Starting Strength

triceps extensions, an exercise that actually is more beneficial when performed with what would conventionally be interpreted as less-than-strict form.
     
    Before we get started, let’s discuss adding exercises to your program. Anytime a new movement is introduced, be conservative with the weight you use the first time you do the exercise. This is a lesson you will learn the hard way eventually, but it’s better to learn it now. Anytime you try a new exercise, you will be working with a movement pattern or a piece of equipment that you have not used before. Even if you are using a partial range of motion from a familiar exercise, you have not used that piece of the movement by itself before. You have previously used it in the context of the whole movement, and working it separately is a different mechanical task than the whole movement – it is sufficiently different that you have chosen to do it that way instead of the other way. You are not adapted to the new exercise, and as a result it will make you sore, perhaps very sore. This soreness may be due to the simple fact that you are doing a different number of reps with the assistance exercise than you use for the parent movement. A rep range to which you are not adapted will make you sore, too.
    But a brand new movement pattern has the potential to go beyond simple soreness. It is one thing for unadapted muscles to get sore, and quite another thing for unadapted joints to get sore. Sore joints usually mean inflammation, if not outright structural damage. Sore muscles mean inflammation, too, but muscle bellies are vascular – supplied with lots of vessels and capillaries that carry blood to help them heal quickly – whereas joints are not. Joint soreness is a much more serious matter than muscular soreness or even muscular injury. Joint problems can persist for years, while muscle belly injuries will heal in a matter of days or weeks. And lots of sore joints start on the day you try something new with as much weight or as many reps as you can do with it.
    This is not to suggest that you be a weenie. It is to suggest that you be intelligent and prudent with new exercises so that you don’t end up being an involuntary weenie later. This point is especially important if you are an older trainee. Start a new exercise with a good warm-up, and only go up as heavy or to as many reps as you would consider being equivalent to a moderately heavy warm-up set, leaving something on the bar for next time. This way, there can be a next time soon enough that you can proceed to make progress on the new exercise, instead of having to wait for something to heal.
     
    Assistance exercises fall into three categories. These exercises 1) strengthen a part of a movement, as with a partial deadlift (either a rack pull or a halting deadlift); 2) are variations on the basic exercise, as with a stiff-legged deadlift; or 3) are ancillary exercises, which strengthen a portion of the muscle mass involved in the movement in a way that the basic exercise does not, as with the chin-up. All assistance exercises of value can be assigned to one of these three categories.
    Partial Movements
     
    The deadlift, as mentioned earlier, can be a brutally hard exercise. When done with very heavy weights, as a very strong trainee would use, deadlifts can become very hard to recover from during the period of time called for in the program. A limit set of five in excess of 500 pounds might require a week or more for adequate recovery for the next workout, and in the meantime squats have suffered as well. When your deadlift gets strong enough that heavy sets of five create more stress than you can easily recover from within the timeframe of your training, it becomes useful to alternate two assistance exercises instead of the deadlift. Halting deadlifts come from the floor up to the top of the kneecaps and cover the bottom part of the movement, and rack pulls are done from below the knees up to full lockout at the top. The combination of the two covers the entire pull, while producing less recovery demand than the full movement.
    Halting deadlifts
     
    The halting deadlift ( Figure 7-1 ) is done with a double-overhand grip and from the same stance as the deadlift. Like deadlifts, haltings are pulled from a dead stop. A brief review of pulling mechanics might be useful here; refer to Chapter 4 if necessary. The knee extensors move the load up from the floor; the hamstrings and glutes maintain the back angle