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Mark Rippetoe:
Is it just me that watches these podcast imagining what it would be like to watch Rip deadlifting with no underpants on? Wow, wow, wow, wow.

Mark Wulfe:
From The Aasgaard Company Studios in beautiful Wichita Falls, Texas... From the finest mind in the modern fitness industry... The one true voice in the strength and conditioning profession... The most important podcast on the internet... Ladies and gentlemen! Starting Strength Radio.

Mark Rippetoe:
Welcome back to Starting Strength Radio. It's Friday and isn't that cool? Isn't that cool you're off. Here in just a little while you're off. Then Saturday and Sunday hang around inside your house, not wear a mask. Can't go to a bar, can you? You know, can't go meet girls. Can't go do anything that you used to be able to do. But you are free to go home here in just a little while because it's Friday.

Mark Rippetoe:
So today we're going to talk about girls today, in fact. Now that I mentioned that and let the cat out of the bag, we're going to talk about girls. We're going to talk about training women and how it's a little bit different, although not that much. And the reasons for that and why you need to know these things if you're going to train women or you're going to make serious mistakes.

Mark Rippetoe:
But first! Comments from the Haters!

Mark Rippetoe:
So today... We got Bre up off her ass finally. Got some comments from the haters here. These are pretty good.

Mark Rippetoe:
Here's Matteo. And there's always the same three or four guys submit these questions, just Matteo. He's got a hard on for Nick this time.

[off-camera]:
Nice! Finally.

Mark Rippetoe:
Finally, you get some attention. Talking about your cast iron skillet little thing that was the silliest thing I've ever seen, actually. You don't fucking wash your cast iron, Nick, you bonehead.

Mark Rippetoe:
Yeah. And so Matteo says, "You have to season it every fucking time you use it? Would you drive a car you had to wax every time you park it? That's some bullshit. For this reason, I'm out.

Mark Rippetoe:
He's never going to watch the show. He's going to... Oh, good.

[off-camera]:
Just as the Rippetoe method and leave your fucking nasty dirty food in there.

Mark Rippetoe:
You don't leave your nasty, dirty food in there. You you get it out and then you scrape it back down to the metal. And... Here's the phenomenology. It works just fine like that. And you know what? Everybody but Nick knows that. But, you know, it's his fucking little video, so am I going to do, you know?

Mark Rippetoe:
Less shit for me to have to do if he wants to make one to tell you to, you know, sandblast your pan every time you get through with it it's fine with me. I don't care. The same exact thing. All right.

[off-camera]:
I mean, washing dishes is that hard, right?

Mark Rippetoe:
If you don't have to, you know, you don't have to why do it, you know?

[off-camera]:
I just wipe it down with a wet rag.

Mark Rippetoe:
Wet?

[off-camera]:
The steam breaks up all the particles...

Mark Rippetoe:
And burns the piss out of your hand. You don't know, all right...

[off-camera]:
It's getting worse. It's getting worse. Just drop the topic.

Mark Rippetoe:
Just drop the... Well, but I can't I can't leave everybody with the impression that you pick up a hot... Or you touch a hot pan with a wet rag. Don't do that. All right. I grew up in a commercial kitchen. And the first day what you learn is you pick up the pan with a dry rag.

[off-camera]:
You don't pick it up.

Mark Rippetoe:
You take your hand and rub a hot iron surface with a wet rag? OK, Rusty. Somebody's going to have to take you to the emergency room one of these days. It is it's not going to be because, you know, you're dying. It's just going to be because it hurts so god damn bad you... I mean, burning your hand's a bad deal, you know. Like you use it for shit, you know, then you can't because it's burnt. Had the hide burned off your... Jesus Christ.

Mark Rippetoe:
All right. All right. "The irony, all puns, intended irony. That this is just hipster shit along with their coffee and whiskey worship."

Mark Rippetoe:
All right. All right, squid potion, let me ask you a serious question, what do you like? Is there anything you like, I mean, besides playing with yourself? We know you like that because the only people that post Comments to the Haters are people that have their dick in their hand while they're typing.

Mark Rippetoe:
So we know you like that, but there's nothing you like well enough to say that it's, you know, something like. Like coffee? Or you drink Folgers. He probably drinks Folger's. Don't you think?

[off-camera]:
He has somebody else making his coffee.

Mark Rippetoe:
Maryland club, Maryland Club.

Mark Rippetoe:
All right. What what does it mean when it says TLD,DR?

[off-camera]:
Too long, didn't read.

Mark Rippetoe:
Too long didn't read, but you comment anyway?

[off-camera]:
Right. What most people do when they pick up Starting Strength: TL,DR.

Mark Rippetoe:
"Rip tells a male bordering on obesity to gain 40 more pounds of body weight."

Mark Rippetoe:
What was this response to? Do you remember?

Mark Rippetoe:
It was a Q&A thing, somebody said he was... Guy was 175, six foot 175. Of course, he's bordering on obesity, right?

[off-camera]:
Skinny-fat guy, right.

Mark Rippetoe:
He was bordering on obesity at six foot 175. And of course, I tell him to gain more bodyweight. And then his buddy Frank comes in and says, "Rip isn't very smart or health conscious, is he? Didn't Ed Coan have a hip replacement heart attack?"

[off-camera]:
What's that got to do with anything?

Mark Rippetoe:
It's... These are the bottom zero point zero nine percent or whatever the fuck of the human race, so...

Mark Rippetoe:
And here's one: "Is it just me that watches these podcasts imagining what it would be like to watch Rip deadlifting with no underpants on? . Wow, wow, wow, wow. Imagine his pink little pinkie handling down."

Mark Rippetoe:
Yes, adburd it's just you. You're the only one. Well, maybe... I don't know.

[off-camera]:
It's pretty specific.

Mark Rippetoe:
You're the only one that's ever... You're you're the only one that's ever mentioned it. How about that? OK.

Mark Rippetoe:
And that is Comments from the Haters!

Mark Rippetoe:
Ok. You know there are still people that don't understand that that's not postproduction reverb that I just did?

