"Starting Strength: Basic Barbell Training" by Mark Rippetoe & Lon Kilgore

• No matter what your personal circumstances might be (the universe is unconcerned with such details), you get out of life exactly what you have contributed to the effort.
• Exercise is not a thing we do to fix a problem -- it is a thing we must do anyway, a thing without which there will always be problems.
• The human body functions as a complete system -- it works that way, and it likes to be trained that way.
• Barbells, and the primary exercises we use them to do, are far superior to any other training tools that have ever been devised.
• The only problem with barbell training is the fact that the vast, overwhelming majority of people don’t know how to do it correctly.
• The full range of motion exercise known as the squat is the single most useful exercise in the weight room, and our most valuable tool for building strength, power, and size.
• Total-body power development originates in the hips, and the ability to generate power diminishes with distance from the hips.
• If it’s too heavy to squat below parallel, it’s too heavy to have on your back.
• Set the rack height so that the bar in the rack is at about the level of your mid-sternum.
• We will use a fairly neutral foot placement, with the heels about shoulder width apart, the toes pointed out at about 30 degrees.
• Your feet should be flat on the floor, your knees are shoved out to where they are in a parallel line with your feet, and your knees are just a little in front of your toes.
• Come up out of the bottom by driving your butt straight up in the air. Up, not forward.
• Keep the chest up while you are driving the hips, so that your back maintains a constant angle with the floor as you move out of the deep position.
• Chalk is always a good idea, because it dries out the skin, and dry skin is less prone to folding and abrasion than moist skin, and therefore is less prone to problem callus formation.
• Use the lower position, where the bar is carried just below the spine of the scapula, on top of the posterior deltoids. This lower position shortens the lever arm formed by the weight of the bar transmitted down the back to the hips, producing less torque at the low back and consequently a safer exercise.
• A narrower grip tightens your shoulder muscles so that the bar is supported by muscle and doesn't dig into your back.
• The thumb should be placed on top of the bar, so that the wrist can be held in a straight line with the forearm.
• The correct grip keeps the hand above the bar and all of the weight of the bar on the back.
• The bar should be placed in correct position -- just immediately under the “bone” you feel at the top of the shoulder blades, with the hands and thumb on top of the bar -- and then secured in place by lifting the elbows and the chest at the same time.
• Take a big breath and hold it, look down at a spot on the floor about 6 feet in front your your position, and squat.
• A careless approach to grip placement could result in problems with heavy weights.
• The thumb should be placed on top of the bar, so that the wrist can be held in a straight line with the forearm.
• Elbows should be elevated to the rear with the hands on top, not placed directly under the bar where they intercept part of the weight.
• A common error is the tendency for some lifters to drive the hips forward instead of upward, especially right before the transition point between hp drive and quads, a little above parallel.
• Don’t think about going down while you’re going down -- think about coming up the whole time.
• By far, the two most common knees errors are:
• knees in too much
• knees too far forward, either early in the descent or at the bottom
• The recommended stance is heels at about shoulder width apart, toes pointed out at about 30 degrees.
• Any squat attempt or set of squats you are uncertain you can do or even a little worried about should be spotted by two people.
• A one-person spot for a squat cannot be safely accomplished.
• A properly designed and adjusted belt is useful as a safety device when squatting heavy weights.
• A properly designed belt is four inches wide, all the way around.
• Your belt should be used judiciously, possibly restricted to the last warm-up and work sets, if then. You may not need a belt at all for much of the early part of your training career, and if your abs are strong and your back is uninjured, you may prefer to never use one.
• Dumbbells -- being not tied together between the hands as with a barbell -- require more active, conscious control, are harder to do, and are therefore less commonly done.
• ALWAYS start every lift with an empty bar, whether learning it for the first time or warming up for a personal record.
• Maybe the biggest, dumbest, most common problem involving the hands is the use of the thumbless grip. This is absolutely the worst habit you can develop with regard to safety, and is detrimental to performance as well.
• The grip is thumbless in the squat because the bar is not moving -- you are; for all movements where the bar moves, the full grip should be used. The thumb secures the bar in your grip, and without your thumb around the bar it is merely balanced over the end of your arm.
• Another problem with the thumbless grip is that it diminishes lifting efficiency: what the hands cannot squeeze, the shoulders cannot drive.
• The most efficient transmission of power to the bar would be directly from the heel of the palm to the bar through the forearm position vertically, perpendicular to the bar. Your grip should be positioned with this in mind, with the bar placed directly over the palm heel and then your hand rotated out so that the thumb can hook around the bar.
