Welcome to the Strong Life Podcast, and if you are a regular listener, welcome back.
This is your host, Zach Evinish, and in this episode, episode 556, I'm going on a little
throwback to a series of video podcasts I did with my great friends over at Play.
You can visit Play at plae.us, flooring, strength training equipment, squat racks, and just
Well, a while back, they helped me and my buddy, Ramakifri, they helped me create a video
series called Iron Roots, which was a inside look into all the Iron History books, magazines,
and just the information I've got in the Underground Strength Library at my home office.
And this episode, this was the 15th episode of Iron Roots, we've got more than 15, so just
go to Zach Evinish and type in Iron Roots, you'll come across all the episodes.
You want to see the videos, not just listen, because we have visuals in those videos.
So this episode is with Bill Penet's West.
He is the founder of the original West Sidebar Bell, which started out of his garage in Culver
City, California, and that's where Louis Simmons learned his training methods from, because
these articles were in magazines, Muscle Builder and Power, from I believe 1968 through
Amazing history, amazing training methods that were around before I was born, so they're
50 plus years old, and they still rival, if not surpass, much of the training information
So give this one a listen as we talk about getting inside Power Rack training.
Getting information, going to inspire you with different and innovative ways to get
Now, if you're new here, get on the Strong Life newsletter, it's free, and get your
free training courses, go to Zachstrength.com, and I suggest printing out those training
courses, but more than anything, use them.
Get strong, put them to the test.
That is how you actually learn training, is you have to do the damn thing, you have to
I'm going to link up other resources below, but one that's very important, go to underground
Strengthsert.com, you will get two free videos that are excerpts from the certification,
and I'd love to hear from you guys.
Do you want me to bring back a live certification?
Right now, that's what I would like to do, it's a little bit tricky in the spring and summer.
Spring time is baseball, and also my daughter still playing tennis at the college level,
we're heavily thinking about it, looking to do it on a Friday Saturday, but there's got to be
There's got to be people who are ready to have skin in the game, people who are ready to travel,
and show up, and do this in person, not just from the comfort of their own home sitting behind
So, just send me an email, respond to any of the emails of my newsletter, and of course,
please keep crushing those five star reviews, or don't, okay, we don't need the lazy folk
being begged to do it, but those of you who respect what we're doing, show some respect around
here, much love, and here we go guys, enjoy this episode, Iron Roots number 15, which is
a strong light podcast, 556, enjoy the show.
Welcome to the Strong Life Podcast, where we talk about dominating and strength, health,
And by the way, if you're a parent out there and you've got a teenager, get over there and
seize that, talk about being jacked up, this place is jacked up and ready to go.
There's no better program than here, I push myself beyond the levels that I can go in here,
gotta get to the underground.
Have you ever seen Zach Evanesh?
Oh, he's a trainer out of New Jersey.
First of all, let me just congratulate him on his badass name.
That's a great name.
What's his name again?
Evan, that's a pretty nice name.
What's up guys, Zach Evanesh here, your host, and your boy, we're back with the Iron
Roots podcast, brought you by play, and this episode I'm gonna be talking about a collection
of articles written in the late 60s, that's 50 years ago, that still to this day have changed
the way we train athletes and parliathes.
This is Play's Iron Roots, a podcast dedicated to uncovering the strength legends, the training
methods, and the stories around physical culture and iron history.
I'm your host, Zach Evanesh.
Ride yourself a protein shake, chalk up, and prepare to travel back in time through some
of the most awe-inspiring stories of iron history.
Alright, guys, so I'm digging into my favorite book, Gifted to Me by Jim Wendler, which was
Gifted to Him by Dr. Ken Lysner, and I've spoken about this book and articles through
this collection of articles before, and these are all the original West Side Barbell articles,
and one of the earliest articles about this style of training, they called it sectional
So if you're listening on iTunes or listening anywhere this podcast could be found, you're
gonna wanna watch the video, because we're gonna be putting a lot of cool photos in here.
So sectional development is now what we call rack training, or power rack training, but
the way Bill Penet's West looked at it was, he was a very eccentric guy, and he would
pay attention to when he would miss a lift, whether it was the squat bench or the deadlift,
and he would do the same thing for his training partners, essentially, it was his team of power
So he would see if somebody would miss a deadlift at the top, and then he started thinking,
what if we started overloading, working that area that your weakest in, that area that
you're missing the deadlift in, same thing with the bench press, what if you can't get
the bar off of your chest, he would set the pins a little bit above the chest, and then
he would press up to those pins, or he would start the pins in the middle or at the top.
The basis behind what he called as sectional development, which then became known as simply
rack training, was it built confidence, right, it allowed you to handle heavier weights
in a lockout position, so it would build your confidence.