[off-camera]:
We had to do it three times last week.

Mark Rippetoe:
Yeah. Yeah. I thought we demonstrated it and put that all to bed.

[off-camera]:
That was live too.

Mark Rippetoe:
But apparently not.

[off-camera]:
I know how you fake a live recording.

Mark Rippetoe:
I don't either. I don't know.

Mark Rippetoe:
People are just so fucked up. They don't understand that I know how to do things that they don't know how to do.

Mark Rippetoe:
Ok, so we're going to talk today about training women. Now, we just in the recent past, we have rerun an old article that I wrote back five or six years ago about training females for strength, strength training for females. And I believe that's the title of it, strength training for females. It's a it's a pretty good article on our website. Under that title, you can look it up. It occasionally reruns on weekend archives because it's an important article.

Mark Rippetoe:
If you are going to be training females, you have to understand that there are important differences in neuromuscular efficiency. Now....

[off-camera]:
It's called... Rip, real quick. It's called training female lifters - neuromuscular efficiency that's the one you're talking about.

Mark Rippetoe:
Yeah, that's the one I'm talking about. Training Female Lifters, neurom... colon subtitled neuromuscular efficiency.

Mark Rippetoe:
And... And I think that our approach to this is the most sensible. You know, when I first got into the fitness industry back in the late 70s, it was quite common at the time for gyms to have a men's day and a women's day. Yeah, the club I started off on, the men trained... It was a men's club on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. And the women trained Monday, Wednesday, Friday.

Mark Rippetoe:
And the when it was on Women's Day, the men were not in the club. You had three day access to the club and that was it. And the the you know, the dogma at the time is that women did things differently than men because they're girls and they you know, they just can't do the same kinds of things boys do because girls and and boys are different.

Mark Rippetoe:
And yeah, girls and boys are different. Girls and boys are quite different, but not for the reasons that were thought 40 years ago, not for the... that was a limited understanding of things.

Mark Rippetoe:
All right, look, here's the deal: women and men have different sexual organs, OK? This may not have occurred to some of you, but in fact, men and women have different sexual organs. But we don't train the sexual organs, we train the rest of the thing that's the same.

Mark Rippetoe:
We have the same musculature. There are occasionally important distinctions in terms of angle and pelvic width and things like this, but they're not really material to the set up of a program. So our approach to this is everybody squats, everybody presses, everybody benches, everybody deadlifts. Everybody does the Olympic lifts.

Mark Rippetoe:
And the differences in the approach to those to those exercises are not in terms of their form or their execution. The differences in training men and women have to do with volume and intensity. And in order to understand why that is, we're going to have to to explore the background information that you need to understand, to understand about neuromuscular efficiency, because men and women are very different in in this respect.

Mark Rippetoe:
And we talked about this on this podcast in the past. And one of the early earliest podcasts we did were was about the topic of of the congenital males participating as females in sports competition. And I think we covered the topic pretty thoroughly then, but I think it's it's important to to to revisit this topic. If we're going to talk today about the differences in men's and women's programming.

Mark Rippetoe:
Now, I think probably the best way to approach this is to look at it from the standpoint of neuromuscular efficiency. And when we talk about neuromuscular efficiency, we need to discuss a thing called the standing vertical jump. The standing vertical jump test is... Well, the test itself is conducted - you've probably heard of this in terms of the NFL combine. It's always a feature of the NFL combine.

Mark Rippetoe:
And the the value in the standing vertical jump test is it is a direct measurement of neuromuscular efficiency. And it is it's a very, very simple test. There's nothing to learn. Anybody can do it with some very simple equipment. And it's a terribly useful look into the genetics and for want of a better term, native capacity, for explosion of the testee. OK.

Mark Rippetoe:
So if we're going to do a standing vertical jump test, what we do is... There's really two ways to do it. The primitive way to do it is to get next to a wall and chalk the tips of the two fingers, middle and ring finger of your dominant hand. And to reach up and touch a place on the wall, flat footed with the most shoulder extension that you can possibly produce. Way up there like that [raises arm and shoulder girdle to show the reach]. And you touch the wall and you're going to make a chalk mark.

Mark Rippetoe:
And then you re-chalk the fingers and standing facing the wall, you're going to squat down into the jumping position, which is a position that most people naturally get into where the hips and knees are unlocked in flexion. And it's a it's a perfectly natural position to get into. Doesn't have to be practiced. You don't go too low. You can't jump flat footed.

Mark Rippetoe:
So you you reach down into the jumping position, hands down and then jump up in the air. And as you jump up in the air, you reach as high as you can and touch the wall and make another chalk mark above the one you made while standing. The difference between these two chalk marks, the one you made standing flat at the top of your reach and then the one you made at the top of your jump. That distance is the standing vertical jump. It is a measure of your ability to recruit muscle mass into contraction in a very short period of time.

Mark Rippetoe:
What happens is you reach down and then jump back up. When you when you when you when you flex the knees and the hips, then you're performing an eccentric contraction within the muscle mass of the extensors of the knees in the hips. And then as you jump up in the air, you are generating enough velocity through accelerating your body's mass upward such that your body's mass possesses momentum proportionate to the speed with which you jumped up in the air.

Mark Rippetoe:
And then we're going to directly measure the distance that you jumped up in the air that that caused your body's mass to accelerate. And the higher you jump - in other words, the greater the distance between the chalk marks - the higher you jump, the more force you produced to cause the acceleration, to produce the velocity that generated the momentum that carried you up in the air when your feet broke contact with the ground.

Mark Rippetoe:
And if you'll look at the amount of time spent in the concentric phase of that jump, it's maybe a quarter of a second. OK, so what we're measuring when we do the standing vertical jump test and the distance between where your hand was when your fingers were at the top of the reach while standing versus the the distance that the hand went up as a result of your body's movement, up off the ground is a measurement of how much muscle contraction you generated in a quarter of a second. This is a very, very good indicator of your ability to recruit motor units into contraction in a very short period of time.

