EFS Product Review: WICKid Shirts

By The Doorman

For www.EliteFTS.com

This review is probably going to sound like total bullshit. If I were reading it, I’d say to myself, “This guy is making up some crock of shit story in order to make some glowing review of yet another Elite Fitness Systems product sound like it happened by accident.”

If you’re preparing to think this way before reading the introduction to this review, you’re on the right track. You should always question everything you read in a review, especially if the review in question appears on the website that’s selling the product – and even more so if it’s written by someone who’s pumped out more EFS propaganda than just about anyone else on the planet.

This is how I look at most reviews I read. The world is such an inbred place that you never know who’s in bed with whom in most businesses, so the best thing you can do, when reading a review, is take the advice Stone Cold Steve Austin once gave The Rock shortly after nailing him with a surprise Stunner: “DTA, Rock. Don’t. Trust. Anyone.”

So when Dave sent me a box of the new WICKid tee shirts EFS is selling and told me to review them however I saw fit, I decided to summon up what little integrity I had left and write this thing objectively. This isn’t to say that the reviews I’ve done previously have lacked integrity or objectivity. If I thought Jim Wendler’s Training Three Days a Week manual sucked, I wouldn’t have reviewed it. I would have told Jim to go back to the drawing board, and he would’ve told me to “fuck off,” and that would have been that.

The point here is that nobody wants to read reviews by someone who’s overwhelmingly positive all the time. It’s not realistic, and it’s not fair to waste your time – and mine – with what today’s internet kids call “nuthugging.” Who wants to be known as a nuthugger?

In any event, I hope what you’ll get from me when I review something for this site is reality. Something you can actually use. I could be wrong here, and I’m sure I’ll hear about it if I am, but I think – and I told Dave this – I’m fairly representative of the average EFS reader/user/customer. I’m a former college athlete, a moderately successful competitive powerlifter and a high school football coach. For the purposes of a review of the new WICKid gear, I’m also someone who trains his ass off – relatively speaking – and has a massive problem with excessive sweating while doing so, especially here in the “fat kid unfriendly” Northeast, where high humidity and awful air quality combine to turn my life into a soaking-wet mess within five minutes of exiting the shower.

The first thing I noticed about the WICKid shirts was the fit – or, to be more precise, the fact that they actually fit me properly. When you wear supposed “loose fitting” gear from some of the bigger-name companies that make this type of clothing, you’ll notice that most of it feels as though it was stitched together inconsistently, with the apparent end goal of forming a sausage casing designed specifically for your discomfort. Not so with WICKid. Not only is the fit with these shirts exceedingly comfortable, it’s also flattering, believe it or not. It’s not exactly how I’d make a fashion statement – not that I give a shit these days – but I’d wear these shirts outside the gym.

When most of what you own says XXXL on the label, proper fit necessarily leads to proper function. At least that’s what you hope for. I wore WICKid shirts through a typical week of training – including some particularly brutal Prowler sessions in the heat – and the freedom of movement they provided was the first thing I noticed. They’re the next best thing to training without a shirt, which is something you can’t do if you train in a commercial gym, like I sort of do. You can bench, squat, deadlift, do overhead lifts and push the Prowler without any concerns about your clothing inhibiting your freedom of movement. Put on a WICKid shirt to train and you won’t need to touch the thing until you’re done.

As for the actual “wicking” capability of the shirts, they’re as good or better than any of the popular brand performance gear shirts I’ve worn. It feels like these shirts absorb everything, as though you’re not even sweating. This is great for me because in the type of heat we’ve been getting here recently, I’ll drench a regular cotton tee shirt before I’m even done warming up. My WICKid shirt was dry as a bone – and odor-free – after a ninety-minute max effort squat workout that included a Prowler session afterward.

The only drawback I can see is the slightly “glossy” appearance of the shirts, which may turn people off at first, but I noticed that this disappears somewhat after the first washing. A counterpoint to this is the fact that the shirts have held up well and still look brand new after two washer-dryer cycles – not to mention the hell my sweat glands put them through this past week.

I guess the best endorsement I can give these shirts is this…

Everyone knows two-a-day summer practices suck for football players, but they suck for coaches, too. By the time you’re halfway through the second practice of the day, you’re shot. You’re probably dehydrated, you haven’t eaten properly, and you’ve been standing out in the sun screaming at people for the better part of four hours. I’ve almost come to dread two-a-days more as a coach than I ever did as a player.

After a week of hard training in the WICKid shirts Dave sent me, I sent a link to the WICKid website to my head coach, along with the following email:

“Can you call this company and see if they make team lines? This stuff is WAY better than what we have and I want to wear these for camp. It would make practices a LOT easier on us.”