An Introduction to Weightlifting

Some conceptual tools you need in order to train independently.

By guest author Peter Thistle.

The sight of Julius Caesar in his crimson cloak riding into the fray amongst his men could turn the tide of battle. George Washington was known to ride in front of his battle line, on occasion, to encourage his men, between the teeth of two opposing forces and their deadly gunfire. Teddy Roosevelt personally led a series of charges up Kettle Hill during the Battle of San Juan Heights, and rode up and down the slope to encourage his men. During his presidency, he was known to host boxing matches at the White House, during which he would challenge anyone — even professional boxers.

Physical prowess is a crucial and foundational attribute of leadership. Fitness, strength, and an imposing figure are attractive qualities and are the foundation of self-confidence, especially in the face of great difficulty. For most of our history, Americans were known as hardened frontiersmen and courageous soldiers; to be an American was to have a tenacious and indominable fighting spirit, with the muscle to back it up. Today, Americans are the most obese population in the Western world. As we endeavor to lead our people back to greatness, and in many ways to lay the foundation of a new aristocratic class, we must embrace this ideal ourselves so that we can be fit to lead others.

You’ve heard it before, no doubt. “Go to the gym!” is a favorite phrase in our circles. Yet time and time again I am confronted by friends of ours who either don’t go to the gym or, if they claim to, evidently have no idea what they are doing, as evidenced by their physique and athletic ability. While I can’t force you to hit the gym if you aren’t already, this essay is an introductory primer to weightlifting that will equip you with the knowledge and resources you need to hit the gym properly, sans bro-science and stupidity.

The primary reference for this essay is Starting Strength: Basic Barbell Training by Mark Rippetoe. Starting Strength is a classic text in the lifting world, and a tried-and-true method for making weak people strong. It is not a bodybuilding text. It is not about “powerlifting.” It is a straightforward method that can be used by anybody, from a sixteen-year-old football player to his grandmother, to get strong. The method does not focus on muscle groups, isolation exercises, hypertrophy, drop-sets, pyramid schemes sets, or “exercising.” It focuses on training the human body as a system by replicating normal human movement patterns under load, and then progressively increasing the load (stress) across training sessions, between which the body grows bigger and stronger as it adapts to progressively heavier loads.

These “normal human movement patterns” are trained by way of the four primary lifts and, per the “Starting Strength” protocol, a fifth “Olympic” lift. If you are at all familiar with powerlifting or Olympic weightlifting, you will no doubt be familiar with these movements. All of these movements are performed with a barbell. They are:

• The Squat

• The (Overhead) Press

• The Deadlift

• The Bench Press

• The Power Clean

It is beyond the scope of this essay to teach you how to do these lifts, but out of the goodness of his heart, Mark Rippetoe and his Starting Strength crew have provided instructional videos on YouTube for your viewing pleasure, free of charge, which I have linked above. You don’t even have to buy the book.

Stress Adaptation

But before we talk about the lifts and the program itself, we need to talk about some fundamental ideas that are often totally misunderstood or overlooked entirely (i.e., some stuff you need to know before hitting the gym at all, Starting Strength style or not). The stress/adaptation concept is the most important and foundational of these ideas. From the book:

It is May 15, and you decide that this year you are going to get a suntan — a glorious, beautiful, tropical suntan. So you decide to go out in the back yard to lay out at lunchtime and catch a ray or two. You lie on your back for 15 minutes and flip over to lie on your belly for 15 minutes. Then you get up, come in and eat lunch, and go back to work. That night, your skin is a little pink, so the next day you just eat lunch, but the following day you’re back outside for your 15-minutes-per-side sunbath. You are faithful to your schedule, spending 30 minutes outside every day that week, because that’s the kind of disciplined, determined person you are. At the end of the week, you have turned a more pleasant shade of brown, and, heartened by your results, resolve to maintain your schedule for the rest of the month. So, here is the critical question: what color is your skin at the end of the month?

