JOINT REVIEW: Starting Strength, by Mark Rippetoe

Starting Strength: Basic Barbell Training, 3rd Ed., Mark Rippetoe (The Aasgaard Company, 2011).

The following is an email exchange between the Psmiths, edited slightly for clarity.

John: I hate the cold. I belong in the tropical heat and humidity, sprawled out on a rock like an enormous monitor lizard, tongue lolling out, eyes half closed as the barest movement of air tickles my glistening neck and stirs my thick and sluggish blood.¹ Extremes of heat are relaxing if you just stop moving and sink into them. Extremes of cold always make me feel like I’m going to die. So it’s odd that this morning, with the temperature a couple of degrees below freezing, I walked past the warm, inviting cocoon of my automobile and rode my bike to work instead.

One of my favorite things about commuting by bike is my rich inner monologue, but on a cold winter morning the first ten minutes are usually: “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck...”² I was midway through this sparkling conversation with myself when I felt the first icy drops land on the back of my neck. A minute later and a steady freezing rain set in, and then I really felt it, that fight-or-flight response, the butterflies in your stomach feeling that you get the moment you’re perched at the top of a roller coaster, or when you’re out in the woods and hear thunder close by. I imagine it’s the feeling an ancient warrior got on the morning of a battle.

What’s so strange about this feeling is that it's a perfect mixture of dread and excitement. Part of it is knowing, deep in your bones, that what’s about to happen is going to suck. But if it’s going to suck, then what am I becoming excited by? It’s only in the last few years that I figured out the answer: the excitement is because you’re about to learn who you really are. The freezing rain that will drench me for the next 45 minutes is a calamity, but it’s also a scouring pad that will strip away all the layers of pretension and social position that I’ve spent a lifetime weaving around myself. There’s no bribing or cajoling or reasoning with the elements, it’s just a question of enduring them. And because in this case enduring them is a choice, because that warm and inviting car is still there, just a couple blocks behind me, the struggle is also with myself. And in little patches here and there, where the surface layers have been stripped away entirely, I get a glimpse at my soul, and get to see where it’s made of iron and where it’s just hot air.

To a certain kind of personality, these fleeting glimpses can become an addiction. I think something like that must have happened to me. When I was younger I was firmly dedicated to hedonism, but to me that didn’t just mean seeking out new and interesting experiences, it also meant avoiding suffering at all costs. I built my life around avoiding suffering, and was partway through building a political philosophy around it too, when the ground beneath my feet began to shift. The first chink in my armor happened in math class (don’t laugh). Math came easily to me as a kid, but one day I reached the level where suddenly it didn’t come easily to me. Every previous time this had happened in my life, my response was to flit off to a different subject that did come easily. But for some reason, this time I didn’t, this time I thought and thought about nothing else for a week straight, feeling dumber and more humiliated with every passing minute. Eventually I got it. The rush of satisfaction was intoxicating, and learning some new math was cool too. But beneath those two feelings there was another much subtler, but in the long term more important feeling. It was the little glimpse I got at a patch of my soul, it was the incredulous, “Wait, I can just do that?”

The second step in my transformation from indulgent sensate to challenge-addict was bound up in my conversion to Christianity, but I’m much less sure about the direction of causality here. You’ve written before about how conversion stories never make any sense when told as stories, because the climax is always actually an anticlimax, like looking up at the constellations and suddenly realizing that a process of continental drift has brought you to the Southern hemisphere. In my own case the drift was Eastwards instead, and when one day I woke up an atheist and went to bed Orthodox, I found I’d accidentally stumbled into a religion that puts seeing what you're made of at its very center. The Christianity I’d been raised with was a big list of dos and don’ts, a minimal checklist approach to being saved. Orthodoxy had the exact opposite orientation: “Here is what perfection looks like, how much of it can you handle?” And then there was the emphasis on asceticism, something which I as a naive convert had no idea I was getting into. Almost every traditional religion on earth recommends periods of fasting and self-denial, but they differ in how they theorize it. To the Orthodox there are two main purposes: one is training — getting practice at doing a little thing that is hard, so that some day you will be able to do great things that are hard. The second is self-knowledge: the ego chafes at even the most mild restrictions. You don’t have to be delirious with hunger or thirst (though that does help) for you to suddenly experience the same feeling I had in the freezing rain. Your back is against the wall, surrender would be so easy, are you really going to go through with this craziness? Fasting strips away pretension even more effectively than elemental terror does, and when you inevitably fail at such a trivial task, it’s good for your humility too.

