The Cult, the Carnage, the Chaos (and Pain): Jamie Lewis Revisited
Josh Hezza- May 5
- 14 min read
Updated: May 9
The Cult, the Carnage, the Chaos (and Pain): Jamie Lewis Revisited
Chaos, Pain, and the Blog-as-Bible: Revisiting Jamie Lewis’ Mad Genius Era
Controlled Chaos
If you Google “most hated man in powerlifting”, you’ll get a rogues’ gallery of internet infamy - names like Evan Kardon or George Leeman, with their steroid-fuelled tirades, controversies, and questionable business ventures. But buried amongst the clickbait and gym drama, one name keeps resurfacing with a different kind of legacy: Jamie Lewis.
I still remember stumbling across Chaos and Pain over a decade ago. It must’ve been around 2011 or 2012, back when forums still mattered and blogs were gospel. I didn’t find it via a hashtag or algorithm. Someone linked a post in a long-dead thread on Muscletalk or Sugden Barbell - something about skulls, stimulants, and squats so heavy they should come with a mental health disclaimer. I clicked. I read. I didn’t sleep. I Believe hes now called Plague of Strength.
This wasn’t some copy-paste strength routine wrapped in fake positivity. It was raw, chaotic, bloodied at the knuckles and smarter than it had any right to be.
What made Jamie’s writing stand out wasn’t just the content - though that was sharp, dense, and often rooted in obscure historical or scientific references - but the tone. There was venom in every sentence, spit on every punctuation mark. It was like Bukowski for lifters, if Bukowski had a 700-pound deadlift and a vendetta against moderation. There was intensity, yes, but also structure - a method to the madness that a lot of people missed.
The Chaos and Pain approach was rooted in a kind of militant individualism: eat big, train harder, do drugs if you want to, don’t apologise for wanting to be a fucking monster. Where Westside had its boards and chains and reverse hypers, Jamie had high-frequency lifting, ultra-aggressive progression, and a pre-workout that felt like getting headbutted by a PCP-fuelled gorilla. (Cannibal Ferox wasn’t so much a supplement as an experience - you either loved it, or you called a priest.) The Subsequent versions that removed the banned ingredients and replaced them with other ingredients that were then immediately also banned were almost as good.
And yet, amid all the rage and barbarism, there were flashes of brilliance. You could trace Conjugate-like elements in his programming - rotating max effort lifts, pushing variations, using intensity and fatigue as tools. But he wore his anti-Westside badge like a scar. He didn’t want to be part of any team. That was the point. He wasn’t just rebelling against Louie Simmons; he was rebelling against everyone.
Importantly, Chaos and Pain was never a formal system. It wasn’t a downloadable PDF or a neat little ebook with page numbers and progression tables. It was a blog-as-bible - a stream of consciousness filled with training logs, rants, historical deep dives, nutrition lunacy, and cultural takedowns. It was chaotic by design. You didn’t follow a program - you immersed yourself in a worldview.
In hindsight, Chaos and Pain emerged during a cultural shift in strength sports - when lifters were becoming increasingly polished, coached, brand-conscious, and algorithm-fed. Jamie Lewis was a hand grenade hurled at that trajectory. He wasn’t trying to sell you a lifestyle. He was trying to destroy the illusion that there was only one right way to lift.
For better or worse, it worked.
What the Chaos and Pain Era Represented
In the late 2000s and early 2010s, strength culture was heading in a very specific direction. Every forum thread, Reddit comment, and beginner blog post seemed to orbit around Starting Strength, StrongLifts 5x5, or some bastardised interpretation of Mark Rippetoe’s barbell gospel. It was the era of linear progression, low-volume templates, and a borderline religious obsession with squatting three times a week - usually done with just enough weight to feel hard but never enough to hurt feelings.
And then, from a blood-stained corner of the internet, Chaos and Pain emerged - not as a rebuttal, but as a full-on rejection. Jamie Lewis didn’t just offer an alternative. He scorched the entire playbook and laughed while doing it.
This was an anti-mainstream, anti-authority, anti-mediocrity manifesto masquerading as a training blog. If Starting Strength was a leather-bound textbook with charts and citations, Chaos and Pain was a bloodied combat journal scribbled in the trenches - all-caps, unfiltered, and deeply, purposefully unhinged.
