Wit and Wisdom of Mark Rippetoe

Responding to a person claiming bodyweight exercises are more effective than barbells:

"This is all very interesting, but how much do you squat? Let's quantify the progress in absolute terms we all understand, like pounds on a bar through full ROM."

When asked about dropping the weight at the top of a deadlift instead of lowering it:

"That's for pussies. That's for fucking pussies. Ostentatious, histrionic pussies that are trying to make noise to call attention to themselves. It's disrespectful to the equipment, it's disrespectful of other people in the gym, and if you do that you're not doing the last half of the deadlift and you're a pussy."

On a strong lifter at a seminar deadlifting 495:

"Hold it—just a minute. Put a two-and-a-half on that goddamn thing! Put a two-and-a-half on it! We're not going to do *four ninety-five* when we can do *five hundred!* *That's bullshit!*"

On the claim that squats are bad for the knees:

"The next time some quasi-professional health-industry type repeats this hoary old silliness, ask them how they know. If they say that the bulk of their professional practice is generated by athletes who regularly and correctly performed full barbell squats and consequently 'blew out' their knees, call me and I will be there within thirty minutes with $80 million in cash. My money is safe, of course."

"I know that I'm an animal that displays bilateral symmetry. I understand that one side should be the mirror of the other, and that human perceptions of beauty are intimately associated with symmetry. For example, I am very handsome."

People who ask dumb questions are usually just lazy. People who won't try things for themselves are pussies. I can do this because God is with me, and I am correct in doing so.

"Has Easy ever worked as well as Hard? No. Next question."

When asked about "guilty pleasure" exercises:

"Curls. Big arms are fun, and if their training doesn't interfere with the rest of the program, wait till everybody's gone, like I do."

An adult male weighs at least 200 pounds.

When asked to "explain how deep squats won't screw up your femur/hips," so the person posting could explain it to his friend who believes that deep squats are harmful:

"Just because some jackass asserts a thing does not mean that it is worthy of refutation. If the same guy tells you that every space shuttle launch perturbs the Earth's orbit, and that the cumulative effects are just about to start the process of the loss of the atmosphere into space, thus creating a vacuum that will destroy all life on the planet in approximately 36 hours, would you deem this necessary to refute? How much time would you spend explaining to him why this cannot happen? Would not your time be spent better doing other things? And if you devise a concise explanation, why would you assume he would understand?"

"I don't go to titty bars much anymore. They have never really appealed to me. Like going into an expensive restaurant, reading the menu for 2 hours, drinking a little, then getting up and leaving without having had anything to eat but paying the bill anyway."

We knew the chickenshit motherfuckers were going to pirate us no matter how cheap we made the DVD, and that there would be chickenshit motherfuckers who would steal it. Can't be helped without a massive eugenics program.

"Yes, if you squat wrong it fucks things up. If you squat correctly, those same fucked-up things will unfuck themselves."

"And the book is not any more expensive in Australia than it is here except for the shipping, which is what you get for living in Australia."

"Thanks for the kind words, but if SS is the most interesting book you've ever read, you must have just started reading a couple of weeks ago."

Poor form in the gym is caused by insufficient yelling.

I can teach idiots to squat in ten minutes.

There are many levels of understanding [of trainees] and you should be in command of most of them...

"Natural athletes are visual learners."

"Mediocre athletes that tried like hell to get good are the best coaches."

People at the Division One and pro level rarely know what the hell they are doing, their athletes are pre-sorted."

"Joe Jurrasic"

"They are already strong or they would not be on the Dallas Cowboys." (On the relative lack of importance of proper training by pro football players,etc.).

"He does not know that Hammer Strength machines are pieces of shit" (On coaches lack of insight into the importance of genetics among pro athletes).

"The spine is best at bearing a load in an arch."

"Perfect is the enemy of good."

You are right to be wary. There is much bullshit. Be wary of me too, because I may be wrong. Make up your own mind after you evaluate all the evidence and the logic.