• The greatest range of motion is obtained with a grip that places the forearms in a vertical position when the bar is on the chest.
• Do not push your head into the bench.
• You need to learn how to tighten up your neck without pushing on the bench with the back of your head. As a practical matter, this involves holding your head about a half-inch off the bench during the rep.
• Bridging takes work away from the target muscles by making the movement mechanically easier.
• The feet need to be wide enough apart to provide lateral stability for the hips and, through the tightness in the trunk muscles, the torso as it is planted on the bench.
• Proper foot position would be flat against the floor so that heels can be used as the base of the drive up the legs. As with most of the things in the weight room, your heels need to be nailed down to the floor.
• Novices should probably take a breath before each rep, hold it during the rep, and exhale at lockout, using the very brief break between reps to make sure everything is set correctly.
• If you can breathe during a rep, you’re not tight enough.
• No rep counts that is touched by anybody other than the lifter. No spotter touches any bar that is still moving up.
• The bar is stuck when it reaches a point of zero upward movement. This will shortly be followed by a deterioration in position as it begins to move down.
• The deadlift builds back strength better than any other exercise, bar none.
• There is no easy way to do a deadlift -- no way to cheat, which explains their lack of popularity in most gyms around the world.
• The deadlift is a simple movement. The bar is pulled off the floor up the legs with straight arms until the knees, hips, and shoulders are locked out.
• It is very easy to do wrong, and a wrong deadlift is a potentially dangerous thing.
• The deadlift is also easy to overtrain; a heavy workout takes a long time to recover from, and this fact must be kept in mind when setting up your training schedule.
• If the bar stays on the floor, the problem is either the grip, an injury producing sufficient pain to distract from the pull, or a lack of experience with pulling a heavy weight that would rather stay where it is.
• Grip strength is crucial to the deadlift, and the deadlift works grip strength better than any other major exercise.
• The lift is famous for its alternate grip, but the use of the double-overhand grip as much as possible makes for stronger hands.
• The back will not pull off the floor what the hands cannot hold, due to proprioceptive feedback that tells the back the weight is too heavy.
• You should apply chalk before you start training every day, for all the lifts.
• Gloves have no place in a serious training program.
• The stance for the deadlift is about the same as the stance for a flat-footed vertical jump, about 12-15 inches between the heels with the toes pointed very slightly out.
• The bar should be about 1 to 1.5 inches from your shins.
• Take your grip on the bar by bending over at the waist, and then bend your knees and lift the chest.
• The grip and the stance are interrelated in that your stance must be set to allow the best grip, and the best grip for the deadlift is one that allows your arms to hang as straight down from the shoulders as possible in order to make the shortest possible distance from the floor to lockout for the bar.
• Make sure you are finishing each deadlift with locked knees.
• Get in the habit of holding the bar locked out at the top for just a second before you set it down, so that a stable position is achieved first.
• The press, performed in rather strict fashion is the most useful upper-body exercise for sports conditioning.
• Rotator cuff problems can be addressed in training before they ever start by making sure that bench press work is balanced by an equivalent amount of overhead work. For every bench press workout there should be at least on press workout.
• Don’t move the bar back. You move your body forward under the bar.
• The term “clean” refers to a way to get the bar clear of the floor “clean” to the shoulders. If this is accomplished in one movement, it is a clean; if in two (if it stops on the way up on the chest or a belt) it is referred to as a “Continental Clean.”
• In the modern usage, the term “clean” refers to a full squat clean.
• The term “power” as a qualifier in front of an exercise refers to an abbreviated version of a more involved movement, the shorter version being harder to perform at the expense of reduced technique requirements.
• The power clean, by training the athlete to move a heavy weight quickly, is the glue that cements the strength program to sports performance.
• Strength developed at a slow rate of speed can only be effectively used slowly, but strength developed at a high rate of speed can be used at that high speed and at speeds slower than that.
• The power clean is not an arms movement, at all, and if you first learn that a jump is the core of the movement, you will never learn to arm-pull the bar.
• When you are racking the bar fairly well, begin to stomp your feet as you catch it.
• This is a very natural movement, and will add explosion to the jump and quickness to the catch, as you anticipate the faster foot movement required to stomp. Again, be sure that each pull starts from the jumping position, touching the thigh with straight elbows. This cannot be overemphasized, as the pull will be wrong if the jump starts from any other position.
