Starting Strength

movements in which all of the shock, moment force, tension, and compression are exclusively applied to one joint. There is no movement that can be performed outside the modern health club that involves only the quadriceps; the only way to isolate the quads is to do an exercise on a machine designed for that purpose. This is a function that hundreds of millions of years of vertebrate evolution did not anticipate. The knee is the home of many muscles, all of which have developed while working at the same time. Any exercise that deviates from the function for which the joint is designed contributes very little to the function of that joint and is a potential source of problems.
    Exercise machines have made several people a lot of money, and while there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that, they have been a very large diversion from more productive forms of training. The pendulum swings, and barbell training is once again being recognized as the superior form of exercise. Glad we could help.

Chapter 8: Programming
     
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    It is May 15, and you decide that this year you are going to get a suntan – a glorious, beautiful, tropical suntan. So you decide to go out in the back yard (to spare the neighbors and innocent passersby) to lay out at lunchtime and catch a ray or two. You lie on your back for 15 minutes and flip over to lie on your belly for 15 minutes. Then you get up, come in and eat lunch, and go back to work. That night, your skin is a little pink, so the next day you just eat lunch, but the following day you’re back outside for your 15-minutes-per-side sunbath. You are faithful to your schedule, spending 30 minutes outside every day that week, because that’s the kind of disciplined, determined person you are. At the end of the week, you have turned a more pleasant shade of brown and, heartened by your results, resolve to maintain your schedule for the rest of the month. So, here is the critical question: what color is your skin at the end of the month?
    If you ask a hundred people this question, ninety-five will tell you that it will be really, really dark. But in fact it will be exactly the same color it was at the end of the first week. Why would it be any darker? Your skin adapts to the stress of the sun exposure by becoming dark enough to prevent itself from burning again. That’s the ONLY reason it gets dark, and it adapts exactly and specifically to the stress that burned it. Your skin does not “know” that you want it to get darker; it only “knows” what the sun tells it, and the sun only talked to it for 15 minutes. It can’t get any darker than the 15 minutes makes it get, because the 15 minutes is what it is adapting to. If you just got darker every time you were exposed to the sun, we’d all be black, especially those of us who live in a sunny area, since we all get out of the car and walk into the house or work several times a day. The skin adapts not to total accumulated exposure but to the longest exposure – the hardest exposure. If you want your skin to get darker, you have to stay out longer in order to give the skin more stress than it has already adapted to. The widespread failure to comprehend this pivotal aspect of adaptation is why so few people actually understand exercise programming.
    Exercise follows exactly the same principle as getting a tan – a stress is imposed on the body and it adapts to the stress, but only if the stress is designed properly. You wouldn’t lay out for 2 minutes and assume that it would make you brown, because 2 minutes isn’t enough stress to cause an adaptation. Likewise, only a stupid kid lays out for an hour on each side the first day, because the stress is so overwhelmingly damaging that it cannot be recovered from in a constructive way. Lots and lots of people come into the gym and bench 225 every Monday and Friday for years, never even attempting to increase the weight, sets, reps, speed, or pace between sets. Some people don’t care, but some are genuinely puzzled that their bench doesn’t go up, even though they have not asked it to. And some people bench press once every three or four weeks, or maybe even more rarely than that, using some arbitrary number like their own bodyweight for 10 reps, then 9, then 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, and finally 1 rep, and wonder why their bench doesn’t go up, and also wonder why they’re so damned sore all the time.
    Your bench press strength doesn’t adapt to the total number of times you’ve