Louie Simmons and His Legacy
There are some people that when they’re alive, feel as if they’ll just be around forever. Even when you do conceive of them as mortal and that they can actually pass on, their memory and legacy loom really large.
However, there’s something I’ve noticed as I’ve gotten older that’s also true: the way you remember or understand someone and their importance may not be transferred so easily to new comers or people who weren’t around to actually know the person.
That’s why I’m writing what I am writing today; Louie Simmons, Westside Barbell— these names are so hallowed, so (in)famous, and carry so much weight, but there will still be people (and still are people) who won’t fully understand the magnitude of their impact. For that reason, I think it’s very important for those of us who were alive and there to witness it (from whatever distance) to talk about what it was like, and the ultimate impact these individuals had on history.
Before I go any further, I want to be very clear: I was not close with Louie Simmons on a personal level. I met him once when visiting Westside Barbell in 2018 and had a nice conversation with him about all the 15 years prior where I consumed everything he had written or put out and how much it impacted my career both athletically and as a coach. He was really humble and gracious and made jokes about Brooklyn (when he asked where I was visiting from). He tried to recall a few crazy guys who had stopped in the gym over the years from Brooklyn, before yelling out “NO SLEEP TIL…!” with a laugh right after. He later met us in the gym and was showing a few people some of his favorite Reverse Hyper variations— which was really cool for me, as that exercise (and machine) was one that was a bit of missing link for me when I first discovered it somewhere around 2008.
I think the one thing that stood out to me most about that visit was that when I walked in the front door to the office that first time at WSBB, there was a desk right by the door in the lobby. That was his desk and he was right there at sitting at it. In my life, I’ve been fortunate to be around a lot of very influential people, and most do all they can to shield themselves and limit exposure to the general public, but Louie was literally right at the first place you step when you go into Westside Barbell.
I would go on to visit Westside Barbell (usually at the Arnold) a few more times, and he was there, in the gym holding court or walking around. There was something comforting, but also really cool about witnessing him in what was definitely his most natural state: coaching at his gym.
I say all this to say: I was like many who admired and learned a great deal from him. We were lucky enough to be acquainted with him, no matter how little that time was. My words and memory come from an observer and not someone who was very close to him, nor would I ever pretend to be. For that perspective, I suggest you visit and speak with my friend, colleague and mentor Matt Wenning; who spent many years as a lifter at Westside Barbell en route to setting world records. He was certainly one of the best lifters to ever be on the team there. His words and recent reflections on Westside and Louie will give you a good perspective of what it was like to be in the trenches at a place like WSBB. I suggest you start with the podcast I did with Matt back in 2020 where we talk about this topic and much more.
With that said, I want to talk about what Louie and Westside Barbell meant and continue to mean to me. I also want to hopefully use this as a piece to serve as touchstone for how important Westside Barbell and Louie’s ideas are and were to the development of Strength and Conditioning in ALL sports at large. Years from now, for any newer coaches or younger people reading this, I hope it can be a good primer to understand what it was like to crossover with such a force.
I think what many people in the field and living today fail to recognize is the influence that Louie had on strength training and fitness down to its deepest level of DNA. Louie’s influence and finger prints are all over so many things that I would argue next to Arnold Schwarzenegger, he’s the next most important figure in fitness in the 20th and 21st century in the West.
That’s a bold claim, I know, but let’s explore it in 4 main points.
Early “Translations”
Louie talked very openly about how he was having trouble with classic linear periodization and coming up with programs to progress lifters at the highest levels. He knew (as many did) that the former USSR sports scientists were very dialed in and had methods that greatly differed from ours. The problem is, that back when he was having this realization, the USSR was very much still around and there was limited availability of Russian texts that were translated into English.
Along with Dr Mel Siff and and a few key figures, Louie was hell bent on getting this information to the states. Without this group spearheading and speeding up the process, you wouldn’t have the breadth of Soviet Sports Science available to the general public at the time you did. I can tell you as someone who has worked professionally for over a decade in the field, that this information still gets translated and comes out yearly. All things considered, the pace is a bit slow. When you consider what happens yearly now as opposed to what he managed to consume and synthesize and apply: you appreciate the magnitude of just how much Louie pushed through the field in a short period.
This had a massive influence on how coaches experimented with programs in the coming years, and the results those same coaches could produce.