• The hips lower the bar to the knees, and the knees lower the bar to the floor.
• The hook grip is critical in enabling heavy weights to be used. It should not be considered optional.
• It is accomplished by simply laying the middle finger on top of the thumbnail as the grip wraps around the bar, and letting the bar settle into the bottom of the “hook” make by the fingers, so that the bar rests in the fingers during the pull, not the tight fist.
• The hook will need to be reset for each rep.
• The entire purpose of the lower half of the pull, the deadlift part, is to get the bar into the jumping position, so that the bar can be accelerated on up to the rack position. As such, it is far more important for the pull from the floor to be correct than it is for it to be fast. Remember this: the bar must be pulled correctly at the bottom and fast at the top.
• Jerking the bar off the floor is the most common problem after the transition to the full power clean from the hand.
• The feet will stomp into their same footprints, or just a little wider.
• After you rack the bar, recover back to a fully upright stance with elbows still in the rack position.
• Eyes should be focus slightly down on a fixed position on the floor in front of you.
• The slow movements rely on absolute strength -- the simple ability to generate force in the correct position -- at their limit capacity, while the quick lifts utilize the ability to apply maximum power at exactly the right time, in exactly the right place.
• The squat, bench press, deadlift, press, and clean form the basis of any successful, well-designed training program.
• The best assistance exercises are those that contribute directly to the performance of the basic movements that produce the most benefit.
• An excellent way to improve a stuck bench press is to add chin-ups to the workout. Chins add enough work to the triceps, forearms, and upper back that the contribution of these muscles groups to the bench press is reinforced for the trainee that needs a little extra work.
• Assistance exercises work by either:
• strengthening a part of a movement, like a partial deadlift -- a rack pull or a halting deadlift
• are variations on the basic exercises, like a stiff-legged deadlift
• are ancillary exercises, which strengthen a portion of the muscle mass involved in the movement in a way that the basic exercises does not, like the chin-up
• When your deadlift gets strong enough that heavy sets of five create more stress than can easily be recovered from within the time frame of your training, it might be good to alternate two assistance exercises instead of the deadlift.
• Rack shrugs are best left for competitive lifters that have trained for a couple of years, and there is no real reason for athletes that are not powerlifters or weightlifters to do them at all.
• If you cannot easily hang clean 135, you have no business doing heavy shrugs.
• Heavy shrugs make the traps grow; there is no doubt about it.
• The term “partial” when applied to squats refers mainly to the use of a non-standard technique that selectively focuses on a portion of the whole squat, and not really to the depth, since most of these methods will involved a full range of motion.
• Anytime a new movement is introduced, be conservative with the weight you use the first time you do the exercise.
• As a general rule, exercises that depend on less muscle mass or fewer muscles groups tend to fail more abruptly in their bar path then exercises that use more muscles.
• The decline press is a rather useless exercise because the angle of the body in the decline position shortens the distance the bar can travel, decreasing the amount of work done with respect to the distance the load moves.
• It should be said that if you are doing both bench presses and presses, everything that the incline press accomplishes is redundant; there is no aspect of shoulder and chest work that these two exercises do not more than adequately cover.
• The SLDL is essentially an RDL off the floor -- without the stretch reflex -- with a couple of other differences.
• Basically, a good morning is performed be bending over with the bar on your neck until your torso gets parallel with the ground or lower and then returning to an upright position.
• Done correctly, good mornings make the back stronger; done incorrectly, they can make the back injured.
• The push press uses momentum generated by the hips and knees to start the bar up, and then the press is finished with the shoulders and triceps as you normally would.
• There is no chin-up like motion in any of the five major lifts, yet chins are a terribly useful exercise. They are multi-joint, they involve the movement of the whole body, they work many muscles groups, and they are dependant on a complete range of motion for their quality -- all characteristics of the major exercises.
• Weighted chin-ups and dips are quite useful at lower reps and heavy weights.
• The pull-up is not only a good exercise, it’s a very good indicator of upper body strength.
• For purposes of this discussion, the term “pull-up” will refer to the version of the exercises with the hands prone, while “chin-up” or just “chin” refers to the supine hand position. The major -- and significant -- difference between the two is the bicep involvement in the chin-up and the lack of it in the pull-up. The additional of the biceps makes chin-ups a little easier than pull-ups, as well as adding the aesthetic elements of arm work to the movement.