If you ask a hundred people this question, ninety-five will tell you that it will be really, really dark. But in fact it will be exactly the same color it was at the end of the first week. Why would it be any darker? Your skin adapts to the stress of the sun exposure by becoming dark enough to prevent itself from burning again… The skin adapts not to total accumulated exposure but to the longest exposure — the hardest exposure. If you want your skin to get darker, you have to stay out longer in order to give the skin more stress than it has already adapted to.

The stress, or stimulus (the weighted exercise), must be carefully measured by performing a specific number of sets and repetitions, and performing the exercise the same way each rep. In the above example, this is your 15-minute-per-side sunbath. Across training sessions, we manipulate only a single variable, that being weight, and increase it ever so slightly (instead of 15 minutes, now we will do 20 minutes per side, and then 25). We are not adjusting the number of repetitions, the exercise itself, or the structure of the training sessions; just the stress itself, the weight. In this way, we are taking advantage of our bodies’ adaptive ability in order to increase our strength. The goal of the workout is not soreness, exhaustion, “muscle confusion,” or hypertrophy. The goal of each training session is to perform each lift with just slightly more weight than the last training session. For novice lifters, this simply means adding 5 pounds (or less) to each lift, each workout. Equipped with this knowledge, you may be tempted to return to a body-building style of workout, progressively increasing the weight of your fifteen different chest exercises in order to build a bigger chest, eschewing the primary lifts and the sacred barbell — but not so fast!

Why Barbells?

Most of us hit the gym because we want to get big; we want big arms, big legs, a big chest, and a big back. You probably want the same, and might care very little about getting stronger, only looking stronger. Our first stop when looking for a good gym program to look stronger is usually the bodybuilding world. After all, if we want to look like Arnold, we need to train like Arnold, right? Well, there is a lot of value in certain bodybuilding techniques, especially for intermediate or advanced lifters, but you are not an intermediate or advanced lifter (probably). The reason why the Starting Strength program emphasizes not only barbells, but the five primary lifts, is that they satisfy the following criteria. They allow us to:

• use the most muscle mass,

• move the most weight, and

• employ the greatest effective range of motion.

In effect, they allow us to train the body as the system it is. From the book again:

[T]here is no way for a human being to utilize the quadriceps muscles in isolation from the hamstrings in any movement pattern that exists independently of a machine [or isolation exercise] designed for this purpose. No natural movement can be performed that does this. Quadriceps and hamstrings always work together, why should they be exercised separately? Because somebody invented a machine that lets us?

Even machines that allow multiple joints to be worked at the same time are less than optimal, since the pattern of the movement through space is determined by the machine, not the individual biomechanics of the human using it. Barbells permit minute adjustments during the movement that allow individual anthropometry to be expressed.

Maybe now you concede that barbell training is the best way to get stronger. But what if you don’t care? What if you really only care about getting big muscles? Shouldn’t isolation exercises and gym machines be your go-to for that? Well, consider that if you bring your bench press from 135 to 315, your squat from 225 to 405, and your deadlift from 250 to 500, you will in fact get bigger. Much bigger. There’s just no way around it. And, as an added side-benefit, your muscles, tendons, ligaments, bones, and cardiovascular system — that is to say, your body — will become stronger as a result, making you healthier and more athletic in the long run (which should probably be your goal anyways).

Eat Big to Get Big

The biggest problem most guys — especially young guys — face in adding a meager 5 pounds to their lifts each workout is not the act of adding weight to the bar itself. It’s not very hard to do the same thing, two or three times a week, and add a little bit more weight each time. The stress part of the formula, you might say, isn’t the problem, but the adaptation.

The fact of the matter is, you’re probably too small. I don’t mean you’re too short; I mean the number displayed on the bathroom scale when you step on it is way, way too small. Maybe you’re fat (in which case getting strong will actually be easier), but if my own experience traveling in these circles is any indicator, in addition to having once been a teenager and skinny guy myself, you probably have the opposite problem.

