Beginning
Iron Addiction;
A Review of
Mark Rippetoe’s Starting Strength
Program
By Charles Hagy, zcnh8@goldmail.etsu.edu
for Advanced
Composition, ETSU, Summer 2011
Author’s Note: Starting Strength is a beginning
weight training program designed to teach basic barbell lifting technique,
increase strength, and add muscle mass.
In conjunction with a proper diet and rest, it will quickly boost the
trainees strength and overall fitness.
Charles has been using Starting Strength for over a year with astounding
results.
******
Starting Strength (2nd Edition) by Mark
Rippetoe and Lon Kilgore. 320 Pages. The
Asgard Company. List Price from Amazon.com $29.95
Weight training is a major industry
in the United States. If you pick up
almost any magazine, there will be many, many ads for The Great New Thing in
Exercise Science. The ads promise us
super human muscles in only a fraction of the time it takes at the gym.
However, for anyone who wants to make real strength gains, there is only one
magic pill: Hard Work with heavy
weight. But, with the plethora of
training methods available, it can be daunting to find a program that will
actually produce results. Fortunately,
there is one program that delivers exactly what it promises: Mark Rippetoe’s Starting Strength.
Starting
Strength was designed by Mark Rippetoe, a strength coach based out of
Wichita Falls, Texas. He designed the Starting Strength program for people who
have no lifting experience at all. The
goal of this program is to give the trainee a solid strength foundation to
build upon for sports, bodybuilding, or general fitness.
Starting
Strength is based entirely around the
standard Olympic sized barbell, which is seven feet long and weighs 45lbs. The program consists of five exercises: The Squat, Bench Press, Power Clean,
Deadlift, and Overhead Press.
|
Workout A |
Workout B |
|
Squat 3x5 |
Squat 3x5 |
|
Bench Press
3x5 |
Overhead Press
3x5 |
|
Power Clean
5x3 |
Deadlift 1x5 |
The Starting Strength Workout:
Alternate between each workout each time you exercise.
The first week, you would do Workout A, Workout B, Workout A. The next week,
you do Workout B, Workout A, Workout B. You only workout three times per week,
resting at least on day between each exercise, and two days for the
weekend. Where an exercise says “3x5”,
that means three sets of five repetitions (a set being a collection of
repetitions, or “reps”). For these three
sets, use the same amount of weight (if you are Squatting 135lbs, you do so for
all three sets). For the Power Clean, only a smaller number of repetitions are
used as it is a very technical exercise.
The Power Clean is the closest lift in this program to Olympic
Weightlifting. Its purpose is to teach
the trainee how to transmit force. Only
perform the Deadlift for one set. The
Deadlift allows the trainee to lift a huge amount of weight, which can be hard
for the body to recover from.
The goal with every workout day is to increase the
amount of weight on each exercise by at least five pounds. Read that sentence again. Go ahead, I have time. You really will add between five and ten pounds
to an exerciser per week (and 15lbs on the Squat per week). As long as you are able to add weight, you
stay on the program. If you get to the
point where it is impossible to add weight, make sure you are eating and
sleeping enough. If you are, and still
cannot add weight to the bar, it is time to go to a more advanced form of
training.
The tremendous increase in weight moved each workout
takes advantage of a curious aspect of the central nervous system. Strength is the product of muscle
contraction. The harder a muscle can
contract, the more force it creates. For
the untrained, the muscles do not contract as efficiently as in those who have
had training experience. It is not
unusual for a beginner trainee’s lifts to increase by 50lbs in the first month
of training (an experienced lifter is lucky to increase their lifts by 10lbs in
that same amount of time). The ultimate goal of Starting Strength is to take advantage of this process so that one
can become very strong, very quickly.
The only major downside of Starting Strength is that, with its emphasis on growing muscle as
fast as possible, a person who has taken up weight lifting to make their body
as aesthetically pleasing as possible will be disappointed. If done correctly, the trainee will put on
fat along with muscle. Starting Strength is NOT a program
designed for “Toning Up” for the beach.
It is about improving exercise technique, gaining weight, and gaining
strength as fast as possible.
I began Starting
Strength in May of 2010. Since 2007,
I had stopped exercising, and steadily gained fat. I had a job manufacturing costumes, which
required long hours and few breaks.
