The History of Starting Strength | Starting Strength Radio #82

Mark Rippetoe | November 13, 2020

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Mark Rippetoe:
I think I'm more magenta. This is really what I look like.

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 Thursday. No, no, it's not Thursday, it's Friday. Friday's the day for Starting Strength Radio, so if you're hearing us for the first time, it's Friday.

Mark Rippetoe:
Now, actually it is Thursday. We're filming this on the Thursday. Filming this the Thursday after the election, in fact. It's November the 5th that we're filming this. You won't see this for about a week. God knows what will have happened in the period of time between right now and we're actually seeing this.

Mark Rippetoe:
I'm not going to talk too much about this today, but this is the most fucked up thing that's happened in the politics of the United States since the inception of the country.

Mark Rippetoe:
And I don't know what to do here. The only thing that you and I as individuals can do is take care of our own day. It's all we can do. These people are trying to take the Republic away from us. They're trying to show us that they're in charge and we just live here.

Mark Rippetoe:
They may get it done too. We'll just have to see. We'll just have to see who has the balls. But this is an occasion that calls for... Calls for some balls, and I'm not optimistic. Since we're all wearing masks.

Mark Rippetoe:
We've just shown everybody what kind of balls we've got. And... man, I don't know. I don't know. These these are dark days. But you guys are equipped for this, you know how to do hard things, you know how to finish the fifth rep. That is a skill that could be very valuable very soon, so just keep that in mind.

Mark Rippetoe:
Now, we don't have any Comments from the Haters! today. You know why? Because.... Fuck those people. I always wanted to tell them that.

[off-camera]:
I think you've told them that once or twice, maybe.

Mark Rippetoe:
Maybe in a roundabout way. Could be in a roundabout way I've told them that once or twice. But just to put a fine point on it, fuck all you people who think you're qualified to tell me what my background is and all this other shit. That's pretty funny.

Mark Rippetoe:
You don't even know what color I am. This is not pink. I think I'm more magenta. This is really what I look like. Right now. And then the picture that you normally have of me where I'm pink is postproduction.

[off-camera]:
That's actually postproduction.

Mark Rippetoe:
That's actually post, right.

Mark Rippetoe:
You know, I had a little article out recently about how Starting Strength, the little method we've developed, is different than everything else. And I thought, well, you know, today we would just discuss this, discuss the the origin of the method and this sort of thing with you. And I'll just remember as much of this as I can.

Mark Rippetoe:
But... See the tendency is when you see a finished product - you see a nice, tight, well-organized, finished product - your assumption is that the process by which this nice, tight, organized, finished product came about was in itself nice and tight and organized. And very few things are like that at all.

Mark Rippetoe:
In this particular instance, the Starting Strength method was the was the is the result of my 43 years under the bar. I started training with weights when I was in college, I was probably 20. And I was probably 20, I'm 64 now, so it's been about 44 years ago.

Mark Rippetoe:
I started out at. Midwestern where I was going to school and, you know, I'd gotten in a fight and it didn't go the way I wanted it to and young men are, you know.... Young men are motivated by loss, you know, things like that. So I decided that I better go ahead and start working out a little bit.

Mark Rippetoe:
I had absolutely no idea what the hell to do. None. I didn't know what the machines were in the room. I didn't know what the bars were for. I didn't know anything at all about it. And the Midwestern weight room, had a few little simple things... Had an old universal gladiator. If you've ever seen one of those four-station, universal machines. And it had an old very one of the old narrow gauge, wall-mounted York power racks in the other room. Those were made out of pipe. There's two uprights and little bitty narrow gauge pins. Oh, there wasn't six inches between those uprights. And we squatted off of that.

Mark Rippetoe:
And, you know, just wandered up there the first day, had no idea what to do. I just sat down and amused myself on a few of the machines and just operated some things, you know. Put some weight on and threw it around and stuff. Kind of like you do right now, you know. Kind of like you do at Gold's Gym right now. You know, just fucking around. You know, exercising.

Mark Rippetoe:
I was taking some exercise and I certainly as hell did not know what to do. I didn't have anybody to show me what to do. Now, later on, I ran into a guy up there - was a professor at school up there - and he didn't know any more about it than I did. But he, you know, had to behave as though he did because that's just what professors do.

Mark Rippetoe:
And so we were doing stupid shit, you know. We were doing stupid shit. Doing half squats and. I think we did some deadlifts, you know. I had no idea about any aspect of the right way to do any of these things. Did not even have an idea that there was a right and wrong way to do this. Kind of like you right now and.

Mark Rippetoe:
And, you know, it's just like, you know, I see on the internet all the time, "there are many ways to squat as there are is there are people doing the squat right now." Now, that's the...

[off-camera]:
Grains of sand.

Mark Rippetoe:
Grains of sand on the beach, as many ways to squat. Well, that's what I thought back then. This would have been probably 1970... Oh, what would that have been 76? Seventy seven? Somewhere in there. And it was a... You know, it was kind of just kind of a mess. But I felt... Just I was frustrated. I needed to do something.

