Strong Enough? Thoughts from Thirty Years of Barbell Training

by Mark Rippetoe

For example, in a clean the power is generated by the extension of the knees and hips applied by the feet against the ground, and it is transferred up the back and down the arms to the bar. The efficient transfer of power along the trunk segment is possible only if the muscles that stabilize the trunk are able to hold it in perfect isometric contraction during the transfer. Any laxity in the back causes some of the power that would ideally get to the bar to be absorbed. In the same way that towing a car with a long spring is not as good an idea as using a chain, a mobile segment absorbs force that an immobile segment would transmit.

There is no benefit to strength from aerobic training, because activities that utilize oxidative metabolism are not dependent on force production, and so do not produce a strength adaptation. Anything you can do for an uninterrupted 2 hours can't be that hard, in terms of the amount of force required. It produces endurance adaptations at the cellular level, changes that are actually detrimental to strength. Long, slow distance destroys muscle mass, beats the hell out of your knees and hips, and takes way too long.

What about the bench press? The bench press is inferior to the press as an overall exercise, but it does allow for the development of greater upper-body strength than the press since the position on the bench is supported. The fact that bigger weights are done on the bench is good for upper body strength, but bad in that the limiting factor is the ability of the trunk to support the weight while it is lifted, and that doesn't get trained on the bench. So, it's a trade off. All standard commercial gyms have several benches, so do them, but be sure to use the press for at least half of your upper body work.

"There's a fine line between fishing and just standing on the shore like an idiot." Steven Wright

The correct stance is taken, with the heels at about shoulder width and the toes pointing out at about 30 degrees. Some people, having been told (often by a football coach) that the toes need to point straight ahead, will need to point them out more than they want to. Some people, having read the muscle magazines and seen pictures of large oily guys with no shirts and no body hair squatting with a narrow stance — "best for isolating the quads, my man" — will take a stance that is too narrow, and will need to be wider than they want to be. This stance is the best for allowing the hips to do their job of lowering and raising; it is not designed to isolate anything but rather to distribute the force evenly between the hips and knees so that everything contributes its anatomically predetermined share of the work to the job. In this correct stance, squat down all the way to the bottom. The bottom is the extent of your full range of motion as limited by your flexibility but enabled by this correct stance. Once there, place each elbow against the inside of that knee, put the heels of the palms together, and jack your knees apart by pushing your elbows out against the inside of your knees, keeping your chest up as best you can. This puts the thighs in a position parallel with the feet, again about 30 degrees out from straight forward, with no twisting of the knee since the femur and the tibia are lined up. Your heels will be down, since that is where they have to be if your weig...