Mark Rippetoe Quotes

If you are so inflamed that you can't train, and ibuprofen and fish oil help with inflammation, maybe you'd better take the ibuprofen and fish oil.

Big arms are fun, and if their training doesn't interfere with the rest of the program, wait till everybody's gone, like I do.

The hang clean is unweighted and is of little use to watch, except that it shows a problem known as a Donkey Kick. As the jump occurs, the heels come up in the back and then stomp back down into place. This is a terrible waste of time and energy, and contributes nothing to making the bar go up. Stop doing this immediately or I will have you killed.

I know that I'm an animal that displays bilateral symmetry. I understand that one side should be the mirror of the other, and that human perceptions of beauty are intimately associated with symmetry. For example, I am very handsome.

What we're trying to do is get things fixed, not allow them to stay broke.

You are right to be wary. There is much bullshit. Be wary of me too, because I may be wrong. Make up your own mind after you evaluate all the evidence and the logic.

but the reality of millions of years of adaptation to a ruggedly physical existence will not just go away because desks were invented.

Exercise is not a thing we do to fix a problem - it is a thing we must do anyway, a thing without which there will always be problems

Bodybuilding is men on a stage in their underwear wearing brown paint showing other men their muscles. It is training for appearance only, and at the contest level requires a degree of vanity, narcissism, and self-absorption that I find distasteful and odd

Most of the problems with the bodies and minds of the folks occupying the current culture involve an unwillingness to do anything hard, or anything that they'd rather not do. I applaud your resolve, and I welcome you to the community of people who have decided that EASY will no longer suffice.

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

The deadlift also serves as a way to train the mind to do things that are hard.

Strength is an excellent example of a physical characteristic that drives improvement in other athletic parameters. More strength means more power, more endurance, better coordination, and better everything else. This is why, all other things being equal, the stronger athlete is the better athlete.

Your ideal body weight as an ectomorph at 6' 0 will be 214.378 lbs. There. Happy? And if you lose or gain a pound, I will have you killed. It is important to be ideal.

The BEST training program in the entire world will be a DISMAL FAILURE if people fail to hold up their end of the deal. The success of ANY training program is ultimately the trainee's responsibility.

The spine is best at bearing a load in an arch

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.

Humans are not physically normal in the absence of hard physical effort.

A squat cannot be performed on a Smith machine any more than it can be performed in a small closet with a hamster.

If you insist on wearing gloves, make sure they match your purse.

For young males that weigh between 150-200 lbs., deadlifts can move up 15-20 lbs. per workout, squats 10-15 lbs., with continued steady progress for 3-4 weeks before slowing down to half that rate. Bench presses, presses, and cleans can move up 5-10 lbs. per workout, with progress on these exercises slowing down to 2.5-5 lbs. per workout after only 2-3 weeks. Young women make progress on the squat and the deadlift at about the same rate, adjusted for bodyweight, but much slower on the press, the bench press, cleans, and assistance exercises.

Women who do look like men have taken some rather drastic steps in that direction that have little to do with their exercise program.

Your muscles cannot get "longer" without some rather radical orthopedic surgery.

Accumulating injuries are the price we pay for the thrill of not having sat around on our asses.

Opinions are like phasers - everybody ought to have one.

Poor form in the gym is caused by insufficient yelling.

Since the trainee is both inefficient and unadapted, only a few basic exercises should be used, and they should be repeated frequently to establish the basic motor pathways and basic strength.

If every day of your life you are told by authority figures that the Earth is flat, you will be scared of falling off the edge whether you want to be or not.

There are no shortcuts. The fact that a shortcut is important to you means that you are a pussy.

I recommend that you change colleges.

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.

But then again, those who argue against squatting and deadlifting on the same day may just be pussies.

You can't make people smarter. You can expose them to information, but your responsibility stops there.

The full-range-of-m otion exercise known as the squat is the single most useful exercise in the weight room, and our most valuable tool for building strength, power, and size.

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.

The full squat is a perfectly natural position for the leg to occupy. That's why there is a joint in the middle of it, and why humans have been occupying this position, both unloaded and loaded, for millions of years. Much longer, in fact, than quasi-intellect ual morons have been telling us that it's 'bad' for the knees.

History tells us what works in the gym, and everything else walks down the road with a carrot in its ass.

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.

I recommend against a wooden squat rack, for much the same reason that I recommend against a wooden car.

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.

I like musicianship, and it's quite lacking in most modern popular music. You're always safe with old Chicago, the Allman Brothers, Gov't Mule, or Tower of Power.

I was driving home the other night, listening to the radio, and the guy filling in for Art Bell on Coast to Coast AM was talking to some other guy about Nazis, UFOs, the Kennedy Assassination, time travel, and George Bush, and how it all relates to OneWorldGovernment. This, of course, made me think about barbell training.

The Olympic Snatch is gymnastics with a bar

You don't get big and strong from lifting weights - you get big and strong from recovering from lifting weights

On resting in between reps: It varies with the length of the set. 5s or fewer get a breath to reset. Longer sets might take 2 breaths. During the last few reps of a true 20RM squat, just do what Jesus tells you. Trust me, if you do an honest 20 rep program, at some point Jesus will talk to you. On the last day of the program, he asked if he could work in.

There is no substitute for milk. Sorry.

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.

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.