If you want to know what injury bothered Dave Tate the most, the answer isn't going to be about pain. It isn't going to be about a torn triceps that made bench lockouts a problem, or about a strained hamstring that made squatting a lesson in pain tolerance.

For Dave, the only real measure of the severity of an injury is the length of time the injury keeps you out of the gym. For powerlifters like Dave, the most painful muscle tear in the world can be classified as a low-level injury if you're able to recover from it in four weeks.

In these terms, Dave's worst injury happened at a meet in 1990. Prior to moving to Westside but familiar with Louie, Dave suffered a  major injury during the bench press that Louie summed up with something along the lines of, "You'll be fine, you just pulled your pec."

Listen to Dave himself tell the story of his ruptured left pec tendon and the amount of time it took to recover and get back in the gym.

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