“How do I get stronger?” has been solved and the solution is Starting Strength.
Evidence: The set of my friends who are strong is exactly the set of my friends who do / have done Starting Strength or a close variant. Also, I used to lift with several competitive power lifters (including someone ranked top 100 nationally in the deadlift) and they unanimously advocated it.
These are relatively large N and effect size btw, i.e. I know at least 15 people who’ve done SS and they’re out-benching the non-SS’ers by 20 pounds on the low end, and 100 pounds on the high end (I pick bench because it is the exercise most people are familiar with; the gap for other things like squat is more like 50 pounds on low end, 200 pounds on high end).
I wouldn’t call SS the end-all, be-all solution for getting stronger, that would more closely be something like “progressive overload using compound exercises (or whatever you want to get stronger at) while under caloric surplus and having decent macro/micronutritional spreads. Also sleeping well and not having any other unusual health problems”.
SS is a great program for beginners, but any other program that fits the above should work (like stronglifts). I also wouldn’t recommend SS to intermediate or advanced lifters, when linear progression is no longer possible.
This is the impression I’ve gotten as a beginner to lifting.
My current problem is “how can I learn to do SS safely and cheaply?” My university has an appropriately equipped gym, but I can’t really afford coaching.
No need. Lifting weights is not rocket science. Even if it were, you’re smart, right? I’m sure your gym has a squat rack & mirrors—that’s all you really need.
Sure. I feel pretty comfortable with squats and benching already. I’m just a bit concerned about learning, say, powercleans without guidance, and going up on weight on them without assurance that I am, in fact, throwing the huge metal object into the air correctly.
There are numerous serious lifting forums on the web that will critique your beginner cleans (for free) out of the goodness their hearts. You just need to film it and upload the video. So do this with lighter weights and see what people say., make the adjustments and ask again. Also, definitely start with cleans—they are a lot safer than snatches and much easier to master.
Happen to know any that also lack pullups? I can’t do one, and likely won’t be able to for a while (I am female). All the powerclean-free ones I’ve seen replace them with pullups.
On pullups—you can replace them with pull-up negatives. Jump up to the chin-above-bar position and lower yourself as slowly as you can, particularly towards the end of the movement. Let go of the bar and jump again. About the only thing this doesn’t train, that the regular pullup will, is the starting-from-a-dead-hang motion.
(This has the added benefit of eventually being able to do pullups.)
I also advise that between jumping pullups, you return to a faux-deadhang position (even if this requires you to bend your knees to fit under the bar). Again, you will get tired of jumping pretty quickly and then will start to rely on your arms and back.
I recommend working up to pullups by using the cable pull-down machine and programming it as 3x5 the same way you do for the main lifts. People typically program pullups for reps because of the inconvenience of adding weight, but it’s fundamentally the same as any other movement in terms of the expected effect at different rep ranges. On the cable machine you are limited to lifting at most your own body weight conveniently, but by the time you can do 3x5 at a weight near your body weight you should be able to perform at least one pullup. Also, you should know that at most gyms it’s possible to add 5 lb plates to the machine by threading the attachment thing through the plate or by using supplemental plates that you can add to the top of the weight stack, if your gym has them. The cable pull-down is reputed to be slightly easier but I find the difficulty comparable as long as you focus on keeping your torso vertical and pretending you are lifting up to the bar rather than lifting the bar down to your neck (kind of silly but it works). Most people tend to lean back slightly which makes it a little easier and a little less like a pullup.
I program my chinups and pullups this way and I can do them weighted with 62.5lb and 52.5lb respectively, starting from only being able to do 1 or 2 at bodyweight. Also I have a powerlifting total >1100lb from Starting Strength then Wendler’s 5/3/1 over the last two years, and highly recommend that track.
I was looking up the Marines’ fitness requirements at some point randomly, and for females the pull-up requirement is apparently replaced with a flexed-arm hang (wikiabout.com), so you could maybe try doing that.
Flexed-arm hang won’t work as a replacement for pull-ups in the context of this particular program; maintaining a load in a static position is very different from moving that load up and down.
As a former Marine, in addition to the difference pointed out by jsteinhardt, the flexed arm hang works your arms only, not your back. Pullups require an overhand grip, whereas the flexed arm hang (and chinup) focus on your biceps.
based on olympic lifting technique from the 60′s when the rules were different.