Because of this, my diet was poor and I eventually stopped exercising
altogether. In the span of roughly one
year, I had gone from 140lbs at about 14% body fat, to 185lbs, and nearly 30%
body fat.
After I left that job, I decided to get back into
shape. However, I could not decide on
what exercise regime I wanted to begin.
I was burned out on Yoga, I have always detested running, and weight
training was, in my mind, only for jocks and meatheads who wanted to look like
Arnold Schwarzenegger. I searched
extensively on the internet, trying to find the best method to return to my
previous level of fitness. I tried many
different methods, but there was nothing that could keep my interest long
enough to make any kind of fitness gains.
One program popped up repeatedly on
message boards I frequented. It was Starting Strength. At first, I was skeptical. Rippetoe promised that, if people did the
program correctly, it was possible to be able to lift massive amounts of weight
in a short amount of time. So what, I thought, every other program promises the same thing. I had no interest in lifting. However, I continued reading about the
program, and eventually, the program’s simplicity won me over. Other workouts I had considered were long and
complicated. This program takes less
than 45 minutes, performed every other day, and consists of only three
exercises per day. Ok, I thought, I’ll give this
a try.
The following Monday was my first Starting Strength workout.
The first workout hurt. Sweat
poured off me, and I could barely walk down the stairs at the Parks and Rec
building, which had the only free gym I could find. The next day, I discovered what Delayed
Onset Muscle Soreness (DOMS) felt like.
DOMS fall somewhere between dental work and getting punched in the face
by Mike Tyson on the pain scale. My next
training day was that Wednesday, and despite being sore, I worked out. Friday, I completed the last workout of my
first week. After the first week, I had overcome the soreness, and developed
the endurance I needed to complete the workout of the day without feeling as
though I had swum from England to America.
I was hooked on iron.
However, I did have one more objection to this
program. Rippetoe encourages people to
eat. A lot. Gain
weight! I thought, why on earth would
I want to do that? I want to lose
weight! However, as I learned more
about the program (and strength training in general), I found that caloric
excess must be present in order for muscular hypertrophy (growth) to occur.
When I first started the program, I decided not to
follow the diet advice, and continued my calorie-restricted diet. This adversely affected my strength gain, and
left me feeling drained and fatigued during my rest days. I had gotten my Squat up to 135lbs within two
months, but could not progress on that exercise. I almost gave up on training, but instead I
followed Rippetoe’s advice on eating more between workouts. While the average person only needs about
2000 calories per day, Rippetoe suggests eating between 4-6000 calories per
day, along with drinking a gallon of milk every day. I should say, though, that I modified this
diet and only increased my eating by about 500 calories a day and drank maybe
one or two glasses of milk a day. All of
my lifts increased, especially my Squat, which increased by 50lbs in less than
a month and fatigue was no longer a problem.
As a beginner weight lifting program, Starting Strength shines. It is simple, though not easy. It takes advantage of a beginning weight
lifter’s ability to adapt to this kind of training quickly, through improving
exercise technique and forcing the nervous system to work harder than it may
have before.
However, the body can only sustain the kind of linear
strength increase that Starting Strength
provides for so long. Eventually, adding
weight to the barbell every workout will become impossible, and the trainee
will have to switch to a program that adds weight more slowly. For some people,
this can take six months, but I have been on this program for a year, and am
still making progress.
My current lifts:
|
May 2010 (Beginning) |
June 2011(Current) |
|
Squat: 85lbs |
Squat: 235lbs |
|
Bench Press: 45lbs |
Bench Press: 155lbs |
|
Deadlift: 135lbs |
Deadlift: 250lbs |
Note: A person
with access to proper training equipment can progress to where I am in roughly
4 to 6 months. I did not have full
access to a gym for some time when I began training, and also suffered from
shoulder injury that put me a few months behind schedule. I would also like to note that I did not
receive the injury through strength training.
I do not know what program I will go to next, but for
any person, man or woman, who wants to begin strength training, Starting Strength is one of the best
programs one can use.
While the book Starting
Strength is not absolutely necessary to do this program, it provides highly
detailed information about the exercises.
A DVD is also available.
Links
http://www.startingstrength.com