The original Ancient Greek meaning of ascesis (ἄσκησις) was “training,” and sure enough I eventually moved from spiritual weightlifting into the corporeal kind. It started shortly after the birth of our second kid, when I was DMing with Nassim Taleb, naturally. He told me to go do some pull-ups.³ I had never done a pull-up in my life. It didn’t seem like the kind of thing I could do. But this was another sort of turning point, and the two previous turning points made it easier to grit my teeth and say, “I'll show you.” So I went on Amazon and bought what amounts to a giant rubber band that makes pull-ups easier. Gradually I dialed down the level of assistance until I was doing them unassisted. Take that Nassim! Pull-ups were the gateway drug. I soon found a reliable way to generate that feeling of momentary, transitory panic, that flutter in the stomach, that incredulous “can I really do this?" It’s right there at the bottom of every squat. And so finally, after having avoided exercise entirely for the first 30 years of my life, I started to lift.

Sometime after that was when somebody slipped me a copy of Rippetoe’s book. But before I get into that, why don’t you tell our readers a little bit about your relationship with exercise? I think this is another way in which you and I are very different.

Jane: Oh yeah, that rubber band! Some time after you graduated from using it, I got it into my head that I was going to learn to do a pull-up too. Unfortunately I could barely even hang from the bar so I kept tightening it and tightening it and tightening it until finally it snapped. I have still never done a pull-up.

Like you, I started out as a lazy nerd. I managed to avoid most of my high school athletics requirements by such expedients as keeping score for the varsity softball team, taking ping pong excuse me table tennis for gym class, and running very very slowly when I absolutely had to. I didn’t like it, I wasn’t any good at it, and it didn’t really seem like it was a thing you could get good at. As far as I could tell, some people were just natural athletes, and that was very nice for them, but I was not one of them so please leave me alone with my book. No one ever tried to talk me out of this idea: I suspect that anyone who had approached their classwork with the same mixture of disdain and apathy I brought to sports would have gotten encouragement (or maybe a stern lecture), but I just got ignored. Whatever! That just went to show that even the coaches knew this stuff wasn’t for people like me.

Unlike you, though, I never really had the experience of struggling with my academics — it took effort, but it wasn’t what you’d call hard. (This is less a humblebrag than it was “I took classes in stuff I found fun and easy,” I’m afraid.) So when I decided I wanted to become strong, it was the first time in my entire life I was really bad at something, stuck with it even though I didn’t have to, and realized I had gotten better.⁴ I feel silly admitting it, but the first time I went to pick up something that used to be hard to lift and found that it was now easy, I was sincerely shocked. It turned out this was for people like me after all.

Why did I decide to get strong? For very boring reasons: I wanted get back in my pre-baby jeans without needing to go to a gym, and I hate running. But then I made a terrible discovery: it was fun. Picking up heavy things felt good to do, and even better to have done. I slept better. I thought more clearly. I was happier. And I did lose weight, not because the exercise burned calories or because my new muscle upped my metabolic rate, but because I didn’t feel as hungry and didn’t get as cranky about it when I was. Plus, it’s very useful to be able to pick up heavy things! I’m still smug about the time you came home all confused that our new toilet had been delivered but it wasn’t waiting on the porch — because I’d carried it inside and up the stairs all by myself.

