Starting Strength Quotes

“A weak man is not as happy as that same man would be if he were strong. This reality is offensive to some people who would like the intellectual or spiritual to take precedence. It is instructive to see what happens to these very people as their squat strength goes up.”
― Mark Rippetoe, Starting Strength

“The deadlift also serves as a way to train the mind to do things that are hard.”
― Mark Rippetoe, Starting Strength: Basic Barbell Training

“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.”
― Mark Rippetoe, Starting Strength

“Humans are not physically normal in the absence of hard physical effort.”
― Mark Rippetoe, Starting Strength

“You do not need to do many different exercises to get strong - you need to get strong on a very few important exercises, movements that train the whole body as a system, not as a collection of separate body parts. The problem with the programs advocated by all the national exercise organizations is that they fail to recognize this basic principle: the body best adapts as a whole organism to stress applied to the whole organism. The more stress that can be applied to as much of the body at one time as possible, the more effective and productive the adaptation will be.”
― Mark Rippetoe, Starting Strength: Basic Barbell Training

“There is no easy way to do a deadlift—not involving actually picking up the bar—which explains their lack of popularity in gyms around the world.”
― Mark Rippetoe, Starting Strength: Basic Barbell Training

“Squatting' in a Smith machine is an oxymoron. A Smith machine is not a squat rack, no matter what the girls at the front desk tell you. A squat cannot be performed on a Smith machine any more than it can be performed in a small closet with a hamster. Sorry. There is a gigantic difference between a machine that makes the bar path vertical for you and a squat that is executed correctly enough to have a vertical bar path. The job of keeping the bar path vertical should be done by the muscles, skeleton, and nervous system, not by grease fittings, rails, and floor bolts.”
― Mark Rippetoe, Starting Strength: Basic Barbell Training

“Physical strength is the most important thing in life. This is true whether we want it to be or not.”
― Mark Rippetoe, Starting Strength

“If you insist on using a thumbless grip on the bench, you need to do it at home so that when the ambulance comes (if anyone is there to call 911), it doesn’t disrupt anyone else’s training.”
― Mark Rippetoe, Starting Strength

“If your gym makes a lot of money selling gloves, you have another reason to look for a different gym. And if you insist on using them, make sure they match your purse.”
― Mark Rippetoe, Starting Strength

“Remember: lifting more weight is not always the same thing as getting stronger.”
― Mark Rippetoe, Starting Strength

“but the reality of millions of years of adaptation to a ruggedly physical existence will not just go away because desks were invented.”
― Mark Rippetoe, Starting Strength

“...full range of motion, multi-joint exercises are
not supposed to isolate any one muscle. We use them precisely because they don't. We want them
to work lots of muscles through a long range of motion. We like it when some muscles are called
into function as other muscles drop out of function, and when muscles change function during
the exercise. This is because we are training for strength. We are concerned with improving the
functional motion around a joint. We are not just concerned about our "favorite muscles." We
do not have favorite muscles.”
― Mark Rippetoe, Starting Strength: Basic Barbell Training

“you don’t get to redefine the exercise and then claim that it’s dangerous. Driving a car is dangerous if you drive it into a great big rock.”
― Mark Rippetoe, Starting Strength

“If it’s too heavy to squat below parallel, it’s too heavy to have on your back.”
― Mark Rippetoe, Starting Strength

“Stance is a highly individual thing and will vary with hip width, hip ligament tightness, femur and tibia length and proportion, adductor and hamstring flexibility, knee joint alignment, and ankle flexibility. Everybody’s stance will be slightly different, but shoulder-width heels, with toes at 30 degrees, is a good place to start.”
― Mark Rippetoe, Starting Strength

“So barbell training, even done incorrectly, is comparatively safe.”
― Mark Rippetoe, Starting Strength

“This lack of posterior support produces an anterior-dominant force distribution on the knee: the further back the hips are, the more hip muscle you use, and the further forward the knees, the more quad you use. Many cases of patellar tendinitis have been caused by this incorrect squat technique.”
― Mark Rippetoe, Starting Strength

“Pressing incorrectly is not the same thing as pressing – you don’t get to redefine the exercise and then claim that it’s dangerous. Driving a car is dangerous if you drive it into a great big rock.”
― Mark Rippetoe, Starting Strength

“The relatively recent innovation known as the Division of Labor is not so remote that our genetic composition has had time to adapt again. Since most of us now have been freed from the necessity of personally obtaining our subsistence, physical activity is regarded as optional. Indeed it is, from the standpoint of immediate necessity, but the reality of millions of years of adaptation to a ruggedly physical existence will not just go away because desks were invented.”
― Mark Rippetoe, Starting Strength

“pedagogy.”
― Mark Rippetoe, Starting Strength

“behooves”
― Mark Rippetoe, Starting Strength

“vagaries”
― Mark Rippetoe, Starting Strength

“perpendicular”
― Mark Rippetoe, Starting Strength

“imprudent.”
― Mark Rippetoe, Starting Strength

“inertia,”
― Mark Rippetoe, Starting Strength

“The Super Athletes (A.S. Barnes and Co., 1970)”
― Mark Rippetoe, Starting Strength

“you go to the doctor when you have a back injury, nine times out of ten she will tell you that “You just tore a back muscle. Take these drugs and quit lifting so much weight.” This diagnosis and recommendation reflect a lack of personal experience with these types of injuries and a lack of understanding regarding how and when muscles actually get torn and how they heal.”
― Mark Rippetoe, Starting Strength

“exercise is the stimulus that returns our bodies to the conditions for which they were designed.”
― Mark Rippetoe, Starting Strength

“A weak man is not as happy as that same man would be if he were strong.”
― Mark Rippetoe, Starting Strength