Before I ever heard of Westside, I had bought a book from Applied Futuristics called Strength Training for Sports , written by Fred Koch. Though not perfect, it gave me plenty of good ideas for periodizing my training. It would also clear up many questions for me.
As a military person, endurance is something I always have to keep in mind. I'll give an example. My general quarters station position was as a stretcher bearer onboard USS PAUL F. FOSTER (a Spruance-class destroyer). We ran plenty of drills to keep us sharp and ready. My job was to help carry injured people to safety in an emergency or during wartime, sometimes from one end of the ship to the other, through hatches, up stairs/decks, while keeping the injured stable. Sometimes, with some kind of firefighting equipment on. In that situation, all the strength in the world doesn't matter if you're out of breath. But I found that if I didn't keep up my strength, the job became harder no matter how much endurance work I did. Paradox, huh?
I came out of a long layoff in January 2003 and decided to get back in shape. I followed a few months long program from Muscle and Fitness that would slowly get me back, but I kept this book in mind when beginning. Activation was my first cycle. Normally, it is 4 weeks long with 3-4 sets of 10-15 reps at 45-60% 1RM. This cycle gets your muscles and joints and everything else ready for the work ahead. I started, however, with one set of everything and gradually built up to 4 sets of a lot of exercises, and I ran this cycle two to three times and tested 1RM each time. I actually built some strength back on this cycle. It built up my work capacity, and with aerobics it helped get my endurance back a bit. I increased my range of motion, also.
In the book, they also had a Maximum Strength cycle. It explains that strength is the key to all other cycles, such as endurance, power, plyometrics, and even building muscle. Makes sense: if one gains weight, your reps in chinups would suffer unless you increased strength to compensate, and would increase if you went beyond that. In a lot of the cycles that do not involve heavy weights, you will still see 2-3 days of some kind of heavy lifting. In a book by Tudor Bompa, it explains that in lighter cycles, nerve/CNS based strength fades first: those 2-3 days of strength work was called Maintenance of Strength, and was designed to prevent that.
Maximum strength, a 6-7 week cycle with weights in the 70-90% 1RM range and 1-8 rep range, worked OK, but the idea of adding more sets (plus long rest periods) as I became more advanced didn't thrill me, especially because I'm not a high school or college athlete with nothing else to do. And I couldn't understand why I was hitting a wall where the gains were slowing down. While this book had a conversion cycle for power that addressed power (an 8 week cycle with weights in the 40-60% 1RM range but with high reps), it didn't explain it well enough and I needed it sooner in my weightlifting cycle than months down the line. Enter Westside, where it not only made it clearer but it put it all in one program. My strength gains from December of 2003 to the spring of 2004 were dramatic. It introduced me to conjugate method, to Prilepin's table, and the idea of accomplishing different objectives at the same time. No longer did I think that more squatting would fix my squats. Now, I thought more back work, more hamstring strength, much more speed, more GPP, more volume (In the old Maximum Strength routine, as you move up in strength the volume dropped and this was one of the problems I could never explain). This became my Maximum Strength cycle. Towards the end of 2004, I also experimented with speed pushups, speed pulls using Olympic-style lifts (this helped improve my deadlift fast: 275 to 365 in a month), front squats, push presses as an ME movement to build bench press.
Now, I've been building up to the next level. I still want a lot of strength. But I also want to last longer in a game of basketball with fresh lungs, jump higher, run longer, get lean. I want to be a more fit Sailor. And though powerlifting sounds like fun, it may never be the only thing I do. I now do a Prilepin cycle where I train conjugate but instead of speed, I train GPP and high repetition movements like situps, pushups, step ups, jump rope. I also run drills forward and backward, do lots of GHRs, shoot balls, jump, sprint. I'm also training to increase my run over 10 weeks so that I could run 20 straight minutes at 7 MPH. I notice that my endurance is climbing steadier than in the past and though you'll hear that endurance work kills strength gains, I'm also gaining strength because of the volume of heavy work I do. And once I'm done in the summer with this cycle, it's Activation time again to prepare for the next goals, or Transition time to do nothing but a few weeks break, lots of sports, no weightlifting, and small muscle work like rotators. Maybe, I'll buy a sled, too, and work that in. This is another evolution for me in training. It's still periodization, still Westside, still conjugate.
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