Deep Simplicity by John Gribbin

• It’s only when many atoms are linked together in complicated and interesting ways that complicated and interesting things like people are produced. But this process cannot continue indefinitely, since if more and more atoms are joined together, their total mass increases to the point where gravity crushes all the interesting structure out of existence.
• An atom, or even a simple molecule like water, is simpler than a human being because it has little internal structure; a star, or the interior of a planet, is smaller than a human being because gravity crashes any structure out of existence. And that is why science can tell us more about the behavior of atoms and the internal workings of the stars than it can about the way people behave.
• Entropy measures the amount of order in a system, with increasing disorder corresponding to increasing entropy. Since we know that in the real world, disorder increases in any closed system (things wear out) as time pases, the inevitable increase in entropy defines a direction of time, an arrow pointing from the ordered past into the disordered future.
• The truth is, there is no such thing as an isolated system (except for the entire Universe), and no system is ever in perfect equilibrium. It may get very close to equilibrium--as close as you like, if you wait long enough--but the equilibrium is never literally perfect.
• A linear system is more or less equal to the sum of its parts; a nonlinear system may be either much more, or much less, than the sum of its parts.
• In essence we have already found the underlying simplicity from which chaos and complexity emerge--simple laws, nonlinearity, and sensitivity to initial conditions and feedback are what make the world tick.
• Resonance is a way of getting a large return for a relatively small effort, by making the effort at just the right time and pushing a system the way it “wants” to go.
• In a system that is sufficiently sensitive to initial conditions, it is always possible that, no matter how many digits we choose to work with, the entire future of the system may, as Lorenz discovered, depend significantly on the value of the next digit, the one we have in effect thrown away.
• The universe cannot, in principle, be predicted in all its detail; but, equally, time cannot, in principle, be reversed.
• The Peano curve is a line that is more than a line, “trying” to be a plane; the Cantor set is a line that is less than a line, “trying” to be a point.
• The key thing about complex numbers is that they are in a sense two-dimensional, whereas everyday numbers are one-dimensional.
• The very term “dynamics” tells us that it describes how systems change; yet ideas such as entropy were derived from calculations involving systems in equilibrium, where nothing changes. Equilibrium itself is of no intrinsic interest, because nothing happens there. But how things move toward equilibrium can be very interesting.
• The nearest a living thing ever gets to equilibrium is when it dies. The fact that something is dead is nowhere near as interesting as how it died--a premise on which the success of a whole genre of detective novels, the murder mystery, is based.
• If the objects were infinitely far apart, the total energy stored by the gravitational field linking them would be zero--essentially because the force is proportional to one divided by infinity squared.
• It is a fundamental truth about the way the Universe works that gravitational fields have negative energy, and the for matter concentrated at a point, this negative energy exactly cancels out the mass-energy of the matter.
• The most important fact about the Universe today is that it is expanding.
• If things are getting farther apart now, then obviously they were closer together in the past, and if we go back far enough into the past, everything was on top of everything else in a single lump, the Big Bang.
• By measuring the present expansion rate of the Universe and using the general theory of relativity, we can pin down the time that has elapsed since the Big Bang to around fourteen billion years.
• One of the greatest things about astronomy is that because light takes a finite time to travel through space, we see things far away as they were long ago. A galaxy ten million light-years away, for example, is seen by light that left it ten million years ago.
• Without going into details of how stars work, we can see that stars only exist because clumps of gas have been drawn together by gravity and became hot enough inside for nuclear fusion reactions to take place.
• A complex system is really just a system that is made up of several simpler components interacting with one another.
• When scientists are confronted by complexity, their instinctive reaction is to try to understand it by looking at the appropriate simpler component and the way they interact with one another. Then they hope to find a simple law (or laws) that applies to the system they are studying. If all goes well, it will turn out that this law also applies to a wider sample of complex systems (as with the atomic model of chemistry, or the way the laws of cogwheels apply both to bicycles and to chronometers), and that they have discovered a deep truth about the way the world works. The method has worked for more than three hundred years as a guide to the behavior of systems close to equilibrium.
• You do not need to invoke some special, rare, and peculiar, physical effect in order to explain why large earthquakes occur--they just do.
• Power laws always mean that the thing being described by law is scale invariant.
• Whenever new discoveries are made in science, there is a bandwagon effect, with people trying to explain everything in terms of their new enthusiasm.