Interesting; that’s a different reason than the one that guy cited. He claimed that a better source for learning powercleans is actually an older one from the ’70′s by Bill Starr. He seems to think, and I get the impression, that Rippetoe’s changes are actually newer, instead of a reversion to an older standard.
Could you elaborate on the differences between what he teaches and… what one should do instead?
The concept of a vertical pull originates from technique when brushing the thigh with the barbell was disqualifying of the lift. This lead to lifters keeping the bar further away from the body, and subsequently for rippetoe to teach the first pull as extremely similar to a deadlift. In contrast, modern technique shows a very distinct S shaped bar path on ascent. Rippetoe is disagreeing with every world record holder in the olympic lifts here, and notably has not trained anyone near close to competitive at even a national level.
In contrast, Glenn Pendlay (who has trained the number 1 nationally ranked lifters in several weight divisions) and every other olympic coach teaches them very differently. Clean pulls are NOT deadlift pulls.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mEyoH5FV03s
As someone who has been in this situation, pullup negatives have worked for me. I would also add regular jumping pullups, without the negatives. As you do more, your jumping abilities will decrease and youll start to rely more on your arms/back, thus building those muscles. Most gyms also have an assisted pullup machine.
Additionally, fitness roughly breaks into two broad categories—resistance and cardiovascular. Starting Strength covers resistance training, but the cardiovascular version of Starting Strength is Couch To 5K. It uses the same basic concept of progressive overload applied to running.
SS covers strength training. There is more visual resistance training, body building, which is more about looks than strength, and utilizes about 50% SS like composite exercises, 50% isolation and higher rep counts, 8-10.
You will not be looking good in the 4 months SS takes. Body composition is a long term project. SS and similar programs are to strengthen the substrate so you have something to build on.
If you want to look good, do starting strength for several months to build a base of strength, then switch to something geared more towards body-building (warning: I haven’t tried this myself yet; also, depends somewhat on how much more muscular you want to look).
Another point is that body fat percent matters a decent amount for how “buff” you look as well, although there’s a tradeoff where you won’t build muscle as quickly if you’re starving yourself.
Also, what you wear has a reasonably large impact on how muscular you look, at least when you’re wearing clothes.
Another point is that body fat percent matters a decent amount for how “buff” you look as well, although there’s a tradeoff where you won’t build muscle as quickly if you’re starving yourself.
I’ll add that there’s a considerable opportunity cost in reaching the low body fat levels necessary to achieve a “ripped” appearance. When I made it a goal to hit seven or eight percent body fat, it was a project that not only occupied about a couple hours every day and imposed harsh limits on what I could eat, it led to my being preoccupied with my body condition even at times when I was working on other things.
When I was young I as instantly doing body-building, as SS was not on the table and it worked well. Of course, I never tried any real world heavy object manipulation. It was purely looks. I think if I tried to do that, the complete lack of squats and deadlifts (just leg presses for quad size) would have made me injure the stabilizer muscles, but I am not a pack mule, I never need to actually use strength.
Starting Strength recommends three sets of five reps at 90% of your maximum lift, each with a few minutes’ rest between, as the best programme for building strength. For increasing muscle mass (which is what makes you look good, and is surprisingly not as correlated with strength as it would appear) you want something like six to eight sets of ten to twelve reps, at 60-80% of your maximum lift, with 60-90 seconds rest in between.
Effectively, the more time your muscles spend under load, the larger they will get, assuming your diet provides enough protein and calories. I don’t know of a program, but anything you can stick to is good. I use the same routine as I did for strength (SS’s A/B workouts, plus barbell curls). I still recommend a few months of Starting Strength to get your weight up to begin with.
No, body building and not weight lifting is the solution to that. That means basically adding some isolation exercises to SS and doing higher rep counts like 5 x 8 or 5 x 10.
This is really not complicated. Getting big is a different goal from getting strong, and there are specialized disciplines for both. Of course they overlap a lot.
Super Slow is working pretty well for me, although I haven’t been at it very long yet. The biggest advantage to it that I’ve seen is that it forces me to use more of my muscles—it helps me avoid cheating by using my strongest muscles to gain momentum to skip my weaker. It also helps me focus on the form of the exercise rather than the end state.
