Strength training is the use of exercises to incrementally and progressively increase force production capacity for physical performance. It is most effectively accomplished with barbell training using basic human movement patterns under load – something that the barbell does better than any other exercise “modality” (a term beloved of academic types). You stand on the floor and produce force with your whole body against an external resistance while not falling down, which should seem familiar to you if you're actually alive. Barbell training is the best way to strengthen normal human movement patterns: squatting down and standing back up, picking something up from the ground, pushing something overhead, pushing something forward away from you, pulling something toward you, and throwing something.

Squats with the bar on your back, deadlifts, presses, bench presses (balanced on your back instead of your feet), chins or barbell rows, and power cleans are the primary strength training exercises, and these can be loaded progressively for years. And at first nothing else is necessary: the first year or so of strength training is more productively composed of nothing but the basic exercises.

Assistance exercises are, basically, everything else. Starting Strength: Basic Barbell Training 3rd edition defines Assistance Exercises as 1). portions of the basic exercises, like halting deadlifts or rack pulls, 2). variations of the basic movements, such as stiff-legged deadlifts or pause squats, or 3). ancillary exercises that work a portion of the muscle mass involved in a basic exercise, but in a way the basic exercise does not, like a lying triceps extension. Less-useful – and completely optional – assistance exercises are unilateral exercises, single-joint exercises, dumbbell exercises, cable exercises, ab exercises, calf exercises, flyes, pec decks, wrist curls, leg curls, and anything done on a machine.

When Starting Strength was first written in 2005, I hadn't considered that strength training could be defined as the normal bi-lateral human movement patterns subjected to an incrementally progressive load. This means chin-ups and barbell rows are strength training movements, not assistance exercises. We use chins very early in the program, after the first few weeks, and they progress incrementally for sets to failure as the trainee gains weight. They can also be loaded for sets of 5 with plates on a dip belt.

And a case can be made for the use of the barbell row after the first few months have strengthened the deadlift to the point that a flat back can be maintained off the floor with useful weight on the bar.

But the critical question is simply, what is the purpose of assistance exercises? Are they necessary, and if so, when? Ask yourself this question: have your squats ever gone up because you did your leg extensions? Obviously not, but they may well have improved when you added paused box squats to your programming. And if you added leg extensions and your squat was going up anyway, and they continued to go up, can you say that they helped? Squats go up because you add 5 more pounds and squat it for 5 reps, not because you pick a favorite muscle group to “catch a pump.”

Your deadlift never went up because you did weighted glute/ham raises, but rack pulls and haltings can put another 100 pounds on your third attempt over the course of two years. In fact, if you can't do a bodyweight chin-up now, try it again after your deadlift is over 365. Heavy deadlifts and deadlift-like exercises make your deadlift go up – 5 pounds at a time. Dumbbell flyes never made anyone's bench go up, but overload partials in the rack do, when you add 5 more pounds. So it matters which assistance exercises you do, and how you do them.

But it also matters when you add them to your training. A 3-month baby novice has no business doing anything but the basic exercises until he can no longer make incremental increases every workout, or even every week. Once your deadlift is in the 500s, the first assistance exercises to add would be haltings and rack pulls, possibly replacing deadlifts for most heavy pulling work. But not before – novices are wasting time doing anything other than the basic lifts as long as they are progressing incrementally.

And here's the most critical question: if they're not necessary, why does everybody do them anyway? And the answer is the same as answering the question, “Why did everybody wear the mask when they don't do a single useful goddamn thing?”

Ready? Because you're supposed to. It's always been done, and that's what we do, so there's no need to confuse yourself with factual analysis – just do what your supposed to do so we can go home.

“Supposed to” is an English idiom that means “what you should do” or “what you are expected to do.” Yes, you are supposed to do your leg extensions and your dumbbell flyes when you train, because we paid a lot of money for this equipment and you should use it. See this poster? But the actual fact is that it doesn't make you stronger, it cannot make you stronger, but that it nonetheless adds unnecessary stress that has to be recovered from even though it does not improve force production capacity.

Better you than us, right? There are a lot of baseless assumptions encumbering the Fitness Industry that legitimate strength training should disabuse itself of. Higher reps for “hypertrophy” is an excellent example: it is possible to go from a skinny 165-pound kid to a useful 225-pound man without doing a single set of high-rep anythings. We do it all the time, because muscle growth is the primary mechanism for an increase in force production, and calling it “hypertrophy” doesn't change the physiology. Nothing stresses force production capacity over time better than sets of 5 reps, so that's what makes you get bigger most efficiently. Sets of 10 are light weights, and light weights don't make you need to get bigger – heavy sets of 5 do.

Unnecessary ineffective assistance exercises are an example of this same faulty reasoning. Simply waving things around in the air accomplishes nothing more than burning a few calories. Recovery capacity is finite, and the best way to shut down progress is to include a bunch of useless shit in your workouts. All the components of your training program should be there for a reason, they should be carefully evaluated for the purpose of increasing your force production capacity, and if they don't accomplish this purpose they should be either eliminated or replaced with something that does.

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