Starting Strength

Over and above any considerations of performance for sports, exercise is the stimulus that returns our bodies to the conditions for which they were designed.

the reality of millions of years of adaptation to a ruggedly physical existence will not just go away because desks were invented.

Properly performed, full-range-of-motion barbell exercises are essentially the functional expression of human skeletal and muscular anatomy under a load.

All styles of squatting tend to make the quads sore, more so than any of the other muscles in the movement. This soreness occurs because the quads are the only knee extensor group, while the hip extensors consist of three muscle groups (hamstrings, glutes, adductors).

Multiple work sets cause the body to adapt to a larger volume of work, an adaptation that comes in handy for those training for sports performance.

It is nothing more than the commonly observed principle of diminishing returns, applied to adaptive physiology.

This is the most common error made by novice trainees: the confusion of strength training with conditioning work.

Doing the squat first provides a superior warm-up for all the subsequent movements, and doing the squat while you’re fresh grants it the attention it deserves as the most important exercise in the program. Remember: strength is the basis of power.

Don’t be in a big hurry to find your sticking point early in your training progression. It is always preferable to take smaller jumps and sustain the progress than to take bigger jumps and get stuck early.