Possible New Articles/ Underrated Things in SS 3rd Ed

[TommyGun]

Good morning Coach. It’s Saturday morning and I am on on the couch with the dog, having coffee, and retreading SS 3rd Ed before I head out to train. Life is so good right now.

I’ve been through your books, multiple times, and today two things jumped out at me that I didn’t fully appreciate during earlier readings and I have not heard them discussed in the vids or forums, but there are interesting concepts that mhopefully can be explored further (hint hint).

1. The into to the Sqyat chapter and the discussion of the importance of the posterior chain, and how we ignore it for several reasons, primarily because we can’t see it. Thus the focus of chest, abs, and all things visible in the mirror. Then you discuss how we are “handy” creatures, and those same body parts are easy to train with the hands. But here’s the part that I am blown away by: you offer an aexample of ifting a heavy object such as a table without using the hands to demonstrate how practical the squat is (page 9). Do you realize what you have done? You have offered (and I missed it) an example of how unimportant the hands are to getting strong. The gym bro routines of curls, etc require extensive use of the hands for their curls. The big movements of squat, DL, etc. require very little of the hands. In fact, the hands in the squat are not load bearing, they are limited to only holding the bar down in place onto the deltoids. In the DL. The hands are simply an extension of the shoulders, although I concede grip is pretty darn important. But any moment diagram would not how the hands. Even in the press the hands could be construed an an extension of the load bearing forearm (again, I concede for grip).

Is there an article for you in here to go further on how we are fooled by our hands and it leads to the general public to ignore the posterior chain? As if you don’t have enough to do. Anyway, the table analogy jumped out at me, and It is likely that many readers also did not fully get it upon earlier readings. Thanks for all the knowledge.

[Mark Rippetoe]

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