The Man, The Meth, The History

[platypus]

I enjoyed this Jamie Lewis interview. A few of the topics covered:
- Daily calisthenics
- Fasting and feasting
- Famous strongmen who were used as models for statues of the gods
- Vin Mariani, everyone's favorite pre-workout back in the day
- Jamie's hatred for powerlifting and powerlifters
- How Henry VIII used his jacked calves to pick up women

[CheekiBreekiFitness]

Thanks for posting this, I enjoyed the interview. I really like the content Jamie Lewis makes about the history of lifting, quite fascinating. Actually it's funny that Jamie dislikes Louie Simmons, because the both of them have this fascination with the Culver City Westside Barbell club. Also what he said about machetes is hilarious.

[5hout]

I'm enjoying it so far, but I have two preliminary issues.

1.

Don't buy that bullshit that Louie Simmons is a genius or that the Westside Barbell Club is anything to emulate- it's nothing but a bunch of fat, racist, gun-toting, drug addicted anti-vaxxers who are trying to fill time between the commission of hate crimes and felonies to be barely better than mediocre in a sport absolutely no one on Earth gives a fuck about.

2. What the fuck is he talking into? It is like he's doing an interview into a hair dryer.

[CheekiBreekiFitness]

I heard Jamie calling the Westside folks racist and antivax several times but could not find anything about it. I'm not an expert on Westside lore. Are those accusations grounded in reality or is Jamie being, as per usual, petulant and hyperbolic ?

[5hout]

I heard Jamie calling the Westside folks racist and antivax several times but could not find anything about it. I'm not an expert on Westside lore. Are those accusations grounded in reality or is Jamie being, as per usual, petulant and hyperbolic ?

I've never trained at Westside, or trained with anyone who did. I train in my barn and work from home. I've listened to a bunch of Louie's stuff and read a bunch of the articles (along with tons of other content of course).

What rubs me the wrong way about the quote, in the context of this (fairly hilarious and entertaining interview) is that he bitches about being the upper-middle class kid going to a fancy school and how everyone was an asshole. Yet, he really seems to have adopted (ugh, maybe this should be in the bottom forum) the kind of coastal-holier-than-though coolkid ironic persona. It's really funny, and he's a gifted writer, but something just grinds my gears when someone with this kind of resume "BA in History and East Asian Studies from the University of Arizona, an MBA from the Vienna University of Economics and an iMBA from the University of South Carolina, he's only got three degrees to show for years of graduate study (which also included a year of law and some coursework in History)" and insane financial advantages growing up, goes off this way on what is basically a collection of blue collar people/working class people and how dare a gym lead by a crane operator and with a bunch of half employed itinerant tradespeople not be so enlightened as him.

I'm sure you can probably find some unprintable in 2024 opinions by plenty of lifters out of Ohio, after all Outlaw is still going. I have no objection to criticism of actual actions/speech, but the way I've seen him do it leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

[MarkKO]

I heard Jamie calling the Westside folks racist and antivax several times but could not find anything about it. I'm not an expert on Westside lore. Are those accusations grounded in reality or is Jamie being, as per usual, petulant and hyperbolic ?

I've never trained at Westside, or trained with anyone who did. I train in my barn and work from home. I've listened to a bunch of Louie's stuff and read a bunch of the articles (along with tons of other content of course).

What rubs me the wrong way about the quote, in the context of this (fairly hilarious and entertaining interview) is that he bitches about being the upper-middle class kid going to a fancy school and how everyone was an asshole. Yet, he really seems to have adopted (ugh, maybe this should be in the bottom forum) the kind of coastal-holier-than-though coolkid ironic persona. It's really funny, and he's a gifted writer, but something just grinds my gears when someone with this kind of resume "BA in History and East Asian Studies from the University of Arizona, an MBA from the Vienna University of Economics and an iMBA from the University of South Carolina, he's only got three degrees to show for years of graduate study (which also included a year of law and some coursework in History)" and insane financial advantages growing up, goes off this way on what is basically a collection of blue collar people/working class people and how dare a gym lead by a crane operator and with a bunch of half employed itinerant tradespeople not be so enlightened as him.

I'm sure you can probably find some unprintable in 2024 opinions by plenty of lifters out of Ohio, after all Outlaw is still going. I have no objection to criticism of actual actions/speech, but the way I've seen him do it leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

I have similar thoughts.

