Starting Strength: Basic Barbell Training

If it’s too heavy to squat below parallel, it’s too heavy to have on your back.

A weak man is not as happy as that same man would be if he were strong. This reality is offensive to some people who would like the intellectual or spiritual to take precedence. It is instructive to see what happens to these very people as their squat strength goes up.

The deadlift also serves as a way to train the mind to do things that are hard.

There is simply no other exercise, and certainly no machine, that produces the level of central nervous system activity, improved balance and coordination, skeletal loading and bone density enhancement, muscular stimulation and growth, connective tissue stress and strength, psychological demand and toughness, and overall systemic conditioning than the correctly performed full squat.

You do not need to do many different exercises to get strong - you need to get strong on a very few important exercises, movements that train the whole body as a system, not as a collection of separate body parts. The problem with the programs advocated by all the national exercise organizations is that they fail to recognize this basic principle: the body best adapts as a whole organism to stress applied to the whole organism. The more stress that can be applied to as much of the body at one time as possible, the more effective and productive the adaptation will be.

Humans are not physically normal in the absence of hard physical effort.

There is no easy way to do a deadlift—not involving actually picking up the bar—which explains their lack of popularity in gyms around the world.

Squatting' in a Smith machine is an oxymoron. A Smith machine is not a squat rack, no matter what the girls at the front desk tell you. A squat cannot be performed on a Smith machine any more than it can be performed in a small closet with a hamster. Sorry. There is a gigantic difference between a machine that makes the bar path vertical for you and a squat that is executed correctly enough to have a vertical bar path. The job of keeping the bar path vertical should be done by the muscles, skeleton, and nervous system, not by grease fittings, rails, and floor bolts.

Physical strength is the most important thing in life. This is true whether we want it to be or not.

If you insist on using a thumbless grip on the bench, you need to do it at home so that when the ambulance comes (if anyone is there to call 911), it doesn’t disrupt anyone else’s training.

but the reality of millions of years of adaptation to a ruggedly physical existence will not just go away because desks were invented.

If your gym makes a lot of money selling gloves, you have another reason to look for a different gym. And if you insist on using them, make sure they match your purse.

Remember: lifting more weight is not always the same thing as getting stronger.

...full range of motion, multi-joint exercises arenot supposed to isolate any one muscle. We use them precisely because they don't. We want themto work lots of muscles through a long range of motion. We like it when some muscles are calledinto function as other muscles drop out of function, and when muscles change function duringthe exercise. This is because we are training for strength. We are concerned with improving thefunctional motion around a joint. We are not just concerned about our "favorite muscles." Wedo not have favorite muscles.

you don’t get to redefine the exercise and then claim that it’s dangerous. Driving a car is dangerous if you drive it into a great big rock.

Stance is a highly individual thing and will vary with hip width, hip ligament tightness, femur and tibia length and proportion, adductor and hamstring flexibility, knee joint alignment, and ankle flexibility. Everybody’s stance will be slightly different, but shoulder-width heels, with toes at 30 degrees, is a good place to start.