Mark Rippetoe:
So I was in there messing around in the weight room up on the second floor of the Coliseum at Midwestern. That's where I started and we had a YMCA downtown and we would occasionally go down there just for the change of pace. Didn't know anything more about it down there than we did at Midwestern, but we tried real hard and we were real serious.

Mark Rippetoe:
And we eventually kind of fell into sort of a program that involved squats and benches and deadlifts. And if I remember correctly, I competed in the intramural weight lifting contest at Midwestern in the spring of 1970...I bet that was 78. I bet that was 19 and 78.

Mark Rippetoe:
And at that point, I'd have been 21 or 22, and I remember doing that. In fact, I ran into that trophy. I still got that trophy. Got that out at my house. Ran into that the other day. All those years ago. It was a powerlifting deal, we did the squat, the bench, the deadlift, but the people running it didn't know that.

Mark Rippetoe:
And, yeah, it's just... The whole thing was just amazing. In retrospect, it was really quite a really quite a deal, but it was fun. And we had, you know, it gave us a little all of us kids that were up there in the weight room, kind of a little competitive outlet.

It was it was fine. You know, but we had no idea that there was an actual way to do this. And it was the next year, it was in 79, when I ran into Bill Star up there in the in the in the weight room at Midwestern.

Mark Rippetoe:
We had had a tornado in Wichita Falls. Some of you may have heard of this. It was the first F5 tornado that had ever been recorded. Because they, you know, it obviously wasn't the first one that ever occurred, but it's the first one that they actually assigned a score to and it was a big giant event.

Mark Rippetoe:
That tornado was a quarter of a mile across on the ground. And it just eradicated about a fourth of the buildings in town. Scraped them off of the dirt. And it was a big giant event and Bill's daughter had been in the tornado and had gotten hurt real bad, and he was in town taking care of her. So this would have been about May. That tornado was in April.

Mark Rippetoe:
So I ran into him at the weight room at Midwestern in May. And, you know, he offered to teach me some stuff and and I kind of got my squats below parallel and started doing some things more correctly after that. And he and I got to be good friends. And we were friends up until he died four or five years ago. And I considered him my mentor. I didn't know what the word meant at the time, but that's what you would call it now, now that we have all these new vocabulary words here in 2020.

Mark Rippetoe:
And I think that probably I went to my first actual powerlifting meet. It was probably late in 1978. Think it was in Houston. And I drove down to Houston for this, entered the powerlifting meet. Drove down to Houston, competed in the meet, learned all kinds of things, competed in another one in 1979, and I might have lifted in two meets in 1979.

Mark Rippetoe:
And I was I was going to school Midwestern, I was majoring in geology and had taken some courses in anthropology. And I was just kind of just basically fucking around out there and, you know, didn't really... Yeah, I had probably had some idea that I would be in petroleum geology because at the time I did not know how hard the field of petroleum geology was to work in.

Mark Rippetoe:
Because the oil business is an unforgiving market. It's boom, bust. Boom, bust. During the booms, geologists get hired. During the busts, geologists sell cars. And I didn't know anything about selling cars.

Mark Rippetoe:
And I moved to Colorado in... it would have been in April of 1980. Moved to Colorado. And I was in Colorado a couple of years and worked up there for a guy that I've, in fact, just got off the phone with here a minute ago. Amazingly enough.

Mark Rippetoe:
And kind of got some miles under my feet, decided to move back to town in eighty one, in the fall of 81. So I started back to school in the fall of 81 with the i... With the intent of finishing my degree, which I finished in 1983. But I had had not really decided at that point that I was going to do this for a living, what you know that I... I do now.

Mark Rippetoe:
I'd had a job in the health club in Canyon City while I was in Colorado. Spent really most of... That was a couple of months, I spent most of most of my time in Colorado horseback.

Mark Rippetoe:
And when I came back, I came back with some horse business experience and kind of messed around with that for many, many years thereafter, but I decided I was going to finish to the degree. I got through with school in 1983 and the bottom fell out of the oil market.

Mark Rippetoe:
The price of oil went from thirty seven dollars a barrel - which 40 years ago was a lot of money - a hot, heated up market, and everybody was making a whole bunch of money. It dropped down to like three dollars. Some insane thing like that. It was a glut in the market. And this was with conventional production before fracking. There was a glut in the market because the world's population at the time was not nearly what it is now. And they had actually managed to figure out a way to overproduce oil. So that potential for a career dried up immediately.

Mark Rippetoe:
Now, I was training here in Wichita Falls and, you know, I was training pretty seriously. This is back when I was a competitive lifter. And I'd been in lots of meets by that point and was very, very serious about about my training. And then in April of nineteen eighty four, I got the opportunity to buy the gym.

Mark Rippetoe:
And it was Anderson's gym. David Anderson owned it at the time and I bought the gym from him and opened it as Wichita Falls Athletic Club on April Fool's Day, 1984.

