Starting Strength

wear a belt in the work set, make sure you use it in the last warm-up set so that your movement pattern will not be altered or your attention diverted under the heaviest weight of the day.
    Using the belt correctly is a matter of practice. It must be worn in the right place at the right tightness to be effective, and if it’s wrong, it can actually screw up the lift it’s designed to support. Put it on around your natural waist (higher than you wear your pants) at a comfortable tightness, take your squat stance, and squat down into the bottom position. The belt will adjust to the position it wants to settle into, the place where it functions most effectively, and it will have done so before the weight is a factor. In other words, don’t let this position adjustment take place at the bottom of the first rep you need the belt for – do it in advance. Stand back up and tighten the belt to the point at which it adds a little pressure to the gut.
    There is a common misconception about the use of a belt. Many people have heard that you push the “stomach” out against the belt. Doing this, however, will usually result in spinal flexion, the very thing we wear the belt to prevent from happening under a load. Just put the belt on tight, forget it’s there, and use your abs the way you would without it. The belt functions without your having to actually “use” it, because the tightness it provides against the abs causes them to work harder without your micromanagement of the situation.
    The right amount of tightness is a matter of individual preference, but as a general rule, more experienced lifters can wear a tighter belt than novices can. It is also quite possible to have a belt on too tight. If you have to stretch up to get the belt’s prong in that last hole, you will be less able to exert pressure with your own abdominal musculature, since it must be contracted to actually generate force. Try this once to see for yourself; when you do, you’ll find that there is an optimum tension on the belt, and that too tight is worse than too loose. You’ll eventually find that your belt adjustment varies with your body weight, your underlying clothing, and even your hydration level; if your belt is designed with holes close enough together to allow for fine adjustment, it will come in handy.
    Contrary to the new conventional wisdom regarding this, a belt will not prevent your trunk from getting and staying strong. It is hard for the layperson – or for that matter, a coach who lacks personal experience with very heavy squats – to understand this, but there is not one single relaxed muscle group in the entire human body under a 600-pound squat; this statement most especially applies to the muscles that are busy stabilizing the spine. It’s not as if your trunk muscles just go to sleep when you put on your belt. What actually happens is that the abs contract harder against the external resistance provided by the belt than they can without it, in the same way that your arms can contract harder when you curl a barbell than when you curl a broomstick. A belt does in fact help you safely lift more weight than you would without one, since a tight back better supports more weight when you’re squatting, and squatting more weight allows you to do more work through the range of motion and thus get stronger.
    Knee wraps are another matter. When a lifter uses tight wraps, the one-meter or longer heavy kind with the various-colored stripes, he is doing so to lift more weight. The mechanism is the same with wraps as with squat suits. In the absence of an injury, knee wraps must be considered supportive gear and should not be worn. But in the event of certain knee injuries, wraps can be very helpful IF USED CORRECTLY. If you have an old ligament injury that has healed as well as it’s going to, wraps are useful to add some compression, and thus stability, to the knee. A light wrap adds just enough circumferential pressure to the whole knee assembly to act almost like an external joint capsule, as well as maintaining warmth and providing proprioceptive input to the skin and superficial structures. The caveat is this: if your wraps are so tight that they must be loosened immediately after the set, then they are acting as aids and not as support. If you can keep the wraps on for the whole workout without cutting off circulation to your lower legs, the wraps are loose enough to be considered as only supportive.

    Figure 2-61. Knee