Mark Rippetoe:
So what is explosion? What is power? In other words, what is what is quickness and how is it generated? The standing vertical jump measures power. It measures your ability to display your strength quickly. Displayed... Strength displayed quickly is power. And the more explosive you are, more power you're able to produce. And what that actually means is your ability to generate the force of the contraction of as much of your muscle mass as you can in the shortest possible period of time.

Mark Rippetoe:
Those people who are extremely explosive are our possessors of great amounts of what we call physical power. Right now, a man that can deadlift 800 pounds is very, very strong. That doesn't necessarily mean he's explosive because the deadlift does not have to be accelerated. A clean, on the other hand, depends completely on acceleration. It depends it depends on the ability of the athlete to pull the barbell off the floor from a dead stop and accelerated to a high enough velocity that the bar possesses sufficient momentum to continue on up as the lifter shifts from the pull to catching it on the shoulders.

Mark Rippetoe:
This is this is this means that a deadlift is a maximum pull and a clean is a sub maximum pull. Because a clean must be accelerated or you miss the ability to rack it on the shoulders. So one of the requirements for Olympic weightlifting is power. Is Power. And the standing vertical jump test is a measure of the athlete's ability to contract a whole bunch of muscle mass in a very, very short period of time.

Mark Rippetoe:
And the period of time, as we've mentioned, is the concentric phase of the upward jump, which takes a quarter of a second. In other words, how much muscle can you get into contraction in a quarter of a second? And that is directly measured by the standing vertical jump test. OK.

Mark Rippetoe:
There's not a lot of practice you can do for standing vertical jump test A standing broad jump is kind of the same thing we're measuring, but it's a much more technique dependent movement. Standing vertical jump is you just jump up in the air. Once you figure out what you're going to do with your hands and feet, you know, practice it three or four times, then that's going to be the test. All right.

Mark Rippetoe:
Now, there's another piece of equipment that we use called a Vertec. And the Vertec is a series - you may have seen them in gyms - it's a series of vanes, 24 vanes at the top of a mast that stands in the middle of the floor. It's better to use a vertec than it is the chalk on the wall because a lot of people are not going to jump as efficiently with the wall right in front of them. And the vertec gets everything out of your way so that you're the downward part of the the jump - the descent part of the jump is not impeded by proximity to the wall.

Mark Rippetoe:
So a vertec is a real handy piece of equipment, and it allows you to quite accurately set the bottom of the vanes at the top of the upreached hand and then allows us to measure the difference between the upper hand and the distance the body has traveled off of the ground. You slap the vanes and standing vertical jump test is will continue to allow you to to jump and try to get a little bit higher until you miss three times. And that's considered to be the the height that you jump.

Mark Rippetoe:
This is what we know about standing vertical jump test data: the explosion generated your body's upward momentum off the ground, took place in very, very short period of time, so the distance that you traveled is completely a function of how fast your body's mass was moving as it left the ground. And since it is a function of that acceleration, it is a direct indicator of how much force you produced in that quarter of a second. And this is really what we're looking for, isn't it?

Mark Rippetoe:
Now, the data are interesting. The standing vertical jump average for a college age male is 22 inches. And the record, the biggest big standing vertical jump we've we've seen recently was 46.

Mark Rippetoe:
And is that right or is it 47? This is that 46 is the number that sticks in my mind.

Mark Rippetoe:
And this was recorded at an NFL combine. The guy jumped up in the air forty-six inches. Now, this is truly a superhuman performance. This is not normal. This is not what we consider to be a normal person. All right. And 22 to 46 is kind of a large spread.

Mark Rippetoe:
Here's the hard part - the female average standing vertical jump is 14. Now remember these are college age women. And at the sad truth is that everybody's standing vertical jump goes down as you get older. There's no point testing a 50 year old man's standing vertical jump because it's going to be disappointing. OK.

Mark Rippetoe:
So this data all comes from from college age people. 14 as opposed to 22. And the female record standing vertical job is thirty one, OK. 31 versus 46.

Mark Rippetoe:
Now, those proportions between record and average are fairly constant between males and females. And what this means is that exceptional females will exceed average males. That shouldn't come as a horrible surprise to anybody.

Mark Rippetoe:
And it's a it's a... This has to be kept in mind because what does this show us? It shows us quite starkly that there is a tremendous amount of difference in the ability to generate a whole bunch of muscle mass into contraction right now between men and women. The standing vertical jump is a direct measurement of your ability to call muscle mass into contraction.

Mark Rippetoe:
A 46 inch vertical versus a thirty one inch vertical. These are both freak performances for the two sexes, but it is a tremendous amount of difference in the ability in the most talented women, in the most talented men, to generate the force of muscle contraction in that quarter of a second that it takes to leave the ground, to go from flexed knees and hips to come off the floor. That short period of time is the is the amount of time during which you spent recruiting the muscle mass to generate that explosive knee and hip extension that carried you up off the ground.

Mark Rippetoe:
And we're measuring the distance it carried you up off the ground. And in doing so, we are measuring quite precisely the amount of force you generated during that quarter of a second. This indicates power production and in sports that require power production. We always, without exception, see better performances in the men's division than the women's division.

Mark Rippetoe:
Now, I don't need to point this out to you. You already know this. I mean, why do you think there's men's and women's tennis? Why is there men's and women's golf? There's men's and women's divisions in all of the sports because men and women are different in terms of what is called neuromuscular efficiency.

Mark Rippetoe:
Neuromuscular efficiency refers to the recruitment by the nervous system into contraction of the muscle mass. That is neuromuscular efficiency and the more efficient you are recruiting muscle mass into contraction, the greater your neuromuscular efficiency. And the standing vertical jump is a very, very simple, very, very unarguable demonstration of that ability. Men and women are completely different in their neuromuscular efficiency potential.

Mark Rippetoe:
Now, what are the ramifications for that difference in neuromuscular efficiency with respect to strength training? The most important thing to note about this is that men and women can do different percentages of their one rep max for sets of five.