Frequency: Train Until the World Makes Sense (or Doesn’t)
While the rest of the lifting world was being taught to “recover more than you train,” Jamie Lewis was lifting six or seven days a week - often multiple times per day. Squats on Monday. Zerchers on Tuesday. Deads on Wednesday. Repeat. No deloads, no autoregulation. Just high-frequency, high-intensity, and a deep, near-masochistic belief that more is more.
You weren’t supposed to follow his template and expect balance. You were supposed to break yourself against it and see what rose from the wreckage.
Singles, Partials, and Shrugs from Hell
The modern trend of triple progression and RPE charts would’ve been laughed off the Chaos and Pain homepage. Jamie’s philosophy was much simpler:
Lift heavy.
Lift often.
Shrug something obscene.
Then go heavier.
He chased heavy singles, partials, and top-end overload with religious fervour. He wrote entire posts about dead-stop rack pulls from mid-thigh and barbell shrugs in the 600–700lb range. Zercher squats were featured so often they practically had their own tag. If it hurt, it was probably working. If it was weird and painful and looked stupid to a Globo Gym crowd? Even better.
Machines Are for Cowards. GPP Is for Warriors.
Where most programs still treated machines as essential accessories, Jamie treated them like symbols of moral weakness. If you were caught doing cable curls instead of carrying something or slamming a sledgehammer into a tyre, you were the problem. He openly mocked bodybuilders for “preening” and celebrated GPP as the cornerstone of real strength. Sandbags, hill sprints, loaded carries, sledgehammer conditioning - this was the chaos-fuelled equivalent of Louie Simmons’ sled dragging, but with more profanity and fewer sleds.
And while the writing was often angry and aggressive, it was also laced with philosophical undertones. You’d get a breakdown of heavy partials followed by a digression on Nietzsche, ancient warriors, or obscure mythological figures. It wasn’t just lifting for lifting’s sake - it was a worldview built around confrontation, discomfort, and transcendence through intensity.
Records, Not Just Rants
Despite the insanity, or maybe because of it, Jamie Lewis got results. This wasn’t all smoke and shrugs. He is a former world record holder in powerlifting in the 181lbs class.
The Cult of Intensity
The real hook of the Chaos and Pain era wasn’t just the methods - it was the mindset. The blog didn’t try to meet you where you were. It dared you to rise to its level. And if you couldn’t? Well, don’t waste everyone’s time.
“Train like a lunatic or don’t train at all.”
That line, or some version of it, bled through every post. Intensity wasn’t a variable - it was a requirement. There was no grey area. No middle ground. You either wanted to be a savage, or you were wasting oxygen.
The Good: Actionable Insights & Enduring Lessons
For all the chaos, carnage, and caffeine-induced rambling, Chaos and Pain delivered something a lot of lifters missed at the time - real-world value.
It wasn’t a structured system, but if you read between the lines (or just read 40 articles back-to-back at 2am), you’d start to piece together a powerful blueprint built on intensity, variation, and total disdain for comfort.
Here’s what actually stuck:
🔩 Heavy Singles and Top-End Work
Singles weren’t just allowed - they were the goal.
Jamie regularly hit 90%+ lifts in training, sometimes daily.
High-intensity wasn’t feared; it was fuel.
This approach built genuine top-end strength without the fuckery.
If you were recovering? Push harder. If you weren’t? Adapt or die.
Lesson: Stop treating heavy singles like precious artefacts. Use them, rotate them, build from them.
🔁 Lift Rotation (Without Overthinking It)
Before "movement variability" became a buzzword, Chaos and Pain was already rotating lifts constantly.
One week might be dead-stop squats; next week, deficit stiff-legs.
Zerchers. Good mornings. Rack pulls. Front squats. Then cycle again.
Lesson: You don’t need a spreadsheet to rotate effectively. You just need guts, intent, and a shortlist of soul-destroying movements.
🪓 Overhead Work, Sandbags, Odd Lifts
Pressing wasn’t optional. Jamie built serious overhead strength with barbells, dumbbells, logs, anything heavy and awkward.
Sandbags featured heavily - carried, shouldered, thrown, cursed at.
Zerchers weren’t a novelty. They were a staple.