On response to a guy who had some life problems lately and afraid of sounding like a "pussy":
You don't sound like a pussy at all. You sound like a normal human being, just like me, who thankfully has a barbell to keep him sane when things get shitty...and realize that one workout out of thousands does not affect your overall progress. Training is a process, not the events of one day

There is simply no other exercise, and certainly no machine, that produces the level of central nervous system activity, improved balance and coordination, skeletal loading and bone density enhancement, muscular stimulation and growth, connective tissue stress and strength, psychological demand and toughness, and overall systemic conditioning than the correctly performed full squat.

Ask Old Santa for a squat rack. Preferably one that won't fit down the chimney. You can't do the program without it, and that would leave you forever an elf.

Responding to someone who wanted the book spoon fed to them:

Steve, buddy, the plan is in the fucking book. That's what the book is about. That's why I wrote the book. This is a Q&A for people who are already using the plan IN THE FUCKING BOOK. Get it, read it, and use it. Really, the book is too long to post here. Get the fucking book.

Anyone who says that full squats are "bad for the knees" has, with that statement, demonstrated conclusively that they are not entitled to an opinion about the matter. People who know nothing about a topic, especially a very technical one that requires specific training, knowledge, and experience, are not due an opinion about that topic and are better served by being quiet when it is asked about or discussed. For example, when brain surgery, or string theory, or the NFL draft, or women's dress sizes, or white wine is being discussed, I remain quiet, odd though that may seem. But seldom is this the case when orthopedic surgeons, athletic trainers, physical therapists, or nurses are asked about full squats.

"If you had to choose between wearing no shoes or running shoes to lift in which would you pick?"

Rip's response: "That is like asking me to choose between stabbing myself in the eye with a fork or burning the roof of my mouth with extremely hot pizza. Can't we just avoid both?"

One does not assemble a book of one's own witty aphorisms without being thought such a fool that any value the book might have would be rather thoroughly compromised.

Absolutely not. Never -- and I mean NEVER -- try anything that someone in authority, like Me, has not specifically approved in advance. This is not allowed, and is specifically prohibited, because if you do this irresponsible thing -- this Trying Things For Yourself -- you might learn on your own, and again, this is PROHIBITED.

Let me ask you a question: Are you from North Korea?

Speaking of kettlebells snatches shoulder position and the Russian: I am a child of the Cold War. I don't like them.

If every day of your life you are told by authority figures that the Earth is flat, you will be scared of falling off the edge whether you want to be or not.

My opinion about barbell rows is as follows: fuck barbell rows. Really. Fuck them. Stop wasting time worrying about barbell rows and get your deadlift up to 500. By then you'll have your own opinion and you won't have to worry about mine.

My program is 3x/week barbell training until the strength gains produced by linear progression are exhausted. That's it, the whole program. Adding a bunch of other stuff in, or even adding a little other stuff in makes it NOT MY PROGRAM, because it fundamentally alters your response to the stress. Do what you want, of course, but it won't be my program if you do it your way.

Q: This is as SERIOUS, question... life and death. Are you a trekkie Rip? Be honest.

A: I watch the show, yes. Okay, fuck you. I am one of the proud folks who, at the age of 9, 10, and 11 were privileged to watch the first series in its entirety every week without missing a single episode. Mr. Spock raised me, Captain Kirk taught me about women, and Mr. Scott is responsible for my malt whisky habit. I have not watched TV hardly at all since about 1980, but I did see all of the Next Generation shows. I have no use for Deep Space Nine, Voyager, or Enterprise. Once again, fuck you.

Opinions are like phasers -- everybody ought to have one.

(A thread from someone worried about learning/doing power cleans by himself)

Usually, people just feel intimidated by anything that resembles a technical exercise and just would rather not do them. This is just being a pussy, and sets a bad precedent for the management of both training and life. I think the Starting Strength includes an understandable method for learning to power clean, and just in case it's not simple enough I rewrote it for the new book so that it is even simpler. You don't really need bumper plates to do them if you don't have access, so that doesn't wash either. They are in the program because an explosive movement is a valuable contribution to power production, and they make deadlifts get stronger faster.

Okay, you don't need a coach to learn power cleans, because we fixed things up so that you can learn them out of the book. And what exactly is the downside of trying to learn them and failing? Firing squad? The fucking bodybuilders making fun of you from the safety of the dumbbell rack? Loss of wages? Just try them before you decide you can't learn them without a coach.