Unfortunately my “relationship with exercise” has all been rather two steps forward, one step back. Without getting into too much whiny detail about my agonies: I have longstanding spinal issues and an exciting array of unhealthy compensatory patterns and musculoskeletal imbalances developed by working around them, all of which get worse during pregnancy and with the repetitive and inflexible demands of a baby. So lately I’ve had to scale way back, yet again, and I’m still slowly rebuilding my foundation. Every time I think “well, maybe I could just lift the bar?” I’ve regretted it. But sometimes that sullen kid who’s mad about being forced to exercise looks out at the grown woman who’s mad she can’t and wonders who I even am.

Our culture (by which I mostly mean “online nerd culture” but if you’re reading this isn’t that your culture too?) can be very strange about bodies. There’s a real strain of vulgar dualism, a sense that what’s going on in your mind is the only “real” part and that your physical existence is a weird concession to the decaying meat-mecha you’re doomed to pilot until you can upload your consciousness to the cloud. At best, the body can transmit the sensations of the occasional sybaritic luxury, and beyond that the most you can hope for the absence of pain. The great joy of strength training has been realizing on a visceral level that this is dead wrong. Yeah, yeah, the Church has taught this for two thousand years: our embodiment matters in a fundamental way, we are not merely souls trapped by flesh (and still less intellects trapped by flesh), our temporary separation from our bodies in death is a consequence of the Fall, and our eternity will be spent not floating among the clouds strumming harps but in bodies. But there’s a big difference between intellectually assenting to something and actually believing it, and I didn’t actually believe all that until I experienced the way simply existing as a body, moving through space, interacting with physical objects, could feel good. Not physically pleasurable, quite (though sometimes it is!), but satisfying, meaningful — like you’re doing the thing you’re here to do. I am slothful and take no pleasure in reporting this.

Or, as Mark Rippetoe puts it:

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 like the intellectual or spiritual to take precedence. It is instructive to see what happens to these people as their squat strength goes up.

Weirdly, Starting Strength reminds me of nothing so much as Cheryl Mendelson’s Home Comforts (which I reviewed here). Barbell training is definitely male-coded, and keeping a home is “women’s work,” but both these books are exhaustively-detailed manuals for how one should properly do very practical, physical things that the authors argue have hidden moral and spiritual dimensions. You don’t have to do it the way they tell you to — I am simply never going to iron my bedsheets twice a week, and at present I am banned from attempting a low-back squat — but they want you to know that it really, deeply matters.

John: When I first cracked open Rippetoe's book, I did not expect it to begin with a jeremiad against exercise machines, but I think this is pretty much the key to understanding his whole vision of human excellence. The human body is an instrument evolved for a purpose, and wondrously, when used regularly for that purpose, resculpts itself to perform better at it. But that purpose is moving around, clambering over obstacles, carrying heavy objects, and shifting them from place to place. These are all complex motions requiring thousands of muscles, tendons, ligaments, nerves, and bones to function together holistically. They are designed to be used together and trained together. Just consider this description of the basic squat motion:

A correct squat perfectly balances all the forces around the knees and the hips, using these muscles in exactly the way the skeletal biomechanics are designed for them to be used, over their anatomically full range of motion. The postural muscles of the lower back, the upper back, the abdominals and lateral trunk muscles, the costal (ribcage) muscles, and even the shoulders and arms are used isometrically. Their static contraction supports the trunk and transfers kinetic power from the prime movers to the bar. The trunk muscles function as the transmission while the hips and legs are the engine. Notice that the core of the body is at the center of the squat, that the muscles get smaller the farther away from the core they are, and that the squat works them in exactly this priority. Balance is provided by the interaction of the postural muscles with the hips and legs, starting on the ground at the feet and proceeding up to the bar, and controlled by a massive amount of central nervous system activity under the conscious direction of the athlete’s mind. In addition, the systemic nature of the movement when done with heavy weights produces hormonal responses that affect the entire body. Not only is the core strengthened, it is strengthened in the context of a total physical and mental experience.