So when you did approach a heavier weight, you'd been there before, you felt the weight
in your hands, and then the other thing that it did was by attacking the weak points,
it allowed you to break through what they called as plateaus, or sticking points, and
these were big buzzwords back in the 60s, about how do I get, whether I was a power lifter,
how do I get my deadlift to go up, how do I get my squat to go up, or if I was a body
builder, it was like, hey, how do I get my biceps bigger, so they would do overloads from
the top, or somebody would take the bar from the top, step back, and do a slow eccentric,
and there's multiple articles that were written, or when they interviewed Bill Penet's
West on this, on the sexual development, and the power training, the power act training,
and another thing they did was the kind of like the defying gravity, which was the slow
negatives, so they would load up a heavier than normal barbell for the deadlift, or the bench
press, and if it was the deadlift, they would be on blocks, and you would just stand up
with it, the blocks would be moved out of the way, and then the lifter would do a slow eccentric
to develop the eccentric strength, because they knew that you're stronger lower in the weight,
than you are during the concentric, and by overloading that area, it gave that lifter confidence,
and then that lifter had more of a psych advantage, and a physical advantage for when they were
going to deadlift, and max out, or enter a power lifting meet, and these articles collectively
were from the mid to late 60s, some of them may have been written around 70 or 71, and which
interesting is at the time this recording, here we are, midway through 2019, and we're still
utilizing these methods, we see, of course, Louis Simmons utilizing rack poles and floor presses,
squatting from the pins, or squatting from the chains in different positions, I've spoken with
many strength coaches in the NFL, who are doing things like squatting from the pins, so you start
from the bottom, and work your way out of the hole, which makes it harder, or they're just doing
limited range movements, and sometimes those limited range movements are done in season, so the
athlete doesn't have to go through the full range of motion, and it helps limit and reduce wear and
tear, for example, I've seen football players work just the lockout on the bench press, or they're
doing the floor press, which would be very similar to the guys that were pressing off of the pins
halfway down, it limited that range of motion, and here we are, 2019 some 50 years later,
still utilizing these methods now, in the late 60s, with all the energy and enthusiasm going into
can we land a person on the moon, it was interesting to see the way they worded these articles as they
spoke about things like rocket launching your strength to the moon, or creating space-age strength,
and the way they worded these articles in the magazines were extremely inspiring, and we could
almost say they almost brainwashed people because you were so fired up by the words they used
that you just felt like this is the way I'm going to have to train, it made you believe in the program
compared to today we have people kind of calling their own programs and naming it after themselves,
and people get confused, whereas in those late 60s it was like here are the lessons from the power
champs, here are the lessons from the strongest men in the world, and you followed suit with those
things, so I want to give you guys a couple examples of how you could utilize some of the rack
training and these sexual movements to help you get stronger, or to help you avoid injury, so
number one, one of the favorite things I love to do is just floor presses, I limit the four-range
bench press, it's a little bit of a shoulder saver, and it's a longevity plan, it's something
that I look at, how can I help this athlete get more longevity and get more bang from his buck
without beating up the shoulders, or the elbow joints, or even the muscles, right, beating up on
the triceps, especially in season, not just in the off season, the other way I look at it is,
if I'm training a high school athlete, I know that when he's in the high school,
he's very likely doing four-range bench presses the majority of the time, so that being said,
I might do lockouts from the top half, or I might do like I said the floor press,
some of the other things we'll do with squats, and this was inspired to me by one of my buddies who
coaches in the NFL, as he said that he has his lineman squatting out of the hole to develop that
starting strength, and when I look through some of these photos, you'll see that Bill Pinoet's
West and his guys are doing these different squats, different deadlifts from different
starting points to develop a different kind of strength, so for always starting from the body,
fully extended arms, or fully extended body, and then we squat, it's different than if we're going
from that dead stop or dead stop, so by doing that, we work the body differently, we're basically
incorporating the early days of the conjugate method, and it excites the athlete, it keeps them
monotony away from things, and athletes today more than ever because of how they're so
connected to their phones and connected to technology, they're so used to things changing on the
fly that they actually respond well to these different training methods, it's very hard to have
an athlete just squat for 12 weeks, or just power clean for 12 weeks, we want to use two to three
weeks of one squat method, maybe a box squat, which we've spoken about before, the next two to three
weeks, we might do zircher squats, but we might start from the pins, and we might start in a very low
position, slightly below parallel, maybe it's the end season, it would be slightly above parallel,
same thing on the bench press, we might just do lockouts, we might do the floor press,
or we could do dead lifts from blocks of different heights, all of these things were written about
and covered 50 years ago, mid to late 60s, maybe some of them in the early 70s, and it's amazing,
here we are 50 years later, and we're still utilizing the methods from almost half a century ago,
so guys I had a great time talking about old school westside barbell build peanuts west stories
and how to develop space age strength and boost your strength like a rocket ship, and that's what we
do here at the Iron Roots podcast, we'll talk to you next time, make sure you visit us at play.pro,
check out the older episodes of all the Iron Roots podcast on video, and you'll also get to see all
the other educational resources that have been organized in the play pro app, it's an awesome resource,
and it's like in all in one place you're not going to have to go all around, so if you're
straying the condition in coach, if you're a sport coach, if you're a mom or dad trying to help
train your kids, it's a one stop shop for awesomeness, you'll see you next time.
