This is the brightest color in the book, unless you make notes with a colored pen.
There’s a scene in Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon, where Randy Waterhouse is aboard Doug Shaftoe’s boat, which is laying at anchor over a sunken WWII submarine. Randy wants to strap on a SCUBA tank and check the wreck, which is about five hundred feet down, out. Doug, being a helpful and experienced diver, has an entire shelf of books about SCUBA diving, which he suggests might provide guidance on doing so. Randy, eventually, realizes that the glossy, tourist-flavored ones are probably not going to suit his needs, and instead ends up poring over older, unadorned books “with titles like DIVE MANUAL.”
Starting Strength, Second Edition, by Mark Rippetoe and Lon Kilgore (Aasgaard Press), is DIVE MANUAL for someone who just wants to get stronger. There are useful illustrations and photographs. There are extensive, straightforward, and helpful descriptions of the right way to do the handful of exercises presented. There are explanations of how the muscles and skeleton work together to do them. There aren’t any fancy moves or convoluted jargon.
Coach Rippetoe simply talks to the reader as if they are paying attention.
He’s well worth paying attention to.
Coming, as I was, from the relatively over-the-top style of attitude and presentation that’s Testosterone Nation’s style, having just finished the Velocity Diet 3.0 program, this was the equivalent of jumping from a Quake LAN party to Scrabble in terms of tone and approach. This isn’t to say it’s boring — in addition to being relentlessly informative, Coach Rippetoe blends hands-on experience with some top-notch snark. This is the first book since Good Omens that has actually made me laugh out loud while reading it — specifically, a caption where the student is demonstrating the most-wrong way to position one’s head while performing a lift. Rather than reiterate “look at a spot about X feet in front of you,” caption for Figure 2-24 simply states, “Don’t do this, you fool.” How about a counterpoint to those complicated nutritional programs, Coach? “A gallon of milk per day, added to the regular diet at intervals throughout the day, will put weight on any skinny kid. Really” (pg 302). Folks who want to drop weight will notice “looser pants in the waist…. and faster strength gains than their skinny buddies. Their body composition changes while their bodyweight stays close to the same” (pg 302-3).
Aimed, as it is, towards an instructor of novice lifters, there are a lot of suggestions for ways to help you (or your student) visualize what you should be doing, which I found to be particularly helpful. For instance, to keep your chin tucked and chest elevated, imagine you’re holding a tennis ball beneath your chin; to get the right drive at the bottom of a squat, picture a chain pulling up on your butt. It’s not fancy, it’s not sexy, but it’s highly effective. It also means that if you work out with a friend or partner, you’ve got the tools and knowledge in hand to make sure you’re both doing things properly.
We’ve all come across a game manual that was trying so hard to fit into the universe of the game itself that it becomes practically unreadable, or couldn’t get out of its own way to just tell you what the heck you need to do. The stark simplicity of Starting Strength never suffers from this. In fact, I found myself re-reading passages because of the inexorable press of valuable information. As a reader or game player, we expect to be able to be given the occasional respite, so to speak, to catch our mental breath — here, you get one about every forty pages, and they’re called chapter breaks.
There’s almost no way to have any lingering questions about how to do any of the five main exercises. I picked it up thinking I knew, more or less, the mechanics of how to do the Bench Press. Forty pages later, it was approximately the same experience as if I’d walked into Richard Garriott’s office and thinking I knew about Ultima. There’s no room for ego, and it’s a very Zen experience to just strip everything down to the bare metal and start clean. Anyone coming to this book with minimal gym experience (and, thus, no bad habits) will, in all probability, have even greater success with it.
And, really, that’s the bottom line for this book — the emphasis is simply on helping you become stronger — be able to pick up more weight, more times, properly. The authors emphasize that they’re not trying to turn anyone into a powerlifter, or elite athlete, or anything of the sort. That said, by following the very simple sample program laid out at the end, after all the fundamentals of the five lifts are understood, they have every expectation that you’ll get stronger.
In this, they’re absolutely justified. Following the basic program, in only two weeks, I’ve improved in every single one of the five exercises. As I said earlier, anyone coming to this book with minimal gym experience will, in all probability, have even greater success with it. Even modest gains of, say, two pounds per week means that at the end of a year, you can lift a hundred pounds more than you did at the beginning. I’d say that’s a pretty good start to strength, by anyone’s measure.
Five barbells out of five.
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[...] Review: Starting Strength Over at ShrinkGeek, my formal review of Starting Strength is [...]
I might have to pick this up. “Don’t do this, you fool” is awesome, and I’m always up for the Zen cluebat. Thanks for the recommend!
[...] The review is pasted below, but consider looking at it in its original environment here on [...]