More Rippetoe on PJ Media

I haven't written much the last few weeks, and in the mean time, Mark Rippetoe wrote three more articles in his series at PJ Media.  So, let's take a look at them in chronological order.  First, Coach Rip engages in a bit of heresy.

Not everybody that goes to the gym wants to lose weight. 

This may come as a surprise to some of you who either need to lose a few pounds or think everyone wants to be skinny. Many underweight men would love to be bigger, stronger, and more physically imposing, and gaining muscular body weight is a simple process. 

Popular culture is currently at war with the notion that a man should be big and strong, because popular culture is at war with the idea of independence and self-sufficiency, and a big strong man literally embodies the concept. 

We are inundated daily by print and video advertising, as well as by essentially every non-action/adventure film, with images of men who weigh about 150 pounds at 5’9” (that’s 10 stone 10 for the Brits, and about 68 kg at 175 cm for the rest of Europe). The image of Obama’s “Pajama Boy” is burned indelibly into the national conscience, but it made a very small blister. 

Ah yes, Pajama Boy, the ideal "Liberal" "man" - small, weak and completely dependent on government.

If you doubt Coach Rip's assessment of the popular desire to keep men weak, recall celebrity fitness guru Tracy Anderson, whose weakness regime, in which women never lift more than three pounds and men never lift more than ten pounds, receives plenty of breathlessly adoring media coverage.

Coach Rip goes on to explain his program for gaining strength and body weight, which in the simplest terms amounts to lifting big, eating big and getting lots of rest.

You go to the gym three days per week, and you do a basic workout that consists of squats, overhead presses, bench presses, deadlifts, and power cleans. You squat every workout, alternate the two press variations, and deadlift or power clean every workout. The lifts are easy to learn, and barbells are commonly available in gyms all over the world — and can be purchased for use in a home gym. Sets of five reps have proven to work best for our purposes. 

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The things your body needs to recover from the work are food and rest — lots of both. This is really the hard part. Most people find it easier to train heavy than to eat enough to both recover from the training and to build the new tissue that adaptation to the work requires. If you want to do a program like this for muscular weight gain, you have to eat more than you want to, more than you’re accustomed to eating — perhaps as much as 6000 calories per day for the few months the program will take.

He's absolutely right.  The gym work is the easy (and fun) part.  It's the recovery that gets me.  Getting a minimum of eight hours of sleep per day is almost impossible for me.  And eating that much is really difficult.  If you're a naturally skinny dude like me, that means eating a lot of fat, because fat is the most calorie-dense macro nutrient.  At least it's tasty!

But what if you're not a naturally skinny dude?  What if you need to lose some fat?  Coach Rip covers that in the comments.

Basically, a man who is already overweight (fat) is in a completely different anabolic state than a skinny underweight man. We advise that fat guys do the program on what is basically the Paleo diet, at about 3000kcal/day, as opposed to the advice for underweight guys, which is 4 meals/day and a gallon of whole milk. 

By the way, I'm lactose intolerant, so drinking a gallon of milk per day would kill me!  Fortunately, I've discovered that I can drink half and half or heavy cream without trouble.  Don't ask me why.  I don't understand it.  Also, the extra fat means I don't have to drink as much of it.

What about women?  Coach Rip doesn't address the ladies in this article, though he does promise in the comments to do so later.  I've never met a woman who actually wants to gain muscle mass, but some do for athletic reasons.



Do read the whole thing.

In the second article, Coach Rip addresses my favorite lift - the deadlift!

The deadlift may be the simplest and easiest exercise to learn in all of barbell training. You pick up a loaded barbell and set it back down, keeping the bar in contact with your legs the whole way.

That's probably why it's my favorite.

“Kinetic chain” is an exercise term that refers to the musculoskeletal components (the “links”) of an exercise between the load (the barbell) and the base of support (your feet against the floor). The kinetic chain in the deadlift is essentially the entire body, and everything between hands and floor is doing its anatomically-determined proportion of the work of moving the bar

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Here’s the best part about barbell training: if you use good technique, your anatomy sorts out each body part’s contribution so that you don’t have to. 

These large exercises — essentially normal human movement patterns loaded with a barbell to make them progressively heavier — eliminate the need for dozens of smaller exercises, and the strength you obtain is directly applicable to your job of being an active human. 