• But any version of the chin-up/pull-up, where the whole body moves, is better than the machine version of the exercise, the “lat pulldown,” where only the arms move.
• Weighted chins and pull-ups are an excellent source of heavy non-pressing work for the upper body.
• The quality of an exercise increases with the involvement of more muscles, more joints, and more central nervous system activity needed to control them. The more of the body involved in an exercises, the more of these criteria are met.
• Parallel bars will usually be between 24-26 inches wide, and the most comfortable ones will be made out of 1 ¼ or 1 ½ inch pipe or bar stock. They are between 48 and 54 inches high, tall enough to allow the feet to completely clear the ground at the bottom of the dip.
• The two most common errors in performing dips involve the completeness of the movement. Do your dips deep, with a lighter weight if necessary, so you don’t miss the actual benefit of the exercise. The other problem is a failure to lock the elbows out at the top between reps.
• Barbell rows start on the floor and end on the floor, each and every rep. The bar does not hang from the arms between reps. Each rep is separated by a breath and a reset of the lower back.
• From the correct stance, take the grip on the bar, take a big breath, raise it from the floor with straight elbows to get it moving, and continue it on up by bending the elbows and slamming the bar into the upper part of the belly.
• The back should never get much above horizontal, and if the chest comes up too high on the last reps, the bar is hitting too low, the range of motion for the target muscles has shortened, and the weight is too heavy.
• The isolation of a single muscle group that moves a single joint seldom contributes significantly to other more complex movements which include that muscle group. A good definition of “functional exercise” is a normal human movement that can be performed under a scalable, increasable load.
• The wider the grip, the greater the degree of supination that will be required to maintain that grip, and the greater the supination, the more the biceps will be contracted at full flexion.
• The elbows are kept against the ribcage and start from a position in front of the bar.
• The elbows never straighten completely, since this would mean that tension is off the biceps, but they get close.
• EZ Curls are not nearly as effective as straight-bar curls for recruiting bicep contraction.
• The EZ Curl bar does in fact take the stress of supination off the wrists and elbows, but it does so at the expense of a quality bicep contraction.
• But the EZ Curl bar works fine for the lying triceps extension.
• Exercise is the same thing a getting a tan -- a stress imposed on the body that it can adapt to, but only if the stress is designed properly.
• The adaption occurs in response to the stress, and specifically to that stress, because the stress is what causes the adaptation.
• To get stronger, you must do something that requires that you be stronger to do it, and this must be built into the training program.
• The less experienced the athlete, the simpler the program should be. The stronger you become, the more susceptible you become to overtraining, a condition produced by the body’s inability to adapt to the stress level applied.
• So, as a general rule, you need to try to add weight to the work sets of the exercises every time you train, until you can’t do this anymore. This is the basic tenet of “progressive resistance training.”
• For as long as possible, make sure that you lift more weight each time.
• The deadlift, for instance, improves rather quickly for most people, faster than any of the other lifts, due to it limited range of motion around the hips and knees, and the fact that so many muscles are involved in the lift.
• The more muscle mass involved in an exercise, the faster the exercise can get strong and the stronger it has the potential to be.
• In a trained athlete, the deadlift will be stronger than the squat, the squat stronger than the bench press, the bench press and the power clean close with the bench usually a little stronger, and the press lighter than the other four.
• The squat should be learned first, since it is the most important exercise in the program and its skills are critical to all the other movements.
• Effective workouts need not be long, complicated affairs.
• Progress means more strength, not more exercises.
• It is not necessary to do many different exercises to get strong -- it is necessary 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.
• Essentially, you squat every workout and alternate the bench press and press, and the deadlift and power clean. This schedule is for three days per week, allowing a two-day rest at the end of the week. It will mean that one week you press and power clean twice, and the next week bench and deadlift twice. The workout should be done in the listed order, squatting first, the upper body movement second, and the pulling movement third.
• People without access to bumper plates may choose to use the barbell row instead of the power clean.
• Warmups server two very important purposes. First, warm ups actually make the soft tissue -- the muscles and tendons, and the ligaments that comprise the joints - warmer. This is important for injury prevention, since it is more difficult to injure a warm body than a cold one. The second function of warmup is especially important in barbell training: it allows you to practice the movement before the weight gets heavy.
• If your schedule does not allow time for proper warm up, it does not allow time for training at all.
• A work set is the heaviest weight or weights to be done in a given workout, the sets that actually produce the stress which causes the adaptation. Warm ups are the lighter sets previous to the work sets. Sets across refers to multiple work sets done with the same weight.
