How I Train and Why - Part I

Today there are many many different methods and styles to training.  My weightlifting career, so to speak, began back in high school.  My head coach was a mountain of a man who played football in college and in the NFL.  Routinely I would walk in the weight room and see him very non-nonchalantly repping out 31-405 on the bench press.  Being the green, wide-eyed freshman that I was that's what I wanted to do and so began bench pressing three times a week.  I got very strong in the bench press fairly quickly (I rose, in less than a year from 155 to over 300lbs.), but also earned myself a shoulder reconstruction my junior year in high school.  I fully believe my injury was due in part to the way that I trained (and poor tackling technique.)  I had the surgery and still  continued my bench pressing ways.  My senior year we started a powerlifting team and I was introduced to the deadlift.  Due to the massive amounts of time spent focusing on my bench you can imagine that the deadlift was a significant struggle for me to master.  Sets and reps at this point consisted of either maxing out or 3 x 10, 4 x 8.
     Fast forward to college.  Since I was playing college football my training became a little more diverse in that I was now performing cleans in addition to squats, presses and other various bodybuilding movements.  While in college I started to read a lot of the muscle mags (M&F, MuscleMag, Musular Developement, etc.)  Upon graduating college I was reintroduced back to the sport of powerlifting and fell in love with it.  So much so that I missed my college football banquet to compete in my first powerlifting competition since high school.  I'm telling you all of this so you can get a decent perspective on why I train how I do and where my ideas have came from.  After college I was introduced to drop sets, forced reps, lots of bodybuilding (hypertrophy)  type training.  It was also during the time period that I started reading PowerliftingUSA and became exposed to Louie, Westside Barbell, the max effort method, and dynamic effort method.  I began to read every article I could get my hands on.  Stay tuned for Part II.