Okay friends, hope you enjoyed that trip down memory, memory, lean, man, I really love,
I've always loved the older stuff, and I got to tell you a story, that made me think about this
book that Jim Wendler gave me, this collection of original West Sidebar Bell articles was gifted to
Jim Wendler from Dr. Ken, and Jim gave it to me, he said, you'll appreciate this more than I will,
I couldn't believe it, I was, you know, over the top about it, and I'm still grateful,
that Jim gifted it to me every time I opened it up, and so it reminds me, I remember as a kid,
I had these old bodybuilding books, I think most of them were the high-intensity training manuals,
and I was in Israel visiting my grandfather, and in the front or the back, they had this, it looked
like a clipping, it was a photo of an article written by Arnold, but the text was so small because
it was a photo of a photo, I remember getting my grandfather's magnifying glass, so I could actually
read this clipping of the article that was in the back of the book, and same thing with Arnold's
encyclopedia, those black and white photos spoke to me, I could literally feel the energy coming out
of those photos, I could hear the plates clanging together, I could hear the guys like the intensity
of the training, so I've always been drawn to the purity and the power of simplicity from those
times, since those times, and that's it, I wanted to share that story with you to give you a little
insight about my deeper appreciation for these older training methods, the lifters who really
paved the way, way, way, way before us, and I think it's very important to help carry their torch
and keep the flame going, I think it's not cool that we have people who put out content and just
refuse to give credit, or they haven't done any research to know where it's come from, and the act
like it's their own, I don't think anything is our own, and I don't think anything I'm doing is
innovative, it's all been really inspired by all of those lifters that I've learned from,
that have come before me, and so I'm very grateful that that information has been put in my hands,
I feel like it's part of the reason why I'm here on earth, a small reason, not a massive reason,
so that is it, my friends, go to Zachstrength.com, reply to my emails, let me know if you're
interested in coming out for the Underground Strength Codesertification, and also leave a five-star
review and check out the links below, and of course thanks to my friends at Play, they are the
reason why Iron Roots was able to come to life, they sent out a professional videographer, and
that's not easy, you know, to find nowadays, if I want to hire a videographer to come out and film
for an hour, edit the video and give me let's say two Instagram Reels, you're looking at $300,
now try doing that, you do that once a month, you're at $1200, twice a month, you know, you can do
the math, it's extremely expensive, so very grateful for my friends at Play, check them out,
turf, strength training equipment, squat racks, you name it, check out my friends at Play,
that's it team, I am out of here. People ask me what warrior, what are you passionate about?
It finally came to me years ago, you know what I'm passionate about, I'm passionate about
fucking passion, I'm passionate about intensity, all the self-help books, all the motivational books,
the inspirational tools that you can buy, the bottom line in them is, do the work,
what you get through all the pages and all the rules and all the principles and all the formats
and all the plans and all the templates, it comes down to that, do the fucking work,
and sometimes the only way to go about doing the work is get fucking raw and get fucking intense,
get angry and aggressive and make it fucking happy, the experts, the gurus, and health and fitness,
they will tell you that resting recovery, 8 to 10 hours sleep a night is what you need,
let me speak blunt with you, none of those fucking triple jand,
punchy belly, basting face, mother fuckers, get through the groin hairs on a warrior,
what is not for you is a ditch you, what is a ditch you is your fucking enemy and you need to kill it,
your fears, your doubts, you're like a confidence, you're like a belief in a certain absolute destiny,
you have to do something unique and correct on this planet,
we start today at 6.15am and you're already up and you're already dragging us by 6.16,
you can change your fucking perspective of the world, love your life,
my advice, fucking do it, dig, fucking deep and get it done, life is not worth living,
without passion, without intensity, warrior man, what your passion, my passion is fucking passion,
intensity for life, whatever you do,
make sure to head on over to ZachStrength.com and get exclusive content, a badass,
free training course, along with a special discount code for any of our training courses,
thanks to everyone for leaving five star reviews.
