This is 100% true. Starting Strength is a great program, but the end game if you just keep increasing calorie intake and weight lifted is you become a fat strong fire hydrant like Rip. If that’s your goal then that’s fine, but most people don’t want that. And when you plateau in the program it becomes boring. He is also basically a cult now, his social media is just a bunch of circle jerking about how his way is The Only Way.
One of his former students is a guy named Alan Thrall out in California. His social media, by contrast, is not toxic and actually embraces uncertainty and common behavioral challenges and is productive and supportive .
In Rip’s defense, he’d probably tell you that once you are strong and fat, then you can work on cutting and when you are done with the cut you will be stronger than if you had tried another way. That’s what he recommends that people who don’t really want to be fat to do.
However, he doesn’t really see being fat as a problem as long as you are strong as well. So he would never really suggest it himself. But if someone said “I want to be as strong as possible, but I don’t want to be fat, what should I do”. He would tell you that you really shouldn’t worry about the fat, but if you insist, then the best way is to do SS first, then some intermediate program, and then cut at some point.
Having said that, I personally don’t think SS+Bulk followed by eventuall cut is the best way. But it is not a terrible plan.
Yeah, I’m not saying that Rip’s advice is the best. There is plenty of better advice out there. I’m just saying it’s not terrible relative to the vast majority of things that people do in the gym. Most people have no specific program and are just fucking around. On the other hand of the spectrum, most don’t have the discipline to do stuff which is that complicated. Rips program is pretty simple and with it you will get strong and fat, which is more or less what he advertises.
Low bar is fine. If you have proper coaching on form to start out with, it doesn’t really matter that much. I guess if you are saying that low bar is harder to learn on your own, maybe that’s true. I don’t know. You could argue for other squat variants being a bit better for one reason or another, but that’s a small rock. If you’re squatting heavy and with good form, it doesn’t really matter that much which you do.
I had an extremely knowledgeable coach teach me all the lifts over a year one on one. I had no confidence in my ability to learn that stuff on my own without a huge amount of effort (which I wasn’t going to do because I’m lazy).
A lot of Rip’s advice is targeted at people who want to compete (maybe not at the hightest levels, just local comps). If you want to compete and lift the most weight, with proper form and training, one should normally be able to low bar squat more weight than high bar.
I don’t think this is true. If you read the book, it’s clear that it’s for just about everybody. It’s not designed as a training program for competitive lifting, it’s very clearly designed for general use.
I feel like I’ve been undereating quality protein and food while exercising previously to reading SS. I could barely bust 200 lbs while eating 3-5k calories a day recently and have not been maintaining that but still have a dad bod 4 pack doing no cardio other than walking dog 3-4 miles a day. If I was doing significant cardio like I have previously while exercising I’d have decently low bodyfat. Shit, even if I was golfing and walking a few times a week that would cut more.
Yeah, I didn’t write that clearly. What I meant is that the audience includes people who want to compete. He would probably tell you it’s better for those people and about the same for everyone else (again that is what he would say), so that is one reason why he prefers low bar. There are others that are in the book.
The main reason that I recall from the book is that he thinks you need to low bar squat to “balance out” the use of the glutes, quads, and hamstrings. HIP DRIVE! Rip’s view is that high bar squatting isn’t bad because it moves less weight, his view is that it’s bad because it doesn’t engage the hamstrings enough which puts too much pressure on the knee joint instead of HIP DRIVE. The fact that you can’t move as much weight is slightly incidental, and in his opinion partly due to leaving the hamstrings out of the mix.
Anyway I recommend starting strength to lots of people, it’s simple and it effective and maybe most importantly it’s pretty safe even for beginners. Most of the reason I don’t listen to Rip anymore is that he has descended into a toxic male caricature of himself through the toxic feedback loop of social media. Maybe he was always a dickhead, but the original book is well reasoned and still holds up today. But his advice rendered today on, for example, YouTube, is just cult level echo chamber gobbledygook.
I’ve really got no idea what Rip is up to these days. The only Rip content I have been exposed to is the SS book. Also the person who taught me to lift knew him well and worked with him for quite some time, so, in the past, I have had a lot of conversations about what Rip thinks about lifting (or what he used to think 10-20 yrs ago).
I think the main reason he recommends low bar over high bar is that he thinks posterior chain development is paramount and has a lot of transfer to various sports. He might be right about that. On the other hand, if you’re lifting for aesthetics (which is a huge part of what drives most people) I think that is the opposite of what you want to do. Front squats and associated quad development would be far more useful. You’ll still get decent posterior chain activation from DLing.
This is mainly because high bar transfers much better to the specific lifts that they do (snatch [especially] and C&J). That’s really it.
I could have guessed that. He’s a boomer gym bro, so him being that way was almost a lock. It should have no bearing on how his other advice is evaluated. His lifting advice can be criticized on it’s own merits and it seems you have no problem doing that.
Not really. It transfers better mainly because the second phase of the snatch is an overhead squat, which is closer biomechanically to high bar than low bar.
Usually the break through here is to do stuff that you like doing. There must be some physical activity that you enjoy doing, so do a bunch of that.
Also don’t try to make a big leap forward. People that want to work out more will often try a mindset that goes something like “I just have to do it! This week I will go to the gym every day!” and they will go for two days then miss the third day then feel guilty about it and game over. If you want to work out more then it’s a better behavioral strategy to try to work out a LITTLE bit more first, so you can achieve that and then ride the good feelings to more success. People get tripped up on this alot, it’s the dynamic behind why the gym is packed in the first two weeks of January and empty in March.
Would you enjoy other exercising more if it was in service to being a better dancer and/or dancing more comfortably? I would think that many programs have to be out there specifically to improve the balance, coordination, and flexibility required for dancing. If that’s your passion, I’d try to turn your whole exercise regime into just an aspect of that passion instead of something you do on the side or even instead of dancing.
This is my go-to workout in terms of most bang for your buck with the least time spent, when I’m not motivated but know I need to keep something going,
