In part one of this article series, I talked about our visit to Cal Dietz’ place and how it broke several of the perceptions I had when it came to training the athlete. Here, in part 2, I’m going to skip ahead to our visit to Westside and talk about our experience there and what I learned when it comes to creating an undefeatable culture.
The Westside story actually starts before our visit, before the trip even started. I really wasn’t expecting to be allowed to visit, but I decided to reach out via phone anyway. To my surprise, someone picked up on the other line. I explained our plan, what we were doing, and why we wanted to visit Westside. The person on the other side of the line told me to send an email. I immediately pulled up my Gmail, put together a quick email, again explaining what we were doing and why we wanted to visit. In the email, I specified we wanted to “observe/shadow” while there.
A couple days later, I got an email back. After several exchanges, which consisted mostly of me acting like Westside was a normal gym, and me trying to set up something formal, I got back the response of “Just show up ready to train at 7”. Oh. “Okay sounds good”. This should be interesting.
So we show up to Westside 2 days after hiking the Grand Canyon, in one day (I am NOT recommending you do this. It’s explicitly stated on their website that you shouldn’t), sore out of our minds. We leave our hotel at 6:25, even though it’s only a 15 minute drive. The reasoning behind this should be self explanatory. We were told to show up to train at 7. We were not about to be late.
Well, it’s now 6:55. We’re sitting in our car in front of a building with the Westside logo on it, but no one else is here. Could they have a second location? Are we in the wrong spot? We wait.
We’re starting to get a little worried when we see someone come around the corner. Not a car though. Nope, it’s a guy walking straight legged, pulling a sled, with an emotionless expression on his face. We watch as he walks past us and continues on down the blacktop to the backside of the business district. We look at each other. We’re in the right place.
We walk in 5 minutes late to find a group of 10 or so guys, all larger than any man should be, mulling around a weight room. We look for whoever it was we were supposed to talk to but see no such person. Eventually, as we’re making our way to the other side of the weight room, we come across Louie.
“Hey, we’re here for the next two days”.
“Okay, you want to get a lift in”?
“Uh, yeah”.
“Okay, feel free to use whatever”!
We thank him and awkwardly walk to the other side of the building. We find a lifting platform and start deadlifting, mainly because we aren’t sure what else to do. We’ve been on the road for about two and a half weeks at this point, with sporadic access to training, as we’re trying to keep the trip as cheap as possible, and can’t really spend any extra cash on stuff we don’t need. Needless to say, our deadlifts on a normal day wouldn’t be comparable to the guys here. But after 2 and a half weeks on minimal training? I get up to 445 with their straight bar and it’s a struggle. Okay, now what? We’d seen some barbell skipping exercise at another facility and decided to try it out. So we walk outside, and begin skipping across the parking lot, right in front of the Westside facility. I’ve never seen or heard of anyone going to Westside to skip, so I guess that makes us somewhat of an anomaly? Anyway, we finish up and head back inside.
“You guys ever use our belt squat machine”?
Maybe this is the guy we were supposed to talk to.
“Uh, no”.
“Hook up”.
I step onto the platform and put a belt on, hooking it up to the pulley that’s coming out of the bottom. I stand up, somewhat unsteadily. The 135lbs on the machine should be easy, but for whatever reason, feels a little heavier than I expected.
“Widen out your feet. Start walking, back and forth. We’re going to do this for a minute”.
I start walking. This shouldn’t be bad. 20 seconds in I start to feel it. 40 seconds in my hips are going to fall off. 60 seconds in I finish and feel like I’m going to fall off the platform. Jarod hops in.
One minute later, I’m told to get back on. This time, we’re doing the same thing, but apparently he wants me to get to know this med ball he’s handed to me a little more intimately, because now I’m walking with the med ball hugged to my chest. I soon learn to despise the med ball and was happy when my minute was up and I didn’t have to be with it anymore. I step off and Jarod gets on again.
One minute later, I’m told to get on yet again, as he adds another 45lb plate to the machine. This time, instead of a med ball, I’m handed a band. He tells me to rotate to my left so that the machine is to my right. He then instructs me to hold the band, straight out in front of me, and then rotate, side to side. “We’re going to do this for a minute and a half”. Okay, that’s doable. “Then we’ll do the other side”.
Oh.
I dig in, finish up the first side and switch over to the other side. I’m doing okay until I have about 45 seconds left. For the last 5-6 years, the closest thing I’d done to this 3 minute long activity, was run from home to third. And that didn’t happen that often. I’m more of an all out for 6 seconds kinda guy, then take a 2 minute rest kinda guy. This 3 minute stuff isn’t really my thing.
I somehow finish and hand the band to Jarod. I take a seat, mostly because I don’t want to pass out at Westside and my body tells me if I keep standing that’s exactly what will happen. Jarod finishes up and we’re led to an incline bench where he tells us to hook our feet in underneath the foot holds. I do so, lean back so my body is in a straight line, and my body immediately begins shaking. It honestly doesn’t feel that bad, but for whatever reason I can’t control my body at the moment.
“See, your core doesn’t know how to activate. It’ll get better as you go”.
Oddly enough, around 30 seconds, I regain control of myself and the shaking stops. I finish up the minute with relatively little problem.
One minute later, I’m back in, this time twisting side to side. For a minute. Remember, I’m a 6 seconds kind of guy. This stuff is new to me and I’m dying. I couldn’t help but think this was pointless for a baseball player. I made a mental note to ask about it later.
