A couple weeks ago, I asked the questions here. Since then, I've emailed a couple Starting Strength certified coaches in my area, and hope to start strength training soon. Having said that, I am interested to understand more about the Starting Strength method. In particular, when I have done weight lifting in the past (using machines with high reps or body-weight exercises like chin ups, pushups, and situps), one of the things I typically tried to do ... just because it makes sense to me ... is pair up exercises with opposing movements. The image below depicts examples of those movements.
Attachment 7485
The highlighted items are exercises I've heard Rip mention before. The non-highlighted items have question marks after them because I'm not sure they are the correct terms. In any case, I can think of a few possibilities for explanations for this seeming gap:
- Some of these (e.g.the situps and whatever the opposite of a squat is) could be redundant (i.e. both working the quads and abs), so while one may be useful, both would not be.
- The muscles used to perform these exercises actually do get sufficiently exercised with other movements. For example, maybe (I'm very much speaking from ignorance here) the muscles used to do dips get sufficiently exercised by doing presses and bench presses.
- Maybe Rip actually does recommend some of these exercises for more advanced people, and I've just missed it. But he recommends a more limited and higher priority set of exercises for those starting out.
- Maybe I'm just an ignorant fool and it isn't important at all to balance one exercise with its opposing movement.
I should also add that it would seem quite possible to add weight to all these movements to enable low-rep variations of them. As it is now, I'm fairly certain I can do 3 sets of 5 chinups, so the only way to improve that further would be to either increase the number of reps or the weight. It seems pretty clear that Rip would recommend the latter over the former.
Am I completely off base here, or do opposing movements have a roll in a balanced strength training program?