The controversial founder of the gym Westside Barbell, who died in March, was the innovator of a go-hard-or-go-home culture of strength training. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/p...ns-defined-the-extreme-sport-of-power-lifting “If you aren’t willing to die to do this, you shouldn’t do this,” Simmons said, of his method of training. in the sport of power lifting, “gear” can refer to two different forms of bodily augmentation. The first is anabolic steroids, the assembly of chemicals associated with disgraced professional athletes, shape-shifting celebrities, and, of course, bodybuilders, many of whom take hormonal enhancements as casually as they would any dietary supplement. The second is supportive gear—wraps, shirts, suits of various thicknesses—which lifters use to aid them in hauling even more than they can au naturel. In both of its forms, gear had no greater champion than Louie Simmons, a lifter and strength coach who captivated the sport with his club Westside Barbell, which became notorious for training some of the strongest humans in the world. Simmons died in March, at the age of seventy-four, and his go-hard-or-go-home enthusiasm for anabolic enhancement could lead to impolite speculation about the cause of his death. Indeed, in 2016, Simmons told Joe Rogan that he hadn’t been off the juice since his first dose, in 1970, and that he had injected himself with, among other illicit substances, a bit of arsenic and strychnine to raise his red-blood-cell count. But asking what killed Simmons is beside the point, because he’s a man who lived with death always pressing down on his shoulders. In hindsight, we can call it a marvel that he lived as long as he did, given his passion for heaving insanely heavy weights in flaming disregard for his health. Few pastimes involving feats of brute strength enjoy a squeaky reputation, and power lifting is no exception, though in truth it enjoys little mainstream reputation at all. Since the nineteen-eighties, when Arnold Schwarzenegger published his tome “Encyclopedia of Modern Bodybuilding,” weight training has become much more than a niche endeavor. Even the maxim that lifting is good only for getting big has been routinely undermined by a new legion of fitness instructors; women who were once cautioned against handling anything mightier than a hand weight now grunt and pull with abandon. And yet, even if average gym rats have discovered areas of their physique apart from the famous “mirror muscles,” they are not likely to think of themselves as a part of the semi-formalized world of power lifting. The sport, which roughly dates to the middle of the last century, revolves around three lifts in particular: the back squat (a bend at the hips and knees with the bar held across the shoulders), the bench press (a leading cinematic idiom for strength, which hardly needs introduction), and the dead lift (so named for the inert weight at rest on the floor until a willing body pulls it up). At its basic, training in power lifting involves thousands of progressively heavier repetitions, until what once felt heavy feels light and what once seemed impossible can be gritted and done. As Simmons put it in a segment with Vice Sports, in 2018, “Every day you got to do this freakin’ thing over and over, and it gets harder and harder.”