• The same size triggers do not all cause the same size events.
• The point is that any single event might be a special case, and doesn’t on its own tell you anything much about the underlying cause of similar events, or likelihood of their recurrence, any more than studying a single earthquake tells you much about earthquakes in general or how often they occur.
• Interesting things happen at the edge of chaos, and feedback is an essential ingredient in what makes them interesting.
• Evolution is a fact, just as the elliptical shape of the orbit of a planet around the Sun is a fact. There is ample evidence of evolution at work, transforming one species into another, both in the fossil record and from studies of present-day life on Earth.
• The test of a good model is not how simple it is, but how well it provides insight into real systems. In atomic physics, for example, it is at first sight an almost ridiculous simplification to treat atoms as miniature solar systems, with electrons “in orbit” around a central nucleus.
• Spectroscopy is the process of analyzing the light from an object by splitting it up into the rainbow spectrum, using a prism or some other device, and looking at the lines in the spectrum produced by different atoms or molecules in the object being studied.
• The difference between a hypothesis and a theory is that while a hypothesis is an idea about how things might work, it has not been tested by experiment and observation. If a hypothesis makes a prediction (or better, a series of predictions) about the way a new experiment will turn out, or what new observations will uncover, and if that prediction is borne out by events, then the hypothesis becomes a theory.
• The story of life in the Universe is another example of surface complexity built upon foundations of deep simplicity. There is new compelling evidence that the Universe as we know it emerged from a hot dense state (the Big Bang) some fourteen billion years ago. The basic building blocks that emerged from the Big Bang were hydrogen and helium, almost exactly in the proportions 3:1. All of the other chemical elements have been manufactured inside stars and scattered through space when those stars swell up and eject material in the later stages of their lives.
• Carbon plays the key role in life, because a single carbon atom is able to combine chemically with as many as four other atoms at once (including other carbon atoms, which may themselves be linked to yet more carbon atoms in rings and chains), so that is has an unusually rich chemistry.
• Chaos: In science, chaos occurs when a small change in the starting conditions of a process produces a big change in the outcomes of the process.
• Complexity: In science, a complex system is one that is chaotic, and in which the way the system develops feeds back on itself to change the way it is developing.
• Emergence: The appearance of structure in systems as they become more complex. When the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
• Entropy: A measure of the amount of disorder in the Universe or in some smaller system. Entropy always increases in the Universe at large. But order can arise in smaller systems that feed off energy from outside.
• Red Queen Hypothesis: A suggestion that in the living world, different species have to evolve as fast as they can in order to stay in the same ecological niche, because if they don’t, their competitors will evolve faster and displace them.

The Journey: A complete Strength Training Guide by Greg Nuckols

• What does it take to be as strong as you can be? Big muscles (duh). Master of the lifts you’ll be using to demonstrate strength.
• There is a very large skill component to mastering a lift: You have to get your muscles to work in a very powerful yet precise manner to lift heavy stuff as effectively and efficiently as possible. This comes with practice--the more specific, the better.
• The less wear and tear you have on your body, the more you’ll be able to lift.
• Simple observation is enough to tell you that there are many roads leading to Rome.
• Remember, the four things we need to accomplish to get super strong:
• Big muscles
• Mastery of the lifts
• Healthy joints
• Age/minimizing the time it takes to get there
• Each phase of your training will be governed by a simple question: What obstacles standing between me and my end goal are hindering me the most right now? This question helps give your training clarity.
• The first and most important factors are buy-in and habit formation.
• Most people who start an exercise program end up quitting within the first year.
• You need to enjoy your training. This is a key piece most people miss.
• Sticking with something is all about the things that make you want to continue outweighing the things that make you want to quit.
• When training new lifters, enjoyment matters just as much as progress.
• If new lifters don’t enjoy a program, they won’t stick with it, and if they don’t start seeing the results they’re looking for, they’ll get demotivated and quit.
• The second most important factor is developing proficiency with the movements you’re using to express your strength.
• The more times you do something, and do it the way you’re supposed to, the faster your nervous system will master and store the pattern.
• Simply doing the movements helps, but to gain proficiency with the lifts as quickly as possible, practice needs to be deep and purposeful to cement the skills and keep bad habits from developing.
