Starting Strength

long as possible, make sure that you lift a little more weight each time. Everyone can do this for a while, and some can do it for longer than others, depending on individual genetic capability, diet, and rest. If you are challenged, you will adapt, and if you are not, you won’t. Training makes the challenge a scheduled event instead of an accident of mood or whim, and certainly not a random occurrence within an exercise program.
    Before you even get through the door of the weight room, you should already know every single thing you will do while you are there, the order in which you will do it, how much weight you will do it with, and how to determine the next workout based on what you do today. No one should ever arrive to train not knowing exactly what to do. Wandering around the gym, deciding what looks fun, doing it until the fun stops, and then doing something else is not training. Each training session must have a definite achievable goal, usually an increase over the previous workout in the amount of weight lifted, or another definable objective based on the person’s training history.
    Strength in each exercise will progress differently, due to differences in the amount of muscle mass involved and in the sensitivity of the movement to technique problems. The more muscle mass involved in an exercise, the faster the exercise can get strong and the stronger it has the potential to be. The deadlift, for instance, improves rather quickly for most people, faster than any of the other lifts, due to its limited range of motion around the hips and knees and the fact that so many muscles are involved in the lift. In contrast, the press goes up rather slowly due to the smaller muscles of the shoulder girdle, while the shorter kinetic chain of the bench press allows it to progress faster than the press.
    In a trained athlete, the deadlift will be stronger than the squat, the squat stronger than the bench press, the bench press and the power clean close to each other (with the bench usually a little stronger), and the press lighter than the other four. This distribution holds for the majority of athletes and is predictive of what should happen. For example, if you bench more than you deadlift, something is out of whack. You may have a grip problem, an injury, or a motivational discontinuity, e.g., a strong dislike for the deadlift. In any case, this situation should be addressed lest a strength imbalance cause problems for other lifts. The differences in the nature of the lifts must be considered in all aspects of their use in the weight room.
     

    Figure 8-2. In order from left to right, strongest to weakest, the continuum of potential strength gains for the basic barbell exercises for the early part of the typical trainee’s career. The deadlift, squat, bench press, and press actively involve decreasing amounts of muscle mass. Other factors affect the power clean; although it involves a large amount of muscle mass, the technical requirements of the lift place it somewhere between the bench press and the press in strength and improvement potential.

    Learning the Lifts
     
    Learn the squat first because it is the most important exercise in the program and its skills are critical to all the other movements. When you begin this program, if you have been taught the movement incorrectly, you will have to unlearn it (the worst-case scenario); if you have never been shown the movement, it will be easier to learn because you won’t have incorrect motor pathways to fix (the best-case scenario). It is much harder to correct an embedded movement pattern than it is to learn a new one, as any sports coach will attest. The problem is particularly evident in the weight room, where correct technique is the essence of everything we do, and a stubborn form problem resulting from prior incorrect instruction can be costly in terms of time and slowed progress.
    Assuming that you have time to learn more than one exercise the first day (and you should arrange things so that you do), the next exercise will be the press. The squat has fatigued the lower body, and the press gives it an opportunity to rest while another skill is introduced. The press is usually easy to learn because of the absence of preconceived notions acquired from pictures in the muscle magazines or from helpful buddies. Since the press is relatively unfamiliar to most people these days, it makes a good first-day upper-body exercise, grabbing your attention so that you