While he appears to be “long-winded” I wouldn’t say that it is unjustifiably so. I appreciate his need to put everything in context and therefore provide a framework for the readers to make their own informed decisions about their training.
All too often, the problem that I find with training articles is that they contain what works for the author and without the supported logic of why something worked. While it is fine for someone who is solely an athlete, a coach or trainer would need to have an understanding of the exact circumstances that produced the result so that it could be replicated.
While he does say all of those things that you mentioned, I believe that there are a few interesting things that I have thought about and have rarely seen others comment on.
The first thing that I’ve thought about it relation to it is classification of an “advanced” athlete. Take a man (relative strength athlete) who weighs 200lbs and has a 330 bench, 455 squat and 550 deadlift. We might consider this person to be “strong.” If this person had only been working out for a year and getting his programs out of FLEX magazine, I wouldn’t consider him advanced. Despite his numbers, the room for improvement that he has is quite vast. Now say we have a person with the same stats who has been training his balls off for 5 years and gets his information from very reputable sources and coaches. This second man has experienced stagnation in lifts lasting months at a time.
The person that is closer to their genetic potential (naturally weaker) can thus be considered more advanced despite their numbers.
Due to this drug-free status, poor leverages, and non genetic freak status, he is making the claim that what he has learned would thus have relevance to drug using, heavy enough, genetic freaks.
As much as I’m undecided about this, it’s something that I’ve thought about quite a bit.
And seeing as I’m being quite long-winded myself, I’ll try to wrap it up…after this. 
The other very interesting point that he brings up is why a relative strength athlete would need to be doing much work in the RE range if they are already at their desired weight. If we’re not trying to increase muscle size, then what benefit is this rep range offering us? I’ve seen plenty of people who are just trying to increase relative strength doing a ton of RE work. It just raises the question, what is our justification for doing this if it won’t lead to increased neural adaptations or gains in strength irrespective of BW.
Just some thoughts.
-Matt
[quote]skidmark wrote:
Matt McGorry wrote:
http://www.powerdevelopmentinc.com/?id=16
This is an interesting article that I dug up, written by James Smith (aka Thinker) of Elitefts.com and the bench press.
His stuff is not the easiest to read, but I find most of it to be incredibly interesting. I suggest that you guys give it a look and perhaps you may draw conclusions that will be of relevance to your own training.
-Matt
He basically says that he has dropped RE (8-20) rep work and DE work in favor of submaximal efforts and super high reps (40-70) and seen a 35 lb increase in his bench in 7 weeks. He credits this to reducing the CNS fatigue DE bench was causing and the improvement in form he was able to train in the SE efforts along with the joint improvement from the high reps.
I think many of us have dropped DE band work for the same reason and gone SE. Remember the 5x5 frenzy for a while? The difference is that he’s using his DE poundages to do his SE work if I read it aright. Nathaniel Hawthorne has nothing on this guy…
Mark Twain accused Nate Hawthorne (The Last Mohican) of never using one word where 5 will do.
Still - good viewpoint in the article and worth examining.[/quote]