• To get in enough work while avoiding failure and technical breakdown, multiple sets of low reps are your best bet.
• Generally, training each lift 2-4 times per week will give you the best bang for your buck.
• Practice is key for learning anything new.
• A high body fat percentage generally goes hand in hand with poor insulin sensitivity, and for every pound of tissue gained, a smaller percentage of it will be muscle, and a greater percentage of it will be fat.
• If you’re a male over 20% body fat, or a female over 30% body fat, getting down to the 12-15%/20-25% range will make it easier to train hard, recover well, and build more muscle and strength.
• If your conditioning is good, but your sleep habits are atrocious, then you’d benefit the most from getting more high quality sleep.
• If you set your calories to lose about 1% of your bodyweight per week, consume enough protein, and train hard, then you should have no issues gaining muscle and strength as you lose weight.
• A major mistake new lifters make is sticking with beginner programs for too long.
• Most of the strength gains you make on a beginner's program come from neurological improvements--your nervous system learning the lifts you’re performing.
• When you hit a wall and your lifts stop going up as quickly, it’s because you’re finally bumping up against the limits of how much you can lift with your current muscle mass. To continue getting stronger, you have to gain more muscle.
• Hypertrophy training generally involves training with accumulated fatigue because the main driver of muscle growth is training volume.
• When you hit a wall for the first time on a beginner's program, it’s time to shift training styles.
• Increasing your work capacity is of the utmost importance because, as previously mentioned, training volume is the #1 driver of hypertrophy. You’ve got to handle high training volume to grow, so you need to be able to recover from that training volume.
• A bigger muscle, all other things being equal, is a stronger muscle. There’s no way around it; past a point, you simply have to grow.
• Our bodies aren’t actually built very well for lifting heavy things. When you compare humans to comparably sized animals, we tend to be far weaker.
• Because muscles attach so close to joints, small variations can make a big difference.
• Proficiency/mastery comes with practice.
• I’d just like to point out that training with a focus on gaining mass to dominate at powerlifting is directly supported in the literature.
• If you stay the same size, you have a cap on how strong you can possibly get.
• The primary goal of intermediate training is to get into the highest weight class possible, as fast as possible, while still being fairly lean and protecting the joints as much as possible.
• Get the bulk of your training volume from accessory lifts for all major muscle groups, with sets of 6-15 reps, training each muscle/movement 2-3 times per week for 4-6 sets (or 40-70 total reps) per session.
• Periodization isn’t overly important for hypertrophy, but varying your training a bit simply helps keep workouts feeling fresh.
• Split your training into bulking and cutting phases. This generally allows you to gain muscle at a faster overall rate than attempting to gain it with minimal body fat fluctuations.
• A major reason to make your training more “bodybuilding-centric” during this [intermediate] phase is that bodybuilding-style training has an astonishingly low injury rate.
• Remember the importance of maintaining joint health over the long haul.
• You can absolutely build a ton of muscle doing more heavy powerlifting-specific training as long as you’re doing enough sets.
• Training volume is the #1 driver of hypertrophy.
• There’s actually a surprising amount of neural coordination that goes into lifting really heavy stuff.
• Periodization plays a larger role in advanced, purely strength-focused training, as it contributes more to strength development than muscle hypertrophy.
• Proper nutrition, sufficient sleep, and stress management all play just as big of a role as proper training, if not bigger. You don’t get stronger in the gym.
• Most people don’t stop to consider this basic fact. At the end of a workout, you’ve accumulated some fatigue and you’re weaker than when you walked into the gym. You get stronger outside the gym.
• It’s not the training itself that makes you bigger and stronger. It’s how your body RESPONDS to the training that makes you bigger and stronger.
• Your body adapts by responding to what it perceives to be a threat.
• Two of the most important threats that keep your body from responding well to training are lack of sleep and chronic life stress, such as a stressful job, a bad relationship, financial worries, etc.
• Chronic stress literally doubles how long it takes you to recover from lifting.

How to Squat by Greg Nuckols

• Most people should squat.
• You’d be hard-pressed to find a better exercise than the squat.
• Squats should probably be at the core of your training program.
• There are few exercises that can build or test head-to-toe strength as well as the squat.
• To produce movement, your muscles contract. By doing so, they produce a linear force, pulling on bones that act as levers, producing flexor or extensor moments at the joints they cross, with joints acting as the axes of rotation.