• As a general rule, the time between sets should be sufficient to recover from the previous set, so that fatigue for the prior set does not limit the one about to be done. The heavier the set, the longer the break should be.
• The squat benefits from sets across, usually three sets for novice trainees, as does the bench press and the press.
• The deadlift is hard enough, and is usually done after a lot of squatting, and one heavy set is usually sufficient.
• The power clean can be done with more sets across, since the weight is lighter relative to the squat and deadlift, and the limiting factor is usually technique, not absolute strength.
• Multiple work sets cause the body to adapt to a larger volume of work, which comes in handy when training for sports performance.
• In fact, one of the most effective intermediate strategies for the squat, bench, and press is five sets across of five reps, done once a week as one of the three workout, increasing the weight used by very small manageable amounts each week.
• A set of 20 squats can usually be done with a weight previously assumed to be a 10RM, given the correct mental preparation and a certain suicidal desire to grow or die.
• Psychologically, 20RM work is very hard, due to the pain, and people who are good at it develop the ability to displace themselves from the situation during the set. Or they just get very tough.
• Sets of five reps are a very effective compromise for the novice, and in fact even for the advanced lifter more interested in strength than muscular endurance.
• Training volume is calculated by multiplying the weight on the bar times the reps.
• The effective training of novices takes advantage of the fact that untrained people get strong very quickly at first, and this effect tapers off over time until advanced trainees gain strength only through careful manipulation of all training variables. Novice can, and should, increase the weight of the work sets every workout until this is no longer possible.
• Don’t be afraid to take small jumps -- be afraid to stop improving.
• It is always preferable to take smaller jumps and sustain the progress, then to take bigger jumps and get stuck early.
• It is easier to not get stuck then it is to get unstuck.
• Failure to train as scheduled is failure to follow the program, and if the program is not followed, progress cannot predictably occur.
• If you continually miss workouts, you are not actually training, and your obviously valuable time should be spent more productively elsewhere.
• Resist the temptation to add weight at the expense of correct technique -- you are doing no one any favors when you sacrifice form for wight on the bar.
• A program of this nature tends to produce the correct body weight in an athlete. That is, if you need to be bigger, you will grow, and if you need to lose bodyfat, that happens too.
• Eat 4 or so meals per day, based on meat and egg protein sources, with lots of fruit and vegetables, and lots of milk. Lots. Most sources within the heavy training community agree that a good starting place is one gram of protein per pound of bodyweight per day, with the rest of the diet makeup up 2500 - 5000 calories, depending on training requirements and body composition.
• People who drink lots of milk during their novice phase get bigger and stronger than people who don’t.
• At home, a good free-weight gym can be built in the garage for the price of three years gym dues.
• The power rack is the most important piece of equipment in the room, second only to the plate-loaded barbell as the most useful piece of gym equipment that has ever been invented. All five primary exercises can be done with a good rack, barbell, and flat bench.
• Your garage gym will not need anything but a flat bench, which should have the same dimensions and simple construction as the support bench without the uprights.
• Bars are the place to spend money, if you have it.
• Cheap bars will bend.
• A good bar should be properly knurled and marked, should be put together with roller pins or snap rings, not bolts, and should require little maintenance beyond wiping it off occasionally.
• All real wight rooms are equipped with standard barbell plates with a 2 inch center hole.
• Standard barbell plates come in 2.5, 5, 10, 25, 35, and 45 lb. sizes. Of these, all are necessary except the 35s. Any loading that involves a 35 can be done with a 25 and a 10, and the space saved on the plate racks can be used for additional, more useful plates.
• Springs work fine for most training purposes. If security is a problem, two can be used on each side.
• Chalk should be provided in the weight room, by either the gym or you. It increases traction between the bar and the hand, reducing the likelihood of lost bars and grip accidents.
• All people who are serious about their training write down their workouts.
• Soreness, unless it is extreme, is no impediment to training.
• If you are not training hard enough to produce occasional soreness, and therefore having to train while sore, you are not training very hard.
• If it has been just a few (fewer than 5 or 6) workouts missed, repeat the last workout you did before the layoff. You should be able to do this, although it may be fairly hard. this approach results in less progress lost than if significant backing-off is done, and the following workout can usually be done in the order it would have been had the layoff not occurred.
• Weight training is precisely scalable to the ability of the individual lifter.