Aretae swears by it, which is the reason I decided to pick it up.
I’m considering putting data together. I haven’t collected data on any of my projects since my experiment to see if calories were a reasonable approximation for weight-loss purposes. (And contrary to my original expectations, they are. But my diet was fairly well balanced, and I expect the data wouldn’t hold for wildly unbalanced diets.)
Having done SS, I regret doing low bar squat instead of the much more intuitive high bar squat. Of course powerlifters advocate for low bar squats, it’s what their sport measures. Other than that it’s pretty great. I have friends following the SS program with high bar and it’s working out well for them.
Why do you regret doing low-bar squats? Presumably you read SS:BBT and thus his arguments for why they are superior to the low-bar version. (E.g. Better use of the hamstrings.)
The argument boils down to “you can use more weight” and “it involves the posterior chain more.” Neither of these supposed benefits are worth the greater chance of injury. Low bar squats place significantly greater loads on the spinal erectors, which is fine if you’re an experienced weightlifter and know how to maintain good form. A newbie who lacks proprioception is the worst person to have doing this. I see and speak with many people doing SS at my university gym and most of the ones doing lowbar do it with poor form and rounded backs. In contrast it is much easier to do highbar squats with correct form as they are much more intuitive. Low bar squats took me months and months to learn proper form with and I strained a spinal erector during this learning process. High bar squats took me a few lifting sessions to learn.
All that said, low-bar will work better for some people due to anatomy, but most have an easier time with high bar.
You do need weightlifting shoes to do proper high bar squats. And you also need to throw in a few sets of RDL’s to hit the hamstrings.
The part I don’t understand is why people want to be stronger as opposed to be more visually muscular. This is not the same thing, for the later goal traditional body-building i.e. one composite and one isolation exercise for every major muscle group works better. Also it is more like 5 x 8 or 5 x 10. A lot of strong people end up still being fairly thin.
What is the utility of strength without beach looks today? I just pay movers to carry furniture from the old apartment to the new. Even in a brawl, punching strength depends more on knowing how to use gravity.
Because just inflated muscles don’t do these? The gap between the two is not that big, the body-builders just go a bit less intense on the heavy lifts in order to have some energy left for the isolation ones, and the rep range being higher makes the weights 20-40% smaller. The difference between 5x5 150kg bench presses vs. 5x8 110 kg ones + doing pec-decs is nowhere nearly as big as the difference between these two and just about anything else. The primary difference is joints and ability to move heavy objects. Doing more in the sense of being more a of human forklift somehow does not look that glorious. The feeling better may as well attach better to the more spectacular looks, and as for longer lasting, probably near draw.
For me strength always meant punching strength and this guy convinced me it is mainly technique.
Caveat: I know grappling sports are getting more popular, such as BJJ / part of MMA. I think this probably does not apply there. I think grappling could be more brute-forced.
I think one reason modern culture may be hooked on strength is that when we were children a lot of fighting / domination / bullying / rough play relied more on intuitive grappling than on punching (or kicking). This made us all respect The Strong Guy Who Can Whip Everybody. And of course movies like the 300 etc. reinforce it. This goes back to very old cultural origins, wrestling is one thing many cultures paralelly evolved because this is how people can physically dominate each other and establish a pecking order without actually hurting each other.
Here is why I like to argue it: weight lifting techniques are used in many sports for a long time. Still, most guys were scrawny, and not due to lack of nutrition, since even today some lifters use really easy nutrition like eating lots of cottage cheese. Or drinking lots of milk if they are tolerant. Body building got popular in the West roughly after 1977 (Pumping Iron) and elsewhere later, I would say, buff guys on bar dancefloors became a common sight 1990-ish, roughly? What do you think body building brought to the table that former lifting couldn’t? I think it brought ease through isolation. That while doing the triceps cables is straining for that muscle, it is not straining for the rest of the body, nor the mind. You can almost not pay attention, and not even feel tired, just stop it when the muscle itself burns but you can almost even avoid getting sweaty. This ease brought a strong motivating factor. When I was 17 it felt like a cheat code: I was sitting in the 45 degree leg press, and wondering how amazing it is that I am sitting on my ass, laid back, relaxed, yet got better looking legs that classmates who played soccer all the time.
