Acute, catastrophic injuries resulting from weight training are thankfully, rare. For those of us with chronic, painful, “non-descript” injuries however, that fact is less than comforting. There’s nothing more frustrating than that all-too-familiar “it doesn’t hurt until I lift” pain.

Sometimes, these injuries take the form of chronic inflammatory problems such as medialepichondialitis (tennis elbow), a shoulder that clicks, low back spasm, heel pain, the list goes on and on. Often, these injuries are unnoticed during normal day to day activities, but as soon as you try to run or lift, or anything else, there it is again. This leads to the observation that weight training doesn’t cause injuries, it reveals them.

In this post I’m going to outline a training method that, more times than not, will allow you to re-establish your training without flaring up those injuries. I call it the “boil the frog” method. But first, let’s look at a few things you really should consider if the opening paragraphs of this post sound like you… Read more

If you’re a competitive lifter, your “core” lifts are your actual competitive lifts (clean & jerk and snatch for O-lifters and squat, bench, and deadlift for powerlifters).

Historically, most lifters have tended to go intense & heavy on the core lifts, and then a bit lighter on the assistance lifts. In recent years, powerlifting maverick Louie Simmons turned the traditional paradigm upside down: his Westside charges go moderate and fast on the core lifts, and then get down to business, going super-heavy on the assistance lifts.

Here’s why this approach CAN work very well, especially for experienced lifters:

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