And so begins another series of posts, this time about programs and programming. Ah, programming. That formidable and dark realm of strength training tricks and secrets, known only by God and the Soviets, and clung to with great fervor for fear that it may fall into the hands of lesser men. Though I am neither God nor a Soviet, I do have a thing or two to say about programming.
In this post, I am going to "review" a particular program, touching on its strengths, weaknesses, and target audience.
Starting Strength is a simple, effective, barbell based strength training program that will (if executed properly) bring you from twiggish and weak to moderately strong and more branch-like. Mark Rippetoe, the creator of Starting Strength (the program) and primary author of Starting Strength (the book), is a well-respected strength coach and a name drop that'll usually earn you a few brownie points in the strength training community.
The program itself is a simple linear progression--starting at a sub-maximal weight and adding a small amount of weight to each exercise every workout--which focuses on the basic compound barbell exercises (squat, bench, deadlift, press, power clean) with very minimal "accessory" work and a simple set/rep scheme (3 sets of 5 reps for most of the lifts). In other words, it is a program intended for beginners (hence Starting Strength) with the purpose of imparting proficiency in the benchmark lifts and getting you plain ol' strong.
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This guy might be a bit beyond Starting Strength.1
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Things I Really Like About Starting Strength:
- First off, it's simple, and this is what a beginner needs. A beginner does not need 28 different exercises using a variety of machines, dumbbells, barbells, bands, chains, angles, and ranges of motion to train the quadriceps. What a beginner does need is a healthy balance of basic, compound barbell exercises, performed through a full range of motion, and loaded in a progressive fashion. Starting Strength is just that. No frills, no fancy-pants nonsense, just strength training. And if you do it right, it's darn effective too.
- It uses loaded multi-joint movements through a full range of motion. This pretty much falls into my first point, but it also deserves a point of its own. No half ROM hack squats, overhead lockout presses, and supine wrist curls here. Starting Strength is built off of the exercises that should, truly, be the centerpieces of everyone's strength training program, regardless of their level. As mentioned before, Starting Strength uses the squat, bench press, deadlift, press (overhead), and power clean. These are the exercises that get people strong.
- The book is great. Really. If you are at all interested in being strong, but you are not yet squatting (real squatting) at least 1 1/2x your bodyweight, I advise you to buy the book. Even if you don't want to follow the Starting Strength program, the book is full of detailed instructions on the lifts, and includes additional information on nutrition, recovery, basic programming, and why you should want to be strong. You can certainly piece together the program and its basic tenets from online articles, forum posts, etc., but the book is well worth it and will help you execute the program the right way the first time through.
- It tells you exactly what to do. There's no guesswork with Starting Strength. If you're following Starting Strength and you find yourself faced with some guesswork, you should take a step back and make sure you're actually following Starting Strength--chances are, you're not. Rippetoe tells you what to do and what not to do, and that's all you need.
Things I Don't Like Quite as Much About Starting Strength:
- I don't prefer the way Rippetoe teaches the squat. The squat, as it is taught by Rippetoe and detailed in the Starting Strength book, differs a bit from how I like to teach the squat. Rippetoe doesn't teach the squat incorrectly by any means. There are a million acceptable ways to squat, and everyone has their opinions on which ways are better. But...
- I don't prefer the prescribed bar placement. Rippetoe teaches a thumbless, low bar position with the bar placed "just below the spine of the scapula, on top of the posterior deltoids" (SS, pg. 19). For the average squatter, I think this bar position is a hair too low and I don't encourage a thumbless grip. Rippetoe has viable reasons for why he teaches it this way (read the book if you want to know), but I think it can cause a few issues, particularly in newer trainees. For my first couple years of squatting, I squatted almost exactly this way. It worked for a while, but switching to a slightly higher bar position with thumbs around improved my squat, eliminated some shoulder pain from squatting, and allowed me to focus more on moving the weight and less on worrying about the bar shifting around/sliding down my back mid-squat. I have seen the same issues and subsequent resolutions in other people's squats as well. But in the end, bar placement depends on what works for you.
- I don't prefer the prescibed "toes out" stance. Rippetoe teaches the squat with the toes out at about a 30 degree angle. The squat is often taught this way to circumvent a lack of lower body mobility, and I can understand squatting with toes out around 30 degrees while mobility issues are addressed. However, squatting toes out because of lacking lower leg range of motion is just a stopgap measure, and often just encourages and teaches poor movement patterns that are hard to break down the road. When mobility permits, I prefer (for a number of reasons) between a 10-20 degree angle. There is an ongoing argument among strength training folk about which stance is better, and it often seems that sides are taken more out of "belief" than "proven fact"--both sides have valid arguments. But I believe 10-20 degrees is optimal and attainable for most lifters.
- I don't prefer the head position Rippetoe teaches for the squat. Rippetoe tells his athletes to look at a point on the ground 5-6 feet in front of them, which leads to more of a head down position. I teach eyes straight forward. I have my reasons, and Rip has his. Ultimately, it's a trivial contention and a simple fix... If you don't prefer the head down position, don't squat that way.
