Starting Strength: Basic Barbell Training

A weak man is not as happy as that same man would be if he were strong. This reality is offensive to some people who would like the intellectual or spiritual to take precedence. It is instructive to see what happens to these very people as their squat strength goes up.

There is simply no other exercise, and certainly no machine, that produces the level of central nervous system activity, improved balance and coordination, skeletal loading and bone density enhancement, muscular stimulation and growth, connective tissue stress and strength, psychological demand and toughness, and overall systemic conditioning than the correctly performed full squat.

The deadlift also serves as a way to train the mind to do things that are hard.

Humans are not physically normal in the absence of hard physical effort.

You do not need to do many different exercises to get strong - you need to get strong on a very few important exercises, movements that train the whole body as a system, not as a collection of separate body parts. The problem with the programs advocated by all the national exercise organizations is that they fail to recognize this basic principle: the body best adapts as a whole organism to stress applied to the whole organism. The more stress that can be applied to as much of the body at one time as possible, the more effective and productive the adaptation will be.

There is no easy way to do a deadlift—not involving actually picking up the bar—which explains their lack of popularity in gyms around the world.

Squatting' in a Smith machine is an oxymoron. A Smith machine is not a squat rack, no matter what the girls at the front desk tell you. A squat cannot be performed on a Smith machine any more than it can be performed in a small closet with a hamster. Sorry. There is a gigantic difference between a machine that makes the bar path vertical for you and a squat that is executed correctly enough to have a vertical bar path. The job of keeping the bar path vertical should be done by the muscles, skeleton, and nervous system, not by grease fittings, rails, and floor bolts.

Physical strength is the most important thing in life. This is true whether we want it to be or not.

If you insist on using a thumbless grip on the bench, you need to do it at home so that when the ambulance comes (if anyone is there to call 911), it doesn’t disrupt anyone else’s training.

If your gym makes a lot of money selling gloves, you have another reason to look for a different gym. And if you insist on using them, make sure they match your purse.

Remember: lifting more weight is not always the same thing as getting stronger.

but the reality of millions of years of adaptation to a ruggedly physical existence will not just go away because desks were invented.

...full range of motion, multi-joint exercises are not supposed to isolate any one muscle. We use them precisely because they don't. We want them to work lots of muscles through a long range of motion. We like it when some muscles are called into function as other muscles drop out of function, and when muscles change function during the exercise. This is because we are training for strength. We are concerned with improving the functional motion around a joint. We are not just concerned about our "favorite muscles." We do not have favorite muscles.

you don’t get to redefine the exercise and then claim that it’s dangerous. Driving a car is dangerous if you drive it into a great big rock.

If it’s too heavy to squat below parallel, it’s too heavy to have on your back.

Stance is a highly individual thing and will vary with hip width, hip ligament tightness, femur and tibia length and proportion, adductor and hamstring flexibility, knee joint alignment, and ankle flexibility. Everybody’s stance will be slightly different, but shoulder-width heels, with toes at 30 degrees, is a good place to start.

So barbell training, even done incorrectly, is comparatively safe.

This lack of posterior support produces an anterior-dominant force distribution on the knee: the further back the hips are, the more hip muscle you use, and the further forward the knees, the more quad you use. Many cases of patellar tendinitis have been caused by this incorrect squat technique.

Pressing incorrectly is not the same thing as pressing – you don’t get to redefine the exercise and then claim that it’s dangerous. Driving a car is dangerous if you drive it into a great big rock.

The relatively recent innovation known as the Division of Labor is not so remote that our genetic composition has had time to adapt again. Since most of us now have been freed from the necessity of personally obtaining our subsistence, physical activity is regarded as optional. Indeed it is, from the standpoint of immediate necessity, but the reality of millions of years of adaptation to a ruggedly physical existence will not just go away because desks were invented.

The Super Athletes (A.S. Barnes and Co., 1970)

you go to the doctor when you have a back injury, nine times out of ten she will tell you that “You just tore a back muscle. Take these drugs and quit lifting so much weight.” This diagnosis and recommendation reflect a lack of personal experience with these types of injuries and a lack of understanding regarding how and when muscles actually get torn and how they heal.

exercise is the stimulus that returns our bodies to the conditions for which they were designed.