Rip: First Things First

[Mark Rippetoe]

First Things First | Mark Rippetoe

[Chiaki Nitya]

Great article.

As someone who is a "self-taught" lifter, ie someone who has never had a coach or mentor, and who has learned everything from self-study via books, articles, and videos from a wide variety of sources, the one qualifying factor between Starting Strength and literally every other resource is that it's obvious that you've *thought about it* and you've sought to define terms and make an actual argument for why you teach things the way you do.

Now, I personally think your arguments are compelling, but even if they weren't, at least you've actually made an argument, which is more than can be said for the vast majority of personalities in the strength training world.

There are people out there with graduate level degrees in biomechanics, with decades of experience owning gyms and coaching people, who make a living from this, but who have never made an actual argument with defined terms to support their positions. I used to want to give them the benefit of the doubt, but I think they're just fucking dumb people in general.

I recently watched a 20 minute squat tutorial video from a very popular YouTube celebrity and it literally boiled down to "Just squat in the way that let's you squat the most weight, high bar, low bar, whatever". A 20 minute video for that... simultaneously overcomplicating and oversimplifying the squat.

Imagine teaching literally any other physical skill like that... "Just hit the baseball in whatever way let's you hit it farther" ok thanks coach! You fuckin' retard.

Anyway thanks for being a voice of clarity and reason in a field of grifters and tards.

[Mark Rippetoe]

I recently watched a 20 minute squat tutorial video from a very popular YouTube celebrity and it literally boiled down to "Just squat in the way that let's you squat the most weight, high bar, low bar, whatever". A 20 minute video for that... simultaneously overcomplicating and oversimplifying the squat.

This is the way these people get out of having to do the work of learning the profession.

[Steven Kalin]

The guy I shared my gym with, when I had it, had a masters degree in kinesiology. I thought I could make it work and all, you know, mutual respect? Agree to disagree? Until one day we were discussing this stuff and the subject of his weighted bats came up ( his thing was baseball, he trains a lot of players). I found myself getting sucked into an argument about this, and his response was “ well, they’ve been doing it this way for decades.”. The writing was on the wall.