"...what should my ideal body weight be for this program? Have you made a table for this, or what do you recommend?" - trainee

"Your ideal bodyweight as an ectomorph at 6' 0" will be 214.378 lbs. There. Happy? And if you lose or gain a pound, I will have you killed. It is important to be ideal.." - Rip

(A guy gives a very detail problem of bowel trouble while squatting and ask if Rip or his trainees had similar problems)

Jesus, Andrew, I could have gone a long time without having to hear about this. The obvious fix is to take a newspaper into the bathroom and not to come out until the whole thing is read. Just before you train. Works for me every time.

(A guy asks if hack squat is useful since his college does not have any squat racks only squat machines)

I recommend that you change colleges.

I don't even like Greg Glassman. I don't have a cult like allegiance to the guy. I really don't like him. He's too hard to get on the phone and he doesn't drink my kind of scotch.

If nothing is wrong with your shoulders, benches are fine. But when someone asks me about rotator cuff injuries, I assume they're not asking for their cat.

And folks, for weight-gaining purposes, "eating clean" is not a useful concept. Big Macs are.

I have bought 4-6 double cheeseburgers and thrown away the bread many times. But I think they just raised the price from $1 to $1.25. Rapists.

The bulk/cut approach holds that you can either add muscle or lose bodyfat, and that all training should be concerned with one or the other. This assumes that aesthetics is the criterion by which progress is measured, that pictures therefore tell the story, and that picture magazines can be the arbiters of success. This type of thinking completely ignores the performance aspects of training, and performance is much more easily and rapidly influenced. Rapid, quantifiable progress keeps motivation high, much higher than waiting for a six-pack that may or may not show up.

You guys that worry about eating clean are actually merely bodybuilders looking for justification for your obsession with abs. You cannot get big and strong on 3000 kcal/day. And you cannot eat 7000/day and eat perfectly "clean".

On resting in between reps:
It varies with the length of the set. 5s or fewer get a breath to reset. Longer sets might take 2 breaths. During the last few reps of a true 20RM squat, just do what Jesus tells you.

Trust me, if you do an honest 20 rep program, at some point Jesus will talk to you. On the last day of the program, he asked if he could work in.

If you can't train and work in a warehouse at the same time, you probably have ovarian cancer. Consult your gynecologist.

Your muscles cannot get “longer” without some rather radical orthopedic surgery.

Muscles don’t get leaner—you do.

There is no such thing as “firming and toning.” There is only stronger and weaker.

The vast majority of women cannot get large, masculine muscles from barbell training. If it were that easy, I would have them.

Women who do look like men have taken some rather drastic steps in that direction that have little to do with their exercise program.

Women who claim to be afraid to train hard because they “always bulk up too much” are often already pretty bulky, or “skinny fat” (thin but weak and deconditioned) and have found another excuse to continue life sitting on their butts.

Only people willing to work to the point of discomfort on a regular basis using effective means to produce that discomfort will actually look like they have been other-than-comfortable most of the time. You can thank the muscle magazines for these persistent misconceptions, along with the natural tendency of all normal humans to seek reasons to avoid hard physical exertion.

I don't read around the web much, because I'm old and busy, and just haven't got time. If I'm on the Internet, I'd rather be looking at porn.

On the ethics of meat eating:

Okay, have you ever been around chickens? They are stupid, uncooperative, inconvenient, ill-tempered creatures. They get what they deserve. Fuck chickens.

Testosterone levels peak in our mid-twenties, hold relatively steady for another decade, and then begin to fall like women’s clothes at the kinds of parties we don’t get invited to any more.

We don't wear singlets because A...one...they're gay.

Baby mammals drink milk, and you sir, are a baby mammal.

Rip: "You would look better if you gained about 10 lbs of muscle"
Woman responds with look of utter horror.
Rip: "Trust me, I've been looking at women a long time, and I'm really good at it."

your DNA is smarter than the people at IDEA

Here in Texas, the Highway Patrol has a slogan "Click it or Ticket" to help motorist remember to wear their seat belt.

As Rip is driving off on his new motorcycle he says, "this is my response to 'click it or ticket'. Typical Rip reasoning.

