Louie Simmons: Enemy of the Hypocritical, Hypothetical
I’m sorry I was gone for such a long time. The real world had its hooks in me for one last pair of projects in a long running affiliation.
A handful of items in world events did catch my interest, each of which would have merited its own entry, but I’ll string them all together to inform the discussion of the last and most significant item on the list, the death of powerlifter, coach, and author Louie Simmons.
1. The U.S. Women’s Soccer team won a long running battle against their governing body.
From THE NEW YORK TIMES on February 22, 2022: “For six years, the members of the World Cup-winning United States women’s soccer team and their bosses argued about equitable treatment of female players. They argued about whether they deserved the same charter flights as their male counterparts and about the definition of what constituted equal pay.
But the long fight that set key members of the women’s team against their bosses at U.S. Soccer ended on Tuesday just as abruptly as it had begun, with a settlement that included a multimillion-dollar payment to the players and a promise by their federation to equalize pay between the men’s and women’s national teams.
Under the terms of the agreement, the women — a group of several dozen current and former players that includes some of the world’s most popular and decorated athletes — will share $24 million in payments from U.S. Soccer. The bulk of that figure is back pay, a tacit admission that compensation for the men’s and women’s teams had been unequal for years.”
I’ve been scouring my conscience for times in which I have been dismissive of women as athletes. I MUST have been, as a kid in the 70’s and a teenager in the early 80’s. Perhaps it wasn’t that I felt women could never be serious, dedicated athletes; it’s just that there were so few of them that I probably didn’t give the subject much thought at all. College had concentrated quite a few female athletes, but still the vast, vast majority of young women at that age were social creatures first and foremost.
As the father of daughters, I’ve grasped what’s happened over the years, how parents and coaches all over the country have built developmental programs from the ground up in any number of sports, fostering thousands of great athletes who’ve gone on to success in college and international sports. In fact, a generation or two of American parents are probably the reason for the American women’s team winning so many World Cups. It will be interesting to see how the landscape changes as other countries - and other parents - catch up to the Americans’ system.
2. I think former President Donald Trump is pulling a Vincent ‘The Chin’ Gigante routine.
From the Associated press: “The House panel investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol said Wednesday for the first time that its evidence suggests . . . Trump and his associates engaged in a “criminal conspiracy” to prevent Congress from certifying Democrat Joe Biden’s victory in the Electoral College . . . Trump and those working with him spread false information about the outcome of the presidential election and pressured state officials to overturn the results, potentially violating multiple federal laws, the panel said.”
Vincent ’The Chin’ Gigante, who rose to lead the Genovese crime family in New York, had not only a prolific career but went to great lengths to avoid getting caught. He rarely, if ever, used the phone. He never left his house unoccupied, for fear of the FBI sneaking in and planting a bug. For years he had his lawyers claim he was mentally unfit to stand trial, and taking that strategy to the extreme he started wandering his neighborhood in a bathrobe and pajamas, trying to pass himself off as significantly deteriorated. He’d even be out in the freezing cold, bent over and shuffling along as he made strange noises and faces at the sidewalk beneath him. His kids were part of the act, running out to get him after a while or bring him a coat. The aim was to convince the watching FBI agents and their federal prosecutor bosses that this poor bastard couldn’t possibly be accountable for anything past - or responsible for anything present.
One of the legal considerations in the charge of conspiracy is that the defendant(s) knew what they were doing was wrong, or that they knew full well that the message they were seeking to present was false. Some 60 lawsuits that Trump and his campaign tried to file after the 2020 election were defeated or flung out of court - which would appear to be ample evidence that the election was not stolen, and by January 6 they should have known better.
Still, everywhere Trump appears, he maintains a wide eyed shock at how the election was stolen. It’s the first and often the only thing out of his mouth; in one appearance FOX News terminated the interview almost immediately. FOX’s lawyers no doubt realize what’s at stake as much as Trump does, and do not want the network to be seen aiding his attempt to beat the conspiracy rap. Like Gigante years ago, Trump is working furiously to litigate the issue outside the courtroom somehow, even at the risk of looking ridiculous.
Gigante was indicted by a grand jury unmoved by his theatrics. Soon after, Sammy ‘The Bull’ Gravano became famous for cooperating as a government witness, testifying that Gigante’s behavior was all an act. Gigante died in prison.
3. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has bogged down into a startling display of incompetence. This is the horde we feared for decades would sweep across Europe and end freedom as we know it?
