My main goal for this article is to make the vast bodies of work on conjugate more digestible and more easily applicable to what is popular now: raw powerlifting.

For a powerlifter on a conjugate or Westside style program, you first need to make sure you know the role of each exercise you’re doing. This will give you direction on how close to failure to train.

While raw powerlifting circles have been discrediting the merits of a concurrent approach to training, many have been using a program that is congruent with the very principles that conjugate is based on.

Commit too many of the mistakes I’m about to present to you and your training will result in zero results. You certainly wont be getting the desired effect of optimizing force development.

Using the Conjugate Method has been one of the most rewarding and fun things I’ve ever done, but it requires ownership and a tenacity to keep looking for answers. Here are four things to avoid as you begin your quest.

You can follow someone else’s program and just lift, or you can develop your own training philosophy by figuring shit out for yourself.

You’ve followed the 9-12×3, but is it making you better? Do you know why?

Six REAL factors to getting strong, not the same crap we’ve read over and over… and over again. Seriously, how many times do we have to be told to train hard, be consistent, follow a program and eat right? Those may not even matter anyhow but these do.

Nate Harvey has adopted the Westside Method of Training to allow his athletes to SFW

If you joined Crossfit to look like Rich Froning, you may need to broaden your approach. This is how I transitioned to powerlifting.

One month program for a powerful press.

Mark Watts explains how deviating from a traditional linear periodization approach in young athletes may yield greater performance.

Looking at CrossFit competitions, there is only one constant and that is that there are no constants

I am living out of a car and sleeping on a couch while coaching at the most historically significant institution of higher learning in the country.

Back when I started my journey into the iron game, even before I started coaching, there was not much to choose from.

The body has the amazing ability to adapt to any stimulus. This can be a bad thing when it comes to training.

As we get stronger, everything changes and we have to keep adapting the program in order to keep getting stronger.

Concurrent training in the iron game was made popular by the Westside Barbell Club and Louie Simmons, who erroneously called it “conjugate.”

I have employed the conjugate system of training with my throwers’ lifting program for four years with tremendous success. One highlight in the weight room was taking a male thrower with a 385-lb squat freshman year to a 615-lb squat/500-lb front squat as a junior. We also had a thrower make a 60-lb PR in the hang clean after not attempting a single training rep in that lift for six months.

I think you may find it interesting because I compare what we train with to NSCA methods and explain to the reader why so many NSCA studies are not completely accurate for use when designing a strength program.