After another set of med ball core exercises and some tubing exercises (100 reps of internal and external rotation, and tricep extensions), we sit down to talk with the man who’d just put us through the lovely exercises mentioned above.
“So yeah, that’s what our guys would do for their warmup everyday when they come in”.
Warm up. Yeah, seems about right.
Jarod and I eventually recover and regain control of ourselves and begin asking questions. Much like the last article, I’ll outline what we talked about below.
As with our talk with Cal from part 1, I do not necessarily agree or want to implement everything that is mentioned below. They are simply interesting discussion points we hit on.
*Note: The following are notes from our talks with both Tom and Louie. We were extremely grateful they took the time to explain their philosophies and answer the questions we had.
- the warmup exercises were done with such high volume because they are targeting joint health. Specifically, with the tubing exercises for the shoulder and elbow, they are trying to lubricate the joint, which in theory would help to keep it healthier over the course of time.
- sumo deadlifts and wide squats should dominate baseball players’ workout programs. When hitting and throwing, when is the player in a position where their feet are at shoulder width? In the stance, maybe. Outside of that, when actually applying force, whether that be after striding in a swing or after landing in a throw, the feet are out wide, outside of the shoulders.
- everything starts with the hips. The walks we did in the belt squat, the straight leg sled pulls we saw the guy doing (and later did the next day), are all targeting hips. For them, that’s where it starts.
- you don’t need to run to get faster. Louie told us several stories about how he took elite sprinters and made them faster without running them at all. “If they power walk faster with a sled behind them, they’ll run faster”.
Again, this is by no means is an exhaustive list, but some of the points that stuck out to me. There’s more, but we’ll stop there for the sake of this remaining an article and not a book.
Culture
I could talk about our second day there, and about how Louie put us through sled work for an hour and a half, but I’ll have to save that story for another day because this article was supposed to be about culture. All I’ll say is that while walking on soft pads for 5 minutes with 135lbs strapped to your hips may sound difficult, it gets a little bit easier when the owner of the strongest gym basically ever says, “Pick your feet up you mother f#$&%r”.
Anyway…
There were several instances during our time at Westside that demonstrated quite clearly why they are able to do what they do and why the gym produces the strongest guys in the world. For me, it comes down to these two points:
- They have a worthy leader. It was evident each and every guy had the utmost respect for Louie and looked to him for guidance and approval. To understand this, you have to understand where many of these guys come from. Most of them are not coming in from quiet, middle class families, who want to lift because it sounds like something they want to do. No, the guys there have rough pasts. Whether that be upbringing, circumstance, bad choices, whatever the case may be. What Louie did was provide them a place to get away and a place to find meaning in what they do. Louie helped them find their purpose and their passion, something everyone and everything else had failed to do.
- Strong men create more strong men. If you go to Westside weak, and stay there for any amount of time, you will not leave weak. There were several instances during our stay in which a guy would be going for a big lift, surrounded by 10 other guys, probably his best friends, who were all screaming and pulling for him to get the lift. There were no small cliques, no individuals, just a small band of guys that were there to do the same thing.
- *Important caveat: this is something that continually frustrates me, so I’m going to throw it out there: Westside didn’t have a great culture because every guy there was on the same program, doing the same lift, everyday. They had a great culture because every guy there understood the reason they were there: to lift as much damn weight as they could. It didn’t matter what route they took, only that they got there. Because of that, they pulled for the guy next to them. And the beautiful thing about this is it creates a weeding out process that makes it nearly impossible for guys that don’t have the same passion to stay. You won’t stay at Westside if you don’t hold the same values as they do. Is it exclusive? Sure, but that’s the whole point. If you’re not fully with them, they don’t want you. A mistake I see many coaches make is thinking that culture has to do with what the guys are physically doing. It has very little to do with that. Making the whole team do the same exact program, year round, doesn’t guarantee that your team is going to fight for each other to the death, or whatever it is you want them to do. Great culture is instead a product of having the right people and getting those people to recognize that while they’re individuals and their individual aspirations matter, everyone has aspirations. If someone tells you their dream, their aspiration, are you going to pull for them or tell them you hope they never make it? You’re going to pull for them. That’s all a good culture is. A bunch of guys pulling for each other. They have a common goal, but that doesn’t mean there’s only one way to get there. It is up to each guy to do their part in reaching that aspiration, which leads to a big group of guys that work har, pull for each other, and all get better in the process.
I think that pretty much sums it up. You need to have someone that leads from the front and sets the stage for the others, and then you need the right group of people that aren’t afraid of a little (or a lot) of hard work and understand the world doesn’t revolve around them and that it’s probably a good idea to pull for the guy next to them. Simple as that (simple to say, tougher to create).
The “lifting guy” is just who Louie is. There’s no pretending there. He loves it and he’s committed his life to it. Every single lifter there is the same way. If you get a group of guys on a team that are the same way, whether that be baseball, football, basketball, whatever, you’ll come out with the same result. Now is that hard, maybe impossible to do? To the extent that Westside does it, probably. But that doesn’t mean you can’t take bits and pieces and apply it to wherever you’re at.
That wraps up part 2 of this article series! We’ll be finishing up the series next time, in part 3, when we talk about what I learned in 5 minutes with Dan Pfaff and why you need to train more like a track player. See you then!
Questions or comments? Shoot me an email at brady@dacbaseball.com.