Any programs you see today that don’t identify as conjugate, but feature varied rep schemes within a week, or a fair amount of variety in a training block, have spindles of Louie’s DNA in them.
Programming
The term “Conjugate System” will forever be tied to Louie Simmons. He may not have invented the Repetition Method, Dynamic Method or Max Effort Method, but very few individuals outside the most educated and tuned in coaches at the time knew anything about them. The fact that we know about them and saw them used in North America was almost entirely the handy work of Louie Simmons.
The use of heavy variety in training is not necessarily a new thing, but for getting maximally strong, Louie Simmons gave the western world the blueprint on how to use variety.
By studying conjugate and special strength exercises (essentially, exercises that feed in and provide a high degree of transfer to the sport), coaches were able to take these ideas and apply them to sports outside powerlifting. This is how (and why) you see programs for football players, baseball players, MMA fighters, and many more take the organization of a typical Westside Barbell Powerlifting program and reapply the exercises based on desired performance in the sport.
So any time you hear coaches referring to the split of the program schedule as including “Max Effort Days,” “Speed or Dynamic” days, you are partaking in a derivative of Conjugate training.
A final thought here as well on Powerlifting: As much as many modern athletes and coaches like to put down conjugate in modern programs, they very much owe a debt of gratitude to Louie’s ideas. Training high rep, low rep and moderating RPE’s throughout a single week is 100% a byproduct of the information Louie helped bring here along with Dr Siff and others. To ignore this and put this down is simply ignorant and incorrect.
Inventions
While nearly every strength coach attributes and connects Louie Simmons to the Reverse Hyper, he had a very lasting impact on the design of commercial gym equipment, particularly in the realm of strength training. When Rogue Fitness was just coming on the scene as a provider of US made strength equipment, they consulted with Louie on the design on their earliest power racks, the R3 and R4. I have one of these very racks in my gym today. The design is essentially a replica of rack that sits in the back corner of Westside Barbell to this day.
Louie continued to innovate strength training equipment into advanced age, pumping out new prototypes for bars, training machines, and further changing up the reverse hyper.
Perhaps his most lasting low-tech intervention in training will be the use of bands and chains. We could talk at length about these, but I think a little brevity here would actually help state that much more emphatically how instrumental he was to you or I using these methods today. Any story I’ve heard of bands attached to a barbell starts at his gym.
People and Legacy
It feels almost disrespectful to mention the legacy of Westside Barbell without first mentioning the all-time great strength athletes that trained there— from Matt Dimmel and Chuck Vogelpohl to Matt Wenning, Greg Panora, Dave Hof to the many who were great specialists like JM Blakely.
The amount of amazing athletes from Westside alone who went on to have both great lifting, coaching or business careers is too many to mention. Famous among them on the “mogul” front are Dave Tate, Mark Bell and Matt Wenning.
There are many lives Louie impacted from a distance as I described above, but there’s an even larger coaching tree who reproduced and put their own spin on Louie’s ideas, that its safe to say his DNA is so embedded— it couldn’t go anywhere if you tried to alter it. In this group, I’d include individuals like Joe DeFranco, Zach Even-Esh, Cory Gregory and so many more.
To Wrap it Up….
I wrote most of this in the week following Louie’s death, and it actually sat in my drafts for nearly 2 months, as I wanted to give this all room to breathe. He was an important figure in my development and understanding of strength.
Beyond that, I wanted to make sure I could summarize this all in a way that really maximizes and showcased his impact.
Many of you reading this were probably very familiar with Louie. Others will find this years later, maybe being less familiar. Even farther down the line will be individuals who never crossed paths with him, but will be surprised to learn how much of their training was impacted by Louie. That’s who I wrote this for.
Rest in peace Louie Simmons.
About the Author: Mark DiSalvo, CSCS
Mark is the founder and owner of DiSalvo Performance Training. He brings over a decade of experience training clients and athletes of all backgrounds and is the strength and conditioning coach to grapplers of all levels and disciplines: from youth to professional and Olympic-level. He is currently a purple belt in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu himself, with 10 years of experience in the sport. You can read more about him here.
A graduate of Northeastern University, he’s an NSCA Certified Strength and Conditioning Specialist (CSCS) and Sports Performance Expert with a specialty in combat sports. He’s also a Steve Maxwell Certified Kettlebell Instructor (Levels 1 & 2).