Starting Strength

easier to injure and more susceptible to overuse than knees and hips are, and dead-stop exercises with heavy weights tend to inflame the attachments pretty badly if they are used too often or at excessive volume. But if you don’t get carried away by the glamour of the heavier weights that are possible because of the shorter range of motion, partial benches can make you very strong.

    Figure 7-7. Rack bench presses allow for the use of heavier weights at different heights above the chest. They must be respected for the amount of stress they can produce if overused.

    You can also start either pressing movement from the lockout position at the top by setting the hooks inside the rack at this height, unracking the bar and then lowering it to the pins, pausing, and driving back up, as with the rack squat. And as with the squat, a bounce off the pins defeats the purpose of the exercise; its value lies in the fact that it allows sticking points to be worked from a dead stop. You must control the pause to prevent the bar from getting out of position on the pins. This version of the press is not commonly used, but it could be. More common is the board press , which uses varying thicknesses of lumber laid directly on the chest to make up the spacing for the partial. It was developed to strengthen the top of the movement after the use of the bench-press shirt (which helps the lifter get the bar off the chest) became commonplace in competitions. The board press does not require a power rack, but does require the assistance of a spotter for the placement and removal of the board.
    Many versions of all these exercises have been developed by many people over the years and used with varying degrees of success. The key is good form, an understanding of the function and desired result of the exercise, and the judicious use of loading.
     
    So it appears that for all the basic exercises – the ones that normally use a stretch reflex as well as the ones that start from a dead stop – partial movements from a dead stop are useful. For the deadlift and the press, they mimic the mechanics of the parent movement by training the dead-stop start from different positions within the range of motion. For the squat and the touch-and-go bench press, they make you generate all the upward motion without the help from a stretch reflex. Either way, they are beneficial.
    But partial movements are not substitutes for the parent exercises. The full movement is the primary work, and the partial versions function as assistance work. If they were capable of replacing their parent exercises, they would have already. The full movement, by definition, involves muscles and neuromuscular details that the partial movement does not; the partial movement is therefore inferior to the whole parent exercise in its ability to improve performance. Even the deadlift is better than its partial derivatives; there are technical aspects to the deadlift that need to be practiced, and only experienced lifters should substitute haltings and rack pulls for the bigger, harder movement. For all these partial exercises that allow the use of heavier weights or harder positions, the point is to apply more or more-specific stress than the parent exercise can produce. They must be used sparingly, under appropriate circumstances, by trainees experienced enough to understand how and why.
    Squat Variations
     
    There are a couple of variations of the basic barbell squat that should be discussed. Front squats and high-bar, or Olympic, squats are commonly used assistance exercises. They are not pieces of the back squat, but rather alternative versions of the parent movement that can be used as a substitute if need be. Opinions differ, and in the interest of full disclosure, they are described here.
    Olympic squats
     
    The Olympic squat is preferred by many coaches over the low-bar position described in this book. This could be because it requires no coaching: the high-bar position, on top of the traps, is what a trainee will self-select unless made to do otherwise, and the knees-forward position at the bottom is what happens in the absence of the intentional recruitment of the posterior chain. If you tell a kid to “Go over to the rack and do some squats, I’m busy here teaching the highly technical, and might I add more rewarding to coach, snatch and clean and jerk” – in other words, if you have him squat without teaching him how to do it – he will do a high-bar squat.