The current SS / SL 5x5 trend is bringing back the former, pre-body-building era, where your energy is wasted on making sure your posture is right, all the secondary muscles are flexed all right and so on. While with a 45 degree leg press basically the only tiring, attention-grabbing, willpower-sapping activitiy is just pressing the legs up, with a squat you must pay attention to getting the whole body right, which is much more tiresome hence demotivating, because most of that does not apply to good looks, just a rather useless forklift-ability.
Doing more in the sense of being more a of human forklift somehow does not look that glorious.
Try being bedridden for a few weeks and see what you feel like afterwards. Then you can decide how much strength you actually want available in your everyday life.
And how much endurance you want? And how much speed you want? And how much coordination you want? And how much sense of balance you want? Why single out strength? Feeling my speed improve feels better than strength improvements… I think strength is a dangerously good sounding word, it has way too positive connotations than utility. Of course, I am not advocating weakness, I am advocating that for people not interested in sports beach-muscles may work better, and for people interested in sports whatever amount, form, and methods of acquiring strength their trainer tells them is probably best.
You spoke of strength, and that is what I was responding to. All those other things are also important. The body you get if you do not attend to maintaining them is unlikely to be optimal, outside of a career that forces you to. Not being a professional athlete, dancer, or soldier, I must take care of the matter myself.
I understand it, I just don’t understand why taking care of the body maintenance equals human forklift stuff? I just baffled that somewhere in the last 10-15 years being healthy or fit gets increasingly equated to having a high one rep max. Alternatives are either beach body building stuff,which optimizes for looks, yet gives most of the forklift stuff as well, or the normal sports, not professionally but like playing tennis 2-3 times a week or something, which does little for muscles but takes care of speed, balance, endurance etc.
When I visualize myself as an ancestral hunter—as it sounds like a good way to take care of the body—I don’t just see someone who can in a rigid and stiff way pick something up and put it down. It involves reflexes, balance, speed, dodging a thrown stone, throwing another back etc.
So this is what I don’t understand this contemporary understanding of fitness. I understand the beach body builders, as it is about visuals. But the idea of picking up heavy things being fitness, it just seems so removed from any possible idea of how an animal’s body is supposed to function.
I agree that having pretty muscles and having a physically capable body are quite different things. I do not agree that having a physically capable body is useless in our times.
Physical capability does not equal picking up heavy things, it is not even close. Speed, balance, accuracy etc. just imagine an ancestral hunter or any animal really. A fast, limber, precise, situationally aware guy who can dodge a spear and throw one in return. Our modern weight lifter would be the pack mule of the hunting band, who is too stiff and slow to do anything useful but he can carry the deer carcass home. OK...
I am not arguing that weightlifting is the best thing ever. I am arguing against your assertion that, except for looking pretty, contemporary people do not need physically capable bodies.
Okay, but how to define physical capability? What kind of capability matters most?
I’d like to have better cardio and better muscle endurance in the legs, for example, dancing for hours or walking sight-seeing all day without having to sit down would be awesome.
Yes, the other extreme : be able do everything, even though you probably don’t want to do everything. It takes so much time that you probably won’t have enough time left do the activity you wanted to become fit for.
It takes as much time as you are willing to commit. You asked what is physical capability, not whether you can afford trying to become physically perfect.
I merely read somewhere about how muscles grow stronger when used and took up a habit of periodically tensing muscles whenever I noticed them needing to do much work in the near future, as that didnt require much concious effort or spent time. Since then, my strength has been above average (I think), but the two may be unrelated; the latter especially might have been caused by a 17-puberty pulse instead.
“How do I get stronger?” has been solved and the solution is Starting Strength.
Evidence: The set of my friends who are strong is exactly the set of my friends who do / have done Starting Strength or a close variant. Also, I used to lift with several competitive power lifters (including someone ranked top 100 nationally in the deadlift) and they unanimously advocated it.
These are relatively large N and effect size btw, i.e. I know at least 15 people who’ve done SS and they’re out-benching the non-SS’ers by 20 pounds on the low end, and 100 pounds on the high end (I pick bench because it is the exercise most people are familiar with; the gap for other things like squat is more like 50 pounds on low end, 200 pounds on high end).
