About

The Starting Strength Method


The Starting Strength System makes use of the body's most basic movement patterns – barbell exercises that involve all the body’s muscle mass – utilized over the longest effective range of motion and loaded progressively, to force the adaptations necessary for increased strength.

Unlike other popular exercise protocols, Starting Strength is a training system – a long-term process designed for getting stronger over time, not a random collection of exercises that just make you hot, sweaty, sore, confused, and tired today.

The Importance of Strength

Strength is the basis of your interaction with the environment. It affects

Health & Quality of Life – Read Barbell Training is Big Medicine

Athletic Performance – Read the Foundations of Fitness

Combat/Disaster Performance – Consider the Worst-Case Scenario

The Starting Strength System

Strength is the most important aspect of one's physical existence, and a lack of Strength compromises both athletic performance and the quality of life as we age.

The Starting Strength System is a distillation of Mark Rippetoe’s experiences over three and a half decades as a competitive powerlifter, Olympic weightlifting coach, and gym owner, coupled with a systematic analysis of the physics of human movement under the barbell.

Barbell training is simply loaded human movement, and the Starting Strength System makes use of the most basic movement patterns that work the entire body as a coordinated system, gradually increasing loads that make the whole body stronger, in a logical, understandable, time-tested manner – the way athletes have gotten stronger for millennia.

Starting Strength is not a list of new exercises from the fitness magazines designed by Physical Therapists for injured sedentary people. It is not a way to use the newest machines in a corporate health club. Starting Strength is a systematic approach to the classic barbell training method of improving Strength – the most critical characteristic of successful athletes and healthy useful people.

The instruction, explanation, and analysis found in Starting Strength: Basic Barbell Training, 3rd edition are unequaled in depth and clarity anywhere in print.



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