• The two factors that determine whether your muscles can produce large enough internal extensor moments to lift a load are the attachment points of the muscles, and the force with which they can contract.
• Attachment points play a huge role because muscles generally attach very close to the joint they move, so small variations can make a big difference.
• Unfortunately, you can’t change muscle attachment points, so the only factor within your control is increasing contractile force.
• In a properly performed squat, there shouldn’t be a meaningful amount of flexion or hyperextension taking place. Your spine should remain rigid and extended to transfer force from your legs and hips into the bar.
• The length of the shaft of your femur largely determines the moment arms you’re working with at the knee and hip.
• Each intervertebral joint is cushioned by a spinal disc, and each allows for only a little bit of flexion, extension, rotation, and lateral flexion, which add up to large ranges of motion in essentially all planes when addressing the spine as a whole.
• The gluteus maximus is your strongest hip extensor.
• “Origin” refers to the attachment point of a muscle closest to the middle of the body, and “insertion” refers to the attachment furthest from the middle of the body. When a muscle contracts, it pulls the origin and insertion toward each other.
• There are four basic challenges you need to overcome in the squat: a spinal flexor moment, a hip flexor moment, a knee flexor moment, and an ankle dorsiflexor moment.
• There are three key components of the squat: the setup, the descent, and the ascent.
• The first consideration for your setup is bar position. There are three basic bar positions for the squat: high bar, low bar, and front. In the high bar squat, the bar is resting on your traps; in the low bar squat, the bar is resting across your rear deltoids; and in the front squat, the bar is resting across your anterior deltoids or in the cleft between your anterior deltoids and your traps.
• The biggest thing you want to avoid when situating the bar for the high bar squat is letting it grind into your C7 spinous process--the little bony bump at the base of your neck.
• For both the high bar and low bar squat, you should actively pull your shoulder blades together.
• In general, for the high and low bar squat, a narrower hand position will help you keep your upper back a little tighter and more stable.
• Wrist position isn’t an overly important consideration for the back squat if you’re creating a stable enough shelf for the bar with your traps or rear delts.
• Remember, your grip should be as close as it can get without pain in your wrists, elbows, or shoulders.
• The first thing you need to square away is the height of the hooks you’re squatting out of. You should be able to get the bar over the hooks comfortably without having to half squat the weight just to unrack it, or rise up on your toes to get the bar over the hooks.
• The second order of business is getting your feet set under the bar. This is primarily a matter of comfort.
• Unrack the bar by driving your shoulders up into the bar aggressively.
• You should walk the bar out of the rack as efficiently as possible so that you waste minimal energy before you actually get down to the business of squatting. This means taking as few steps as possible.
• The next issue is finding your stance width. There are two main considerations here: comfort and carryover.
• No need to complicate this. Simply play around with your stance width and see what feels best for you.
• In general, you’ll get the best carryover if your squat width is similar to your stance width in whatever movement you’re hoping it will carry over to.
• In general, your best bet is to let your hips and knees determine your foot angle.
• You want your knees to track over roughly your first or second toe. Rather than squatting with your feet turned out to a predetermined degree or arbitrarily pointed straight ahead and forcing your knees and hips to follow along, you’re better of seeing what hip and knee position feels the strongest and most comfortable, and letting that determine how far out you point your feet.
• There are two key factors for developing torso rigidity: spinal extension strength, and intra-abdominal pressure.
• You want to create as much tension throughout your entire body as possible so that you’ll be in utmost control of the bar.
• In general, your best bet is to descend as fast as possible while remaining in complete control of the bar.
• A faster descent can help you get a little more “bounce” out of the bottom of the squat via the stretch reflex, but a little extra pop isn’t very helpful if you’re loose and out of control when you hit the hole.
• Some people are concerned that deep squats will injure their knees or their back, so they squat high and cut their squat off as soon as their torso starts inclining forward ever so slightly. However, the most thorough review of scientific literature found that deep squats posed no serious risks to the knees or spine.
• Deep squats help you gain more strength and muscle than shallow squats, and they transfer better to most athletic endeavours.
• If you’re going to squat deep, then you may as well go until you bottom out. Not only do you get the benefits of increased range of motion, but most people find they can actually lift more weight.
• The advantage you gain from decreasing your range of motion is generally outweighed by the additional effort it takes to reverse the load without the aid of the bounce.
