In lifting terms, we want you starting with a weight that begins to challenge your ability. This can be gauged, roughly, by when the speed of the bar slows down or the technique suffers slightly. If the latter happens, however, we need to back the weight down just a tad in order to preserve proper form see below.
This mostly stems from people not doing Step 1 , i. When compounded by the fact that this program aims to get you as strong as possible in the shortest amount of time, things start to escalate quickly. It would behoove any person to see a Starting Strength Coach within their first week of training just to hammer this all out. I was thinking about putting this as number one, but alas, I thought the other things were actually more important and, specifically, doing number 1 would take care of this number.
This is done through food, like LOTS of it. You have one chance in your life to put on muscle at an almost unnatural rate. What SL prescribes for dealing with a stall is nearly the polar opposite of everything that you should actually do — add volume, use different rep ranges, increase work capacity. Greg Nuckols discusses the trap of reducing volume further in his article on work capacity:. So, lo and behold, they dial back their training volume and the gains start coming again.
Only they last for a mere weeks. Then they plateau even harder. They were peaking. Their body was accustomed to a certain level of work. When they reduced the amount of work, supercompensation happened, and they could put more weight on the bar. On the physical side, the problem is that all other aspects of training — such as cardio, conditioning, periodization, and work capacity — are neglected in the extreme.
The routines themselves suffer from using a single stagnant set x rep scheme and contain no periodization, which scientific study has concluded is almost always superior to non-periodized training. Finally, a trainee is told to rest as long as they feel is necessary in order to hit their target reps on the next set, which is detrimental to building work capacity. And he includes the overhead press and power clean alongside the low-bar squat, bench press, and deadlift. So is Starting Strength better than a powerlifting program for building muscle?
Yes, no doubt. Mind you, most powerlifters alternate between hypertrophy phases, strength phases, and peaking phases. The hypertrophy phases are designed to stimulate muscle growth size gains , the strength phases are designed to make those bigger muscles stronger neural gains , and the peaking phases are designed to prepare those big and strong muscles for a powerlifting competition restful practice.
That means that someone who aspires to become a good powerlifter will typically be advised to start with hypertrophy training to gain muscle size and then switch to strength training as they get closer to their genetic muscular potential. Starting Strength most closely resembles the strength training phase of powerlifting training.
How does it compare then? Starting Strength has us training three times per week, alternating between two different full-body workouts. So the main set and rep scheme is doing 3 sets of 5 repetitions. But because deadlifts are disproportionately fatiguing, we do just a single set. And because power training is done in lower rep ranges, the power cleans are done for just 3 reps per set.
Whenever we can complete all three sets with a given weight, we increase the load, adding 5 pounds on the squat, 10 pounds on the deadlift, or 2. This is called linear progression, and it works quite well with beginners. He believes these lifts are the best because they use the most muscle mass, use the greatest effective range of motion, and use the most weight possible with proper form.
And these are great lifts, both for obvious and not-so-obvious reasons. On the obvious side, exactly as Rippetoe states, these are compound lifts that engage a tremendous amount of overall muscle mass through a fairly large range of motion, making them great for stimulating a ton of muscle growth.
On the not-so-obvious side, these lifts also allow us to challenge our muscles in a deep stretch. Muscle growth is stimulated via mechanical tension, and we can put mechanical tension on our muscles by actively contracting them and by stretching them.
When we combine a strong contraction with a deep stretch, the active and passive mechanical tension are added together, stimulating far more muscle growth study. As a result, the lifts that are hardest while our muscles are stretched tend to be best for building muscle study. If we consider the bench press, for example, then we get a deep stretch on our chests at the bottom of the lift when it touches our chests , which is near where the lift is the most challenging a couple of inches above our chests.
As a result, the bottom part of the bench press is amazing for stimulating muscle growth. This same benefit applies to the squat , which challenges our quads in a stretched position, and the deadlift, which challenges our hips and hamstrings in stretched positions.
Again, this does a good job of explaining their popularity among bodybuilders, powerlifters, and athletes. For instance, the long head of the triceps extends our elbows and extends our shoulders.