In contrast to this “total physical and mental experience,” the exercise machines at the gym boast of their ability to “target” particular muscle groups. But a moment's reflection tells you that this “targeting” is completely unnatural and utterly contrary to the way that biomechanical systems are meant to work. What are the benefits to “targeting” a hamstring or quadriceps without also working and strengthening the dozens of small muscles that brace, stabilize, and control it? Why “target” it and leave out the skeleton it pulls on or the nerves and tendons that guide and direct its movements? After all, “bone is living, stress-responsive tissue, just like muscle, ligament, tendon, skin, nerve, and brain.” Is there really any benefit to “isolating” and “targeting,” has anybody ever actually thought seriously about this, or does this all just flow from a sick combination of commercial gyms’ financial incentives and modernity's fetish for pretending it knows better than nature and tradition?⁵

Rippetoe’s opinion on this is about as extreme as they come: he thinks that outside of a tiny group of people with exotic injuries, nobody should ever use an exercise machine. To start with, by training one relatively small muscle here and there in isolation, they sacrifice 90% of the physical, skeletal, mental, hormonal, and spiritual benefits of weightlifting. But it’s actually worse than that: making a particular muscle very strong while allowing the stabilizing and accessory muscles around it to atrophy is a recipe for injury. And this is made much worse by the Procrustean nature of the machines themselves: “The pattern of the movement through space is determined by the machine, not the individual biomechanics of the human using it.”

One could conclude from this that one should only do bodyweight exercises, and indeed some people do!⁶ But Rippetoe sees complex barbell motions as a reasonable compromise — the barbell is ergonomic enough that you can use it to move massive weights (with the accompanying skeletal and hormonal benefits), but close enough to natural and permitting “the minute adjustments during the movement that allow individual anthropometry to be expressed.” There's a real philosophical subtlety here, something almost teleological. Machines force bodies to move in ways contrary to their purpose, while barbells permit a concentration or distillation of that purpose. Or as he puts it, “Properly performed, full range-of-motion barbell exercises are essentially the functional expression of human skeletal and muscular anatomy under a load.”

There’s so much in this worldview which rhymes with contemporary intellectual trends, and I think that goes a long way towards explaining the resurgent popularity of powerlifting. One immediately sees, for instance, why Taleb is constantly going on about deadlifts: the skepticism of over-optimization that pervades Taleb’s work, the emphasis on hormesis and anti-fragility, and the deep and abiding humanism (and, also, the macho bellicosity) — it's all right there in Rippetoe. In fact, Taleb didn’t just read Rippetoe, he trained at Rippetoe’s gym. Imagine having this guy screaming at you about isometric contraction of spinal muscles while you're squatting heavy DURING THE 2008 FINANCIAL CRISIS (which you saw coming), then eating an entire bowl of squid ink pasta and getting oneshotted by a six-dimensional ancient Phoenician demon. I think few men could handle that combo without turning into whatever sort of being Nassim is now. We should be thankful that he’s too distracted by Levantine grammar and morphology to properly establish his reign of terror.

Speaking of pasta, Rippetoe is basically to exercise what Michael Pollan is to food:⁷ a rejection of modernism, artificiality, over-refinement, the whole panoply of quasi-scientific hubris that dominated mid-century America. You might call it “the anti-cybernetic movement,” an intellectual tendency that swims against the reductionism that has dominated Western thought since the collapse of Thomism. Something that began on the left with hippies and yoga and transcendental meditation, and now that the parties have switched sides finds its expression in MAGA crunchy moms and in bros sunning their testicles and chugging raw milk. Like all populist movements, this one is hilariously wrong about some things. And like all populist movements, this one is dead-on correct that something which makes us essentially human has been ripped away and stolen from us. We all know we’re sick, and there are a thousand thousand charlatans peddling cures, and as those go Rippetoe’s is far from the worst: “Exercise is the stimulus that returns our bodies to the conditions for which they were designed. Humans are not physically normal in the absence of hard physical effort.”