I wouldn’t call SS the end-all, be-all solution for getting stronger, that would more closely be something like “progressive overload using compound exercises (or whatever you want to get stronger at) while under caloric surplus and having decent macro/micronutritional spreads. Also sleeping well and not having any other unusual health problems”.
SS is a great program for beginners, but any other program that fits the above should work (like stronglifts). I also wouldn’t recommend SS to intermediate or advanced lifters, when linear progression is no longer possible.
This is the impression I’ve gotten as a beginner to lifting.
My current problem is “how can I learn to do SS safely and cheaply?” My university has an appropriately equipped gym, but I can’t really afford coaching.
No need. Lifting weights is not rocket science. Even if it were, you’re smart, right? I’m sure your gym has a squat rack & mirrors—that’s all you really need.
Sure. I feel pretty comfortable with squats and benching already. I’m just a bit concerned about learning, say, powercleans without guidance, and going up on weight on them without assurance that I am, in fact, throwing the huge metal object into the air correctly.
There are numerous serious lifting forums on the web that will critique your beginner cleans (for free) out of the goodness their hearts. You just need to film it and upload the video. So do this with lighter weights and see what people say., make the adjustments and ask again. Also, definitely start with cleans—they are a lot safer than snatches and much easier to master.
Oh, that makes much more sense. Actually there are various versions of SS that swap out powercleans for technically easier exercises.
Happen to know any that also lack pullups? I can’t do one, and likely won’t be able to for a while (I am female). All the powerclean-free ones I’ve seen replace them with pullups.
(Also, I just found this on Google and am somewhat disturbed. Rippetoe claims you can learn to power clean without a coach, while this guy claims that Rippetoe doesn’t even teach power cleans correctly: http://www.manlycurls.com/2012/02/starting-strength-truth-rippetoe-opinion-fitness/)
On pullups—you can replace them with pull-up negatives. Jump up to the chin-above-bar position and lower yourself as slowly as you can, particularly towards the end of the movement. Let go of the bar and jump again. About the only thing this doesn’t train, that the regular pullup will, is the starting-from-a-dead-hang motion.
(This has the added benefit of eventually being able to do pullups.)
I also advise that between jumping pullups, you return to a faux-deadhang position (even if this requires you to bend your knees to fit under the bar). Again, you will get tired of jumping pretty quickly and then will start to rely on your arms and back.
I recommend working up to pullups by using the cable pull-down machine and programming it as 3x5 the same way you do for the main lifts. People typically program pullups for reps because of the inconvenience of adding weight, but it’s fundamentally the same as any other movement in terms of the expected effect at different rep ranges. On the cable machine you are limited to lifting at most your own body weight conveniently, but by the time you can do 3x5 at a weight near your body weight you should be able to perform at least one pullup. Also, you should know that at most gyms it’s possible to add 5 lb plates to the machine by threading the attachment thing through the plate or by using supplemental plates that you can add to the top of the weight stack, if your gym has them. The cable pull-down is reputed to be slightly easier but I find the difficulty comparable as long as you focus on keeping your torso vertical and pretending you are lifting up to the bar rather than lifting the bar down to your neck (kind of silly but it works). Most people tend to lean back slightly which makes it a little easier and a little less like a pullup.
I program my chinups and pullups this way and I can do them weighted with 62.5lb and 52.5lb respectively, starting from only being able to do 1 or 2 at bodyweight. Also I have a powerlifting total >1100lb from Starting Strength then Wendler’s 5/3/1 over the last two years, and highly recommend that track.
I was looking up the Marines’ fitness requirements at some point randomly, and for females the pull-up requirement is apparently replaced with a flexed-arm hang (wiki about.com), so you could maybe try doing that.
Flexed-arm hang won’t work as a replacement for pull-ups in the context of this particular program; maintaining a load in a static position is very different from moving that load up and down.
As a former Marine, in addition to the difference pointed out by jsteinhardt, the flexed arm hang works your arms only, not your back. Pullups require an overhand grip, whereas the flexed arm hang (and chinup) focus on your biceps.
That is correct, Rippetoe teaches the powerclean based on olympic lifting technique from the 60′s when the rules were different.