Mark Rippetoe:
And I was at the time working at a yard business. I was mowing yards. It was making decent money mowing yards. Had a little truck, went around town, had 15 or 20 yard accounts. I made pretty good money. And my overhead was low.

Mark Rippetoe:
And... I was interested in my training, so I thought at the time, well, all right, let's just buy the gym. And I'll just work the gym in with my yard business. And I got, in fact, I got my first member the day I opened the gym. First member came in that first day second member came in the second day. That second member was our friend, Mike Morrison who still trains with us to this day.

Mark Rippetoe:
And you know, we just showed people... What I knew how to do was powerlifting. All right. And the gym was a black iron gym. It was a barbell gym. There was a few machines. But by and large, it was it was primarily barbells.

Mark Rippetoe:
So I started off in the gym business teaching people how to do free weight barbell exercise. That's what... That from the first day that I worked my own gym, I was showing people how to do the movements.

Mark Rippetoe:
Now, I didn't know how to show them how to do the movements, but that didn't keep me from showing them anyway. And you know the type, don't you?

Mark Rippetoe:
You know the type. The personal trainer at Gold's that thinks he knows all about how to show you how to squat and you end up about eight inches above parallel with your chin looking up at the ceiling and stuff.

Mark Rippetoe:
I don't remember how I showed people how to do those movements back then, probably because I have purged it from my memory just out of embarrassment. But I'm not a stupid person. I'm not the brightest guy in the world, but I'm not stupid.

Mark Rippetoe:
And one thing about people who are of, you know, more than average intelligence is that they learn from their mistakes quite readily. And that's what I did every time I showed somebody how to squat, how to deadlift, how to bench press. And it wasn't till later that I started using the press. But every time I showed them one of the basic barbell exercises, I took note of what part of the explanation made sense. I compared it to my own movements in the squat, and it took quite a while, even under those circumstances, to develop a way to teach these exercises.

Mark Rippetoe:
And at the time, I had some machines in the in the gym and I thought, well, hell, I've got them, I've got to use them. So I would put leg extensions and leg curls into the into the programming. Because, I mean, I bought them... Here they are. Gotta get some use out of the damn things. And over the years they got less and less use.

Mark Rippetoe:
And, you know, people coming and doing their own workouts would throw them in. But I've got to the point where the last 10 years that I owned those machines in the gym, I didn't use them in my programming at all. I had realized over time - over training hundreds and hundreds of people - on these movement patterns that you keep the things that work and you get rid of the things that don't work.

[off-camera]:
Rip, during this during this time were you teaching a high bar squat?

Mark Rippetoe:
Probably. Probably. I probably was, because I didn't know any better. I have since learned better. And during the process of teaching more and more and more people how to squat, I finally realized that you got to use your hips, that you got to drive with your hips out of the bottom of the squat.

Mark Rippetoe:
Furthermore, that everybody had squats heavy does it that way, and that if you're going to drive your hips up out of the bottom, you've got to put the bar lower than on the top of your traps. It just dawned on me one day that this is where it goes. There's a shelf back there. That's what I called it even at the time. Put it on the shelf, the posterior delts. That happened fairly early, but I didn't realize the significance of it until later. I just knew that it was it felt better back there and everybody was stronger with the bar in that position.

Mark Rippetoe:
But in the course of setting up these programs that everybody that came in the door. I taught how to train everybody that was a member that did not specifically tell me they wanted to do it their own way, and at that time I'd let them do that. But but everybody else got taught how to squat bench press and deadlift. And again, I started using the press much later.

Mark Rippetoe:
I've had a lot of experience teaching people how to squat. I don't know anybody that's had more experience than I have in teaching the squat. I don't know that there's another coach on Earth that's had more experience at teaching people how to squat than I have just because of the sheer numbers of people I have dealt with both in the gym and at seminars over the past 15 years.

Mark Rippetoe:
But at the time that I was developing the way we we did our our barbell programs in the gym business one of the things that motivated me, as you know, a fledgling businessman was client retention. And I thought, you know, I've got to... I have a product here, you know, and I still hadn't figured out all the nuances and all the things that I know about it now. But I did know that there was... That the best way to handle membership was to provide value with the membership. Not to bullshit, but to actually provide value. And the best... The way I figured out how to demonstrate value was the numbers.

Mark Rippetoe:
So I started getting these little composition notebooks. You've seen them. They got kind of a mottled cover and you you get them for classes in college and you keep a semester's worth the notes in the thing. And it's ruled paper, you know, and they're like a quarter apiece or whatever the hell they were at the time. You get them on sale for a quarter. So I'd buy a bunch of them.

Mark Rippetoe:
And every time somebody joined the gym, I would make them up a book. And I'd write down the the basic program. The list of the exercises, Monday, Wednesday, Friday on the first page. And then I would turn over to the second page and then I'd start keeping a day's log. And what I would do is put today's date at the top of the paper and I would just make a narrow column of the day's exercises: squat, bench press, deadlift, lat pulldowns, triceps, barbell curls. Whatever I was going to have them do.