Jane: That’s more or less the argument Herman Pontzer makes in Burn, too: our bodies are complicated biological systems full of feedback loops and inhibitors, they evolved to function well in specific conditions (many of which no longer apply) and when we move into the artificial “human zoo” of industrial society they don’t work right any more. And like you say, it’s not just bodies. This is the core insight of every “retvrn” argument: we are not infinitely malleable, and in our eagerness to make line go up we’ve built a profoundly anti-human world. So many people now exist shut off from meaningful contact with so many aspects of the human experience — children, food, the natural world, uh…movement — that they don’t even realize there’s something missing.

You could draw a couple of different conclusions from Rippetoe’s fulmination against exercise machines. The first, what we might call the Wizard’s answer, is that someone should just make a better machine! After all, when you think about it, it’s pretty great that we’ve reached the point in our tech tree where we can turn capital into human muscle without anyone — gym staff or exerciser — having to pay much attention to the process. (It’s a lot harder to hurt yourself doing a leg press than a squat.) If his object level critique is right, if our current machines aren’t doing a good job of training all those stabilizing and accessory muscles, I bet some smart person can design one that does — and make a bundle to boot. But that’s not where Rippetoe is going with this: the fact that you can do real damage if you lift wrong is part and parcel of what makes lifting so valuable. There’s a right way to do it, and your body needs to learn.

This is all very strange and counterintuitive to the recovering nerd dualist, because intellectual pursuits work very differently from physical ones. Once you understand — really understand — how to conjugate a verb, or take the derivative of a function, or diagram a sentence, you’re finished. Now you can do it! On to the next thing! But understanding the theory of how to do something with your body is only the first step, because however thoroughly you grasp the concept you’re going to be clumsy as all hell the first time you try. Watch all the knife skills videos you like, that first onion will take forever and look awful. But if you keep at it, you’ll find that it suddenly begins to flow together smoothly and you don’t have to think about it all.

In fact, the less you think about those details, the better off you’ll be. You have millions of years of evolution and years of life experience behind your motor planning capabilities. You have to get out of your own way. Instead Rippetoe offers cues, like the “look where you’re trying to go!” I try when I’m teaching my kids to ride a bike:

…if you make the bar path vertical when you are deadlifting, the biomechanics of the pull will be correct because the task of making the path vertical causes you to solve the problem with your “body,” not your “brain.” This concept is an example of a bar cue, which enable the body itself to sort out complex motor problems by jumping past the analysis to the result. You have been solving movement problems your whole life… By giving the body a general task instead of a specific one, you move your brain out of the way and allow your accumulated motor skills to solve the problem. If you command the bar to move in a vertical line, it will do so, and you will move your back, thighs, and shins in a way that makes it do so without your having to analyze the problem.

But your body really does learn! I’ve spent the last few days trying to master a particular set of complex movements, and as soon as I would get one part of it right I’d realize something else was all wrong. And then this morning I tried again, and it all just….worked? Somehow this was a surprise to me. I’ve read approximately seventy-three different “learning to fight with a sword” sequences in various fantasy novels, and I spend most of my time with small people who are mastering motor skills that range from picking things up to writing in cursive, and yet I was really expecting to have to be constantly thinking about every aspect of this forever.

When I was a kid, I used to regard my poor posture as essentially a form of poor character. I figured I slouched because, I don’t know, I didn’t think enough about sitting up straight (which I assumed that I would do if I were a better person). Then eventually I discovered that people with good posture don’t actually think about it, either: they just have strong core muscles that make their natural, not-thinking-about-it way of sitting or standing, well, straight. Slouching was a matter of physical weakness, not moral weakness. But lately I’ve come full circle on this: being strong isn’t quite the same as being good, but all the things you have to do in order to become physically stronger — joyfully embracing a challenge, bringing your mind and body into harmony with one another and into subjection to your will, identifying and seeking the version of excellence that’s available to you — will make you a better person, too.⁸

John: The moral dimension you describe is driving every aspect of Rippetoe’s agenda. He doesn’t come out and say this, but it’s pretty obvious that beneath all the fulmination about ergonomics and holistic training and systemic benefits, part of what Rippetoe hates about the machines is that they’re easy.⁹ Easy to get started with, easy to use without direction or instruction. He comes from a world of elite powerlifters with a rich culture, folklore, traditional practices, and a particular form of excellence; and now that world is being demolished by technology and capital. I’d be angry too!

