Force Training
By Jim Wendler and Elite Fitness Systems

The best educational seminars I’ve been to have been impromptu roundtables after workouts, at dinners or at powerlifting meets. This is when people who have trained for years pass ideas, ask questions and share advice from others. This is where the best ideas on training exist. You can go to conferences, take college courses, study books and read articles written by experts and all pale in comparison to the information being passed by those who are truly strong. And internet forums are not a substitute for personal roundtables! Anyone can hide behind their computers and give advice and criticize.
Recently after a squat workout, several lifters, all of them with decades of experience, begin talking about training with bands and the mistakes they’ve made and the mistakes they see many people make. The majority of the conversation centered on squatting and it was amazing to hear how similar some of the ideas were. After driving home and digesting some of the main points, I came up with the following analogy that helps illustrate one of the key points.

A lifter is like a magician that has a large bag of tricks. When the magician is starting out, he will start entertaining kids’ parties, the local Moose lodge and some retirement homes. At this time, pulling a stuffed rabbit out of a hat and some simple card tricks will suffice. There is no need to break out David Copperfield’s illusions and making white tigers disappear. That will simply be overkill. Also, he is going to have to work on his stage presence and presentation. This takes time, practice and some failures. Once he has perfected this, the magician will begin playing to larger crowds and expectations are higher. He is going to have to pull more tricks from his bag in order to succeed. Making a nickel appear from behind someone’s ear isn’t going to turn heads. Not only will his tricks have to be more complex but his presentation and performance have to be entertaining and nearly perfect. Once he has reached this level, it will take some radical new ideas to push his performance above all others. This is where his experience, the experience of others and some experimentation will occur. Sometimes he will have to go back to the basics in order to get some new ideas. This is what separates him from the rest in his profession.

This analogy works well with lifters. A lifter needs to start with the basics. In this case, straight weight (no chains or bands). During this time his technique and strength need to be developed. He will have to learn his body and develop the perfect form in order to maximize his technique. During this time, there will be a lot of frustration and he will have to learn to take some personal criticism in order to succeed. Eventually he will have to move to a different training stimulus to elicit gains. This is when chains become a possibility. He will take the knowledge from his previous training (this includes sets, percentages, volume, etc.), apply it, experiment and once again he will make gains. Once this stage has been perfected and he no longer feels that he can make progress, he can move to bands. Again, he will draw upon his previous experience, make some mistakes and eventually perfect what works for him. He will experiment with different training cycles, band tensions, percentages and again find success. Of course nothing works forever and now he needs to start pushing the envelope with different training combinations. This is what is so challenging, frustrating and rewarding about powerlifting.

What can you learn from this? If you are new to lifting, your technique is off or you haven’t maximized straight weight, take a step back and learn the basics. Too many times people reach into their bag and try the most complex and complicated tricks without first mastering the basics. Start with the simplest training methods and don’t move on until you maximize them. That way, when you do plateau you will have a new stimulus to move to. 

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