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MARINE CORPS AIR STATION IWAKUNI, Japan - Abe Roman, 165-pound male division first place winner and overall male Far East Powerlifting champion, deadlifts 474 pounds. Photo Lance Cpl. Cayce Nevers
Last month I attended the National Strength and Conditioning Association's (NSCA)Tactical Strength and Conditioning (TSAC) Conference as an invited speaker. The TSAC is a great conference with world class athletes and speakers. If you ever have the opportunity to go, do it. One of the speakers was Matt Wenning. Matt is a beast with a 600lb raw bench press! He is also very intelligent and a very articulate speaker. Matt made a strong case for using the Westside strength template for tactical athletes. His main point was that:
1. Westside works for producing strength.
2. The high level of variety with the Westside system ensures that it has more transfer to the highly varied strength challenges of tactical athletes.
I agree with that assessment on both counts. Point # 2 is especially important and should not be overlooked. However, for novice lifters, Westside is going to be a bit complex. Also, novice lifters often do not have the experience, or lifting technique in the basic lifts in order to benefit from a Westside type of template. For those reasons, I often recommend a simple Starting Strength type of program for novice tactical athletes. This gives them plenty of experience with the basic lifts (i.e., bench press, deadlift, back squat, powerclean, press). These are the fundamentals. Remember your old football coach used to always preach, "fundamentals before fancy stuff." Six to 10 months of Starting Strength is a good foundation in the fundamentals. Some are going to need more than that. After building some proficiency with the fundamentals, the Westside template makes sense for a tactical athlete.
However, Matt applied the Westside template to hundreds of US Army Rangers with great success. In this case they had excellent coaching. With good coaching, tactical athletes can jump into a Westside type of program much sooner. Those tactical athletes who are doing this on their own would be better served with a simpler approach like Starting Strength first.
Matt has an excellent guide to applying these principles to tactical athletes. You can find it here.
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