Mark Rippetoe:
Now, think about what I'm saying here, OK? If a male has got a three hundred and sixty five pound bench press, his set of five for that 365 might be 285, might be 275, 285 somewhere in there. On the 365 single he might get might get a 290 set of 5. Right. Probably on a three sixty five he's got a triple of about 315.

Mark Rippetoe:
Females on the other hand... A woman that is benching a hundred pounds can probably do a set of five with ninety five pounds, certainly with 93 pounds, a complete set of five. Six or seven pounds away from her one rep, Max.

Mark Rippetoe:
Now, what does this tell you? It tells you that a one rep max for a female and a one rep max for a male are two different physiologic events. They're not the same thing. All right.

Mark Rippetoe:
If I can do a 365 single and do ts15 for a triple with it, that means that my three sixty five was a more efficient summary of my ability to recruit muscle mass into contraction.

Mark Rippetoe:
If she's doing a 100 for a single and ninety four for a set of five. This means that one hundred for her is not the same level of intensity in terms of the amount of muscle and contraction that my three sixty five was. OK.

Mark Rippetoe:
It is terribly important to understand the ramifications of this. OK, if I'm going to do a heavy single - let's just discuss several scenarios here - and I do 365, I'm probably calling into contraction 96 to 97 percent of my motor units that are contributing to this this contraction. 96, 97.

Mark Rippetoe:
Probably she doing a 100 pound bench press may only be calling 82 percent of her motor units into contraction. In other words, she can do one hundred for a single, but she can't do 101. Right, but she could do a much higher percentage of that one rep, max, for a set of five because the one rep max was not as "hard" for her. Notice the scare quotes around hard. It's not as intense a contraction for her. It doesn't involve as much muscle mass and contraction as my 365 did for me.

Mark Rippetoe:
Now, this has several important implications, doesn't it? If I want to train her for strength. And the only thing I can get out of her is 82, 83, maybe an 85 percent summary of the ability to put muscle mass into contraction that is not the equivalent to the male's. It's not the same training stimulus because it's not the same stress. Since it's not the same stress, we have to understand that it's not going to be as effective a way to reach down and produce a stress that causes a strength adaptation.

Mark Rippetoe:
A woman is going to have to have more exposure to heavier weights relative to her maximum strength than the male. And if a male tries to do that same level of exposure that the female trainee is doing, he's not going to be able to do it. He's not going to be able to recover from it, whereas she has to do it and she can recover from it because it's not as hard relative to her absolute capacity. She cannot show you her absolute capacity with the level of efficiency that I can get.

Mark Rippetoe:
Now, why do you think this would be? What do you think is responsible for this profound difference in neuromuscular efficiency between men and women? And the answer is testosterone. Now, that should be obvious. It's obviously going to be testosterone. But it's not just the testosterone. It's not the presence of the testosterone right now.

Mark Rippetoe:
The presence of the testosterone right now makes a difference in terms of the strength. I can give steroids to a female athlete and make her stronger. But that same female athlete that got stronger from the administration of androgens - testosterone, and it's analogs - is not going to improve her power very much.

Mark Rippetoe:
The thing that makes the biggest amount of difference in terms of the effects of testosterone are the effects of that testosterone in utero. When she was in the womb, when I was in the womb, we experienced different levels of exposure to testosterone.

Mark Rippetoe:
Eight weeks after conception, the fetus starts to produce testosterone if it's a male. The sexual differentiation is already taking place at about eight weeks. And at that point in time, the male fetus begins to be exposed to testosterone. And the exposure to testosterone has an extremely profound effect on everything else that happens in utero to the fetus.

Mark Rippetoe:
And little boys and little girls come out with a whole different set of plumbing, but also a whole different set of neuromuscular efficiencies. And parents that understand... That they've got boys and girls understand this. This doesn't have to be explained to anyone. But the reason for the differences was the exposure to the testosterone, the skeleton, the muscle mass, the connective tissue. Everything was exposed. The central nervous system was exposed to it, and it changes profoundly all of that structure.

Mark Rippetoe:
This is why the International Olympic Committee has just basically destroyed women's sports by saying that if you're testing that testosterone has been below a certain number for a year, then you can compete as a female.

Mark Rippetoe:
I, I don't understand how they don't understand that. That's that's not just wrong. That's... It's so wrong that it has to be, you know...

[off-camera]:
It's willful ignorance.

Mark Rippetoe:
That... The level of willful ignorance serves no one well, no one.

Mark Rippetoe:
You can't have congenital males competing in the women's division because guess what happens to his vertical jump, even if you give him estrogen? Not much. He still boy. He got the advantages of the testosterone for the seven months of in utero exposure that she did not enjoy. And this is this is blatant politics. It's patently unfair.

[off-camera]:
And and then they look really stupid when a situation like... What happened to Semenya recently, what happened? Did you know?

Mark Rippetoe:
I didn't I didn't hear this. What what happened to her?

[off-camera]:
I don't think she can compete anymore, really, because of her testosterone levels.

Mark Rippetoe:
So here's one of the rare...

[off-camera]:
Yeah. There's no fundamental principle of how we're going to do this thing so it's just up to whatever arbitrary shit they want to decide.

Mark Rippetoe:
Right.

Mark Rippetoe:
This is a situation, one of these rare people that's actually born intersex. This is a this is, you know, one in a hundred thousand kind of a kind of a birth where there, you know, the the secondary sexual characteristics and the primary sexual characteristics are not differentiated like they are in the vast majority of people. A female producing large amounts of testosterone.

Mark Rippetoe:
I don't know... You start getting into this situation where, look, we all know whether we're male or female. And there are exceptional individuals, but those situations are not what we're concerned about on a daily basis, are they?

Mark Rippetoe:
If the girls in Connecticut who are trying to go to college on a track scholarship get pushed into third place at the state meet because the politicians let a boy run in the event who identifies as a female. It doesn't no matter how he identifies, he's a male, and he's going to beat the girls. And everybody knows that. And they did it anyway. And now what happened to her scholarship?

Mark Rippetoe:
So this is... I'm much more concerned about her than I am Semenya. The case of that true actual intersex athlete is an extremely rare event, but it is becoming common that we have been made to be willing to ignore the obvious differences in physical potential between males and females.

