Quote Originally Posted by BrotherIron View Post
You can learn the lifts by yourself but to learn them properly, you NEED some coaching. There is technique involved in powerlifting. It's childs play in comparison to Olympic Weightlifting but there is still some degree of technical difficulty when performing squats, deads, and benching. How many remember to flair there lats when performing the bench press? That is only one of many things which need to happen if you want to bench properly. Of course you can pick up a bar, squat it, press it, etc but if you want to be more than mediocre get some help in your technique.
I know you are way more experienced than me in the subject and I respect that, but I'll have to disagree with you. How did people back in the day learn the lifts by means of a coach? There is the story about how Bill Starr learned how to snatch by looking at pictures in weightlifting magazines, and my own story (far less memorable than Starr's) in which I have learned the lifts without direct coaching.
Sure, it took me quite a while to nail it down, and a coach would have helped but powerlifting is as popular as pesto flavored ice cream here in Brazil, so a proper coach would have been quite hard to find. So I just read SS, then I read it again and I would say I have quite decent technique and I've "coached" three friends of mine in the mean time. I'm still in mediocre territory, a 320 pound deadlift, a 285 pound squat, a 130 press and 175 bench, but I don't think it will take me that much time to get to serious weight territory and call myself something other than a mediocre lifter.