I think we're getting too hung up on exercise names here. This all started with
an article Mike wrote for me when I was at TMUSCLE.
He's making one major point, based on something he observed with his athletes: The best gains seem to come with what we call Bulgarian split squats, which he calls RFESS.
When I was editing a short-lived magazine called Muscle, Terry Todd, a strength-training historian, wrote an article saying that Eastern European Oly lifters didn't do any squats in their training. Instead, they did step-ups exclusively, and saw much better gains in strength and size than they ever got from squats.
So this is nothing new. And there's much, much more to Boyle's new product than a takedown of a single exercise -- which he isn't taking down so much as suggesting an alternative.
Boyle has been around for a generation. He's trained athletes who have entertained us in college, pro, and Olympic competition. He's one of the nicest, most honest, and most self-critical guys I've met in the fitness biz. He's admitted coming full circle on things like static stretching -- from "do it" to "don't do it" to "my athletes got hurt more often after we stopped doing it, so we started doing it again."
There are very, very few people who are as quick as Boyle to admit their mistakes and try to correct them.
Do we really begrudge him an opportunity to make money off a project that sums up what he's learned in the past few years? Yeah, the marketing is aggressive, but the people buying it are strength coaches and trainers whose jobs depend on them using the most up-to-the-minute systems with their athletes and clients. These are people who know what they're doing. Nobody's getting hustled or duped here.
New Rule#20
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