Mark Rippetoe:
I wrote an entire article about women in ground combat. We'll talk about that in another podcast. But you see the obvious problems with allowing women to serve in a in a in a potentially very bad situation physically without the same physical potential to perform in that role as men. And people are going to get killed and all that shit. So we'll talk about that separate time.

Mark Rippetoe:
I've got an article on the website about that as well. Women in ground combat. And it's a spin off of the same topic.

Mark Rippetoe:
But back to women and strength training. If when you produce a one rep max, you are demonstrating your ability to summarize into contraction a huge amount of muscle mass, then the differences between men and women must be addressed in terms of setting up the training program.

Mark Rippetoe:
Now women and men squat exactly the same way. They deadlift, press, bench press, exactly the same way, because the execution of those movement patterns is not dependent on secondary sexual characteristics. It's dependent on skeletal and muscular anatomy, which is not any different in men and women.

Mark Rippetoe:
Women's squat looks exactly like men's squat. Women's and men's deadlifts are exactly the same. Presses and benches exactly the same. The potential for strength is obviously different between the two.

Mark Rippetoe:
OK, let's say a guy walks in the gym, he's untrained, he's 18 years old. We test his vertical jump. We don't normally do that, but let's say we decided today we test these vertical jump and he's got a 26 inch vertical. You know, he's a normal college kid, a little bit better athlete than maybe the vast majority of the human race. But he's only got a twenty six inch vertical.

Mark Rippetoe:
Another guy comes in off the street, same height, same weight, and he jumps 36 on the first day. I know without a doubt that the kid with a 36 inch vertical is going to squat more on day one than the kid with the 26 inch vertical. Happens every single time. And the reason for that ought to be obvious. The kid squatting thirty six with the thirty six inch vertical is able to put more muscle mass into contraction and thereby generate more force than the kid with the 26 inch vertical. Now, this ought to be obvious.

Mark Rippetoe:
And if you've been around a whole bunch of people that train and this is something you witnessed over and over again over the years. You know, kids come in at different levels of athletic ability. All right. And athletic ability is largely determined by power production. How quick is the kid? How explosive is the kid?

Mark Rippetoe:
This is what college recruiters are good at finding when they go to ball games, go to high school football games, and they're looking for talent to recruit for the for the college team. They're looking at power production. They can tell by watching the kid on the field how explosive he is. And they're good at intensifying this particular trait, this ability to explode.

Mark Rippetoe:
And as we previously mentioned, men and women have different levels of neuromuscular efficiency. And they their physical performances are quite thoroughly dependent for athletics on power production. Power production is the key to a good team. And recruiters know this even if head coaches don't. Strength and conditioning coaches don't understand this, but the recruiters do.

Mark Rippetoe:
If the recruiter put 55 freak athletes in the locker room, the team is going to do well because the athletes are freaks. The team is not going to do well because of the dances with balls bullshit that the strength of conditioning coach has them do in the weight room in lieu of getting their deadlift up to 600 pounds like he ought to be doing. Right. They're going to do well anyway because the at... Because the recruiter put the talent in the locker room.

Mark Rippetoe:
And the recruiter for the women's sports is doing exactly the same thing. He's looking for explosive women. Those of you with a bunch of kids, those of you that get four or five kids, have noticed that there are profound differences in the physical ability of these kids, even when they're little. Right.

Mark Rippetoe:
We all have seen little sproingy little kids that can jump up on top of the table. And yet when they're six or seven years old, you know, you deal with enough kids and you immediately begin and you start looking for this set of characteristics.

Mark Rippetoe:
You immediately begin to understand that there are different physical potential potentials in these kids from the time they're born. All right. Not all men are created equal. Not all women are created equal in terms of physical characteristics. And men and women are definitely not equal in terms of power production and neuromuscular efficiency. OK.

Mark Rippetoe:
So how does this bear on our training programs? Right. Well, in terms of the selection of exercises, it has no bearing on it at all. As I mentioned, we're not training the secondary sexual characteristics. We're training the musculoskeletal system. And those are not sufficiently dissimilar that we make any differences, any distinctions in the exercises we choose.

Mark Rippetoe:
Everybody squats, everybody squats below parallel, because that's the best way to squat in terms of a way to get people strong. Everybody deadlifts. Everybody deadlifts the same way because the deadlift is a complete movement and it cannot be different just because there is a cervix or not a cervix. It's this we're not concerned with training the cervix. We're training the musculoskeletal system. And the neuromuscular system that powers the musculoskeletal system is the primary interest in terms of differences between men and women training. OK.

Mark Rippetoe:
We're all going to bench, we're all going to press, we're all going to squat. We're all going to deadlift. We're all going to power clean. We're all going to power snatch. We're all going to do the same barbell exercises, but we're going to do different numbers of sets and reps for men and women.

Mark Rippetoe:
Now, when we first start people off, whether they're men or women, we use sets of five because experience over the decades has shown us that nothing works better than sets of five.

Mark Rippetoe:
When I start a novice male off in the gym, start a novice female off in the gym, we'll do exactly the same thing. We'll warm up to three sets of five across with a weight that will go up five pounds every workout. When I start them off on the press, we will work up to three sets of five and the boys will go up five pounds a workout on the three sets of five between workouts and the girls will go up to two and a half pounds for three sets of five. So upper body mass being the basic controlling factor there. Bench press the same thing. Five pounds versus two and a half pounds.

Mark Rippetoe:
Deadlift will be fairly similar. I probably run him up fifteen pounds per workout at first and probably run her up seven 1/2, maybe ten pounds every workout at first.

Mark Rippetoe:
Now, very soon after we get her in the weight room, she will not be able to take the same types of jumps in terms of absolute weight on the bar that he can. He will be able to do five pounds on the squat for months. She won't be able to go up that fast because she's not going to be able to recover from the huge volume of work it would take.