If you’ve spent any time at all peering into the online lifting world, you surely know all about hitting your protein intake each day. “Protein is the key to muscle building, one or two grams per pound of body weight,” all of that good stuff. What you might not be aware of is the major role that a caloric surplus plays in your ability to recover (adapt) after each workout. If you are a 17- or 18-year-old guy, or if you are six feet tall and a whopping 150 pounds at any age, you almost certainly aren’t eating enough. If you could be described as “skinny,” this applies to you.

No matter what kind of training program you follow, you will never be able to put weight on the bar or mass on your pecs if you aren’t eating. For someone with an active lifestyle, 2,000 calories a day is simply not enough. Additionally, when you gain muscle mass, your body’s calorie requirement will only go up, as the number of calories required for your body to maintain muscle tissue is much higher than what would be required to maintain, say, fat tissue. (The Basal Metabolic Rate is a great buzzword, and an important concept to understand when dealing with your calorie intake.) For a skinny guy trying to get big and strong, you probably need to be eating in the 3,000–4,000 calories-per-day range. As a rule of thumb, if you’re skinny, and you “can’t gain weight no matter how hard you try,” take whatever you normally eat and double it. It is true that some people gain weight more easily than others. It is not true that you, or anyone else, “can’t gain weight.” Mark Rippetoe (among others) famously recommends that young guys trying to pack on the pounds work their way up to drinking a gallon of whole milk a day (GOMAD). While GOMAD has become something of a meme, the idea is sound. A gallon of whole milk has well over 2,000 calories and 100 grams of protein. I’m not saying you need to do that, but understand that you need to get those calories one way or another, and, well… do what you have to do. If you can’t or won’t eat what your body needs, you’re wasting your time at the gym. This point cannot be overemphasized.

Assistance Exercises and Programming

Your program’s exercises can be separated into two categories. The first category consists of your primary exercises. These are your Squat, Press, Deadlift, Bench, and Power Clean. The second category consists of your assistance exercises, and includes basically everything else you can think of (e.g., bicep curls, back extensions, lat pull-downs), with varying degrees of utility depending on the exercise. The main focus of the Starting Strength program is, of course, the five primary exercises which form the foundation of strength training; but as for assistance exercises, the Starting Strength method especially recommends the chin-up, rack pulls, halting deadlifts, barbell shrugs, a variety of partial squats and presses, angled bench presses, and various Olympic squats.

The best assistance exercises are those that directly contribute to the performance of the basic movements that produce the most benefit.

Not that the basic movements need much help. They are complete exercises in and of themselves, since they all involve lots of muscles moving lots of joints in anatomically normal, functionally useful ways. But after a certain period of time, usually several months after serious training begins, the stimulation provided by the execution of the basic exercises alone is not enough to produce sufficient stress to cause further adaptation. This change is due not to any deficiency in the basic exercises but to the trainee’s ability to successfully adapt to the stress these exercises provide.

For the rank novice, assistance exercises (especially a large number and variety of assistance exercises) are not necessary for an effective program, but will become more necessary the further you progress in your weightlifting journey, as they serve to add work (stress) to the muscle groups that support the primary lifts, therefore promoting adaptation.

The most important thing to understand about programming your assistance exercises is that they will always be less useful for getting stronger than the primary lifts, and you should not mistake the assistance exercises for the primary lifts themselves. This is especially true given the constraints placed on all of us by life, such as time, energy, recovery, calories, and so on. If your assistance exercises are making you overly sore or tired, or if they are ruining your recovery between workouts such that your ability to progress in the primary exercises is being hampered, you need to reevaluate your programming.