Girls don't like big pecs! they like money and "this"!(as he indicates with his hand mid thigh on the leg)

I just don't miss [having big pecs] that much, and I don't care what my pecs look like anymore. It is now sufficient that I am merely hung well.

You must wear socks or workout pants on the Dead Lifts. We don't want your DNA on the barbell.

Rip whispered this into a woman's ear (who had severe kyphosis and had a very difficult time pulling her shoulders back/pushing her chest out) while coaching her bench press:

"Now, push your tits toward me."

She immediately corrected her kyphosis and had AMAZING bench press form -- despite the fact that she and Rip were laughing so hard, the rest of us couldn't WAIT to know what the coaching cue was that worked so well.

What we're trying to do is get things fixed, not allow them to stay broke.

Does a bigger motor slow the car down? No. But a bunch of junk in the trunk does.

I'm not interested in what's been done in the past. I'm interested in what should be done.

Yes, you're absolutely right, the books are so disorganized as to be all but unusable, especially in the absence of the ability to exercise one's own judgment and apply a bit of common sense. Please e-mail me your mailing address and I shall refund all of your money, including shipping, you fucking idiot.

The interesting thing is that everybody really already knows this, because there are few examples in life that don’t follow the basic rules of the universe, the ones that dictate the behavior of everything. One of the most basic of those rules is that, with the exception of the occasional lottery winner, you pretty much get out of an effort what you put into it. We’re all quite familiar with this reality, although we are often willing to believe people who tell us otherwise, about exercise and about life. The sooner everybody—both halves of the population—accepts the fact that effective exercise is more like training for athletics and less like lying around on the floor, more about performance and less about appearance, the sooner it will be understood that women really don’t need their own figure salon.

Any idiot can get on a treadmill and watch TV and then take great pride in the fact they've 'exercized.

Well, Rip knows that a 135-pound, 5’ 9”, 18-year-old kid doesn’t look like either Ronnie or Rip, even if he has a twelve-pack, and that if he seriously wants to head in that direction the first thing to do is to gain about 60 pounds. Ole Rip also knows that women don’t really care about abs. They care about Other Things. And after all, you asked Rip; he didn’t ask you. So put down your Muscle and Fiction, do your squats, drink your milk, and pay better attention to the answers when you ask the questions.

When a guy (Alex) asked what to do about his balls hurting after squats...

Alex, buddy, you're on your own here. Unless we get some other input. My balls haven't hurt since 1973, when I learned how to finish what I started.

If you want to look like a bodybuilder, that's fine with me. That is a matter for you to discuss with your God and your psychologist. But even a bodybuilder is a novice strength trainee until he's an intermediate. The fastest way to gain muscular bodyweight -- the supposed goal of a bodybuilder -- is with a linear progression on the basic barbell exercises. And 5s are the way this progression works best.

And no, you don't excrete excess calories, because evolution didn't see fit to exterminate the species in this way. If that happened, fat people would be in zoos where they belong since they'd be quite rare.

There are few things graven in stone, except that you have to squat or you're a pussy.

I was driving home the other night, listening to the radio, and the guy filling in for Art Bell on Coast to Coast AM was talking to some other guy about Nazis, UFOs, the Kennedy Assassination, time travel, and George Bush, and how it all relates to OneWorldGovernment. This, of course, made me think about barbell training...

(in reference to a bicyclist who seemed to be saying that riding was similar to squats since they both made your legs hurt):

Yes they both hurt, but so do burning your hand and burying your bulldog. The differences are actually quite significant.

The trouble with cyclists is that their training establishment keeps reinforcing the silly bullshit that all recreational athletes want to believe: at some point, all serious athletes go outside their sport-specific work to improve, and recreational athletes just want to play their sport and wear the clothes.

Milk is quite literally better than steroids for a novice lifter to grow on, and no supplement produces the same effect.

It is because over thirty years of direct observation has demonstrated to me that when trainees drink one gallon of milk added to their regular diet and train in a progressive linear fashion, they gain significant muscular bodyweight, and those that do not drink their milk, even in the presence of progressive linear training, fail to do this. They also fail to continue progressive linear training for the same length of time, because this is facilitated by the steady weight gain. I understand that you're asking me if I have controlled for other factors such as failure to do the program correctly, and the answer is yes, of course I have, because I am not a complete idiot. Those that will not do the program are not being considered when I make these remarks, because that would be too fucking obvious a hole in my analysis. The difference in the milk drinkers is that THEY GET BIGGER THAN THE ONES WHO WON'T DRINK THE FUCKING MILK. Please tell me that you understand this now.

