Background

To understand Westside Barbell, you have to understand where it came from. The original Westside Barbell Club was actually based in Culver City, California, in the 1960s and 1970s. It was a legitimate powerhouse in the world of competitive powerlifting, producing champions and setting standards. But the Westside Barbell that the entire strength world knows and argues about today is the one in Columbus, Ohio, the one built by Louie Simmons. And Louie did not simply copy the California club's name as an act of flattery — he inherited its spirit and then took it somewhere nobody else had the vision or the audacity to go.

Louie Simmons came up as a lifter in an era when powerlifting was raw, rough, and not particularly scientific. The sport in the 1970s and early 1980s was built mostly on doing the competition lifts over and over again, adding weight when you could, and hoping your body held together. Periodization was a concept that most American coaches and lifters had barely encountered in any formal way. Soviet and Eastern European strength science was beginning to leak into Western consciousness through translated texts, but it was still largely inaccessible to the average powerlifter grinding it out in a garage or a small gym somewhere in Middle America.