Notes from Mark Rippetoe's barbell-training certification

I spent last weekend in a two-day barbell training certification presented by Mark Rippetoe, longtime powerlifting coach and author of Starting Strength. His co-author Lon Kilgore was there as well. He's into strength training but is also a kinesiology professor, so his expertise complements Rippetoe's very well. They are both clear communicators and very engaging, encouraging us to ask questions and answering them effectively. I ended up feeling that I learned everything I needed to know and everything I wanted to know based on my own questions.

We learned to do and to coach the squat (low-bar back squat), press, deadlift, bench press, and power clean. I already had a lot of experience doing all but the bench press, which I had not done, and I had trained a few clients in these lifts as well based on what I learned from reading and rereading Starting Strength. The weekend was a great chance to find out what I'd misunderstood or plain missed in my reading and coaching.

Some things I learned:

• Beginners can respond to any stimulous because they are unadapted and do not require specificity to improve. For example, according to Mark and Lon, a beginner's press can get stronger from riding a bicycle. They're unadapted, so anything they do starts a strength adaptation. Rippetoe said this is why so many studies of beginners in training lack credibility in his opinion; no matter what the researchers did with beginners, they would see a quantifiable result.
• Potential to excel in athletics doesn't diminish with age as fast as was thought, particularly in the absence of injury. People of widely varying ages who are considered to be past the prime in their sport are maintaining high levels of performance. (This is affirming for me, because although I'm almost 44, I know I'm still getting stronger, and luckily I have no old or new or chronic injuries.)
• CrossFitters who want to experiment with strength training can improve their CrossFit conditioning by doing one weight workout a week. Getting stronger improves their performance just like it does in any sport.
• There's no sport that doesn't benefit from strength training. Stronger is better. And across the board, regardless of sport, power output ability is predictive of athletic success. Those are the reasons for training these five lifts.
• Coach in order of priority--make sure the athlete knows and does the core of the concept before worrying about other details. So, in the squat, get their posterior chain and hip drive working well before emphasizing their hand position, unless something about their hand position makes the lift impossible to do.
• How deep should you squat? The requirement is that the patella has to be above the hip crease. The complete answer is to go as deep as you can with the spine in extension and the hamstrings tight, not relaxed. Relaxing the hams for a second at the bottom lets the knees come forward and removes the stretch-shortening cycle that is felt as the bounce up out of the bottom. The bounce comes from the tightening hamstrings, not from the knees.
• When to try a client under a barbell for squatting? Don't wait for a perfect air squat because it may never happen. Put a barbell on their back, adjust the stance (usually widening it), and coach them to sit back, reach back, tip forward at the hip if necessary. A tipped-forward back is still a safe, straight back, unless it flexes. Using weight helps flexibility. Fix the squat by squatting.
• Good goals for pressing strength: For men, press your bodyweight. For women, press two-thirds bodyweight. (This made me feel good because I'm within a couple of kilos of that.)
• Shoulder impingement isn't caused or worsened by pressing. Impingement happens when the humerus is abducted and externally rotated. Pressing builds strength in the whole shoulder, including the so-called rotator cuff muscles. Impingements can be alleviated.
• Double your press and you have doubled the strength of your rotator cuff. That way there is no need for the well-known rotator-cuff isolation exercises that Rippetoe and Kilgore referred to irreverently as "those little arm-waving things." Unless you're coming off of surgery. Rehab and strength training are different places on the spectrum of training.
• How to get a trainee to stop the knees from caving in when coming up out of a squat? Lighten the load by 20 percent and strongly exaggerate the coaching cues. This is caused by weak adductors, causing the person to want to use their strong quads instead. The way to fix it is to squat correctly (break the habit). When they start doing it right, their adductors will get sore, and that's how you know it's being fixed.
• Power clean: The athlete has to memorize the three key positions and be conscious of all of them during the lift. When teaching it, if form falls apart, start over from the beginning (from the hang and jumping positions) and work down again.