Mark Rippetoe:
And I'd write all these things down in a column. And we'd always start with a squat and we'd always move to a pressing movement and we would pull and then any of the assistance exercises we were going to do, we did last. So I recorded all of those exercises in a column in the order in which they were executed with the weights and reps, every set, every rep, all the weights written down in this column. And I could get five days on each page.

Mark Rippetoe:
So over the course of two pages that you had open in front of you on the table, you would see ten workouts. And at the end of ten workouts you could run across - because the squats are all in the same position on the page, the bench press is all in the same position, the deadlifts and power cleans are all in the same position on the page - and you could see those numbers go up.

Mark Rippetoe:
And what I did was every time a new member came in, we'd go up 10 pounds in the squat for the first three or four workouts and then we'd go to five pounds in the squat. Because I was interested in showing the member that this process, over 10 workouts, has made you stronger. ANd how are you stronger? Because the numbers bigger.

Mark Rippetoe:
And that bigger number helps with client retention because people want to see that they're not wasting their time and their money. All right. And at the time, these are not personal training clients, these are just gym members. When you joined my gym at the time, I'd work with you three or four times every time you came in. And then I'm there to supervise and make sure you're squatting below parallel and doing everything you're supposed to be doing, while not working with you as a as a personal trainer. And I didn't start doing personal training until much later.

[off-camera]:
So you're saying that things haven't changed too much?

Mark Rippetoe:
That's exactly right. I kind of do the same thing now. And... Except that now I don't have any personal training clients at all. And but I had you know, I had had a lot of clients there after a while. I started taking on personal training clients and, you know, I will say that you know, you learn a lot from these people. Personal training clients and gym members are typically two different groups of people.

Mark Rippetoe:
Personal training clients need you more than the gym members do. You know, you you you teach the gym members what to do and then you just kind of give them some pointers every once in a while and keep them on track. And they're fine by themselves. But the personal trainer clients typically hire you because they don't want to learn about this. They just want you to do it for them because they got other shit to do.

Mark Rippetoe:
And I understand that completely. I trained a lot of doctors. They're just busy and they don't have time to learn my job. So I did it for them and they paid. And I think most everybody in this business finds that that's the case even now.

Mark Rippetoe:
And the net effect of this whole thing was that I taught a hell of a bunch of people how to squat. And I taught a lot of people how to squat while not knowing how to teach them how to squat. Now by that, I mean, I know... I knew at the time what I wanted their squat to look like, but I didn't know why. I knew what it should look like. I knew what their deadlift should look like, but I didn't know why it should look that way. The same thing on the bench press. I knew what to look for, but I didn't know how to explain what I wanted to look for.

Mark Rippetoe:
Now I know how to explain all of that because I've had to learn how to do it, because we decided that we were going to publish this book back in 2004. When I started writing it, I had to start thinking more about why, instead of what. I already knew what. I knew what a deadlift needed to look like. But the process of going from writing the first edition in 2004 to to last week has been one of refinement and reconsideration and reanalysis and and perfection and learning how to explain things more concisely, learning which explanations made mathematical sense and which didn't. Learning the physics, learning the mechanics. I had had a background in in in the sciences, but I didn't, you know, understand how the concept of a moment arm applied to all this yet until I had to start thinking about it myself.

Mark Rippetoe:
And we we had to we had to we had to finalize all of that because I've never heard our moment model of barbell training explained anywhere except us. We originated that. That was our baby. And, you know, I'd had a lot of very, very smart people help me out with this. Lots and lots of smart people, people I've trained with. Stef who's smarter than anybody else I know and, you know, people in the sciences, people in mechanics, physicists. Engineers, lots of engineering input into this. Where people that use mechanics on a daily basis, reviewed our explanations and said, yeah, this part of it is right, but you need to consider this over here. And I thought, oh, yeah, you're right. That does make more sense as an explanation for why we're doing it like this.

Mark Rippetoe:
And like the alignment model of the deadlift. I had absolutely no idea about that when I bought the gym. Had absolutely no idea about that up until the late 2000s when I had to have an answer for why we deadlift over the middle of the foot and why the hips are high. I had had to come up with an answer about it, because I can't say do it like this. And then explain like this by saying, well, this is the way we do it. Because that's that's dumb, that's low level.

Mark Rippetoe:
Do it this... Because this is the way we do it, is not ever an answer to an honest question about why. This is the way we do it means you haven't thought about it. That's all that means is you don't... You have not spent the time to think about what it is you're trying to explain. And I couldn't be put in that position.

Mark Rippetoe:
So we we went through and and with... The idea to write the book, the first edition of Starting Strength, was the organization of a bunch of stuff that I had already known, but that I had not articulated in a way that was that was concise. And the first book, in fact, was a complete fucking mess. I can't even stand to read it anymore because it was it's just, by today's standards, sloppy and unprofessional. And it was just, you know...

