Starting Strength

and take a knee so that you don’t have as far to fall if the blackout continues to develop. An uncontrolled blackout can cause severe head injuries if you hit the racks, the bar, or the plates on the way down. To repeat: the blackout itself is harmless and is corrected by moving the bar away from the throat a little. Once the buzz diminishes, you can resume the set with no trouble as long as you have made the correction. But if you manage to black out once, you will find that you’re more prone to it for the rest of that workout, so be careful when correcting the rack position.
     
    One more thing: There is a version of the front squat, referred to around here as the California front squat , in which the lifter’s arms are crossed in front, with the right hand on the left shoulder and vice versa. This form involves less upper body flexibility than does the standard hand position, and proportionately less security on the shoulders. It is not as safe at heavy weights, and since we train with heavy weights, we don’t use it.

    Figure 7-16. The California front squat. This position is not advised.

    The standard position is derived from the clean, the movement typically preceding the front squat in Olympic weightlifting, in which the bar is trapped against the shoulders by the upraised elbows jamming the hands and the bar back into the rack position. The crossed-arms position relies entirely on the elbow position and completely loses the stability provided by the hands. Doing front squats this way is tantamount to just holding your hands out in front of you with the bar balanced on the delts. And if you need to drop the bar in the event of a miss, the crossed-arms position makes the drop awkward and hard to control. There is an argument to be made for cleaning everything you’re going to front-squat, and California front squats contribute to the argument.
    Bench Press Variations
     
    The bench press is such a popular exercise that it’s no surprise there are lots of variations of the basic version. Selectorized bench press machines that control the bar path have long been a feature of multi-station machines; bars have been developed that allow the weight to travel past the top of the chest, down to where the elbows aren’t supposed to go; machines have been invented that allow each side to work independently of the other (like dumbbells, only much more expensive); the pec-deck takes the triceps out of the exercise. None of these variations are particularly helpful advances in exercise technology. The bench press is a valuable exercise because it couples heavy potential load with the motor-control aspects of barbell training, and these devices remove much of this benefit. The most valuable variations preserve the benefits while allowing different aspects of the movement that might need additional work to receive it. They are of two types: variations in the grip width and variations in the angle of the shoulder during the press.
    Variations in grip width
     
    The grip can be either wider or narrower than standard. The narrower the grip, the more inclined toward the middle the forearms are at the bottom, the sooner the elbows stop traveling down as the bar touches the chest, and therefore the shorter the range of motion around the shoulder, even though the bar travels farther at the top. The less angle the humerus covers as it travels down, the less work the chest muscles do; the more angle the elbows open up, the more work the triceps do ( Figure 7-17 ).

    Figure 7-17. A comparison of the start positions of the close-grip and wide-grip bench presses. The distance the bar travels is at maximum when the lifter’s arms are vertical in the lockout position.

A medium grip – with the forearms vertical at the bottom – uses the longest range of elbow motion, and a very wide grip involves a shorter range of bar and elbow motion because the bar touches the chest before the elbows can travel down very far. With a wide grip, the triceps extend the elbows over a shorter angle, and the pecs and delts end up doing more of what work gets done. So, bar travel is at maximum when the arms are vertical at lockout, and elbow travel is at maximum when the forearms are vertical at the bottom. It is for this reason that wide-grip benches have the reputation for being a chest exercise. More weight can be benched due to the shorter range of motion, and that is done without as much help from the triceps, so the chest gets most of the