

Written by Chad Wesley Smith

The methods used by a certain powerlifting gym in Columbus, Ohio are undoubtedly among the most popular in powerlifting and strength & conditioning today. This gym has produced some of the strongest geared powerlifters in history through the use of heavy good mornings, box squatting, training with bands and chains and partial range bench press movements, not to mention excellent coaching and atmosphere. The gym’s owner has also greatly contributed to the strength community by publishing in depth articles on his club’s training through their website and various publications like Powerlifting USA. As great as this gym’s methods are for producing great strength in multiply powerlifting, I feel they are often misused when trying to develop strength in the raw lifter. It is undeniable that raw and geared lifting are different animals, the strength curves are different and the means which are used to develop them must be different.

Differences between raw and geared training…

1-Full Range Movements: The raw lifter must place greater attention to developing strength through the full range of motion of a lift. Multiply bench shirts and squat suits aid the lifter greatly during the bottom portion of each lift, placing much greater emphasis on the lifter’s top end strength. Rarely do you see raw lifters miss benches at lockout or squats in the top half, so they must devote more energy to training full ROM (or even beyond full ROM) lifts than the geared lifter.

2-Practice of the Competition Lifts: There are many more movements that have correspondence to the geared lifter than there is for their raw counterparts, because of this the raw lifter must use a smaller pool of max effort exercises and must perform the competition lifts (squat, bench, deadlift) more frequently. One of the main criticisms I have of this style of Conjugate Periodization for raw lifters, is that too many people will tend to use a wide variety of max effort lifts and in doing so are never really able to build enough skill in the lift to progress and can’t measure their progress.

3-The Deadlift: In 2012, big geared totals are built with massive squats and benches, big raw totals are built on massive squats and deads. It is often joked about in powerlifting circles that this Columbus based gym places no attention on the deads (that isn’t to say that they haven’t had some great pullers). The typical Conjugate template is full of box squats and good mornings, but deadlifts aren’t often a staple. If you wanna be a great puller, you’ve got to pull. Deadlifts need to be part of your max effort rotation and they need to be addressed with supplementary work and on dynamic effort days.

4-Volume: The raw lifter can’t handle the same poundages that the geared lifter can and because of this they can and need to handle more volume. The raw lifter needs to build volume, particularly early in a training cycle, through back down sets of their main movement and variations of the competition movement.