This one is a little long…but worth reading (I think).  If you’re lazy and you “don rly lik 2 reed” you can skip to the bottom for a summary.

 

I’ll be the first to say that I’m not really a powerlifter.  I lift primarily to be strong, healthy, and look good.  However, a couple years back I decided that I’d abandon everything I knew (or thought I knew) about how to get strong and joined a local powerlifting club.  I figured the best way to gain new knowledge was to have an open mind to something completely different.

 

Little did I know that the club in my area was run by Bill Jamison who is one of the founders of the Ontario Powerlifting Association and the Canadian Powerlifting Union.   He is also a standing member of the International Powerlifting Federation technical committee so I obviously jumped right on board and agreed to meet at his place the following Sunday.

 

Bill Jamison

 

Now when I first showed up at Bill’s place out in the country on a cold winter day and he mentioned to me that we’d be training in an old barn in his back yard I was a little put off.  I honestly started to think that this was the beginning of some type of freakish horror movie and that I was going to be taken to the barn and nobody would ever hear from me again.

 

Gladly, when I got inside there was a crew of about eight or ten guys, a space heater, two benches, two squat racks, bars, plates, and some mismatched dumbbells.  There was no fancy equipment and there was no drywall on the walls.  There was just a bunch of iron, chalk, and some angry motivated dudes who were ready to lift.

 

After a few brief introductions Bill sent everyone to work on their programs and everyone just seemed to know what to do.  The crew just threw me into the mix and I trained the hardest I’d trained in a long time.

 

Most people seemed to be on a similar routine and it was pretty straightforward.  Here it is (as best as I can remember it):

 

Bench Press

1 set of 10 reps (warm up)
5 reps
4 reps
3 reps
2 reps
1 rep

 

Incline Dumbbell Press (This one was only for me apparently)

3 sets of 10 reps

 

Squat
1 set of 10 reps (warm up)
5 reps
4 reps
3 reps
2 reps
1 rep

 

Deadlift
1 set of 10 reps (warm up)
5 reps
4 reps
3 reps
2 reps
1 rep

 

Not one of these sets was taken to failure!

 

The whole workout took just shy of two hours because of the large number of people, but I felt absolutely incredible when I was done.  As I slammed my post-workout drink I remember Bill telling me that I’d need to repeat the same workout again the following Wednesday and be back next Sunday for more of the same.  Truthfully, I ended up repeating this routine for about three months straight with only minor changes.

 

To this point I had a pretty solid understanding of exercise programming so, as you can imagine, it was hard to completely let go and follow this routine.  It was so simple and standardized with little individualization.  

 

However, I vowed to myself that I’d hand over the reigns to Bill for at least 12 weeks without saying a word and see what happened.  Besides, it was hard to argue with the fact that a 16 year old kid named Randall Truscott who trained with us was squatting over 500 pounds on a regular basis.

 

Randall in Competition

 

In the end, a change in my schedule made the Sunday workouts impossible beyond the initial 3 months I had planned to train there, but I did make some progress.  All in all, my squat increased by 40 pounds, my deadlift increased by 40 pounds, and my bench press increased by 30 pounds over the course of 12 weeks.  That’s not bad for a seasoned lifter.  To this day I still use a lot of the tips I got from these guys and my strength has never been better.

 

More importantly, here are some of the valuable lessons I learned along the way:

 

1.  Even if you think you know everything there is to know about getting strong, having a coach can take you further than you ever expected.  Humble yourself enough to ask for help and you just might learn something.

 

2.  Having a group of like-minded motivated people as a social support network will ALWAYS speed success in every area of your life.

 

3.  Sometimes we overthink our exercise programming when often it is just a change to a new system or an increase in effort that will smash us through our training plateaus.  If you’re having trouble with the effort, see point number two above.

 

4.  You don’t need a lot of fancy equipment to get strong.  I thought I knew this before, but training in a barn with nothing but bars, plates, and chalk solidified this for me.  This was the best training environment I’ve ever trained in.

 

5.  Powerlifting gear like bench shirts, squat suits, and belts can help you lift more, but the gear doesn’t do the lift by itself.  You have to learn how to use that gear for it to be effective.

 

6.  Going to failure is rarely necessary for the development of strength.

 

7.  Powerlifters are usually a supportive bunch of people and will cheer you on even when your lift is about to break their own personal record.

 

8.  If you choose to squat raw (i.e., without a squat suit) as I did, make sure to wear pants that have some give.  Otherwise, if your pants split in half at the bottom of your squat, you can expect your training partners to make you finish your set anyway.

 

 9.  Leg drive is absolutely imperative when performing a bench press.  In fact, I attribute a large percentage of the strength I gain in the bench to learning how to use my legs.

 

10.  To lift heavy weights you have to learn how to breath properly.  If you’re not full of air when you step out of the squat rack you’ll get crumpled like an accordian.

 

However, the biggest lesson I learned was this:

  

Even if you have no inclination to be a competitive powerlifter, I’d highly suggest spending at least a few months in a solid powerlifting club at some point in your training career.  The lessons you’ll learn will be priceless.