racticing primitive free weight barbell and dumbbell exercises collectively, each in turn stepping into

the spotlight to lift as the others watch, critiquing each other immediately after the set, is an
intimidating, daunting and exhilarating experience. Your ego is flattened when more experienced
training partners tear you to shreds with blistering critique before rebuilding you with constructive
criticism prior to the next set. To have someone “spot you” on the potentially dangerous lifts allows
you
—inspires you—to give 110%. We all pick up our game when another person or persons are watching
us do something and watching us intently. The attention makes us perform at a different level, a
higher
level.
A spotter allows you to extend yourself. Lifting by yourself when bench pressing or squatting,
requires you to leave a rep or two “in the bank”—you need some reserve strength left at the end of
each set. You cannot afford to get pinned under a heavy weight and that means you never try that
questionable rep. With a spotter you are now liberated to try that extra growth or strength
producing
rep that safety and sanity won’t allow when training solo. Muscle growth and additional strength lies
in those reps barely made, the stuff you’d be crazy to try on your own.
With spotters the dangerous reps become plausible and beneficial. You don’t need a spotter for a 40
pound leg curl or a 15 pound triceps kickback, but you damned sure need them when you are
attempting to handle 405x6 when the most you’ve ever done is 405x5. Spotters allow you to go
where
no timid man should venture: into the productive danger zone of extended reps and increased
poundage.
Purposeful Primitives instinctively push against the limits of the poundage and rep envelope: that is
where the gains reside. Anyone performs better when all eyes are riveted on them during a heavy
lift.
As my old Zen power coach once said, “You only think you’re training hard until you get sucked into a
training group, a group way smarter and way stronger than you.” Better to train in a dump with
Supermen than in a posh palace surrounded by low-pain tolerance politically-correct metro-sexual
sissies.