Mark Rippetoe:
But it did have the saving grace of having never been attempted before. And it was the only book of its kind in print. Just like the Blue Book is now. The first edition of Starting Strength was the first attempt anyone had ever made to thoroughly explain how to do squat. All the other books that have been in print about the squat take about two pages and basically they say, well you put the bar on your back and you squat down and you stand back up. And I'm sorry, that's inadequate because that's not what you do.

Mark Rippetoe:
And Starting Strength was an attempt to flesh out the idea that barbell exercise requires a bunch of thought. I'm continually amazed when I start people out that haven't ever done this before and after they've been training in a couple of months, they they always say, you know, this really requires a whole lot more paying attention to what I'm doing than I thought it did.

Mark Rippetoe:
And. Yes. Yes, it does. You are squatting down and standing back with a barbell on your back with a lot of weight. Now you can fall down. Right? You can fall down and that'd be bad. But you didn't fall down. What did you do to not fall down? Not only what did you do to not fall down, what did you do to control the barbell on the way down and on the way back up? What made it easier? What would make it harder? All of these things have to be thought about, and it's a it's an extremely intensive activity to do, to control every aspect of your body's movement weighted with a barbell through space.

Mark Rippetoe:
There's a whole bunch of concentration and focus that's required from barbell training that is not required of you riding the treadmill while you watch TV or waving your legs around in the air doing, you know, sitting on the leg extension machine. Barbell exercise is very, very demanding in terms of your ability to perceive what every aspect, all the pieces of your skeletal anatomy, are doing at any one time. We are training movement patterns.

Mark Rippetoe:
See and this is something that I didn't really understand until much later. I started off back a long, long time ago reading the bodybuilding magazines, just like everybody did back in the 80s. I started off reading the bodybuilding magazines, so I thought in terms of quads and delts and hamstrings and calves and pecs and abs and lats and traps. And it took me till till quite a bit later to realize that that's not what strength training is about. Strength training isn't is not about body parts. Strength training is about movement patterns.

Mark Rippetoe:
The squat, the press, the bench press and the deadlift and the Olympic lifts are movement patterns that we load with the barbell. I don't care what muscle groups are involved in those exercises, because I know that doing all of those exercises together works the entire body, nothing is left out because the movement patterns involve all of the skeletal kinetic chain.

Mark Rippetoe:
And if the movement patterns involve all the skin at skeletal kinetic chain, then all of the muscle mass that moves all of the skeletal kinetic chain is loaded. And if we progressively load it, we get it stronger and stronger thdn all of that muscle mass gets stronger and stronger too. And I don't have to know what my gemellus inferior is doing during a squat. I just know that it's doing whatever its anatomical job is because I'm making it do that with the technique that we have developed for the squat.

Mark Rippetoe:
So it wasn't until much later that the idea that what we were doing in Starting Strength is completely different than everyone else's concept of strength training. It wasn't until later that that that I had that idea crystallized. We are doing movement patterns. We're loading movement patterns. But when I first started off, I didn't think that way. I thought, like you do. I thought just like you do when I squat, I'm doing quads.

Mark Rippetoe:
There is so much more to the squat than quads. It's just absolutely fascinating that a person could still think that squats are about quads. I don't know how you leave out all of the important things that we're actually doing under the bar by thinking about your quads. I mean, it's it's bizarre to me you're squatting down and standing back up, your entire skeleton is in movement, the whole thing's in motion and you're worried about your quads.

Mark Rippetoe:
I mean, that's, you know, but look, it took me a while to get here, too, so I understand, but you've got to get past that idea now.

Mark Rippetoe:
How did I get past that idea? I wrote the book. I wrote the book. I had to.... When you sit down to write a chapter of a book, what what happens is you begin to just organize your thoughts as you type and and some of you that are authors might do it a different way, but what I found to be the case is, is that I will write a sentence. And then I'll flesh that sentence out into a paragraph. And then I'll reread the paragraph and I'll say, you know, there's a better way to say that. And I'll retype a couple of the sentences and then it'll dawn on me... You know, I'm really that's not really what I'm trying to say. But let me change this and. Oh, yeah, now, that's exactly right. And I've taught myself something. I've taught myself something.

Mark Rippetoe:
Authors, I think, those of you that have written, especially nonfiction writers, will all agree that you learn from writing because the writing of the paragraph makes you organize the thoughts you have that started the paragraph off and as you write it, it changes and it improves. And finally, little things begin to crystallize that are obvious now that you've thought about it.

Mark Rippetoe:
And that really sums up the process that I went through from opening the gym in 1984 to where we are right now. It was a it was a crystallisation process. All these ideas are floating around out there individually. They're all right. They're all correct one way or another. I may not see the pattern. I didn't see the pattern at the time. But having played around with all of these little nuggets of of mineral clarity, over the years, they organized themselves into this crystalline structure that we refer to as Starting Strength.

