Mark Rippetoe > Quotes

“Strong people are harder to kill than weak people and more useful in general.”
― Mark Rippetoe

“A weak man is not as happy as that same man would be if he were strong. This reality is offensive to some people who would like the intellectual or spiritual to take precedence. It is instructive to see what happens to these very people as their squat strength goes up.”
― Mark Rippetoe, Starting Strength

“There is simply no other exercise, and certainly no machine, that produces the level of central nervous system activity, improved balance and coordination, skeletal loading and bone density enhancement, muscular stimulation and growth, connective tissue stress and strength, psychological demand and toughness, and overall systemic conditioning than the correctly performed full squat.”
― Mark Rippetoe, Starting Strength

“The deadlift also serves as a way to train the mind to do things that are hard.”
― Mark Rippetoe, Starting Strength: Basic Barbell Training

“Humans are built to move. We evolved under conditions that required daily intense physical activity, and even among individuals with lower physical potential, that hard-earned genotype is still ours today. The modern sedentary lifestyle leads to the inactivation of the genes related to physical performance, attributes that were once critical for survival and which are still critical for the correct, healthy expression of the genotype. The genes are still there, they just aren't doing anything because the body is not stressed enough to cause a physiological adaptation requiring their activation. The sedentary person's heart, lungs, muscles, bones, nerves and brain all operate far below the level at which they evolved to function, and at which they still function best.”
― Mark Rippetoe, Practical Programming for Strength Training

“Humans are not physically normal in the absence of hard physical effort.”
― Mark Rippetoe, Starting Strength

“You do not need to do many different exercises to get strong - you need to get strong on a very few important exercises, movements that train the whole body as a system, not as a collection of separate body parts. The problem with the programs advocated by all the national exercise organizations is that they fail to recognize this basic principle: the body best adapts as a whole organism to stress applied to the whole organism. The more stress that can be applied to as much of the body at one time as possible, the more effective and productive the adaptation will be.”
― Mark Rippetoe, Starting Strength: Basic Barbell Training

“Strong people are harder to kill than weak people, and more useful in general.”
― Mark Rippetoe

“There is no easy way to do a deadlift—not involving actually picking up the bar—which explains their lack of popularity in gyms around the world.”
― Mark Rippetoe, Starting Strength: Basic Barbell Training

“Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not; it is the first lesson that ought to be learned; and however early a man's training begins, it is probably the last lesson that he learns thoroughly." Thomas H. Huxley”
― Mark Rippetoe, Strong Enough? Thoughts from Thirty Years of Barbell Training

“  If your expectations are always those of someone content to live without physical challenge, then when it comes time for mental, moral, or emotional challenge you fail to meet it because you are out of practice. Meeting and overcoming obstacles are skills that can be honed, as opposed to talents with which we are born. The best way to prepare for the inevitable shit that life occasionally hands us all is to live in a way that prepares you for it. If you can treat personal tragedy like a heavy set of 20 squats, you'll do better than someone who has never met any challenge. Intentionally placing yourself in the position of having to complete a task when you don't know if you can is the single best way of preparing to be in that position unintentionally.”
― Mark Rippetoe, Strong Enough? Thoughts from Thirty Years of Barbell Training

“When you discover you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount. But other strategies with dead horses [include] the following: buying a stronger whip; changing riders; saying things like 'this is the way we've always ridden this horse'; ... and, finally, harnessing several dead horses together for increased speed." Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson”
― Mark Rippetoe, Strong Enough? Thoughts from Thirty Years of Barbell Training

“Squatting' in a Smith machine is an oxymoron. A Smith machine is not a squat rack, no matter what the girls at the front desk tell you. A squat cannot be performed on a Smith machine any more than it can be performed in a small closet with a hamster. Sorry. There is a gigantic difference between a machine that makes the bar path vertical for you and a squat that is executed correctly enough to have a vertical bar path. The job of keeping the bar path vertical should be done by the muscles, skeleton, and nervous system, not by grease fittings, rails, and floor bolts.”
― Mark Rippetoe, Starting Strength: Basic Barbell Training