Soy milk is essentially Coffee-Mate laced with estrogen, and is best left to vegans and other socialist vegetarian types that can't bring themselves to eat the completely natural-for-humans flesh of our friends the Animals but who have no trouble with slaughtering trillions of our other friends the Plants and processing -- in gigantic factories run by multinational corporations with shareholders that eat meat themselves -- very selectively chosen components of their poor little bodies into gooey shit that humans have never had an opportunity to adapt to digesting. Why, eating such material, with its high levels of isoflavones, touted by gynecologists as tantamount to Estrogen Replacement Therapy (ERT), will make you grow boobs, and this will screw up the clean lines of this fine young man's Under Armor. I recommend against it.

There is no substitute for milk. Sorry.

CrossFit has the potential to change the popular cultural perception of what exercise actually means over the next decade, and I will watch with delight as selectorized leg machines are melted down into more useful items like re-bar and manhole covers.

My own opinion of Greg [Glassman] is that he has done more to legitimize actual training in the minds of the public than any other person since Arthur Jones destroyed it in the mid-70s.

But nobody lives in Canada. It's a frozen wasteland with an inefficient postal system, probably suffering from a shortage of sled dogs.

Pierre, if you are eating 5500 calories a day, then I am a female kangaroo with a Sonic Drive-In franchise and a heroin habit.

The only legitimate use for a glove is to cover an injury... A desire to prevent callus formation (possibly so as to not snag one's pantyhose) does not constitute a legitimate use.

Rip: "Leg Pressing is masturbation."

Tuesday: "Oh, come on. Masturbation isn't that bad."

Rip: "Oh, I didn't say it was bad. But at least when I masturbate, I am not under the impression that I'm making anybody else cum but me."

On steroids:

There are no shortcuts. The fact that a shortcut is important to you means that you are a pussy.

...and since we all want big chesticles, we have to put some pec in it, ok? Chesticles are why we bench press, afterall

In response to a guy complaining that his leg curl weight hasn't increased since he started dead lifting:

"That's like bitching about masturbation not being fun anymore since you started dating a porn star"

On the possibility of a failure to deadlift resulting in stroke:

Deadlifts that are too heavy to pull generally don't take very long; the bar just kinda lays there. So if trying to move immovable objects was dangerous from the standpoint of stroke, the history of the human race would be littered with stupid people's corpses.

Strong people are harder to kill than weak people, and more useful in general.

On not calling "The Press", "The Shoulder Press:"

We just call it the press, because how could you press without the shoulders? You can leg press... but that's gay.

On adding bike riding and leg extensions to the program:

The program in [Starting Strength] is not designed to be supplemented with anything. Neither of you -- old guy or young kid -- are in a position to recover optimally, as would be a 21 year-old genetic freak. Just stick with the program and let it work for you unsullied by the trappings of muscle magazine silliness or a desire to gild the lily. If you want to ride your bikes, don't be gone too long. In fact, be back before supper.

On drinking not 1, but 2 gallons of milk/day:

But you would be shitting primarily cheese. Are you ready for this?

A Rip Anecdote:

My favorite happens to be the tale on supplementary equipment. A man insisted on wearing straps for exercises he probably could have gotten away without having worn them. Rip, in classic Rip fashion, decided to start wearing straps to do all sorts of things, including opening doors and going to the bathroom (he would wear one on his "holding" hand, gotta have wrist support for that) until the guy stopped wearing straps completely.

But then again, those who argue against squatting and deadlifting on the same day may just be pussies.

Now I also know that you're supposed to 'listen to your body', but my brain says 'don't be a pussy, and just lift the fucking weights', and that's just what I do.

On a respectable number of pull-ups:

Well, I can do 16, and I'm 51 and I weigh 210. So you have to beat me or you're a pussy. And if you do beat me, you're probably using drugs.

