Starting Strength

will develop. Some cues, like “chest up,” are almost universal due to their usefulness, brevity, and sound. They almost bark the correct position at the athlete. Other cues, which appear to be so non-specific as to be useless (like “Now!”), are in fact specific to a thing decided upon between coach and lifter and are extremely individual to that particular situation. Cues must be given in the right circumstances and at exactly the right time, or they do not trigger anything useful.
    A cue can also be a reminder that you give yourself. It will not necessarily be spoken aloud, although this sometimes helps. It will be the same thing that a coach would say to you under the same circumstances, a reminder of a position problem that you have already worked out but that you need to pay attention to just before doing the movement. As you learn the exercises covered in this book, you should develop your own set of cues that will serve to reinforce good form. As you become more experienced, you will find it necessary to build cues into your approach to each lift, to solve your own individual problems with each movement pattern. You will find that each lift responds to its own reminder, and if you train alone, you’ll have to remind yourself.
    You will find that there are two basic types of cues: body cues and bar cues. Body cues are references to parts of your body interacting with the bar, like “chest up,” “look forward,” or “long, straight arms.” These cues draw awareness to the thing doing the moving: the muscles or body part needing a correction. In contrast, bar cues refer to the object being moved. For instance, if your problem is jerking yourself out of position while coming off the floor in a deadlift, a problem that usually happens when you’re in a hurry to get the bar moving fast, the bar cue might be “pull it slow” or “squeeze it up.”
    As a general rule, body cues draw the lifter’s attention to a component of the movement, while a bar cue refers to the whole movement or to a part of it that several components are engaged in. “Straight elbows” may fix a problem by calling attention to the specific problem addressed. In contrast, “Keep the bar vertical” describes a complicated process of adjusting the three diagnostic angles, which the lifter can easily do by visualizing one simple thing. A bar cue generally means that if you do certain things to the bar correctly, your body will solve the problem. Some people process bar cues better than body cues, and what works for one exercise might not work for another. Deciding which cues to use is just one of the skills that you will develop through experience.

Chapter 3: The Press
     
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    The press is the oldest upper-body exercise done with a barbell. The day the barbell was invented, the guy who invented it figured out a way to pick it up and shove it over his head. After all, it is the logical thing to do with a barbell. Equipment has changed quite a bit over the past hundred or so years. We now have barbells that load with plates, racks we can set our bars in and adjust to various heights so that we don’t always have to clean the weight to our shoulders first, and even plates made out of rubber in case we need to drop the weight. But pressing the barbell overhead is still the most useful upper-body exercise in the weight room.
    Prior to the rise of bodybuilding, the standard test of upper-body strength was the press or, more correctly, the two-hands press . The popularity of the bench press has changed this to the detriment of athletes and lifters who never obtain the benefits of the press, which is the more balanced exercise. Bench pressing, a contest lift in powerlifting, actually became popular among bodybuilders first, when large pectorals (“pecs,” or maybe “chesticles”) became the fashion in physique contests, starting in the 1950s. Powerlifting incorporated the bench press as a standard contest lift in the mid-1960s, thus diminishing the importance of the overhead version of the press among those training primarily for strength. The final nail in the coffin was the elimination of the clean and press from Olympic weightlifting competition after the 1972 Olympics. This unfortunate development changed the nature of Olympic weightlifting training, effectively removing upper-body strength training from the list of exercises perceived as necessary by most weightlifting coaches. The exercise has continued its decline in