The Magic Carpet
From Westside Barbell to S5: the rug that traveled every mile of thirty years. — By Dave Tate
There is a rug in our gym.
Woven, colorful stripes, fraying at the edges. When I squat, I throw it over the box. People ask about it. What is that for? Why is it there? And my honest answer is that there is no real reason for it outside of what it is.
But if you want to know where it came from, that story goes back further than elitefts. It goes back further than any compound we have ever had. It goes back to Westside Barbell on Demorest Road, before Louie Simmons moved the gym to its current location, when there were about a dozen of these rugs scattered around and I was one of the people training there.
I call it the magic carpet.
I trained at Westside for twelve, thirteen, fourteen years. If you want to know what that means, I am not going to summarize it in a paragraph. You already know if you know.
When Louie moved from Demorest Road to the current Westside location, I asked him if I could take one of the rugs. He had a bunch of them. They were always around. And I asked because I wanted one.
"I am not a nostalgic person. But this rug, I kind of am. That is as close to sentimental as I am going to get."
So Louie said yes. And I took it.
The magic carpet. Still on the floor at S5.
People at Westside used these rugs on the box when squatting. If you asked Louie what they were for, he would tell you it kept you from sliding back on the box when you sat back into the squat.
I will be honest: I never really bought that. I never saw anybody slip off a box.
What it actually did was cover the splinters. The boxes at Westside were old wood. You sat back on them session after session, year after year, and the wood would give you splinters. You throw the rug over the box, and that problem goes away. Simple.
The other thing it did, and this one I do think mattered, was on the glute ham raise. A little bit of slippage on the pad gives you just enough movement to settle into a better position. That small thing made a real difference.
So the magic carpet served two purposes: splinters and glute hams. That is the whole story on the practical side.
The other side is that it goes back so far that if you find one of the very first Westside squat videos with Matt Dimmel in it, you might see this rug or one just like it in the background. We are talking about footage most people have never seen. That is how far back this thing goes.
Here is what happened after I took it from Demorest Road.
- 1994 to 2004 — The home gym. The shed out back. The garage. Just me with a sled Louie had given me, some plates, and the extra equipment I was rotating through. The rug was there.
- S1 — Main Street, London, Ohio, 2005 to 2008 — Everything from the garage came with it. The rug came.
- S2/S4 — Maple Street, 2008 forward — When we outgrew that space, the rug came.
- S3 — The old tractor dealership repair shop — Blue insulation walls. Propane bills running two thousand dollars a month in winter. The rug was there.
- S4 — 2012 to 2018 — The landlord enclosed the old lumber storage area into a real weight room. The gym most people who trained with us remember. The rug was there.
- S5 — State Route 665, London, Ohio, 2018 to present — 30,000 square feet. The rug came here, too.
Five compounds. Decades of training. It has been on the floor for all of it.
I am not going to sit here and tell you the rug absorbed something sacred. It is fabric. But when I think about what has taken place in the gyms it has been in, the list gets long fast.
The crew that started forming. Todd Brock, Jim Wendler, Kenny Patterson, and the others who came through during those early S3 and S4 years. The sessions that got serious enough that we had to sit down and talk about what kind of gym we actually wanted this to be. Not rules. Just the things we knew we did not want. Show up a little late, not a big deal. Train how you train. Just know what days are squat days and what days are bench days.
The events that started building momentum when we finally had enough space to have people come out. The seminars have moved from rented hotel conference rooms to having everything under one roof. The Q&As I would answer at the table that eventually became Table Talk.
The people who came through those doors not knowing what they were doing and left with something they are still using. The coaches who showed up thinking they had it figured out, only to leave with a completely different perspective.
And the people we have lost who were part of this. John Meadows was in that gym. That hits different when you think about who has stood in that space.
The rug was on the floor through all of it.
I replaced the leg press, hack squat, and power squat machines last year. The only reason was aesthetics. Those machines were over two decades old and they all still worked perfectly.
That is the point I try to make about the equipment we build: zero maintenance, used hard, and everything still functions. But we swapped them for newer versions because the gym is also a showroom, and I wanted it to represent what we are making now.
Most of what has been in the elitefts compounds from S1 forward could still be out there and functional today. That is not nostalgia talking. That is just the truth about what happens when you build things to last.
But the rug stays for a different reason.
Everything else in the gym is there because it trains you or because it represents what we make. The rug is there because of where it came from and what it has been part of. That is the one thing out here where I will admit that sentiment plays a role. I know where that rug was before I had it. I know every place it has been since.
There is not a piece of equipment in this building with a longer history.
elitefts started in 1998 with a thousand dollar loan and a simple mission. A place where real training information was available to the people who needed it. No paywall, no gatekeeping, no charging people for access to knowledge that should be shared.
The gym compounds were never part of the original plan. They grew out of necessity, then out of community, and finally out of something harder to define. When you have a space where people come together to train hard and learn from each other and pass what they know to the next person, that space takes on weight over time.
Not every gym we have had was pretty. S3 was brutal. No bathroom, which meant you had to go outside. Propane bills in winter that we absolutely did not account for. Walls covered in blue insulation that I started stapling printed photos onto just to have something to look at.
That became the photo wall, which became the bar wall, which became the vinyl graphics that cover the back wall of S5 today. Everything in this gym has a story if you ask.
The magic carpet is the oldest story in the building.
If you want to see what thirty years of strength culture looks like in person, elitefts hosts training sessions, seminars, and events at the S5 compound throughout the year. Everything in this gym is here for a reason. Some of it is training. Some of it is history. Some of it, like the rug, is both.
The equipment we build is designed to hold up the same way this gym has held up. The SS Yoke Bar was developed in this compound, tested until bars broke, and did not go to a single customer until it was right. The specialty bars, racks, and training equipment on this floor have been through more sessions than most commercial gyms will ever see. They are still running.
If you are outfitting your own space, build it to last. Buy equipment that holds up so you never have to explain why you replaced something that was still working fine.
The rug has never needed to be replaced. That is the standard.