They look more like those poor idiots on the side of the highway whose mattress has gone airborne from the roof of their car. Russian advances, if they’ve not been stopped by a lack of food and fuel, have been stymied by surprisingly fierce Ukrainian resistance. It’s no longer World War Two, Vladimir Putin is discovering. Tanks, once elements of invincibility, are now targets for modern portable missiles. Russian generals, pressing forward to restore some level of order to the chaos, are being killed. Mobile crematoriums are disposing of casualties so they won’t have to be brought home to a Russian public oblivious to the carnage.
Just the other day, in a bold THIRTY SECONDS OVER TOKYO stroke, Ukrainian helicopters flew into Russian territory and destroyed a critical fuel depot. Like a thrashing Cyclops, Russia can only cruelly and blindly strike cities with missiles fired from a safe distance. It’s unclear if leader Vladimir Putin is being informed of the true state of affairs.
4. Actor Will Smith slapped comedian Chris Rock onstage at the Academy Awards. This has ignited a firestorm of debate over who was in the wrong, given Rock’s joke about the shaven scalp of Jada Pinkett, Smith’s wife, who suffers from alopecia and hair loss.
The real issue would seem to be the delusional level of entitlement on Smith’s part. There he was, seated in the front row, poised to win the Best Actor Award for his role in KING RICHARD and be crowned King of Hollywood. If that weren’t heady enough, his non-stop presence on social media and innumerable television talk shows had likely convinced him he could do no wrong. He was not only King, he was Louis XIV at Versailles, among courtiers and with nothing to restrain his impulses. This would be a fascinating psychological study, the unmooring effect of fame and power.
FINALLY, powerlifter, coach, and author Louie Simmons died on March 24, 2022. His Westside Barbell Club in Columbus, Ohio, named for the Culver City, California gym that launched his career in 1970, became an elite training center and the birthplace of a methodology that has transformed the off-season preparations for football, rugby, track and field, mixed martial arts, and other sports. Simmons was an acquired taste, introduced to the wider world when he became CrossFit’s subject matter expert on strength training. He brought with him a strenuous and complicated system of maximum and dynamic effort days, along with a mind-bending use of bands and chains to vary the load within the course of a single lift. This also came with quite the cast of characters, enormous shaven headed, goateed men, gigantic 300-plus pound versions of Simmons himself, for whom this system had worked. They were world record holders, benching 700 or 800 pounds and squatting more than 900.
Simmons quickly learned to follow CrossFit’s example in establishing a commercial presence on the internet. Decades before, powerlifting excellence had been a solitary pursuit. Before the Berlin Wall fell (and all the prominent Eastern Bloc strength coaches came running for the big money at publishing houses and the major college football programs) Simmons delved into any Eastern European training manuals - or translations - he could get his hands on, since those were the athletes dominating the international sports scene. He discovered that strength and sports were not so simple. Five separate speeds exist in the human neuromuscular transmission: quickness, speed-strength, strength speed, maximum strength, and isometric strength, each of which has a specific athletic role and can be targeted with suitable weights in training.
Russian scientists knew, for example, that training with 50 percent of one’s maximum is ideal at the very beginning of a lift. However, as the motion nears completion, a lifter would benefit most from 85 percent of that load. It was Simmons who figured out how to saddle a lifter with 50 at the bottom and 85 near the top in the same lift. The solution was accommodating resistance, the use of chains or bands on the lifter’s bar. The more a chain piled on the floor is reeled into the air by a rising bar, the more weight it places on the bar. Giant bands anchored to the floor, slack at the bottom of a lift, increase tension as the bar goes up. ‘That’s genius,’ remarked the Russians who visited the Westside gym.
Having read that it can take as long as an impractical seven seconds for an athlete to realize their full strength in a given contraction, Simmons sought to improve athletes’ rate of force activation by way of jumping. The instant acceleration necessary to leap to a decent height is analogous to the rapid demands of any sport - including powerlifting. Though the Russians had been at it for years, Simmons made leaping onto boxes commonplace in American gyms, along with chains and bands.
If chains and bands were genius, then so was the invention of the reverse hyper extension machine, the belly-down, legs swinging behind and below you rehabilitative exercise for the lower back. It’s proven so beneficial that versions of it have appeared in chiropractors’ offices everywhere. Still, as with everything with Louie Simmons, it comes with a certain duality: Simmons invented this because he had broken his back with an obscene amount of weight in a squat. So he’s a genius, but what was he thinking to get himself in that predicament to begin with?
