Starting Strength

widespread availability of bumper plates, snatches had to be lowered eccentrically. This requirement added another dimension to the workout that was probably beneficial, if less fun. If you have the luxury of bumper plates, learn to use them correctly. Drop them from overhead while precisely controlling the drop by not letting go of the bar until it is close to the floor. Make sure that the plates land evenly if at all possible; an uneven drop can bend even the best bars. It is fashionable in some circles to drop empty bars from overhead or to let go of a dropped bar from overhead. These circles can go somewhere else to train, because equipment is expensive and the gym must be respected as a place where you control your immature urges to call attention to yourself.
    The power snatch is best trained with doubles – sets of two reps – or singles. The pull is long, it is sensitive to fatigue, and sets of, say, five reps will cause you to start making mistakes that would not happen were you not fatigued. High-rep sets will very quickly have you practicing sloppy snatches. If your workouts entail more incorrect reps than correct ones, you will get highly proficient at doing them wrong. So limit yourself to two-rep sets, and accumulate workload by doing multiple sets instead of doing too many reps per set.

Chapter 7: Useful Assistance Exercises
     
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    The squat, bench press, deadlift, press, and clean form the basis of any successful, well-designed training program. But there are other exercises that can assist these five and improve certain aspects of their performance.
     
    There are, quite literally, thousands of exercises that can be done in a well-equipped gym. Bill Pearl, in his classic text Keys to the Inner Universe, includes cursory descriptions of 1621 exercises. Not all of these exercises are useful for strength training purposes, though, because few of them actually contribute to the performance of the core barbell exercises.
    This point is important for a couple of reasons. Your training priorities, which should depend on your advancement as an athlete, should involve strength, power, or mass. No matter how long you train, or how strong, explosive, or big you get, your training will always be tied to the performance of these basic movements or their derivatives. The fact that resources – time, recovery, the patience of family and friends – are always in shorter supply than we’d like makes the efficiency with which your goals are accomplished an important consideration. The best assistance exercises are those that directly contribute to the performance of the basic movements that produce the most benefit.
    Not that the basic movements need much help. They are complete exercises in and of themselves, since they all involve lots of muscles moving lots of joints in anatomically normal, functionally useful ways. But after a certain period of time, usually several months after serious training begins, the stimulation provided by the execution of the basic exercises alone is not enough to produce sufficient stress to cause further adaptation. This change is due not to any deficiency in the basic exercises but to the trainee’s ability to successfully adapt to the stress these exercises provide. A natural result of training is that progress slows down after progress has been made, and progress is why we train. These topics are discussed at great length in Practical Programming for Strength Training, Second Edition.
    For example, an excellent assistance exercise for the bench press and the press is the chin-up. Chin-ups add enough work to the triceps, forearms, and upper back that the contribution of these muscle groups to the bench press is reinforced for the trainee who needs a little extra work. And this work is done using another multi-joint functional exercise. In fact, chin-ups are so useful that they are included in the program from very early on as the only non-barbell component of the program. A less efficient way to accomplish the task would be to add a triceps isolation movement like cable triceps extensions, a machine-based movement that, when done with what is usually considered strict form, leaves out the lats, upper back, forearms, posterior deltoids, biceps, and grip strength. Since the bench press uses all these muscles, why lose the opportunity to train them all together at the same time with another multi-joint exercise? Chin-ups work better as an assistance movement, as do heavy lying