Chapter 1: Strength – Why and How? (Starting Strength)

The modern world, with the help of technology, needs us to use our physical strength less than we needed to, but physical strength is no less important to our lives. Exercise returns the body to the conditions for which they were designed.

Why Barbells?

A machine was designed for each limb or body part, and a cam was incorporated into the chain attached to the weight stack that varied the resistance against the joint during the movement. The machines weredesigned to be used in a specific order, one after another without a pause between sets, since different body parts were being worked consecutively. And the central idea (from a commercial standpoint) was that if enough machines – each working a separate body part – were added togetherin a circuit, the entire body was being trained.

The machines were well-made and soon most gyms had the obligatory, very expensive, 12-station Nautilus circuit. They were not new, but there was one problem, they didn’t work so well.

When people switched to barbell training, a miraculous thing would happen: they would immediately gain – within a week – more weight than they had gained in the entire time they had fought with the 12-station circuit.

The reason that isolated body part training on machines doesn’t work is the same reason that barbells work so well, better than any other tools we can use to gain strength. The human body functions as a complete system – it works that way, and it likes to be trained that way. It doesn’t like to be separated into its constituent components and then have those components exercised separately, since the strength obtained from training will not be utilized in this way.

Barbells are superior to any other training tools. Training using barbell exercises can utilize all the muscles of the body.

Barbells allow weight to be moved in exactly the way the body is designed to move it, since every aspect of the movement is determined by the body. Machines, on the other hand, force the body to move the weight according to the design of the machine.

The only problem with barbell training is that most people do it wrong.

This is enough of a concern to prevent people from training with barbells. This book is Rippetoe’s attempt to address this problem.

YARPP List

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4. Chapter 19: And They Lived Happily Every After (Sapiens)