“Physical strength is the most important thing in life. This is true whether we want it to be or not.”
― Mark Rippetoe, Starting Strength

“People seem to have acquired the idea that they have the inalienable right to stroll through life without either having sweated, picked up anything heavy, worked hard, or eaten less than they wanted at every meal. This approach is, of course, wrong. And it has resulted in a lot of expensive, unattractive, and entirely preventable problems amongst people who seem puzzled about why things aren't going well.”
― Mark Rippetoe, Strong Enough? Thoughts from Thirty Years of Barbell Training

“If you insist on using a thumbless grip on the bench, you need to do it at home so that when the ambulance comes (if anyone is there to call 911), it doesn’t disrupt anyone else’s training.”
― Mark Rippetoe, Starting Strength

“but the reality of millions of years of adaptation to a ruggedly physical existence will not just go away because desks were invented.”
― Mark Rippetoe, Starting Strength

“Remember: lifting more weight is not always the same thing as getting stronger.”
― Mark Rippetoe, Starting Strength

“If your gym makes a lot of money selling gloves, you have another reason to look for a different gym. And if you insist on using them, make sure they match your purse.”
― Mark Rippetoe, Starting Strength

“...full range of motion, multi-joint exercises are
not supposed to isolate any one muscle. We use them precisely because they don't. We want them
to work lots of muscles through a long range of motion. We like it when some muscles are called
into function as other muscles drop out of function, and when muscles change function during
the exercise. This is because we are training for strength. We are concerned with improving the
functional motion around a joint. We are not just concerned about our "favorite muscles." We
do not have favorite muscles.”
― Mark Rippetoe, Starting Strength: Basic Barbell Training

“you don’t get to redefine the exercise and then claim that it’s dangerous. Driving a car is dangerous if you drive it into a great big rock.”
― Mark Rippetoe, Starting Strength

“myofibrillar hypertrophy, more actin, myosin, and other associated proteins are added to those already existing in the cell. More contractile elements within the cell mean more actin/myosin interactions and more force production. This type of hypertrophy is typical of low-repetition, high-intensity training. It adds less mass but produces greater increases in the force generated per unit area of muscle than the second type of hypertrophy, sarcoplasmic hypertrophy.”
― Mark Rippetoe, Practical Programming for Strength Training

“Stance is a highly individual thing and will vary with hip width, hip ligament tightness, femur and tibia length and proportion, adductor and hamstring flexibility, knee joint alignment, and ankle flexibility. Everybody’s stance will be slightly different, but shoulder-width heels, with toes at 30 degrees, is a good place to start.”
― Mark Rippetoe, Starting Strength

“If it’s too heavy to squat below parallel, it’s too heavy to have on your back.”
― Mark Rippetoe, Starting Strength

“The Super Athletes (A.S. Barnes and Co., 1970)”
― Mark Rippetoe, Starting Strength

“This lack of posterior support produces an anterior-dominant force distribution on the knee: the further back the hips are, the more hip muscle you use, and the further forward the knees, the more quad you use. Many cases of patellar tendinitis have been caused by this incorrect squat technique.”
― Mark Rippetoe, Starting Strength

“perpendicular”
― Mark Rippetoe, Starting Strength

“imprudent.”
― Mark Rippetoe, Starting Strength

“Every barbell exercise that involves the feet on the floor and a barbell supported by the body will be in its best balance, both during the movement and at lockout, when the bar is vertically plumb to the middle of the foot, as discussed earlier.”
― Mark Rippetoe, Starting Strength

“you go to the doctor when you have a back injury, nine times out of ten she will tell you that “You just tore a back muscle. Take these drugs and quit lifting so much weight.” This diagnosis and recommendation reflect a lack of personal experience with these types of injuries and a lack of understanding regarding how and when muscles actually get torn and how they heal.”
― Mark Rippetoe, Starting Strength