On bending the arms in the deadlift:

Bent elbows just absolutely suck.

I didn't lock that last [bench press] out in a safe position over my fairly sturdy sternum, here. I came up off the bench and put that thing right over the most valuable structures that I possess; teeth, eyeballs... all precious voice... [Rip then looks off camera at someone and shakes his head.] I'm 51, they aren't as valuable anymore as they used to be.

Newb: Got any good ab exercises?

Rip: Got any better questions?

Cindy [Crossfit WOD] is a vicious wretched bitch.

It would depend on your recovery ability, i.e. how old you are, how much you eat, how well you sleep, and how big your balls are. Some guys can recover from lots more work than other guys, so this just depends on you.

The only time LSD (long slow distance) is necessary is if your going to compete in a sport that requires it. It is far inferior to CrossFit-type metcon for producing an increase in VO2 max, it interferes with power and strength production, it can be quite catabolic and immune-suppressive in high doses, it destroys muscle mass, and the people that do it usually wear silly clothes. Read the stuff on the CrossFit website regarding this, and you will learn many good, important things.

Never ask a question that you may not be prepared to have answered.

If you want to look like some Abercrombie model, then find another program and enjoy your nice, easy training style. If you are serious about adding muscle to your frame, then get under the damn bar and make it happen.

Go home and tell Mom that you're a man now.

The deadlift is more functional in that it’s very hard to imagine a more useful application of strength than picking heavy shit up off the ground.

…we have not spent the last 65 million or so years finely honing our physiology to watch Oprah. Like it or not, we are the product of a very long process of adaptation to a harsh physical existence, and the past couple centuries of comparative ease and plenty are not enough time to change our genome. We humans are at our best when our existence mirrors, or at least simulates, the one we are still genetically adapted to live. And that is the purpose of exercise.

Accumulating injuries are the price we pay for the thrill of not having sat around on our asses.

[Bill] Starr was damned strong, primarily because he worked as hard as any human being ever has. He was not a genetic freak, but his balls were huge, and he applied himself to his training like few people have ever done.

There are no shortcuts. The fact that a shortcut is important to you means that you are a pussy. Let me be clear here: if you'd rather take steroids than do your squats heavy and drink enough milk, then you are a fucking Pussy. I have no time or patience for fucking Pussies. Please tell everyone you know that I said this.

The Olympic Snatch is gymnastics with a bar.

On a missed squat:

Yes, 350 was pretty good. Now, why do you think you missed 360, besides the fact that it was so fucking heavy?

on U2:

I don't like Bono. He needs to train more.

A common problem in analysis is the confusion of correlation with causation. Baker illustrates this nicely for us. Lots of people, all of whom are crazy as hell, train early in the morning without problems. Coffee becomes more important than testosterone in this situation.

I recommend against a wooden squat rack, for much the same reason that I recommend against a wooden car.

As for the definitions of butt wink and butt-wink Nazi, the first is obscene and scatological, and the second is not discussable due to European Union restrictions.

We never consciously squeeze our asscheeks in the weight room. It's not a valuable biomechanical cue, and it might get misinterpreted by the guys on the next platform.

...the rather inescapable conclusion that the older men get, the more like older women we become, hormonally speaking.

It is important to always stay within your comfort zone. This prevents having to subject oneself to the inconvenience of learning something new and potentially useful.

If you insist on wearing gloves, make sure they match your purse.

Critiqueing a power clean:

...it shows a problem known as a Donkey Kick. As the jump occurs, the heels come up in the back and then stomp back down into place. This is a terrible waste of time and energy, and contributes nothing to making the bar go up. Stop doing this immediately or I will have you killed.

...bodybuilding is men on a stage in their underwear wearing brown paint showing other men their muscles. It is training for appearance only, and at the contest level requires a degree of vanity, narcissism, and self-absorption that I find distasteful and odd.

I like musicianship, and it's quite lacking in most modern popular music. You're always safe with old Chicago, the Allman Brothers, Gov't Mule, or Tower of Power.

You can't make people smarter. You can expose them to information, but your responsibility stops there.