The bench press extends our elbows and flexes our shoulders. To solve that problem, we push with the shorter triceps heads instead. To develop it properly, then, we need something like a skull crusher or overhead extension. When we add those in, we see balanced triceps and chest growth:.
Does that make our workouts a bit longer? It might add an extra five minutes after we finish our bench pressing. And will it make our workouts more complicated? And will bulking up the long heads of our triceps improve our powerlifting performance? But adding in triceps extensions will allow us to gain more muscle size and strength. And it will make our arms grow quite a bit faster.
This is just one example. Our shoulders benefit from lateral raises in addition to overhead presses. Now, the next argument is that this program is for beginners. We could, yes, but isolation lifts are incredibly valuable to beginners, too. All of this makes isolation lifts an incredibly powerful way for beginners to build muscle faster.
Those isolation lifts are also simpler and safer, making it easier for beginners to stimulate muscle growth right from their very first workout.
The low-bar squat is given a massive emphasis in Starting Strength. Every single workout starts with three sets of squats, giving it twice the training volume of any other lift.
Our quads and glutes are by far the biggest muscles in our bodies, and they have incredible potential for growth. The squat is thus the single best lift for adding pounds of muscle to our frames. For men who are eager to bulk up their upper bodies, the mismatch of goals grows even starker.
It can be frustrating to see our squat strength skyrocket while our bench press lags behind, and while our upper back and biceps are barely being worked at all. We can move up several pants sizes while still looking fairly similar in our t-shirts.
Starting Strength is a program that works quite well when people are taught how to do barbell training by an in-person coach. To make things harder still, skinny beginners tend to have less muscle mass on their frames, longer spines, and lankier limbs. Oftentimes we wind up failing because of our lower back or grip strength, or because our shoulders fall out of position at the bottom of the bench press. A simple solution to this problem is to start with easier progressions. Now, a lot of people worry that by starting with easier variations of the big lifts, yes, they might be safer, easier to learn, and foster better long-term lifting techniques and habits… but it might mean missing out on short-term muscle growth.
I remember being skinny. I remember wanting to build muscle as fast as possible. I wanted to start lifting, to start growing. If we choose simple brute-strength lifts, then instead of spending weeks improving our coordination on the big compound lifts, we can open the floodgates of muscle growth right from our very first workout. For example, instead of spending weeks trying to learn how to do a low-bar back squat to full depth without rounding or arching our lower backs, we can do a goblet squat.
The setup is much easier: all we need to do is grab a dumbbell or weight plate. And holding that weight in front of us keeps our torsos more upright, making it easy to squat to full depth without jamming up at the hips. It also makes it easier to keep our hips in a neutral position while squatting, which sets us up for better squat technique in the future. Because of how much easier it is to learn, most people are able to do a goblet squat with solid technique during their very first workout.
Not perfect technique, no, but good enough. The same is true with the other big lifts. By swapping out some of the more advanced lifts for simpler brute strength lifts, we can shrink the learning curve, speed up muscle growth, reduce the risk of injury, and develop better longterm lifting form.
On the other hand, athletic lifters or people training with an in-person coach might not have any problems starting with some of the more advanced lifts. It depends. A workout stimulates 24—72 hours of muscle growth, meaning that if we want our muscles to be growing steadily all week long, we need to be training them every 2—3 days. Plus, our hands, our lower backs, and our traps are worked with almost every exercise. And so for beginners who are still sensitive to muscle damage, it can really help to have dedicated recovery days between our workouts.
Finally, Starting Strength also has the advantage of alternating the exercise selection from workout to workout. One workout we do the bench press, the next workout we do the overhead press. One workout we do the deadlift, the next workout we do the power clean. This gives our muscles, joints, and connective tissues a bit of variety. It tends to reduce overall wear and tear, and it also yields more balanced muscle growth. Starting Strength uses three full-body workouts per week to train every muscle three times per week.
