because of linear periodization, and that when he met Louie Simmons at a meet, Louie said that if Dave were to continue using linear periodization, he would wind up not even being able to be competitive in powerlifting. So Tate switched to conjugated, Westside-style periodization and wound up with even more injuries. I like Dave Tate a lot, but his injury list and unsafe practices amaze me! (I’m not being sarcastic.)
From what I’ve read, people who took a more gradual, linear approach to training had a lot less injuries. Sure, Ed Coan, Kirk Karwoski, and Glen Chabot, the powerlifters that really caught my interest, though not being a powerlifter myself, had injuries, but if I have it right, they were not riddled with god knows how many.
Which additional injuries did Dave pick up after Westside? From what I’ve read, Dave wasn’t even able to bench before him and Louie figured out a way to troubleshoot his pec.
I never got the impression that Dave blamed linear periodization for his injuries from what I’ve read in his writing. It seemed like a lot of the bad stuff came when he was training with a group that was essentially maxing out every workout in full gear.