The full squat is a perfectly natural position for the leg to occupy. That's why there's a joint in the middle of it, and why humans have been occupying this position, both unloaded and loaded, for millions of years. Much longer, in fact, than quasi-intellectual morons have been telling us that it's "bad" for the knees.

Guy 1: I was just wondering, are all the copies of [Starting Strength] missing pages 206-207, or is it just my copy?

Rip: Page numbers 206-207 were offensive to us, for numerological reasons we'd not care to discuss, so we omitted them and indexed around them. No material is missing, just the 2 most horrible, sickening, disgusting, revolting, baby-killing, maggot-infested, sorry, rotten, substandard numbers in all of mathematics. And good riddance, I say. Fuck 206 and 207, both of them.

Guy 2: Thank God someone has taken a stand on this.

Rip: Courage will always be the watchword of The Aasgaard Company.

If lifting heavy weights for partial [squats] were of any benefit for sports, Gold's Gym would be fielding the majority of the 2008 Olympic team.

Shitting yourself when you deadlift was omitted from [Starting Strength]. The best way to avoid this is to not deadlift when you need to shit, and vice versa. Planning is the key here.

When asked if masturbation or sex hinders strength:

Yes, it does. Never do either. Ever. Not if you want to be strong like bull.

An anecdote:

I was shooting photos for CrossFit Central's Fittest Games Challenge #2, which was a CrossFit Total event. (both links wfs) Rip was judging the event, of course. The squat and press were done in a rack facing towards the back of the venue, and I'd set up a remote camera in front of the platform so that I could shoot pictures from that position without danger of moving or disturbing someone (really wasn't an issue in the end, but... anyway...).

So, they decide to remove the rack and turn the lifter around for the deadlift. I quickly move to start relocating my remote camera, so that I can get it ready before the event starts - I try to be as unobtrusive as possible at these sorts of things, so I was just trying to hurry, etc... Well, one of the folks with CrossFit Central (who was trying to be helpful) says to Coach "Hang on a minute, Dave has to move his camera...". Oh, how I cringed at those words

Coach looks over and says "Has to move a camera? You GOD DAMNED paparazzi, you killed Princess Diana! You're the reason she's dead!"

Rip: You need to drink one gallon of full fat milk everyday. It's almost mandatory.

Somebody from audience: I'm lactose intolerant, could I substitute yogurt for milk?

Rip: Gallon of yogurt.

It is not necessary to bump the shins with the bar, or dig a ditch in the shins on the way up. Good control of the weight is necessary to avoid this, and it should be avoided or sores get established on the shins that will be a problem for a long time - every time the trainee deadlifts he will break the sore open and make a big mess on his socks or worse, the bar.

I strongly advise against intentionally farting whilst moving heavy weights. Sometimes -- especially under those circumstances -- farts have a solid center.

Most of the problems with the bodies and minds of the folks occupying the current culture involve an unwillingness to do anything hard, or anything that they'd rather not do. I applaud your resolve, and I welcome you to the community of people who have decided that EASY will no longer suffice.

If you are so inflamed that you can't train, and ibuprofen and fish oil help with inflammation, maybe you'd better take the fucking ibuprofen and fish oil.

There is never an absolute answer to everything, except of course that you have to do your squats.

JLascek: I just wanted to throw in the fact that you cannot "pull yourself down" in any kind of squat unless you are moving faster than gravity will allow, and this is never the case in the presence of a significant load.

TPrewittMD: Actually, you can't "pull yourself down" unless your feet are literally fixed to the floor. Simply dropping the bar to the floor is faster than any squat and is the effect of gravity.

Tuesday: I wonder why CrossFitters haven't used this fact to improve their Fran time by fixing themselves to the floor.

Rip: Because it slows down the pullups, you fool.

On Andy Bolton's 1008 deadlift: "The video has been pulled from youtube (I guess because Andy's strength was obscene)."

A 2 pound weight gain doesn't count, since it is the size of an average turd.

But a hot gym is where most of us have trained before. Learn to deal with it: more water, more minerals, bigger balls..

In response to someone who hit himself in the testicles when deadlifting: "You either have very short arms or very long nuts."

On having sex before going to the gym "I guess that depends on how it was approached. If you PRed the poke, you might have to adjust your other numbers down a little"

**Back to The Starting Strength FAQ**