- It doesn't combine well with other athletic endeavors. If you really want to do it right, you cannot simultaneously do Starting Strength and any other athletic training of considerable intensity (running, cycling, MMA, football, etc). This often means temporarily setting aside other goals in order to spend some time focusing on strength, which isn't always ideal, but is necessary for intense and focused linear progression strength programs like Starting Strength.
- It will probably require you to eat a lot. This might sound like a good thing to some folks. If you're already an avid face-stuffer and are looking for an excuse to continue to stuff face, read no further--Starting Strength is right for you. But if you've ever finished off a huge holiday meal and thought to yourself, "I'd hate to eat like this all the time," then this part of the program might be the most challenging. Because Starting Strength puts a large amount of stress on your body, especially as the weights get heavier, it usually requires a hefty dose of food to properly recover and get the most out of the program. For me (naturally twiggish), this meant spending the better part of a year averaging 4000+ calories a day. This is particularly challenging (and expensive) if you don't want to get diabetes or if you have any sort of aversion to eating Big Macs and dying of coronary heart failure. Some people (generally those who are naturally larger or put on weight very quickly) won't need nearly as much food. But those who are blessed/cursed to be among the more svelte in figure would be wise to stock up on ground beef, peanut butter, bananas, and whole milk. This caloric surplus will help add large amounts of muscle in a short amount of time, but most trainees will also put on a little fat while following Starting Strength. For some (those who are very skinny to start out), this isn't necessarily a bad thing. But for most, it will mean some concentrated effort down the road to lose the extra fluff they accumulated. (Note: the need to eat more is fairly universal in strength training, but is particularly necessary with Starting Strength because of the overall volume at high intensity and how quickly the weights progress.)
Things I Neither Like nor Dislike About Starting Strength:
- It's not sustainable in the long-haul. This is not a knock on the program. This is just a simple fact about Starting Strength and about other beginner-oriented linear progression programs like it. Eventually, you will stall. If you add a bit more weight to the bar every time you're in the gym, logic dictates that inevitably it will get heavy enough that you can't lift that weight for the prescribed reps/sets. If that weren't the case, everyone who followed a linear progression program for a year would be squatting 800lbs. Rippetoe tells you exactly what to do in this situation (so I won't bother explaining here), and you should be able to blow through a few stalls and still gradually creep the weights up for a while; but eventually, you'll really stall. You will be tired and unable to adequately recover, and you will cease to get stronger on the program. This is when Starting Strength has run its course, and it's time to move on to another program (generally deemed an "intermediate" program). Again, this is not a problem with Starting Strength, it's just how novice linear progression programs work. Starting Strength is intended to tap into those "novice gains" that everyone has the potential to harness, and to ride those gains hard until they're completely exhausted.
- It doesn't really allow for tweaks or variation. Again I'll say that this isn't really a negative, just a fact. If you don't have access to a barbell, some plates, a squat rack/stands, and a bench, you can't really do Starting Strength. If you, for some odd reason, can't do squats, you can't do Starting Strength. There really are no "substitution" exercises. But I see this as part of the beauty of this program as well. It's a do it or don't, no-nonsense kind of deal. This is also why it is a beginners' program. Intermediate and advanced lifters have specific weak points in their main lifts that will usually need to be addressed more precisely with assistance exercises. For beginners, everything is a weak point, and so simple tends to be the most effective. Hence, the (more or less) absence of assistance exercises in Starting Strength.
- It gets ridiculously difficult towards the end. If done correctly, you will reach a point in Starting Strength where the weights are heavy enough on each exercise that it takes every ounce of effort you have to get the last rep of the last set. You will start taking mini naps and having sandwich breaks between sets in a desperate effort to complete every squat rep. Things get hairy and you're left feeling like a heap of broken down manliness. These are the best of times, these are the worst of times. No agony no bragony, am I right?
In summary, Starting Strength is great. If you'd like to be strong and you think you might fall into the beginner category, do it. If you think you're in the intermediate category but you've never heard of Starting Strength, you're probably still a beginner (or you don't have the internet) and should try out Starting Strength. If you're not ready to put in some serious work and follow the program, you shouldn't do Starting Strength.
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When it comes to strength training, one of the primary issues with programs that you'll find on the internet or in a book is that they are all general. Because they are mass-published programs that are intended to work for a huge variety of people, they cannot be specific to your needs. This is why, again, a knowledgeable personal coach or trainer is your best bet. But who has the money for that? I sure don't, and never have. So I learned and am still learning, through lots of trial and error and reading, what programming works for me and what doesn't; and, more generally, I've learned about what to look for in a good program and what the signs are of a crap program. In future posts I'll look at other notable programs and will address my thoughts on particular aspects of programming as a whole.
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Strong of heart, strong of mind, strong of swole.
1 (By ablight (AJB) (ablight) [CC-BY-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons)↩
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