Mark Rippetoe:
So this is this is what some of the differences would be. If I come in and have him do three sets of five three days a week on the squat, very shortly, maybe two months in, I'm going to change her from three sets of five to five sets of three.

Mark Rippetoe:
Now, notice that the volume of fifteen reps is the same, but I'm going to have her do sets of three because you can do threes with a heavier weight than you can for sets of five. And she needs that heavier weight represented by the triple to more closely match the intensity of the effort to what he's able to get out of a set of five.

Mark Rippetoe:
And this goes back to our previous discussion about the ability to handle reps as a percentage of the one rep max. So it might take two months before we switch her over to five sets of three. We would keep him on three sets of five for a very long time because it works.

Mark Rippetoe:
Now, after both of these individuals have been training six or seven months, we're going to have to start looking at other changes, but the change over from for her from fives to threes happens relatively quickly, all the while keeping the number of reps during the workout at about the same level.

Mark Rippetoe:
Now, there's another another thing that needs to be thought about here. The deadlift is an interesting movement pattern. The deadlift starts from a dead stop on the floor and starts with a concentric movement all the way up. The hard part of the deadlift starts from... Is in the front of the deadlift. It's breaking the thing off the floor and pulling it up the legs to lockout. OK.

Mark Rippetoe:
It's hard because everybody - and I don't remember an exception to this unless there's some exotic injury going on - everybody deadlifts more weight at first than they can squat. And the reason for this is that the range motion of that the bar travels through is shorter, the position of the start has more knee and hip extension in it than the bottom of the blow parallel squat. For several reasons. It's easier to deadlift heavier weights.

Mark Rippetoe:
And for men, what we set people up on is one heavy set of deadlifts. Because a heavy set of five deadlifts is harder to recover from than a heavy set of five squats. So where we would have the men on three sets of five squats across, that same guy would lift maybe seventy five more pounds on one set of deadlifts. Ok.

Mark Rippetoe:
But guess what the girls have to do? The girls immediately start with multiple sets across on the deadlift from probably the first workout. She can recover from two or three sets across deadlifts, whereas we'd beat the piss out of a boy if we had him try to do the same thing. So this is an important distinction.

Mark Rippetoe:
And then at the same time we would take her up to triples on the deadlift at about the same time we would take her up to triples on the squat in order to more closely approximate the level of stress that he experiences from sets of five. She has to do sets of three because threes are heavier than fives as a higher percentage of the one RM.

Mark Rippetoe:
So if we understand all of these things, then we understand the way that this is not terribly complicated. You just got to you've got to stress her harder than you stress him in terms of the percentage of one rep max. Right.

Mark Rippetoe:
And now when I say percentage of one rep max, I don't want to generate any confusion. We do not test for one rep max, OK? We don't test you for a one rep max unless you're at a meet. That's the only time we ever have anybody do one rep max because one maxes are comparatively dangerous and that risk is worth it if you're a competitor and you're going to do a meet to see how much you can do, but as a matter of general training, 1 rep maxes don't tell us anything that we need to know that our sets of five and sets of three don't also tell us.

Mark Rippetoe:
So when we shift her over from three sets of five to five sets of three on her squats, what would typically happen is the first day we switch her to triples, we'd have her do the same weight that we did for fives. And then the next time we'd bump it up a little bit more aggressively than we might for him.

Mark Rippetoe:
In fact, let's say she go... She's doing her last three sets of five at one thirty five. The next time we did the three sets or the five sets of three, I'd probably keep her at one thirty five for five sets of three because that's some extra volume, She'll be a little bit more sore in the next time. But then the second workout of five sets of three, I'd probably take her to 140, maybe 145 to get back into that heavier weight to bump the intensity of the stress back up so we can continue to force a strength adaptation in in her training.

Mark Rippetoe:
And we're going to be more careful of that with the press and the bench press, because the jumps are going to be much smaller already because of the differences in upper body mass in between men and women.

Mark Rippetoe:
But the idea is that since women cannot produce the level of motor unit recruitment, the level of muscle mass contraction, that men can, then they have to work at relatively higher levels of intensity than men do in order to obtain the same level of stress and the same level of strength adaptation.

Mark Rippetoe:
Now, here's another aspect of this thing that that has to be taken into consideration. If I've got a guy in the gym doing... He's an intermediate level lifter and he's doing 405 for five sets of five across -- this is a pretty strong guy -- he's doing 405 for five sets across. That kid may need to rest 20 minutes between those sets, especially between the fourth and the fifth set. He may need to rest 20 minutes because of the level of fatigue that he is producing, the level of stress he's producing with his heavy weight and bunches of sets across, he has to take more time between sets because each one of the sets is more fatiguing.

Mark Rippetoe:
She, on the other hand, may not need five minutes between sets because remember, she's... Each one of the sets represents a lower stress event than a comparable workload for him. And since it wasn't as hard -- because she can't make it as hard -- she can't get as much muscle mass into contraction as he can, therefore, the contraction isn't is fatiguing. The set doesn't produce the fatigue and she can recover from the set faster.

Mark Rippetoe:
So typically we reduce the risk times between sets for women as well. Taken as a whole, these factors - and they're fairly simple - they tend to control the way we program differently between men and women. But if you don't know this, then you're fucking up because you can't train men and women the same way in terms of their programming.

Mark Rippetoe:
But you train them exactly the same way in terms of the exercises. Everything is the same with exercises, but in terms of sets and reps and rest and all the variables that that go into the programming, you have to understand the differences and why they're important.

Mark Rippetoe:
Nick, you got anything you want to add?

[off-camera]:
So in in practical terms, the way this looks, if you're a woman yourself lifting or you're training women where a guy will start to grind through reps, right. When you've got a guy who's going through six seconds, seven second squats at the end of his linear progression, it's it's time to be thinking about what the next step is for programming. Where women can grind through a set, grind through a rep and be perfectly fine in three minutes.

Mark Rippetoe:
And get recovered and be recovered for the next workout.

[off-camera]:
So that's not an indicator that something's wrong.

Mark Rippetoe:
Right. Absolutely. Because she's only grinding through an eighty five percent recruitment effort instead of a ninety six percent recruitment effort. And the level of stress is not the same no matter what it looks like.

