Practical Programming for Strength Training, by Mark Rippetoe & Ron Kilgore, 2nd Edition, p.10:
There are many weight training books for sale…. Follow the recipes, they promise, and you will be as good as the Spurs and as ripped as Vin Diesel…. Copying… successful programs without understanding why they were successful is never a good idea.
I made this mistake especially the first few years of trying to learn how to lift weights. In my case, I mostly tried to blindly copy workouts from body building magazines (whose main purpose was to sell ad space for the supplement industry) and a few books from chain book stores. After years of very lame results and a few over training / bad form injuries, a friend recommended Rippetoe’s Starting Strength & a blog called stronglifts.com. Both of these sources advocated a novice[1] program that focused on a few big exercises (the stronglifts.com author has since altered his program a bit), like the Squat & the Deadlift, and increasing the weight by 5 to 10lbs per workout while squatting 3 times per week until a plateau is reached. That ended up being the most successful approach for me. Since then, I’ve considered Rippetoe’s stuff as pretty reliable overall and more valuable than most books on the subject at the typical B&N or Borders. Can’t wait to read more of this book!
Incidentally, chain stores, like Borders, don’t carry Starting Strength. I wonder why. Is it because a chain store’s distributor (bulk sales source) is essentially a monopoly & demands too high a cut from the publisher? Is it bad marketing on the part of the publisher? Is it a deliberate tactic, to market the book via word of mouth, Crossfit affiliates, etc? Is it an ideological commitment on behalf of the author to be “indy” and not rely on “The Man”?
1. “…the amount of weight lifted or years of training do not classify a trainee’s development,” Practical Programming for Strength Training, by Mark Rippetoe & Ron Kilgore, 2nd Edition
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