IM HYBRID TRAINING
The Raw Story
By Eddie Avakoff, owner of Metroflex LBC
An argument for ditching all of that cool weight-room gear.
T
he squat is everything that’s right in the
world of weight training. A quote written
on a wall inside Metroflex LBC reads:
“The squat is the perfect analogy for life:
It’s about standing back up after something
heavy brings you down.” That sums it up right
there.
The squat is a movement that can be
deemed applicable training for just about any
sport or endeavor. Squats test the strength of
your legs, core, and anterior/posterior sys-
tems (depending on how you squat). Squats
also test sheer explosive power. Squats are
one-third of the sport of powerlifting, an
enormous component of Olympic weightlift-
ing, and the root of everything “functional.”
Squats have become the strength benchmark
in the gym. “How much you squat?” has be-
come as much of a validation as “How much
you bench?”—a question that dominated
the scene in the 1990s until the early 2000s.
Funny enough, the squat was revered with
the same validity back in the ’70s and ’80s, a
classic age in the weight room.
With the new-age rise of functional fit-
ness, the squat has seen a resurgence in
the mainstream community. And rightfully
so. It’s an all-encompassing movement that
serves a purpose for just about any sport. Of
course, much like the movement’s exposure
to the masses, niche equipment has also
risen to the surface of mainstream training.
This equipment is made for specialists of
the movement, not for the masses. Although
most of our one-rep maxes could use the
additional stability of a belt, is it necessarily in
our best interest to always strap one on?
What I’m getting at is specialized equip-
ment designed to aid the squat has become
a backbone of mainstream training with the
84 april 2017 | ironmanmagazine.com
The word “funcTional”
implies everyday
applicabiliTy, and
when’s The lasT Time
you needed a belT and
special shoes To geT in
and ouT of a chair?
squat. What should be saved for elite spe-
cialists (highly skilled lifters who use these
tools as a strategy into larger lifts) is now
being overused by anyone, often for vanity
and self-inflation. And there’s an irony here.
If someone’s training the squat in order to
build their core and their legs, yet they insist
on using a belt, knee sleeves, Olympic shoes,
wrist straps (to support the stress of a low-
bar back squat?), an eight-foot bar, and the
whole nine yards, how do they expect to
place any stress on the body itself? I mean,
if the belt stabilizes the midsection, elevated
shoes allow for an easier drop into the hole,
and knee sleeves and the bar allow for a faster
bounce out of the hole, then when does the
body get to do any work? And that’s what
we’re supposed to be training, right?