Do barbell rows instead of cleans. This won’t cause any problems.
Interesting; that’s a different reason than the one that guy cited. He claimed that a better source for learning powercleans is actually an older one from the ’70′s by Bill Starr. He seems to think, and I get the impression, that Rippetoe’s changes are actually newer, instead of a reversion to an older standard.
Could you elaborate on the differences between what he teaches and… what one should do instead?
The concept of a vertical pull originates from technique when brushing the thigh with the barbell was disqualifying of the lift. This lead to lifters keeping the bar further away from the body, and subsequently for rippetoe to teach the first pull as extremely similar to a deadlift. In contrast, modern technique shows a very distinct S shaped bar path on ascent. Rippetoe is disagreeing with every world record holder in the olympic lifts here, and notably has not trained anyone near close to competitive at even a national level. In contrast, Glenn Pendlay (who has trained the number 1 nationally ranked lifters in several weight divisions) and every other olympic coach teaches them very differently. Clean pulls are NOT deadlift pulls. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mEyoH5FV03s
As someone who has been in this situation, pullup negatives have worked for me. I would also add regular jumping pullups, without the negatives. As you do more, your jumping abilities will decrease and youll start to rely more on your arms/back, thus building those muscles. Most gyms also have an assisted pullup machine.
Update: Romeo_Stevens has done better than Starting Strength, and every other exercise program I’m aware of, with the power of science.
Additionally, fitness roughly breaks into two broad categories—resistance and cardiovascular. Starting Strength covers resistance training, but the cardiovascular version of Starting Strength is Couch To 5K. It uses the same basic concept of progressive overload applied to running.
SS covers strength training. There is more visual resistance training, body building, which is more about looks than strength, and utilizes about 50% SS like composite exercises, 50% isolation and higher rep counts, 8-10.
This is also a solution to “I am underweight/too skinny, how do I get bigger?”
Is SS for looking good, or for practical strength? I know they correlate, but optimizing for one doesn’t necessarily mean optimizing for the other.
You will not be looking good in the 4 months SS takes. Body composition is a long term project. SS and similar programs are to strengthen the substrate so you have something to build on.
If you want to look good, do starting strength for several months to build a base of strength, then switch to something geared more towards body-building (warning: I haven’t tried this myself yet; also, depends somewhat on how much more muscular you want to look).
Another point is that body fat percent matters a decent amount for how “buff” you look as well, although there’s a tradeoff where you won’t build muscle as quickly if you’re starving yourself.
Also, what you wear has a reasonably large impact on how muscular you look, at least when you’re wearing clothes.
I’ll add that there’s a considerable opportunity cost in reaching the low body fat levels necessary to achieve a “ripped” appearance. When I made it a goal to hit seven or eight percent body fat, it was a project that not only occupied about a couple hours every day and imposed harsh limits on what I could eat, it led to my being preoccupied with my body condition even at times when I was working on other things.
When I was young I as instantly doing body-building, as SS was not on the table and it worked well. Of course, I never tried any real world heavy object manipulation. It was purely looks. I think if I tried to do that, the complete lack of squats and deadlifts (just leg presses for quad size) would have made me injure the stabilizer muscles, but I am not a pack mule, I never need to actually use strength.
This sounds reasonable. I’m guessing bodybuilding programs are more controversial than Starting Strength. Or is there a clear winner there too?
Thanks for the informative comment.
Starting Strength recommends three sets of five reps at 90% of your maximum lift, each with a few minutes’ rest between, as the best programme for building strength. For increasing muscle mass (which is what makes you look good, and is surprisingly not as correlated with strength as it would appear) you want something like six to eight sets of ten to twelve reps, at 60-80% of your maximum lift, with 60-90 seconds rest in between.
Effectively, the more time your muscles spend under load, the larger they will get, assuming your diet provides enough protein and calories. I don’t know of a program, but anything you can stick to is good. I use the same routine as I did for strength (SS’s A/B workouts, plus barbell curls). I still recommend a few months of Starting Strength to get your weight up to begin with.
No, body building and not weight lifting is the solution to that. That means basically adding some isolation exercises to SS and doing higher rep counts like 5 x 8 or 5 x 10.