Mark Rippetoe:
And it took time. It took years and years. It took hundreds of thousands of hours, if that's even possible, on the platform with different people trying to do the same movement pattern, me trying to figure out a way to explain what I wanted them to do and how to get them to do it the way I wanted them to do it.

Mark Rippetoe:
And then later, much later as it turns out, the why I want to get them to do it this way organized itself out of the out of this giant mess of things that were correct but weren't organized at that level. And as a result, the program is what you see now.

Mark Rippetoe:
Starting Strength is is is composed of two basic ideas. One is the idea that there are optimal ways to acquire strength and that the optimal way to acquire strength is always with the barbell. The movements that the barbell permits are movements that are perfectly natural to the human body, movements you're already doing. You're squatting down and standing back up. You're picking things up off of the floor. You're pushing things up over your head. You're pushing things away from you. And with the power clean and power snatch, you're throwing things up and catching them. These are all perfectly natural movement patterns you're already doing. All we're doing is loading them with a barbell that allows you to do the movement pattern in an efficient, safe way that can be increased in load and therefore your strength increased.

During the course of exploring the use of this method what we've determined over time is that for the first six or eight months of your training, if you don't come in to the gym or do anything except squat, press, bench, press, deadlift and power clean, you're going to get stronger if you go up every time. And that triceps and abs, sit ups, back extensions, barbell curls, wrist curls, knee extensions, leg curls - all of the stuff that constitutes the typical floor of a commercial gym - all of that shit is not necessary because those are the movement patterns you can't make go up for six or eight months, every workout. You cannot increase your barbell curl every time you come in the gym for six to eight months, but you can increase your deadlift. So what you're going to do is worry about your deadlift and leave barbell curls for later. Right?

Mark Rippetoe:
You can't go up on the pec deck machine every time you come in the gym. And if you try to go up on the pec deck machine, what's going to happen is your bench press is going to suffer because your bench press can go up every time you come to the gym.

[off-camera]:
What is a pec deck machine?

Mark Rippetoe:
Pec deck. You've never seen a pec deck?

[off-camera]:
Never heard of it.

Mark Rippetoe:
That's where you sit in the machine and go like this.

[off-camera]:
I call that the hugging machine.

Mark Rippetoe:
The hugging machine?

[off-camera]:
Because it makes you really good at giving hugs.

Mark Rippetoe:
Well, it's kind of the. It's kind of like the the you know, the adductor abductor machine for your... That's the yes/no machine. Yes no yes no. Right?

Mark Rippetoe:
Those things can't go up every workout. And if they can't go up every workout, you don't need to do it because time is money. All right.

Mark Rippetoe:
If everything else in your barbel training program is going up every workout, then all of that other shit is getting strong too without you having to do it. And making time in the workout to do stuff like that is expensive. It's expensive in terms of the amount of time you you have available for the rest of the shit that you're trying to get done.

Mark Rippetoe:
Not everybody is a 20 year old college kid in the weight room at Midwestern with nothing else much to do. You know, most of us are adults. Most of us have responsibilities. Most of us can carve out an hour and 15 minutes, hour and a half for our training, three days a week. But if you drag that out into a three hour workout by adding a bunch of unnecessary assistance exercises to it, that don't actually make you stronger because you can't make the load on those exercises go up every time you train like you can the major barbell exercises, then you're doing things that are wasting your time.

Mark Rippetoe:
After you've been training two or three years and your progress has slowed down like it inevitably will, then you can do all that stuff you want. And you'll have a better feel by then about how much how much of it to do and how much time to devote to it.

Mark Rippetoe:
I don't have a problem with a guy doing barbell curls. It's fine. Tou know, if you want big arms - and big arms are useful, not just nice looking - barbell curls are the best way to get it. But you don't need to do that the first six to eight months of your training where your arms are going to get big anyway because you're squatting and deadlifting and pressing and bench pressing and doing power cleans. Your arms are going to grow anyway.

Mark Rippetoe:
Now, if you don't understand that, it's because you haven't done it. This is not my opinion. Your arms are going to get bigger whether you train them directly or not. Because of the other things you're doing, your arms are going to grow. I know this and you don't. If I were you, I would listen to me, OK? Because the first six to eight months of anybody's training is the most productive time in your training history. More changes to your body will occur in that initial six to eight month period if it's taken seriously and if it's done correctly than any other time in your life.

Mark Rippetoe:
That's when you go from a hundred and eighty five pound deadlift to a 405 deadlift. That's when your squat goes from 135 to 365. That's when your bench press goes from 155 to 300. That's when your press goes from 95 to 185. These are all big, giant, profound increases in strength and they're big increases in muscle mass. This is when you start to look different. This is the period of time that, if you do it correctly, is going to make the greatest amount of difference in both your strength level and your physical appearance than any other time in your training career, if you'll take it seriously.