I kind of gave up on paying attention to him a while back. Personally, my take on his attitude is that he's bitter because the raw powerlifting world left him behind. As best as I could tell, he was good when raw started being a thing but never could or would keep up as standards improved.

So he makes his niche being the better than everyone guy who shits on everyone else without really having the chops to back it up.

[Tommy1507]

I gave some parts a listen. I don't care at all about strength training history, so skipped that. What did i take home? Train more varied include some calisthenics. What i always find interesting is the mindset of lifters. He, the crazy extroverted trainee, who is easily bored. And the other one, wo seems to be more introverted, plans more and is ok with a stupid boring routine. Apparently the latter is more frequent to find on the internetz.

And then i googled his name a little bit too hard. Now other images come to my mind when he talks so much about manliness and all that stuff

[lehman906]

I asked him about the Westside stuff and he responded:
"If you look at old videos you'll see Confederate flags. Their gym manager being a Nazi was all over the forums. I found that out by accident. If you want the real dirt, I heard a lot of it from the guys at North Georgia barbell. Then there was the CRAZY shit going on in 2020 but they all scrubbed their profiles."

The documentary and older videos always implied there was a ton of drug use and maybe something shady going on, but I never cared enough to look into it. I don't know how accurate his take is, but I can see some parallels between them and Rip's temple of sadness.

[Hardartery]

I asked him about the Westside stuff and he responded:
"If you look at old videos you'll see Confederate flags. Their gym manager being a Nazi was all over the forums. I found that out by accident. If you want the real dirt, I heard a lot of it from the guys at North Georgia barbell. Then there was the CRAZY shit going on in 2020 but they all scrubbed their profiles."

The documentary and older videos always implied there was a ton of drug use and maybe something shady going on, but I never cared enough to look into it. I don't know how accurate his take is, but I can see some parallels between them and Rip's temple of sadness.

Confederate flags didn't necessarily mean anything in those years, speaking as a guy that lived in the US during the time. There was plenty of under the surface racism in most places, and not so hidden in some circles but usually mild stuff that they thought wasn't racist. Louie's gym had cops and convicts in it, there is guaranteed to be some racists in that mix even today. And as for drug use, let's be serious. AAS was and still is schedule 3 narcotics in the US, and those guys were usually in pain. Many were open partiers (Dimmel comes to mind) and they liked to go to bars and get in fights. We are not talking about manicured lawn suburbanites here, and only a handful had college degrees.

Most of them seem pretty open about what went on, and the fact that they were active in plenty of illegal activity. He isn't going to say anything that you can't already find in a TableTalk on EliteFTS somewhere and gym managers changed frequently. They often didn't even know each others real names, only nicknames. These were all rough characters and usually outcasts from society in some way, which is what drove them to lift and got them to Westside. I doubt there is any real overt racism, and they have probably all changed with the times to some extent. I went to school with plenty of kids with Confederate flags on their jackets or elsewhere in Canada - and most of them were not really aware of the racism context to be honest it was just a stupid thing that was on album covers and other places , kind of like flaming skulls and barbed wire. We aren't talking about guys that give a damn either, if they scrubbed profiles it's because when the Tren haze cleared they realized how immature and cringey a lot of stuff was. And anybody from anywhere in Georgia having much to say about racism is a kettle meet pot situation.

[platypus]

Hating on everyone else currently living is part of Jamie's shtick. He has his own forms of prejudice and his own drug use preferences, and has been writing about them for more than a decade. I don't think there's a reason to take it seriously when he insults anyone for any reason.

And then i googled his name a little bit too hard. Now other images come to my mind when he talks so much about manliness and all that stuff

And then there's that...

---

Despite any of that, Jamie's a very good lifter and good historian, and I find what he has to say about training always interesting. In this episode, one thing that stood out was the emphasis on daily calisthenics work. I've only ever done it for short periods of time, but there's others who seem to be on board with it as a permanent staple. Wendler, in recent years, has been on this train, and John Sheaffer always was too.

Seems like something that might be worth a try. I suspect that someone could get by with a lot less work done in the gym, if they were knocking out a bunch of pushups and chinups all day too. The issue is getting to a decent number without an overuse injury.

I actually wonder to what extent a protocol like this might help with recovery from heavy lifting, since you're constantly pushing blood into the muscles. I, for the most part, do nothing but lounge about when I'm not rolling or lifting.