Tag Archives: Westside

Some people think Westside makes some of the strongest athletes in the world because unlike most other training regimes, they are constantly lifting very heavy weight.  Other protocols restrict heavy lifting to certain times of the year, in-season / off-season, etc.  At Westside, you’re going heavy on an exercise that changes very frequently (every 1 – 3 weeks).  And it’s this latter point that provides the basis for why other people think Westside works.  By constantly changing which exercise is lifted at maximal intensity, the body never fully adapts, or gets into a rut – this is part of Westside’s ‘Conjugate Method.’

The principle is embraced by Crossfit, as per their random workouts-of-the-day, and also follows a tangent of the Hormesis theory: small doses of individual exercises, eg, conventional deadlifts one week, good mornings the next, sumo deads the next week, and so on and so forth – will improve your squats; the body never knows what’s coming (even though you might have planned it weeks in advance, or at least planned to check The WOD Shop).  Also discussed albeit briefly, in Taleb’s Antifragile, wherein being prepared for “random” shocks seem to benefit the system as a whole, or make it stronger.  Sedentary makes you fragile, weak, and soft; exercise makes you robust; Westside is Antifragile.

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