Lesson: Lifting weird, hard stuff makes you harder. The end.
📈 Volume by Obsession, Not Obligation
You didn’t follow a set/rep scheme. You chased madness.
Two-a-days weren’t a special block - they were Tuesday.
Jamie’s logs were full of sessions that looked like overtraining to anyone else… but they worked.
Lesson: You probably aren’t doing too much. You’re probably just doing too much soft shit.
🧠 Turning Anecdotes into Action
Between the aggression and absurdity, Jamie had a real gift: → Telling stories that made you want to train harder.
Whether it was an obscure war reference or a rant about why you should shrug more, it always came back to one thing: do something today that makes you stronger tomorrow.
Lesson: Philosophy matters. The mindset behind the lift can fuel ten times the progress.
This wasn’t about balance. It wasn’t even about programming in the traditional sense. But if you absorbed what Chaos and Pain was actually saying - beneath the screaming - you walked away stronger, meaner, and far more willing to suffer in the name of progress.
he Unhinged: Ramblings, Rants, and Chaos
At its peak, Chaos and Pain wasn’t just a blog - it was an unfiltered hybrid of training log, war journal, underground manifesto, and deranged stand-up routine. One part history lesson, one part program breakdown, three parts caffeine-fuelled mania.
This wasn’t a polished content platform. There were no lead magnets, no eBook funnels, no SEO strategy. What you got was pure, uncensored Jamie Lewis - mid-rant, mid-lift, mid-apocalypse - and it was incredible.
🧠 Where Structure Went to Die
You’d open a post expecting a squat write-up and instead get:
A breakdown of ancient Assyrian torture techniques
A rant about shoulder day
A snatch joke that wouldn’t make it past HR
Then a 700lb deadlift variation followed by a protein shake recipe laced with pre-workout and contempt
There were no clean transitions. No attempts to tone it down. Just a chaotic stream of consciousness, like Fear and Loathing in a squat rack.
📚 Legendary Post Titles That Belong in a Museum
Some of the most iconic pieces read like mixtape tracks or rejected punk zine covers:
“Heavens! You Say I’ve Worked My Shoulders Too Many Times This Week?!?” → A hilarious, aggressive takedown of bro-science recovery dogma
“Who Loves Snatch? I Sure as Hell Do.” → Half Olympic lifting, half sexual innuendo, 100% madness.
“Say Uncle, Bitch!” → A grappling-inspired piece on domination, physicality, and refusing to quit - written like a cage match with punctuation.
“How Do You Make a Hormone - Don’t Pay Her” (Parts 1 & 2)
→ A two-part deep dive into hormone science, PEDs, and physical transformation, laced with chaos, brilliance, and one of the most offensively clever titles in lifting blog history.
Each post was a mood. A vibe. A gut punch. And whether you laughed, raged, or hit a new PR after reading - you felt something.
🎭 Pros and Cons of the Gonzo Tone
✅ The Good:
Wildly engaging - you couldn’t stop reading
Made strength training feel visceral, violent, fun again
Created a cult following without trying to sell one
Embedded real training gems inside absurdist humour and fury
Inspired lifters to train with teeth, not just templates
❌ The Trade-offs:
Zero filtering = not for the easily offended
Hard to separate signal from noise without serious attention
No traditional structure = hard for beginners to follow
Some rants aged like milk (though that was half the charm)
You had to want to be there - it didn’t meet you halfway
Chaos and Pain was never meant to be a curriculum. It was a cultural artefact. A Molotov thrown at fitness conformity. The tone was unhinged, but it worked because it wasn’t fake. The rage was real. The lifts were real. And the lessons were often buried inside three paragraphs of profanity and brilliance.
You didn’t read it for clarity. You read it for permission - to be angry, strong, and absolutely unreasonable in your pursuit of something bigger than mediocrity
Programming: Structured Chaos
There were no spreadsheets. No intro blocks. No "Rate of Perceived Effort" charts. If you came to Chaos and Pain looking for a clean 5x5 template or a two-week intro cycle before things got hard - you were already in the wrong place.
Jamie Lewis called his flagship program Issuance of Insanity for a reason. This was programming as provocation - a deliberate rejection of every mainstream model. And yet, somehow, it worked.