This is really not complicated. Getting big is a different goal from getting strong, and there are specialized disciplines for both. Of course they overlap a lot.
Super Slow is working pretty well for me, although I haven’t been at it very long yet. The biggest advantage to it that I’ve seen is that it forces me to use more of my muscles—it helps me avoid cheating by using my strongest muscles to gain momentum to skip my weaker. It also helps me focus on the form of the exercise rather than the end state.
I wouldn’t mind seeing an update on this after a few months. I haven’t seen any evidence, even anecdotal, that anyone got strong on it.
Aretae swears by it, which is the reason I decided to pick it up.
I’m considering putting data together. I haven’t collected data on any of my projects since my experiment to see if calories were a reasonable approximation for weight-loss purposes. (And contrary to my original expectations, they are. But my diet was fairly well balanced, and I expect the data wouldn’t hold for wildly unbalanced diets.)
I don’t know anything about Super Slow, but FWIW, these are all attributes of Starting Strength as well.
Having done SS, I regret doing low bar squat instead of the much more intuitive high bar squat. Of course powerlifters advocate for low bar squats, it’s what their sport measures. Other than that it’s pretty great. I have friends following the SS program with high bar and it’s working out well for them.
Why do you regret doing low-bar squats? Presumably you read SS:BBT and thus his arguments for why they are superior to the low-bar version. (E.g. Better use of the hamstrings.)
The argument boils down to “you can use more weight” and “it involves the posterior chain more.” Neither of these supposed benefits are worth the greater chance of injury. Low bar squats place significantly greater loads on the spinal erectors, which is fine if you’re an experienced weightlifter and know how to maintain good form. A newbie who lacks proprioception is the worst person to have doing this. I see and speak with many people doing SS at my university gym and most of the ones doing lowbar do it with poor form and rounded backs. In contrast it is much easier to do highbar squats with correct form as they are much more intuitive. Low bar squats took me months and months to learn proper form with and I strained a spinal erector during this learning process. High bar squats took me a few lifting sessions to learn.
All that said, low-bar will work better for some people due to anatomy, but most have an easier time with high bar. You do need weightlifting shoes to do proper high bar squats. And you also need to throw in a few sets of RDL’s to hit the hamstrings.
The part I don’t understand is why people want to be stronger as opposed to be more visually muscular. This is not the same thing, for the later goal traditional body-building i.e. one composite and one isolation exercise for every major muscle group works better. Also it is more like 5 x 8 or 5 x 10. A lot of strong people end up still being fairly thin.
What is the utility of strength without beach looks today? I just pay movers to carry furniture from the old apartment to the new. Even in a brawl, punching strength depends more on knowing how to use gravity.
You can do more, it feels better, and your body lasts longer.
Because just inflated muscles don’t do these? The gap between the two is not that big, the body-builders just go a bit less intense on the heavy lifts in order to have some energy left for the isolation ones, and the rep range being higher makes the weights 20-40% smaller. The difference between 5x5 150kg bench presses vs. 5x8 110 kg ones + doing pec-decs is nowhere nearly as big as the difference between these two and just about anything else. The primary difference is joints and ability to move heavy objects. Doing more in the sense of being more a of human forklift somehow does not look that glorious. The feeling better may as well attach better to the more spectacular looks, and as for longer lasting, probably near draw.
For me strength always meant punching strength and this guy convinced me it is mainly technique.
Caveat: I know grappling sports are getting more popular, such as BJJ / part of MMA. I think this probably does not apply there. I think grappling could be more brute-forced.
I think one reason modern culture may be hooked on strength is that when we were children a lot of fighting / domination / bullying / rough play relied more on intuitive grappling than on punching (or kicking). This made us all respect The Strong Guy Who Can Whip Everybody. And of course movies like the 300 etc. reinforce it. This goes back to very old cultural origins, wrestling is one thing many cultures paralelly evolved because this is how people can physically dominate each other and establish a pecking order without actually hurting each other.