[off-camera]:
Exactly. And the thing that you... That's the point at which you're going to change two sets of three because yeah, the bar speed is slow. Yeah the LP looks like it's slowing down, but if you just change to threes now, you can up the intensity and continue to apply more stress and keep the program going.

[off-camera]:
The number one thing that people do to mess this up when they're training females or they're lifting themselves as females is they switch programs too early. They go two months and then they can't get their fourth or fifth reps.

[off-camera]:
And then they look to change programs or do whatever when all they had to do is switch to threes and they'll get another two, three months.

Mark Rippetoe:
Three, four months out of that because grind for a male - what we call a bone on bone rep - is a different event than grind - a bone on bone rep - for a female. It's a completely different physiological event and it has different ramifications in terms of recovery and adaptation and everything.

[off-camera]:
Yes, so relatively early on you're going to see first reps on a squat, for example, first rep goes wham like this second round boom, like this second, third rep wham and then the fourth rep and goes on the pins. And then people like what the hell, what do I do? You know. And all it is, is that you give to the point where that those sets of five are not stressful enough.

[off-camera]:
And it's stressful for everybody at the beginning, but you've got to pay attention to it and know when to make that switch to threes. And the other thing is that it's not... Female walks in and I know that it's week seven or eight or week six that she's going to switch.

Mark Rippetoe:
It varies with the individual.

[off-camera]:
It's going to vary with the individual. So some people are going to have to switch in month one and a half, some people are going to switch in month four.

[off-camera]:
When Melissa started... I trained Melissa two times and I said... I taught her all the lifts and I said, so make ten pound jumps, when it starts to get a little heavy, switch to five. And then eventually you'll go down to two, two and a half pound jumps.

[off-camera]:
I catch up with her about two months later and she goes, hey, it's starting to get kind of hard. And I go, well what are you squatting? 275 And I said, that doesn't add up. Like, why are you why are you squatting so much? I said, that's great. But you're squatting like a lot of weight right now. And she goes, well, you told me to go sit to ten or ten pound jumps until it started to get hard...

Mark Rippetoe:
And just didn't get hard.

[off-camera]:
Sets of five, two seventy five on the bar, it just never got hard for her.

Mark Rippetoe:
General rule of thumb. Boys and girls, if what you're doing is working, you don't change it, you don't change it. Eventually it'll get hard. Eventually it'll stop working. But as long as it's working, there's no arbitrary reason to make a change in it just cuz some jackass on the internet said that, you know, this this program will work better. The one you're doing is working. Don't change it. If the if you're making five pound jumps.

[off-camera]:
Yeah, keep going, keep going, keep going.

[off-camera]:
The other thing everybody screws up is going to the meet, right? They go to the meet and then they want to they want to handle the women the way they handle the guys. 30 pound jumps on the deadlift.

Mark Rippetoe:
You can't do it.

[off-camera]:
Ten pounds on the press.

Mark Rippetoe:
That's how I learned all about this is making a bad mistake with a woman I took to a meet a long, long time ago. Opened her at a 220 deadlift - she was in the 123 - opened her at a 220 deadlift. Thing went whooom! Looks like a clean, I thought, hmm. Let's go to 105 - two thirty one. And it was stapled to the floor.

[off-camera]:
Didn't move.

Mark Rippetoe:
Stapled to the floor. Not her fault, my fault.

Mark Rippetoe:
But by the same token, one of the most important problems with modern powerlifting is the fact that these hard headed bastards will not go to the one kilo rule in powerlifting.

Mark Rippetoe:
It's stupid to expect a female to be able to take two and a half kilo jumps on the bench press, especially between second and third attempt. That's dumb. That's that that it it completely ignores this entire lesson we're trying to give you today. All right.

Mark Rippetoe:
Women can't make two and a half kilo jumps between a relatively grindy second attempt and a third attempt. She can't do it right. She needs a one kilo jump.

Mark Rippetoe:
And for some bizarre reason, I mean, they make the equipment, the Olympic lifters did this as of the minute they added women's division, they went to the one kilo rule. And power lifters just... They're just pig headed fools and they won't do it. And that that is the most immediate and obvious change that needs to happen in women's powerlifting.

[off-camera]:
Yeah, that's why we do it in strengthlifting. And your... The opener to third attempt for females is going to be on a squat and a deadlift, maybe seven and a half kilos difference.

Mark Rippetoe:
Maybe.

[off-camera]:
Maybe ten kilo different.

Mark Rippetoe:
Maybe ten kilos.

[off-camera]:
And for the press it might be five.

Mark Rippetoe:
Oh that's risky.

[off-camera]:
And they're going to look completely different. Yeah. You know, the the the first one is going to look easy and the last one is going to be a horrific eight second grinding press.

Mark Rippetoe:
Right. If she could stay with it.

[off-camera]:
At a five kilo difference. Right.

[off-camera]:
Right. I made that mistake with Jamila the first time I trained her, coached her at a meet. I jump too hard on that press because that first one looked easy.

[off-camera]:
Everybody does it.

[off-camera]:
And you said the same thing.

Mark Rippetoe:
Everybody has to do has to learn this the hard way for some weird reason. So why don't you listen to what we're telling you, OK? And save yourself the embarrassing situation of looking like a moron handling your female lifter at the meet. Because she can't do the jump you can do.

[off-camera]:
And you've got to rein them in, too, right. Because, I mean, this happens all the time.

Mark Rippetoe:
They don't understand it.

[off-camera]:
I go to them, you know, they're deadlift and the first one flies up and I'm like, well, what do you want to do? And I'm like you're probably not going to get that, you know, but they want to do it. So fuck it. do it. Not on the first meet, not at the second meet, and not if they're serious about winning the thing.

[off-camera]:
And then the last thing for for training purposes, the the difference between the heavy day and the the Texas method, for example, the difference between the intensity day and the volume day is going to be very small.

Mark Rippetoe:
Not like it would be for us.