It wasn’t just insanity. It was structured chaos. Enough order to make it work. Enough madness to make it evolve.
🔀 Lifting Medleys: Barbell Combat Drills
Instead of “Squat 3x5 and go home,” Jamie had sessions that looked like:
Zercher squat → Deadlift → Good morning → Shrugs
All heavy. All raw. All in the same session.
Think of it as barbell medleys for war readiness. Your body didn’t get to settle. That was the point.
Lesson: If your training feels too predictable, it probably is.
🌪️ Chaos Cycles
Rather than traditional deloads or periodisation, Jamie rotated movements and loading based on feel, obsession, and attitude.
One week: 20 singles at 92.5%
Next week: Sandbag carries, barbell snatches, heavy Zerchers
Week after that? 30-rep shrug sets followed by sledgehammer GPP
There was logic - but it was brutal and instinctive, not scientific and polite.
Lesson: Adaptation lives on the edge of your comfort zone. Chaos pushes you off the ledge.
🎲 Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Days
Some sessions were laid out like a menu with one rule: make it violent.
Max effort upper + 3 shrug variations
Pick a squat and go until your vision narrows
Hit a snatch PR, then do hill sprints, then go out drinking
There was structure, but the lifter filled in the blanks. It demanded engagement, self-trust, and borderline recklessness.
Lesson: Ownership over your training isn’t optional - it’s where real growth begins.
🧨 Daily Maxing: If the Bulgarians Could, So Can You
Chaos and Pain championed ultra-frequent, high-intensity lifting - drawing on Bulgarian Olympic lifting methods but filtered through a meathead lens.
Daily squats
Regular max attempts
Repeated heavy singles at 90–95% - not once a week, but whenever the hell you felt like it
No taper, no finesse - just immersion through intensity.
Lesson: Stop fearing the weight. Start confronting it.
⚖️ Just Enough Order, Just Enough Madness
This wasn’t mindless chaos. The structure was there - like a cage made of broken glass:
High-frequency lifting
Constant variation of movement and intensity
Odd lifts and GPP to plug gaps
Heavy partials to overload weak points
Philosophy embedded in the programming
You couldn’t follow it blindly - but that was the point. You had to earn it. You had to figure it out under the bar.
You weren’t given a roadmap. You were handed a torch and shoved into the woods. That’s what made it beautiful.
Influence on Modern Lifters (Including Me)
For all its madness, profanity, and pre-workout psychosis, Chaos and Pain left a mark.
It didn’t just stir the pot - it cracked it over the head, spat in it, and then dared you to drink. And for a certain type of lifter, at a certain point in time, it was exactly what was needed.
I was one of them.
I didn’t adopt Jamie Lewis’ methods wholesale (not many could without falling apart), but the impact? That’s still visible in how I coach, program, and write to this day.
🔁 It Changed How I Thought About Programming
Reading Chaos and Pain was like getting permission to break all the rules I didn’t know I was allowed to question.
Why not lift five days a week?
Why shouldn’t you shrug 300kg for reps on a Tuesday night?
What if fatigue management was just an excuse to stop early?
It showed me that intensity could be trained, not feared - and that chaos could force adaptation when used with intent.
🧱 Influence on Strongman & Hybrid Training
A lot of my off-season strongman templates - especially for intermediate or borderline hybrid athletes - still echo that Chaos and Pain vibe:
Odd lifts rotated aggressively
Sandbag work for conditioning AND power
Shrugs, carries, GPP medleys
High-frequency strain blocks
These aren’t Westside clones. They’re informed by Conjugate, yes - but coloured by that Lewis-style belief in doing hard, weird things with intent and violence.
Lesson: It’s okay if a program looks a little unhinged - if it makes you stronger, it works.
⚔️ Strain Tolerance & Conjugate… Even if Jamie Hated Westside (Sort Of)
Jamie hated Westside - or at least, the internet version of it. He posted mutliple articles about how the original Culver City westside was far better. But the funny thing is, some of his best ideas line up with Conjugate principles, whether he liked it or not:
Max effort rotation
Ultra-heavy singles
Odd-object training
High-intensity variation blocks
It wasn’t Westside as Louie taught it - but it was Conjugate in spirit. Just wrapped in blood, chalk, and rage.
💡 What I Do Differently Now
I don’t train like Jamie Lewis. Not anymore.