• The ascent revolves around the single most crucial point in the lift: the sticking point.
• The #1 thing you want to avoid is getting caved forward and reaching the sticking point in a good-morning position.
• One final point: EXPLODE. Lift every rep as fast as you can while still maintaining proper technique.
• You’ll gain strength much faster if you make a point of lifting each rep as explosively as you can, from the first rep of each set to the last.
• To correct a good-morning squat, most people need dedicated quad work.
• The biggest tell-tale sign that your core is limiting you is a big discrepancy between your squat and deadlift. If your deadlift is more than 15-20% higher than your squat, it’s likely a core issue.
• The biggest factor that explains why most people can deadlift more than they squat is that people naturally brace more effectively for the deadlift.
• In other words, your squat and deadlift numbers should be pretty similar. If they aren’t, the most likely explanation for the difference is suboptimal core bracing patterns.
• There is the potential for injury with every exercise. However, on a risk scale from 1 to “snap city”, properly performed squats are a 1. The reason I say “properly performed” is that things like spinal flexion or excessive knee caving can make squats more dangerous.
• With very heavy loads (2x your body weight or more) your bar path should be very close to vertical, but you shouldn’t expect it to be with lighter loads.
• I’ll spare you the math, but essentially bar path depends on the weight of the bar compared to the weight of your body.
• In general, longer ranges of motion mean more hypertrophy.
• Any type of squat will build your quads, but high bar squats and front squats taken as deep as possible, sitting down into the lift instead of sitting back into the lift, will probably build your quads the best.
• While squats should probably be at the center of your lower body training, squatting probably won’t maximize leg development by itself.
• If you’re doing front squats...just suck it up or don’t front squat. They’re never comfortable until you eventually deaden the nerves surrounding your clavicles and AC joints.
• If you have healthy knees, letting your knees track past your toes isn’t a concern.
• Unless you’re already a very strong squatter, improving your squat will probably make you better at other sports.
• There’s almost certainly a point of diminishing returns, but aiming for a ~2x bodyweight full squat would be a good goal for most athletes who play sports that require a lot of running and jumping.
• The overall difference in whole-body training effects between all three varieties of squats is probably pretty small.
• Front squats are, hands down, the best squat variation for building upper back strength.
• In a general sense, the best bar position for you is the one that lets you train the hardest and the most consistently.
• Squat as deep as you can for general training purposes and for weightlifting.
• Squat low bar to build more hip strength.
• Squat high bar to build more quad strength.
• Front squat to build more upper back strength.
• Lift every rep as explosively as possible.
• Improve quad strength if your squats end up looking like good mornings.
• Improve core bracing if there’s more than a 15-20% gap between your squat and your deadlift.
• Improve hip extensor strength if you don’t meet the first two criteria.
• Any shoe with good traction and a solid sole is fine; with or without a raised heel is just a matter of preference, but cushion-y soles should be avoided.

How to Deadlift by Greg Nuckols

• Most people should deadlift.
• Do you want to add muscle to your posterior chain, gaining quality mass from your traps all the way down to your hamstrings? You’d be hard pressed to find a better exercise than the deadlift.
• Deadlifts should probably be at the core of your training program.
• There are few exercises that can build or test head-to-toe strength as well as the deadlift (I’d put squats on the same level, with push-press close behind).
• When our muscles contract, they exert a pulling force on one end of the muscle straight toward the other end.
• While force is linear, moment is rotational.
• Moments imposed by a load on your musculoskeletal system are called external moments, and moments produced by your muscles pulling against your bones are called internal moments.
• To produce movement, your muscles contract. By doing so, they produce a linear force, pulling on bones that act as levers, producing flexor or extensor moments at the joints they cross, with joints acting as the axes of rotation.
• The two factors that determine whether your muscles can produce large enough internal extensor moments to life a load are the attachment points of the muscles and the force with which they can contract.
• Attachment points play a huge role because muscles generally attach very close to the joint they move, so small variations can make a big difference.
• Unfortunately, you can’t change muscle attachment points, so the only factor within your control is increasing contractile force. There are only two ways to do that: 1) increase your skill as a deadlifter so your current muscle mass can produce more force during the movement and 2) add more muscle!
• The deadlift is a full-body movement, so a multitude of muscles and bones are involved.
