FOR
ME to be the first to arrive is a rare thing indeed. I’m usually just on time,
or late, or (if it’s around Hillarys) lost. So here I was, sitting alone at a
banquet table in Lapa, a Brazilian barbeque restaurant at the heart of Armadale’s
shopping district… and a pretty difficult place to find on a rainy night, as it
turns out. But then if you're not a local, that's pretty understandable (and if you are, you're probably loling about the fact that we were in Armadale).
Brandon Lilly, his wife, and the
rest of WA Strongman eventually got there and dinner was underway an hour after
the reservation, but we made up for the late start by eating everything in
sight and beckoning the wait staff to come by again and again with skewers of
different, delicious meats.
Once
everyone had eaten enough to be slowed down with meat sweats, and after a bit
of small talk, Dan asked Brandon how he’d come to create the Cube training
method. This kicked off the most fascinating discussion of strength I’ve ever
been privy to. I was at the opposite end of the table to Brandon, so I couldn’t
catch everything he said. But what I did hear was quite astounding.
For
a start, Brandon told us he left West Side
Barbell to get stronger. But when he started lifting in high school he couldn’t
bench 60 kilos. He tried to squat 60 and fell on his face, busting his nose. In fact he was, in
general, incredibly weak (compare this, he said, to his friend Dave Hoff who
was benching 160 for reps at age fifteen). This was a massive revelation for
myself, to see proof first hand that genetics isn’t the only determinant of
strength.
Though it is, quite plainly, a major factor. Just look at arguably
the strongest deadlifter in the world right now; Benedikt Magnusson. Brandon
told us that Benedikt really wanted to work with cosmetics, and would rather go
clay pigeon shooting, or do a variety of activities other than train. He is
exceptionally intelligent but doesn’t like to advertise the fact. He is one of
several brothers, the smallest of whom can deadlift 400 kilos. Magnusson told
Brandon this last fact as a way of explaining to him why he, at that stage of
his career, should have been lifting more than he was (if Benny’s little
brother could do it, so could Brandon, obviously).
Brandon
gave us all some great suggestions on how to begin tailoring the Cube method to
our Strongman training (similar to
Josh Thigpen’s treatment), and by the time
we had all eaten our fill and it was time to leave it felt like Dan and Brandon
had really only just gotten started.
DAY 2 – ALONGSIDE GREATNESS
The
Muscle Pit again played host to the strongest in the iron game. SMWA did our
training outside
while a small but lively crowd gathered indoors, where a
semi-naked Lilly was giving one-on-one coaching in the deadlift. The atmosphere
was incredible; one newcomer, Kurt, was so inspired seeing people around him
charged up and hitting records that he hit one himself; a 115 kilo snatch (at about
70 kilos bodyweight I believe) and Gabor walked a 400 kilo yoke the full 15
meters.
When
I left, Dan and Brandon were locked in conversation once more while his
trainees continued to smash weight on the platform.
Brandon
Lilly went to a school with no dividing walls between classes. To this day, background
noise allows him to think more clearly. So facing a crowd of thirty or more
people all seated in awed silence seemed to make him a little
uncomfortable. He encouraged us to talk amongst ourselves while he jotted out
some diagrams and program templates on the whiteboard behind him.
The
design of the Cube was first on the agenda, though the seminar was not rigidly
structured; Lilly relied on his audience to ask him what they wanted to know,
and invariably this would lead to anecdotes and stories about the many strong,
strong guys he’d met, learned from and competed against in his career. He would
always answer the question, but there was sometimes such depth to his reply that the original question became incidental.
Brandon
gave us a stark insight into his past and the trials he and his second wife
have gone through in order for him to make his 1015 kilo RAW total. How
he’d been dealt a bad hand academically and his high school coach, Travis
Lynch, had introduced him to the iron when he could no longer play soccer for
his school. You could say that it was under the bar where Brandon had his first great successes in life,
something that I think a lot of us can identify with.
But
when he chose to follow his dream and commit to Powerlifting 100%, he lost the
support of his first wife and pretty much his entire family. Before he met his
second wife, Jess (who was a little embarrassed, seated amongst the crowd), he
was alone. “Eddie
Coan lived with his parents, in their basement, while he followed his dream.” Brandon
said, adding that while it was a great thing to have such supportive parents,
he didn’t think he could have done it himself. Dependence on other people in that way would damage his pride.
He
talked about sacrifice and priorities. Jess, for instance, travels hundreds of miles each week
to her part time nursing job and back home again, just so she can be with him.
He explained to us that it wasn’t even a question; he hadn’t asked her to do
this, she did it because that was what she needed to do, just as he needed to
be where he was. He
pointed to his shirt, and said that he’d have arrived shirtless today if his
wife hadn’t handed it to him; same with all his clothes, for that matter; he
wears the shirts and shorts his sponsors give him to wear. He doesn’t waste
money or time on clothes, and pays no attention to fashion.
“Think
about this" he said, "what if all you had in life was the iron? What if you were paid to
train? What if all you did was squat, bench and deadlift every week for four
weeks and on the fifth week compete. Well, that’s how it is for Russian
athletes. Could you do it?”
I asked him about where his drive came from, and he said other lifters helped to give it to him. He follows his competition closely. He then spoke of the injuries he’d sustained, and the training methods he’d
abandoned over the course of his career (and why Powerlifting in general was
fraught with bad information). He had so many stories to tell about other great
athletes and coaches he’d met; how he badgered Sheiko as often as he could get
near enough to him to ask questions, and how even Jim Wendler would agree that
Wendler’s 531 will make you a really strong dude, but it isn’t the best program
for a competitive Powerlifter.
Magnusson
had helped him improve his deadlift by making him drop his soap in the shower.
And his shampoo bottle, and his washcloth. And perform a deadlift to use each
one. “Make every lift a four hundred kilo lift.” He said ‘Bennie’ had been
watching him perform variations of bench press when opening doors, eating with
utensils, et cetera. He performed his best lift every day, and so he needed to adopt the
same behaviour with the deadlift. It worked.
Brandon was a little offended when the questions seemed to dry up an hour or so
after we’d resumed from lunch. “Well I have a question then.” He said, “Why the fuck don’t
you have more questions?” Then someone got the ball rolling again, and we
learned why Brandon strips down to short shorts whenever he’s lifting.
“There
will always be haters. My haters say, when I bench wearing clothes, that I got
a [bench] shirt under there, or when I deadlift that I got a suit on. So that’s
why in my last comp I took my shirt off and I pulled my shorts up. People might
say ‘hey you look like a fag’, but I don’t care. Nobody can say I’m not a raw
lifter.”
I left just as Lilly was getting to the practical part of the seminar, but I got a whole lot out of the day, and the weekend generally has been a major experience for me. I'm glad Brandon took the time to come and speak to us (Perth being a helluva detour from the CAPO worlds in Tasmania) and I wish him and his wife a safe trip back home.