Mark Rippetoe:
Now, taking it seriously brings us to point number two of Starting Strength. The first part was how to do the exercises and why. Which exercises, how to execute them. It's all in the book. Part two is how to program. And what we decided a long, long time ago was that this idea I had of the 10 workouts displayed in the training log was showing us something very important about human physical adaptation.

Mark Rippetoe:
Because back then, the dogma and it was dogma and it's still dogma when it's repeated mindlessly, is that the first six months of your training, you don't grow any muscle mass, you just make more efficient the muscle that's already there. The only person that could possibly say that with a straight face is someone who has never had a personal training client do squats, presses, bench presses, and deadlifts for six months.

[off-camera]:
One of my favorite things is the.... You need to get rid of the imbalances.

Mark Rippetoe:
Get rid of the imbalances.

Mark Rippetoe:
You know what gets rid of imbalances?

[off-camera]:
What's that?

Mark Rippetoe:
Getting your squat up to 405 gets rid of imbalances. Getting your perfectly executed, balanced squat up the 405 hunts down and murders imbalances and nothing else does. All right.

Mark Rippetoe:
But this is all the dogma and what we have done is completely blow past that, because what we always see is when a when a young man comes into the gym, 18 year old kid comes into the gym, he's five 11 he's 155. Every single time this kid does what we tell him to do at the end of six months, you know, that period of time where you don't grow anything, you just get real efficient? Somehow he's gained 30, 35 pounds of bodyweight. Twenty seven or eight pounds of which is muscle mass.

Mark Rippetoe:
This is normal, this is what we see. This is just what happens. I don't care what you learned in ex phys in college. Because in college you learn lots and lots of things that are bullshit. All right. I hate to break the news to you.

Mark Rippetoe:
Those of you that have been in college know what I'm talking about. Because this is a classic example of ex phyx bullshit, exercise, physiology, intro to exercise physiology that's what they tell you. Oh the first six months of a strength training program you just improve neuromuscular efficiency and it's only till after that period of time that muscle mass starts to accumulate.

Mark Rippetoe:
All right. Let me ask you a question. If I load you with a deadlift and I have you I have you come in, I teach you how to do the deadlift, and first time you go through the deadlift movement and you end up at 185 for a set of five, and then the next time you come to the gym, you go to 195 and then 205 and then 215 and 225 and then 235, 245. And then we have to start slowing down to five pound jumps and then 250. And then 255. 260 265. What about that stress does not require both an efficiency adaptation and hypertrophy. How do you separate the stress into an efficiency stress and a hypertrophy stress?

Mark Rippetoe:
Guess what? You can't.

Mark Rippetoe:
I guess what you also didn't learn in ex phys class. You didn't learn about the stress recovery adaptation phenomenon, which is responsible for what happens to you during a strength training program. You didn't learn about that in exercises class, did you? And as a result, things are not being explained correctly. All right, you start growing immediately on a strength training program. And the only way to not grow is to not eat enough. And, you know, if you're laboring under the delusion that you don't need to provide enough caloric surplus, enough protein intake to produce hypertrophy, then I guess you're not going to get bigger.

Mark Rippetoe:
That's your fault, not mine. All right.

Mark Rippetoe:
You begin to get bigger immediately. This is just one of the things that doing it the way we have done it has taught us that is directly contrary to the conventional wisdom that is emitted from ex phys class. It's it's just absolutely wrong. And that's the kind of thing that you learn, having done this for 44years or three or two, what did I say it was, I can't remember. I'm 64. I started when I was 20 to say 44 years. I can't keep track. That's a lot of years to remember. If I forget one of them it's no big deal.

[off-camera]:
I have a hard time remembering last year.

Mark Rippetoe:
I do, too. I do, too. They all fly by so fast right now. As you get older, a year isn't as important as it used to be.

[off-camera]:
But this year is never ending.

Mark Rippetoe:
This year will never go away, will it? It's just dragging on.

[off-camera]:
What if we're in hell right now? What if that's the deal.

Mark Rippetoe:
We could be in hell. Right? This could be the Matrix. We're in the Hell version of the Matrix.

[off-camera]:
January 1st, looking at the calendar, it's still going to be 2020. Resetting.

Mark Rippetoe:
Over and over and over 2020 the rest of the rest of time.

Mark Rippetoe:
Anyway.

Mark Rippetoe:
So this is... The idea that the programming has to drive the stress adaptation, the stress recovery adaptation cycle is the other piece of Starting Strength that we developed ourselves that didn't come out of anybody else's ideas. That first six to eight months where you every workout you can come in and add weight to the bar, we call that the novice linear progression. It's not exactly linear, but everybody likes to say that. So we just call it the novice linear progression or NLP, as it has been dubbed on the internet.

Mark Rippetoe:
The novice linear progression is the period of time during which I can show that training book to the kid and make his numbers on the squat go up every time he comes in the gym. This a very important time because that's motivational. Now that doesn't last forever or we'd all be squatting 7500 pounds. You reach the point of diminishing returns.