• As long as your spine doesn’t flex too much, it should be able to tolerate the loads placed on it in the deadlift without issue if you don’t have pre-existing back issues.
• Your spine should always remain rigid and extended to transfer force from your legs and hips into the bar.
• Intervertebral joints are those between two vertebrae. To briefly recap: Each intervertebral joint is cushioned by a spinal disc, and each allows for only a little bit of flexion, extension, rotation, and lateral flexion, which add up to large ranges of motion in essentially all planes when addressing the spine as a whole.
• “Origin” refers to the attachment point of a muscle closest to the middle of the body (proximal attachment), and “insertion” refers to the attachment furthest from the middle of the body (distal attachment). When a muscle contracts, it pulls the origin and insertion toward each other.
• There are three basic planes: sagittal, frontal, and transverse.
• There are four basic challenges you need to overcome in the deadlift: a spinal flexor moment, a hip flexor moment, a knee flexor moment, and, obviously, you need to be able to hold onto the bar.
• Knee extension demands are pretty low; odds are very low that quad strength will limit how much someone can deadlift with a conventional stance.
• The farther your hips are behind the bar, the harder the lift is for your hip extensors.
• In general, hip extension demands are highest at the start of the lift, and progressively decrease throughout the pull.
• In the Sumo deadlift, especially with a very wide stance, your don’t just drive your feet straight down through the floor. You also drive your feet out against the floor.
• Pulling a lot of weight depends, of course, on being jacked enough and having enough muscle to produce the required force against the bar.
• As a general heuristic, the best place to start [your stance width] is simply by performing a vertical jump, and noting what stance you naturally gravitate toward.
• Generally, larger people who have a little more of a gut to fit between their thighs pull with a slightly wider stance than smaller conventional deadlifters.
• Once you find your strongest stance width, the next factor to address it toe angle.
• The biggest difference between the sumo and conventional deadlift is stance width, with all the other smaller differences arising from the difference in stance.
• Grip width is pretty straightforward: take the narrowest grip you can without forcing your knees to cave in, or without causing undue friction between your arms and thighs at the start of the lift.
• There are four main grips you can take on the bar: double overhand, mixed grip, hook grip, and double overhand with straps.
• Double overhand grip is generally a no-go. Of the four grips you can take on the bar, double overhand is the one that allows you to grip the least amount of weight.
• If you grip the bar deep into your palms, it’s going to pull itself down into your fingers anyways, tearing your hands up without actually letting you grip heavier weights. Instead, set the bar either just above or just below the calluses at the base of your fingers.
• Grip the shit out of the bar, but leave your upper arms relaxed. Don’t try to row the bar when you’re deadlifting it.
• Always grip the bar harder than you need to.
• The biggest difference between gripping the sumo and conventional deadlifts is that your knees won’t be in the way of your arms when pulling sumo. As such, you can take a narrower grip on the bar. Grip the bar with your hands directly below your shoulders.
• Before you really bear down and rip the bar off the floor, you need to make sure your body is tight enough that your form won’t disintegrate as soon as you start lifting the bar. This is often called “pulling the slack out of the bar”.
• You should create as much tension throughout your body as humanly possible before adding the extra force required to start pulling the rep. You should already be pulling so hard on the bar when it’s still on the floor that adding just a tiny bit of extra force will get the lift moving.
• If your center of pressure shifts too far forward or too far back, it may make lockout excessively difficult.
• As a general rule of thumb, the bar should start about an inch or two from your shins, or roughly over your shoelaces.
• As mentioned earlier, a general heuristic for finding your sumo stance is to start with a stance width where your shins are vertical when viewed from both the side and the front.
• The biggest key to picking a heavy bar up off the ground is...to pay as little attention to the bar as possible. Beyond gripping the bar and pulling the bar into your body to keep your lats engaged, your focus should not be on the bar itself.
• To complete the lift, you need to extend your knees and hips while keeping your spine stiff.
• Generally, thinking “chest up” will help keep the spine stiff through the pull. That requires you to, at the very least, attempt to extend your thoracic spine.
• To initiate the pull, think “drive the floor away”. For whatever reason, focusing on pushing the floor away instead of picking the bar up helps people keep their hips from rising too quickly at the start of the pull. This is the cue for just the first 3-4 inches of the pull; after that, it’s all about hip extension.