That’s the essence of Simmons: he’s a controversial figure who defies immediate judgment. The criticism that his Conjugate Method, with its Maximum and Dynamic Effort days, does not work for ordinary lifters is true - but the principles within, applied properly, work very well. He’s not the one who figured this out; his focus was on the big guys, but an approach associated with his tattooed behemoths, the New Zealand All-Black Rugby Team, and NFL players was adapted by other coaches for CrossFit athletes and mixed martial artists of all sizes, both of whom must emphasize conditioning over pure strength, as well as skinny guys, old guys, women, and ordinary gym goers of lesser capacities. This was probably a happy accident in Louie’s view. In his books he never shifted from the orthodoxy that worked for the big men, (he might not have known enough) but generously he referred readers to his Eastern European source material. The way to judge Louie Simmons is to hold him up against the larger world he blundered into, for example the issues I mentioned above - women’s sports, criminal activities, and so on [and not in that particular order.] He was indeed a consistent, positive force in a murky world.
Unlike Donald Trump, Vincent the Chin, or Sammy the Bull, Louie never tried to distance himself from his outlaw proclivities, particularly the use of anabolic steroids. He’d been a user for at least 50 of his 74 years, and was untroubled by the notion to the point that he felt that the rules prohibiting their use in sports were arbitrarily drawn, if not ridiculous in the first place. In an interview, he brings up two examples to illustrate his point: An NFL player’s elderly father can go to a doctor for all the testosterone he needs, yet that player is banned from taking any. A collegiate hockey player was kicked off the ice for their use while a number of his teammates, guilty of driving while intoxicated, are still allowed to play. Of course steroids confer advantages, he’d say. That’s the whole point, no different from optimizing coaching or programming.
The powerlifting federation under which Louie and his lifters were competing had no bans on steroids, so to use them was not cheating. It was never unethical. He never had to lie about it, or betray any confederates, or look ridiculous in having to change his story. This would be inspiring to the handful of Proud Boys or Oath Keepers presently in prison for the role on January 6 while Donald Trump is golfing.
If he was an enemy of the hypocritical, he was also an enemy of the hypothetical, the kind of training where an athlete never quite knew where he stood in terms of progress. Wandering into a powerlifting meet without training at limit level poundages would be tantamount to invading Ukraine without any knowledge of whether you could accomplish a single task you set out to do. Those poor idiots: they believed the propaganda on their awesomeness and might. The only thing that failed more than Russia’s military or propaganda is American intelligence, which seemed to think very highly of Russian capability.
Louie reminded us to keep things real. His system called for maximum attempts just about every week to alleviate any uncertainties and provide feedback for changes. Executing a limit level lift is an art and science all its own, quite apart from working through sets and reps. Being practiced in that would be the highest form of readiness, a lesson for athletes and warriors.
If Mark Rippetoe is any indication, it must be hard to be prominent in your field and produce a steady stream of content for clients and subscribers while sticking to the subject at hand. Rippetoe’s ‘Ask Rip’ webcast started with him being his curmudgeonly self on topics concerning strength training, but his online presence has devolved into a curmudgeonly take on everything: the coronavirus, guns, Dr. Fauci, Trans athletes, and anti-Biden ‘Let’s go, Brandon’ jokes. To be fair, this is a question of degree; he was never exclusively weights before and is not exclusively right wing talk radio now. Rippetoe is a top tier expert in strength training, yet I can’t help but imagine that the way he loves to hear himself talk and his staffers guffaw - along with the subject matter - would make people doubt his objectivity.
The analogy here is Will Smith’s epic level of entitlement, the feeling that the world was in the palm of his hand and people simply couldn’t get enough of him. Rippetoe is not this deranged, but clearly the fact that he has only been rewarded for opening his mouth on any and all subjects has had a destructive influence. Louie Simmons, by contrast, while he was likely not lacking in ego either, stuck to the subject of training. His blog entries, his podcasts . . . books, even a memoir about the history of Westside, full of stories of lifters come and gone, are all focused on what happened on the platform.
If Louie was pleasantly surprised that his method held a wider appeal than he ever imagined, then he met the moment. He was able to look beyond the steroids and the 300 pound monsters he was used to coaching. He shared his knowledge with ‘hardgainers,’ Olympic lifters, sprinters, NBA and NFL players, and even women bobsledders. He was happy to test his template and research in any sport, with both men and women. He coached a number of successful female powerlifters, but on the topic I think Louie is best summarized by a story he told:
Here’s the ending first, so I don’t sound too trite: this young woman went on to become a collegiate champion in track and field. As a high schooler, she and her coach asked to visit Westside one day. (Westside was always a private club. Athletes trained by invitation only; visitors were allowed after making appointments.) The gym had become famous online, and excitedly the girl ran from place to place, recognizing people or pieces of equipment. She must have been fairly local; she wanted join and train with the champions she admired. Louie watched her and was trying to summon the courage to tell them that he really didn’t have room for her to join. The coach caught on to what was happening. ‘It’s OK,’ he said. ‘She’s not very good, but she tries hard.’
Louie cut him a quick look. ‘I’ll take her,’ he said.