Mark Rippetoe:
And the principle of diminishing returns is that graph you saw back in analytical geometry, where the thing starts off at a steep slope, the slope goes horizontal and finally planes out as it approaches a limit. At the limit function is what you're seeing in strength training and everything else in nature. It's a common phenomenon and if you don't understand how it works, you're going to fuck your training up.

Mark Rippetoe:
At first, the slope of the line is very steep. And this is what you take advantage of coming in every day to the gym and adding weight to the bar on every one of the exercises you're going to do. Every day is a PR. Later, that will slow down, because the stronger you are, the harder it's going to be to get even more strong. Kind of like the better a piano player you are, the harder it is to get to be better. You know, things slow down as.things accumulate. As the things at the base of a curve accumulate, the slope of the curve goes horizontal and this is observed all over nature.

Mark Rippetoe:
This means that after the novice linear progression takes place, you're going to be in a period of training that we refer to as the intermediate. Intermediate is when for convenience, we tend to try to have you go up once a week instead of once every workout. Right, and then that period of time will last for anywhere from one to three years, depending on how diligent you are about controlling your programming.

Mark Rippetoe:
And then at some point you're only going to be able to make PRs once a month, once every two months, maybe once or twice a year, depending on how advanced you are. And that's the advanced period. And once again, here's the slope of the line right now. We were the first ones to make this observation, as weird as that sounds.

Mark Rippetoe:
Until practical programming for strength training, the first edition was published in 2006 that observation had never been made. What we were dealing with back in the early 2000s is that periodization is the standard by which all strength training programs must apply. And by periodization, what they meant was undulating Matvey of periodization where you hit a PR every three weeks or something like that.

Mark Rippetoe:
And when I tried to get a paper published with the NSCA in one of their little shitty-ass journals they rejected... I've still got these e-mails. It's it's funny to see them. I postulated that at first progress goes very quickly and then as progress slows down, programming must get more complicated. But at first, programming is simple. Simple programming, rapid progress, slower progress as you accumulate strength, more complicated program. And finally, very complicated programming with just a little bit of progress over time, if you're lucky, right?

Mark Rippetoe:
This was controversial.

Mark Rippetoe:
And I remember one of the reviewers I turned in this paper, I think Lon and I wrote the paper and we turned it into the probably strength & conditioning journal. And one of the reviewers said, you don't seem to understand periodization. That was his comment for rejecting the idea. You don't you don't seem to understand the importance of periodization.

Mark Rippetoe:
And my response was. That's the point. You don't understand periodization.

Mark Rippetoe:
And, you know, it's pointless to argue with them. So these people are academics, they know things that a gym owner can't possibly understand, right. Just a common gym owner can't possibly understand the things that these brilliant PhDs in ex phys know.

Mark Rippetoe:
So, you know, I've messed with it a little bit and finally got it published. A little 400 word column in the thing back when I thought it was important to play that game over there.

Mark Rippetoe:
And then I published, we published, Practical Programming. It's in its third edition now. And it sold more copies than any of their books ever has.

Mark Rippetoe:
We made more people strong than anybody with a Ph.D. in ex phys has ever made a strong. Because they just don't understand what it is they're supposed to be doing. And God damned if they're going to learn it from me, huh?

Mark Rippetoe:
I don't care, though, I'm not here because of them, I'm here because of you guys. If you want it, if you want to get stronger, we offer the logic by which this can be accomplished.

Mark Rippetoe:
And it's never been refuted, you know. Your calling me fat does not refute my argument. Has that occurred to you? Has it occurred to you that the fact that I'm pink or magenta doesn't refute my argument? I don't know, maybe you think it has.

Mark Rippetoe:
Anyway. That's kind of a summary of the process by which we've gotten here. You know, if this has prompted any questions that you might have you're more than welcome to submit those to us for a Q&A. Because we'll take... We'll do write in Q&A is where you submit questions and we'll accumulate those and have a big stack of paper on the table here. You've seen the programs.

Mark Rippetoe:
And you know, we're doing a live call in Q&As now and something I've said may make you ask some questions. And I'd be glad to answer the things if you let us know.

Mark Rippetoe:
But anyway, I hope that kind of clears up some of the questions that you may have about the history of this program. And did I leave anything out guys? Can you think of anything?

[off-camera]:
I think it was pretty good.

Mark Rippetoe:
Bre, you got any questions?

[off-camera]:
She never has questions.

Mark Rippetoe:
Never asks questions.

[off-camera]:
She has questions in her brain. She just won't ask you.

Mark Rippetoe:
She just won't ask and she'll ask after we get through. I'll edit them back in.

Mark Rippetoe:
You're waiting, waiting for the microphone to be turned off.

Mark Rippetoe:
Oh, I got a question! That's what she'll say.

Mark Rippetoe:
All right. Well, that's it. Thanks for watching us today.

Mark Rippetoe:
We'll be with you next Friday for Starting Strength Radio.

[off-camera]:
But wait! I have a question.