• Perform each rep as aggressively as possible, applying maximal force through the lift. Research has shown that lifting at maximal velocity causes roughly twice the strength gains of lifting at purposefully slower velocities.
• Many people have a tendency to hyperextend their hips and spines at lockout. This is unnecessary for competitive purposes, and it’s necessary to gain the training effect you’re aiming for with the lift. It makes the lift harder without any real payoff.
• Many people who have issues locking out heavy pulls can fix their problem simply by engaging the glutes properly.
• The deadlift lockout is basically just a loaded pelvic thrust.
• You should set the bar back down the same way you picked it up: under control and with your spine extended.
• Remember, there are four basic demands in the deadlift:
• Keep the spine extended (or re-extend the spine if you pull with some thoracic flexion).
• Extend the hips.
• Extend the knees.
• Hold onto the bar.
• Speaking in generalities, the smaller you are, the more likely it it that sumo will be your best stance, and the larger you are, the more likely it is that conventional will be your best stance.
• Chalk increases the friction between your hands and the bar, independently and by soaking up any moisture on your hands to make them a bit less slippery. This can let you grip considerably heavier loads more comfortably.
• Liquid chalk is normal lifting chalk dissolved in an alcohol-based medium that rapidly dries after application, leaving the chalk behind on your hands. This keeps chalk dust from spreading.
• If you can’t hold onto the bar when attempting max deadlifts, or if there’s a big gap between what you can pull with straps versus without straps, then your first order of business should obviously be to improve your grip strength.
• Just because fat bar grip work is hard, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s maximally effective for improving your deadlift-specific grip.
• The easiest and (in my opinion) most effective way to implement grip training for the deadlift is simply with timed deadlift holds.
• The deadlift generally responds best to a fairly high frequency of hinge-pattern work, but a relatively low frequency of actual deadlifting.
• People who are built better for the deadlift (long arms relative to their body height) and people who pull sumo can generally train the deadlift more frequently and with higher volumes.
• The better and more consistent your technique gets, the higher deadlift volumes you can generally handle.
• In short, be a bit more conservative with your deadlift training than you would be with your squat or bench training, and prioritize building back strength. The stronger and more resilient your back is, the easier each deadlift session will feel, and the more often you’ll be able to train the deadlift.
• Hip position at the start of the pull is determined and constrained, under normal circumstances, by basic geometry.
• In general, longer ranges of motion mean you’ll build more muscle and “general” strength.
• If you can pull more with a belt and feel more comfortable with a belt, wear one.
• Deadlift straps work by allowing you to grip heavier weights or grip a given weight for longer.
• Straps over two big advantages: They help protect your hands, and they make sure grip won’t limit how hard you can train your back and hips.
• If you’re a powerlifter, you should practice like you play for the majority of your training, and deadlift with a straight bar.
• If you’re not a powerlifter, it’s perfectly fine to deadlift with a trap bar. In fact, it may even be preferable.
• Trap bar deadlifts are probably slightly better than straight bar deadlifts for most non-powerlifters.

How to Bench by Greg Nuckols

• Force is linear: It describes how things are pushed or pulled in a straight line.
• To produce movement, your muscles contract. By doing so, they produce a linear force, pulling on bones that act as levers, producing flexor or extensor moments at the joints they cross, with joints acting as the axes of rotation.
• Attachment points play a huge role because muscles  generally attach very close to the joint they move, so small variations can make a big difference.
• Unfortunately, you can’t change muscle attachment points, so the only factor within your control is increasing contractile force. There are only two ways to do that: a) increase your skill as a bencher so your current muscle mass can produce more force during the movement and b) add more muscle!
• Narrowly defined, the shoulder joint is simply the ball-and-socket joint made up of the humerus and the glenoid cavity of the scapula.
• Your shoulder is a very shallow ball-and-socket joint--much shallower than the hip. That can cause a bit more instability (which is why dislocated shoulders are way more common than dislocated hips), but it also allows for a huge range of motion in all planes.
• The elbow is a simple joint. It flexes (like a biceps curl) and extends (like a triceps extension).
• Your pecs are your biggest, strongest prime mover in the bench. Their main role is in horizontal flexion, but they can also aid in shoulder flexion, extension, and internal rotation.