That's why, as Coach Rip stated in an earlier article, isolation movements are a waste of time.

Unfortunately, the deadlift inspires fear in many people.  After all, there really is a risk of injuring ones spine during a deadlift attempt.  However, as Coach Rip explains, good technique is the key to safety.

Source: PJ Media

Exercise strengthens muscles. If an exercise requires that you use certain muscles to perform the movement, and the movement is performed correctly, then the exercise strengthens all the muscles used in the movement as you lift progressively heavier weights. Doing it wrong doesn’t count, because poor technique means some part of the kinetic chain didn’t do its job — it failed to do the work, and therefore didn’t get strong. The use of less-than-perfect technique allows some of the muscles to weasel out of doing their job, then they fail to get strong, and then they cannot do their job. 

In other words, if you want a strong back - and you should, if you want to protect your spine - you need to deadlift.  People of any age or athletic ability can perform deadlifts safely as long as they do so with good technique.  Even pregnant women can.  Aimee has through two pregnancies now.

Here's a side note on the subject:

The world’s second-best performance on Open Workout 14.3 was set by a 39-year-old athlete from Buford, Ga.
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Steven Platek completed the same number of reps as worldwide winner Austin Malleolo, but fell behind on the tiebreak time. Malleolo finished his last set of box jumps in 7:07, while Platek finished them in 7:17.

By Workout 14.3, they mean the third workout of the 2014 CrossFit Open; the first step toward the 2014 CrossFit Games.  Workout 14.3 is a deadlift-intensive event.  You can watch a demo here.


Most men start falling apart physically in their 30s.  Mr Platek - and thousands like him - prove that isn't necessary, and strength training is the key to preventing that from happening.  This was my favorite part of the article:

Four years ago, Platek wouldn’t have been excited by a workout with a lot of deadlifts. The former self-described meathead hurt himself deadlifting in his old globo gym, and thought his heavy lifting days were over.
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It wasn’t until a friend suggested he try CrossFit that he eventually started to lift again and work on correcting his technique.
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Now, after years of deadlifting and focusing on technique, his deadlift one-rep max is somewhere in the range of 625 lb.

Again, good technique is crucial.  Read both articles in their entirety.

The latest article in Coach Rip's PJ Media series covers the strict overhead press.

Pressing a barbell overhead is one of the oldest exercises in the gym. It might well have been the first exercise invented after the first barbell was discovered. Since it is performed while standing with the bar in the hands — after the bar is cleaned from the ground to the shoulders, or taken from the rack at shoulder height — the entire body is involved in the exercise. From the floor to the hands, the job of pressing the bar overhead is shared by all the muscles in the body.

Notice a pattern here?  Every movement trains the entire body.

Due to a poor understanding of the mechanics of the movement, doctors and physical therapists commonly advise against performing this perfectly natural and perfectly safe exercise. The alleged problem is an injury known as “shoulder impingement,” and nothing could be further from the truth. The correctly performed press (incorrectly-performed exercises do not count) is not only perfectly safe for the shoulders — more importantly, the press is the best exercise for keeping shoulders strong and injury-free.

There's another pattern.  Ignorance of technique leads people to blame injuries on a movement that actually prevents injuries by strengthening the muscles around a joint.  A devotee of kettlebell training once told me the human body isn't designed to lift heavy things overhead with both hands, which is hilarious.  But even educated people (doctors and physical therapists) make similar mistakes.

Source: PJ Media

...what is the normal daily role of a “rotator cuff” muscle, and does it perform this function all by itself? Does it make your shoulder externally rotate, and that’s all? Or does it primarily function as one of several muscle groups that stabilize the head of the humerus in the glenoid, while also externally rotating the arm when you’re in a physical therapy office, lying on your side with a two-pound chrome dumbbell in your hand? The rotator cuff muscles are just another muscle group that helps hold the shoulder together, and they are best trained — and rehabbed — while performing this function. 

The press is precisely the movement that uses all the shoulder muscles in this manner. Since they are functioning simultaneously with the other muscles that press the bar overhead, they are both strengthened with and protected by the rest of the muscles that operate the shoulder girdle. This is their normal function — synergy, not isolation, and the best way to make them strong and healthy. 

This training philosophy is diametrically opposed to that which is most popular today - sitting at enormously complex, expensive machines and isolating the smallest muscles possible.  But if you think about it, it makes a whole lot more sense.