But I don’t train like Rippetoe either. Or Sheiko. Or some TikTok template with “evidence-based” in the name.
Instead, I coach with a blend of what actually works:
✅ Structured rotation
✅ Movement intent
✅ GPP and carryover
✅ Strain tolerance built over time
✅ Enough chaos to stay dangerous - but enough order to keep progressing
Because that’s the real takeaway: Jamie Lewis hit me at the right time. And more than anything, he got me thinking differently. He broke me out of a box I didn’t know I was in.
And sometimes, that’s what real influence looks like. Not a template. Not a coaching cert. But a spark.
The Legacy: A Time Capsule Worth Revisiting
Chaos and Pain wasn’t just a blog. It was a war cry, a philosophy, a middle finger to every lifter treating training like a school project.
And while much of today’s fitness content is polished, palatable, and algorithm-approved, Jamie Lewis’ writing stands as a time capsule - one worth digging up, studying, and maybe even emulating, if you’ve got the stomach for it.
🧠 More Than Sets and Reps
This wasn’t just about training splits and volume prescriptions. It was about:
Identity
Rebellion
Strength as a form of defiance
Jamie didn’t just write how to train - he wrote why. And that why was always bigger than chasing numbers.
Training wasn’t for sport. It was for survival. For becoming something savage. And you felt that in every line, every rant, every max-effort shrug.
💥 Mental Fortitude, Aggression, and Non-Conformity
What Jamie gave lifters was permission to go there - mentally, emotionally, physically.
He made rage usable
He made pain acceptable
He made quitting unthinkable
In a world full of “balance” and “self-care,” Chaos and Pain was a necessary correction. A reminder that sometimes, progress hurts. That sometimes, being good at this means not being good at moderation.
It wasn’t healthy. It was real.
🤷♂️ Why Most Wouldn’t Understand It Now
Let’s be honest: drop Chaos and Pain on today’s average lifter and they’d either cancel it or miss the point entirely.
Too aggressive
Too offensive
Not evidence-based enough
Doesn’t fit into a three-swipe infographic
But that’s exactly why it matters.
This was writing that didn’t care if you liked it. It wasn’t trying to build a funnel or go viral. It was raw expression - of strength, madness, passion, obsession - the kind of voice you can’t fake and shouldn’t forget.
🗿 Why It’s Worth Preserving
Because it challenged the norm. Because it inspired a generation of lifters to think for themselves. Because it made training feel like war, not work.
Even if you don’t follow Jamie’s methods... Even if you think his tone was too much... Even if you don’t shrug 700lbs or drink Ferox like it’s water...
You can still learn something from the chaos.
That’s the legacy: a little disorder, a lot of strength, and a complete rejection of average.
A Tribute, Not a Template
Let’s be clear: this isn’t about copying Jamie Lewis.
It’s not a call to train seven days a week until your spine taps out, or to mainline a pre-workout named after a war crime. You don’t need to write like you’re mid-bar fight or squat until you see stars just to make progress.
But what Chaos and Pain offered - and what still matters today - is the mindset behind it all.
This was lifting as defiance. As identity. As ritual.
Jamie Lewis showed what happens when you treat the gym like a proving ground, not a pastime - where every rep is a rebellion, and every PR is a middle finger to mediocrity. It wasn’t polished. It wasn’t balanced. But it was real.
For lifters who feel like they don’t quite fit the algorithm-friendly coaching world - who want something harder, darker, sharper - his writing felt like home.
There’s a difference between reading a program and feeling like you’ve been punched in the chest by one.
Jamie Lewis delivered the latter.
Want That Mindset, with a Bit More Structure?
I coach lifters who train with purpose, not passivity. If you want strength built on violence, vision, and real-world application - without the burnout spiral - I’ll help you find it.
📩 Apply for coaching or drop me a DM.
💥 Programs. Intensity. Sanity-optional.
And maybe, just maybe, I’ll write a book that’s nothing but my blog ramblings stitched together with duct tape and chalk. We’ll call it Issuance of Insolence.
You’ve been warned.
Thanks for reading.
If you got something out of this post, you'll find even more inside my new book, Outsider Strength. It's a full collection of my best writing - updated, expanded, and sharpened into one place.
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