• There are only three major movements you need to accomplish to complete the bench press: flexion at the shoulder, horizontal flexion at the shoulder, and extension at the elbow.
• The most important thing is simply that your shoulder blades are pulled together.
• A key aspect of a tight set up is finding proper foot position. Your legs and hips help stabilize you on the bench and help you get leg drive.
• A common feature of studies that compare elite-level benchers to average joes is that elite lifters lower the bar slower and do a better job controlling the weight on the way down.
• If you’re a powerlifter, you need to get experience pausing the bar on your chest for each rep, since that’s required for competition. Otherwise, lightly touching the bar to your chest without a pause before pressing it back up is fine.
• Drive the bar off your chest aggressively, initiating the press with leg drive and pushing the bar up and back toward your face.
• Hold your breath throughout the duration of the rep. Take a deep, diaphragmatic breath before you start the descent, and release it once the bar is locked out, or at least nearing lockout. This will help you maintain tension and stability.
• Press every rep as hard as you can.
• In one study, pressing each rep as fast as possible resulted in literally twice the bench press gains as pressing the bar intentionally slower with the exact same training program. When you press harder, force output is higher (so training conditions are more similar to conditions when attempting 1RM loads), and you recruit more motor units, amplifying the training effect.
• Remember, there are three primary movements you need to produce in order to bench the bar: You need to flex your shoulders, horizontally flex your shoulders, and extend your elbows.
• As you start the press, squeeze your glutes hard and try to drive your heels through the floor.
• When you DB press, the only appreciable force you’re dealing with is the force of gravity acting upon the dumbell. Gravity pulls the DB straight to the floor, and you press against that force. Because of that, the weight needs to stay more-or-less over your elbow the whole time.
• The reason your elbows have to stay more-or-less directly under the weight when you’re DB pressing is that you can’t impose a meaningful amount of outward lateral forces on the dumbell.
• Once the bar starts moving back off your chest, you’ll want to start to flare your elbows to get them back under the bar by the midrange of the press.
• One of the only findings that seems consistent across the majority of the studies is the activation of the triceps tends to increase a bit more than pec activation as you add weight to the bar.
• Muscles don’t produce the same amount of force ever their entire range of motion. Muscle fibers themselves produce the most force when they’re around resting length, and their capacity to produce force increases or decreases as they lengthen or shorten.
• Lockout should be the strongest part of the lift.
• Bench press cues:
• Squeeze the shit out of the bar.
• Bend the bar/rip the bar in half (while lowering it).
• Chest up/inflate your stomach.
• Heels through the floor/squeeze glutes (for leg drive).
• Flare (to get the bar back over your shoulders).
• Screw your shoulders out (to make sure elbows are facing out for lockout).
• The reverse grip bench is a forgotten art form. [...] It’s probably a better upper pec developer than bench with a pronated grip.
• If you have shoulder or elbow issues when benching, it’s worth giving the reverse grip bench a shot.
• Incline press will train your front delts slightly harder than flat bench will, and maybe your upper pecs as well. However, based on available research, it seems like incline still doesn’t challenge your upper pecs quite as much as reverse grip benching with a wide grip does.
• If at all possible, incline press with a low incline (15-30 degrees) if you’re primarily incline pressing to train your pecs.
• In my personal opinion, decline press is primarily an ego lift. [...] Dips are a much better movement to train your pecs and triceps at that pressing angle since your scapulae can still move freely, and since you can achieve greater range of motion.
• For starters, research has shown that different regions of a muscle are activated and grow to different degrees based on the exercise performed. So, to fully develop the entirety of a muscle, you’ll need some exercise variety. You don’t need to take the full-on muscle confusion route, but you should probably have at least 2-3 movements in your training routine targeting each muscle if overall hypertrophy is your goal.
• Incline curls are my go-to exercise for happy elbows with heavy bench training.
• Ultimately, technical improvements can help your bench press dramatically (for both strength and longevity). However, technical improvements aren’t going to give you a huge bench press--they simply allow you to get all the strength possible out of your current muscle mass.
• Improving your skill as a bencher can make a big difference for a novice or intermediate lifter, but ultimately if you want to reach your full potential in the bench press, you need to put on as much upper body muscle mass as possible.
• If you already have good technique but your bench press is stalled, the prescription is simple: increase your training volume, make sure you’re eating enough protein, and increase your calorie intake.