Here is why I like to argue it: weight lifting techniques are used in many sports for a long time. Still, most guys were scrawny, and not due to lack of nutrition, since even today some lifters use really easy nutrition like eating lots of cottage cheese. Or drinking lots of milk if they are tolerant. Body building got popular in the West roughly after 1977 (Pumping Iron) and elsewhere later, I would say, buff guys on bar dancefloors became a common sight 1990-ish, roughly? What do you think body building brought to the table that former lifting couldn’t? I think it brought ease through isolation. That while doing the triceps cables is straining for that muscle, it is not straining for the rest of the body, nor the mind. You can almost not pay attention, and not even feel tired, just stop it when the muscle itself burns but you can almost even avoid getting sweaty. This ease brought a strong motivating factor. When I was 17 it felt like a cheat code: I was sitting in the 45 degree leg press, and wondering how amazing it is that I am sitting on my ass, laid back, relaxed, yet got better looking legs that classmates who played soccer all the time.
The current SS / SL 5x5 trend is bringing back the former, pre-body-building era, where your energy is wasted on making sure your posture is right, all the secondary muscles are flexed all right and so on. While with a 45 degree leg press basically the only tiring, attention-grabbing, willpower-sapping activitiy is just pressing the legs up, with a squat you must pay attention to getting the whole body right, which is much more tiresome hence demotivating, because most of that does not apply to good looks, just a rather useless forklift-ability.
Try being bedridden for a few weeks and see what you feel like afterwards. Then you can decide how much strength you actually want available in your everyday life.
And how much endurance you want? And how much speed you want? And how much coordination you want? And how much sense of balance you want? Why single out strength? Feeling my speed improve feels better than strength improvements… I think strength is a dangerously good sounding word, it has way too positive connotations than utility. Of course, I am not advocating weakness, I am advocating that for people not interested in sports beach-muscles may work better, and for people interested in sports whatever amount, form, and methods of acquiring strength their trainer tells them is probably best.
You spoke of strength, and that is what I was responding to. All those other things are also important. The body you get if you do not attend to maintaining them is unlikely to be optimal, outside of a career that forces you to. Not being a professional athlete, dancer, or soldier, I must take care of the matter myself.
I understand it, I just don’t understand why taking care of the body maintenance equals human forklift stuff? I just baffled that somewhere in the last 10-15 years being healthy or fit gets increasingly equated to having a high one rep max. Alternatives are either beach body building stuff,which optimizes for looks, yet gives most of the forklift stuff as well, or the normal sports, not professionally but like playing tennis 2-3 times a week or something, which does little for muscles but takes care of speed, balance, endurance etc.
When I visualize myself as an ancestral hunter—as it sounds like a good way to take care of the body—I don’t just see someone who can in a rigid and stiff way pick something up and put it down. It involves reflexes, balance, speed, dodging a thrown stone, throwing another back etc.
So this is what I don’t understand this contemporary understanding of fitness. I understand the beach body builders, as it is about visuals. But the idea of picking up heavy things being fitness, it just seems so removed from any possible idea of how an animal’s body is supposed to function.
I agree that having pretty muscles and having a physically capable body are quite different things. I do not agree that having a physically capable body is useless in our times.
Physical capability does not equal picking up heavy things, it is not even close. Speed, balance, accuracy etc. just imagine an ancestral hunter or any animal really. A fast, limber, precise, situationally aware guy who can dodge a spear and throw one in return. Our modern weight lifter would be the pack mule of the hunting band, who is too stiff and slow to do anything useful but he can carry the deer carcass home. OK...
I am not arguing that weightlifting is the best thing ever. I am arguing against your assertion that, except for looking pretty, contemporary people do not need physically capable bodies.
Okay, but how to define physical capability? What kind of capability matters most?
I’d like to have better cardio and better muscle endurance in the legs, for example, dancing for hours or walking sight-seeing all day without having to sit down would be awesome.
That’s how.
Yes, the other extreme : be able do everything, even though you probably don’t want to do everything. It takes so much time that you probably won’t have enough time left do the activity you wanted to become fit for.
It takes as much time as you are willing to commit. You asked what is physical capability, not whether you can afford trying to become physically perfect.
I merely read somewhere about how muscles grow stronger when used and took up a habit of periodically tensing muscles whenever I noticed them needing to do much work in the near future, as that didnt require much concious effort or spent time. Since then, my strength has been above average (I think), but the two may be unrelated; the latter especially might have been caused by a 17-puberty pulse instead.