A way to interpret this book is as one long, bitter act of “gatekeeping.” But what if gatekeeping is good, actually? The right attitude for picking up any kind of new skill is humility. Some people are naturally humble, but most are not. Since time immemorial, practiced sages have hazed their apprentices, made them perform menial tasks, enforced brutal hierarchy between older and younger students, and so on. As a modern and a lib, I naturally assume that these are benighted backward customs preserving the legacies of ancient power imbalances blah blah blah, and like most libs I subconsciously find such institutions offensive and I structure my life to avoid them. But what if I’m completely wrong? Monasteries force novices to be humble because humility is the path to salvation, but if humility is also the path to education then there’s a reason for other sorts of institutions to put the newbies in their place as well.

The lib view also fundamentally misunderstands human psychology. Everybody in a tizzy to make their hobby “accessible” should note that Islam has amassed a billion or so adherents while requiring them to learn Classical Arabic (a very difficult language that I have personally tried and failed to learn) in order to read its scriptures. If your little club isn’t popular, making it harder to get in is a great way to turn that around. People crawl like flies on a lump of sugar to get into societies whose only reason for existence is that they’re exclusive, and half the religions on earth started as weird mystery cults with multiple levels of initiation and membership.

Is the same now happening for powerlifting? We can only hope so, because here we find not exclusivity for exclusivity’s sake; but something that is difficult because it demands that your body and mind work in unison to do something that is beneficial for both. Once you get over yourself and start to squat, peace and tranquility will flood into you. Revolutions have been made out of less. Or, as Rippetoe puts it:

The more people who learn to squat correctly, the more people who will understand the squat and, like ripples in a pond, knowledge and strength will spread through the masses. This process starts here, with you.

1. The character I identify with most in the Star Wars movies is Jabba the Hutt.

2. Sorry, this is a family-friendly Substack and we try to avoid profanity, but sometimes I must tell it like it is.

3. As I recall his language was a good bit more colorful, but as I said this is a family-friendly Substack.

4. The runner-up may be learning to cook; I sometimes revisit a recipe that used to take ages of concerted effort and now find that I’m throwing it together while doing three other things, but that was so gradual I hardly noticed.

5. Rippetoe:

There is no way for a human being to utilize the quadriceps muscles in isolation from the hamstrings in any movement pattern that exists independent of a machine designed for this purpose. No natural movement can be performed that does this. Quadriceps and hamstrings always function together, at the same time, to balance the forces on either side of the knee. Since they always work together, why should they be exercised separately? Because somebody invented a machine that lets us?

6. Besides the bodyweight people, there’s another parallel community that’s more extreme than Rippetoe — they disdain barbell exercises as artificial, and just endlessly heave themselves up onto ledges and drag massive objects around their front yards instead. I’d be lying if I said that a small part of me wasn’t intrigued.

7. You think I’m reaching? I have not yet begun to reach. Rippetoe is also to exercise what the “all-up testing” of the Saturn V was to rocket design. Hobart and Huber's book has a great bit about how the Saturn V designers tried to test all the pieces of the rocket working together as early in the development cycle as possible — an approach that has largely been ignored by contemporary rocket designers, but notably not by SpaceX.

8. The parallels between the physical and the spiritual go beyond that — I once had a physical therapist tell me I was trying to use momentum as a substitute for strength, which is to this day the most insightful thing anyone has ever told me about myself.

9. The other reason he hates them, by the way, is that much of what the machines aim to do is aesthetic. They sell you on a Hollywood bodybuilder look that gives the appearance of strength, but is actually like a glass knife — pretty to look at, but useless as a tool. Elite special forces tend to be wiry and skinny, and the “brutally strong men” Rippetoe seeks to create tend to be chubby with pot-bellies. “This is what peak performance looks like,” but for real!