[off-camera]:
Exactly. So...

Mark Rippetoe:
Not like it would be. And that'll have to be titrated up because remember what is heavy for her, for a single, she can back off six or seven pounds and do three sets of five across with.

[off-camera]:
Right. And and that's what you should do. Sets of five. I've heard of people programming eight triples. I would fire that coach immediately. Who's going to do eight triples in the gym, you know, for a volume day. They don't understand that. They're not understanding the mechanism. Right.

Mark Rippetoe:
And by the same token, women have no excuse for ever doing a set of ten. Sets of eight are stupid. They're they're just heavy enough.

[off-camera]:
It would be the equivalent of you doing a set of fifteen. I mean, essentially, right.

Mark Rippetoe:
Yes. Be the same thing's as me doing a set of twenty.

[off-camera]:
A set at twenty. It just not it's not even in the strength training realm.

Mark Rippetoe:
It's not strength training. Set of ten for women is not strength training. Set eight for women is not strength training. And this is this is a terribly common mistake.

Mark Rippetoe:
We don't need to do high reps for women because they're not heavy and heavy is strong. When you get stronger that's because the weight, the amount of weight you lifted went up. And eights won't do that for girls.

Mark Rippetoe:
It's I'd argue they don't work very well for boys either, but they're they're more commonly used for men. But I see no point whatsoever in doing anything ever more than five reps for females.

[off-camera]:
Yeah. And the overall point here is that this is the exact opposite of the conventional tecommendation, which is women should do sets of eight to 12, you know, whatever. Because because...

Mark Rippetoe:
Because I don't know why.

[off-camera]:
Yeah, they're less neuromuscularly efficient so let's do sets of 8-12

Mark Rippetoe:
So let's do shit that's easier because after all, they're just girls. They're only women. They don't need to be lifting heavy weights because... Let your brother do that.

Mark Rippetoe:
Look don't let people treat you like that. That's stupid. All right. That we've explained the physiology of the situation to you. And if your coach, your personal trainer, the guy you're paying, the woman you're paying to show you what to do in the gym, doesn't understand this, show them this discussion. And if they remain pigheaded about it, fire them, get somebody else that can help you.

Mark Rippetoe:
Don't stay with a consultant whose advice is wrong.

Mark Rippetoe:
Right?

Mark Rippetoe:
So that's about all I've got too.

[off-camera]:
I don't know that there's anything else to cover.

Mark Rippetoe:
I think, you know, there's a whole bunch of stuff to cover, but a lot of this comes down to just experience with it yourself. If you're training women, if you're a female lifter, you just have to keep these general principles in mind and apply them to your specific situation.

[off-camera]:
We could cover the psychological part, but that would be like a two or three hour podcast.

Mark Rippetoe:
Well, I'm not a psychologist. I don't deal with vegans and I don't deal with psychology.

[off-camera]:
You deal with the same psychological issues with dudes, too. It's not any different. You know, it's not any different.

[off-camera]:
I disagree because women their entire lives are being told don't weight a certain amount, don't gain weight.

Mark Rippetoe:
You know, that's a good point.

[off-camera]:
Guys are told the same thing. Guys are dealing with the same shit.

Mark Rippetoe:
They bring... Women do tend to bring more baggage into the gym than boys do.

[off-camera]:
The weight gain thing.

Mark Rippetoe:
The weight gain thing and the and pushing on things hard because they... Most women come into the gym not knowing how to push on something hard.

[off-camera]:
That's true.

Mark Rippetoe:
Because they've not only if they never done it, they've been told not to do it.

[off-camera]:
I've had far more success in getting women to do what they're supposed to do in terms of gaining weight, showing up to the gym, than guys. If you've got a guy who's convinced himself that he's going to get fat, that fucker's never going to eat, there's nothing you can do but women listen to you.

Mark Rippetoe:
Well, this is like teaching them to shoot.

[off-camera]:
Women'll listen.

Mark Rippetoe:
They're way easier to teach, to shoot because they'll listen to you. Because they don't have a they don't have any preconceived notions about what it is they're supposed to do.

Mark Rippetoe:
But if they come in, a lot of women come in with preconceived notions. Gecause, oh, they've had an exercise class in college and some moron has told them that, you know, they don't need to squat, they need to leg press and do knee extensions and shit instead of deadlift.

Mark Rippetoe:
But, you know, if you if you can I don't know, Rusty, I kind of I kind of agree with Rusty. I think that a lot of women do tend to come in with this vast amount of knowledge they've gotten out of Vogue magazine about what to do in the gym, what not to do in the gym.

[off-camera]:
I'm not disputing that they come in with preconceived, preconceived notions. But I but I think they listen... They're more likely to listen than a guy will. On anything.

Mark Rippetoe:
Well, you know, I think I've had good results with just being honest with them.

[off-camera]:
That's that's the big thing is people want to baby them. Whenever they're just people like everybody else and not. It took me a while to get that way. Especially Jameilla was my first actual client. And after I realized, wait, I can't handle her with kid gloves...

Mark Rippetoe:
No. They can they can take a little bit of pushing around and you've got to... And I think that women that are going to be good long term clients and that are going to get strong and will listen to you appreciate you treating them as humans instead of women.

Mark Rippetoe:
Because that's what we're dealing dealing with here. We got humans. We have different hormonal profiles in these humans, but they they squat the same way. You don't let them squat high. You yell at them when they fuck up, just like you do everybody else.

Mark Rippetoe:
And if they're if they're worth a damn, they'll respond to that just like everybody else does.

[off-camera]:
Totally agree.

[off-camera]:
Yep.

Mark Rippetoe:
OK, well, I hope this clears up some some preconceived notions that you people may have had about training females. You've got to approach the things fundamentally the same in terms of the movement patterns and fundamentally differently in terms of the programming.

Mark Rippetoe:
It is it is something that you have to consider or you're going to have to learn this the hard way. And our our intent today is to save you the embarrassment that those of us that have learned it the hard way have had to deal with. OK.

Mark Rippetoe:
So see you next time onStarting Strength Radio.

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