In fact, people who are new to lifting weights tend to be quite sensitive to weight training, and so starting with too many sets can cause excessive muscle damage and soreness , increasing our recovery needs, and impairing our ability to build muscle. This is a true beginner program. There are just 3 sets per exercise and just 3 exercises per workout. In fact, because the deadlift can be disproportionately fatiguing, the training volume is dropped even lower. That requires being fairly fresh.
And so using lower training volumes is often ideal. Starting Strength is great for this. We do enough work to stimulate those neurological adaptations, but not so much that we cause too much muscle damage or fatigue. Perhaps the first week starts with just two sets per exercise, then three sets in the second week, and then four sets in the third week. Is that necessary? But can gradually increasing our training volume speed up muscle growth?
Starting Strength is just 3 sets per muscle, 3 times per week. Now, does that mean that we should add extra sets to Starting Strength to stimulate more muscle growth? Probably not. Most beginners doing Starting Strength are already working some muscle groups, such as their lower backs and grips, pretty hard. Plus, low-rep sets tend to be pretty hard on our joints. If we just bumped the training volume higher, we might start to run into recovery issues. For that goal, it makes sense to do just a few heavy sets each workout.
Starting Strength recommends doing 5 repetitions per set on every lift except for the power clean. In that case, doing 5 reps per set instead of 3—4 reps per set is a nice way to get a bit of extra muscle growth while gaining strength.
To understand why that is, we need to consider that we stimulate muscle growth by putting mechanical tension on our muscles. The heavier the weight is, the more tension we put on our muscles with every rep, which is good. The problem is, the heavier the weight is, the fewer reps we can do with it, and so we put less tension on our muscles per set.
The lower the rep range, the more sets we need to do, at least to a point. When comparing low-rep sets 3—5 reps against moderate-rep sets 8—20 reps , we see that the moderate-rep sets stimulate more muscle growth per set. At that point, every set seems to stimulate a similar amount of muscle growth. Now, some experts blow the hypertrophy rep range a bit wider than that.
Mike Israetel, PhD, argues that the hypertrophy rep range is 5—30 reps per set. Greg Nuckols, MA, believes that the hypertrophy rep range is 4—40 reps per set. We also have evidence showing that we can stimulate as much muscle growth with just 3 sets of 12 repetitions as we can with 7 sets of 4 repetitions study.
So if your only form of exercise is following SS through its linear and then later intermediate to advanced programming, you are inevitably going down a purest strength training rabbit hole. One that even Mark has attested is injury prone. In the same way running long distance as a sole form of exercise is injury prone. Truth is the vast majority those hiring a trainer never heard any certification let alone SS either.
If popularity meant quality or effectiveness, then Crossfit or OrangeTheory beats Starting Strength hands down. Mark will also not mention many notable coaches who let their SSC expire or openly disbanded with the organization.
But there is the value of supply and demand, which they have in their favor for their strict certification process.
Nor does this mean that they are the jedi knights of the strength world. They can be thought of as specialists who teach exactly and ideologically what Mark has outlined in SS.
This is fine, but I would argue they are not universal experts in strength and conditioning or even coaching for that matter. That is in their ability to coach and deliver in their opinion the most effective strength program available. Essentially that you should be able to coach their version of the lifts as quickly as effciently as possible.
Makes sense. What I witnessed was not the case. There were countless situations at the seminar where the coaches simply could not coach or cue the lifter the way they wanted.
Or worse yet just gave up for the sake of time, even Mark himself. It was obvious from a few of the attendees that they felt frustrated and confused with what exactly to do. I saw nothing revolutionary about their coaching ability. For the record I actually was given a green light on every lift from my coaches and Rip on the few that he watched. So I hold no sour feelings about the experience, just that the coaching is good.
The SS lifting technique methods are defended heavily on their explanation of lever arms. Aside from the many individual variables that can affect biomechanics, the ultimate problem with their approach is their gross overuse of specificity of their style of lifting to overall general strength in all areas.
Theoretically based on the biomechanical model this style would recruit more muscle mass, in turn make you stronger, and then transfer to better olympic lifting. Please see this video of Greg Everett tackling this issue of debate.
0コメント