That being said, we can discuss the basic program recommended by Rippetoe in his book. The rank novice should begin with this very simple workout plan:

“A” Workout
Squat (3x5)
Overhead Press (3x5)
Deadlift (1x5)

“B” Workout
Squat (3x5)
Bench Press (3x5)
Deadlift (1x5)

The two workouts alternate every M/W/F, switching the Overhead Press (“A”) and Bench Press (“B”) days (the following Monday after this first week should be a Bench Press day, and so on). The Squat is performed first because it functions as an excellent full-body warmup for the rest of the workout. For the new lifter, proper technique is more important than adding weight to the bar; the first several training sessions should focus on form, not adding weight.

Each exercise begins with warmup sets, which should start with an unloaded barbell. Add weight to the barbell incrementally (for intermediate and advanced lifters, this is usually adding about 50 pounds per set) until you have reached your working weight, decreasing the number of repetitions in each warmup set as you increase the weight. The working weight is the weight at which you are actually stressing the body, therefore prompting adaptation. For the Squat, Bench, and Overhead Press, the exercise is performed at the working weight for 3 sets of 5 repetitions. The Deadlift is the only exercise that should be performed for a single set at the working weight (instead of three sets across), due to its nature. In the plan above, the parenthesized numbers indicate the working sets for each exercise (i.e., 3 sets of 5 repetitions). This makes each exercise look something like this:

Bench
2 sets, 5 reps, 45 pounds
1 set, 5 reps, 85 pounds
1 set, 3 reps, 125 pounds
1 set, 2 reps, 155 pounds
3 sets, 5 reps, 175 pounds (work sets)

Between each working set, you should rest as long as necessary to prevent fatigue from one set being introduced into the following set, which might cause you to miss your last one or two reps for no reason other than your own neglect of the rest period. For the novice, five minutes rest is a good rule of thumb, but it can always be longer. Don’t miss your lifts on account of rushing the rest periods.

Now, let’s say that this workout was performed on Wednesday in the schema above. That means that on Friday you will Overhead Press, instead of Bench, and the following Monday you will Bench Press once again. On Monday, the workout should look like this:

Bench
2 sets, 5 reps, 45 pounds
1 set, 5 reps, 85 pounds
1 set, 3 reps, 125 pounds
1 set, 2 reps, 155 pounds
3 sets, 5 reps, 180 pounds (work sets)

You should now add 5 pounds to your bench press for the work sets. For the novice, this kind of linear progression of adding 5 pounds per exercise per workout can be continued for many months. Should you fail to complete your working sets at the increased weight, the reason can almost always be attributed to inadequate recovery (not eating or sleeping enough) or inadequate rest period between sets. However, as you progress, your ability to continue this linear progression will diminish, and gaining strength will become more difficult; your progress will plateau. This does not mean that you have reached the ceiling of your natural ability, but that your programming needs to widen to promote more stress and adaptation than the primary lifts alone can provide. The Starting Strength program recommends that after the first few weeks of the above training schema, the novice should begin to include the Power Clean. Note that the Power Clean is performed for five working sets across:

“A” Workout
Squat (3x5)
Overhead Press (3x5)
Deadlift (1x5)

“B” Workout
Squat (3x5)
Bench Press (3x5)
Power Clean (5x5)

This program will work quite well for most people, for many months. But as you progress, assistance exercises can be incorporated, and the frequency of deadlifts can be reduced to every fifth workout, alternating with the power clean:

“A” Workout
Squat (3x5)
Overhead Press (3x5)
Deadlift (1x5) or Power Clean (5x5)

“B” Workout
Squat (3x5)
Bench Press (3x5)
Back Extensions
Chin-Ups

Programming assistance exercises will not follow the pattern of the primary lifts. Chin-ups, for example, might be performed for several sets across (five or more). Once you have progressed to being able to complete 12 to 15 chin-ups (as a rule of thumb), it might be appropriate to begin training with weighted pull-ups, keeping in mind the stress/adaptation concept, and adding just a pound or two per workout.

Assistance exercises can’t be programmed as exactly as the primary lifts due to the inherent nature of most assistance exercises. For example, I have taken a liking to supplementing my Bench Press days with dumbbell bicep curls and one-armed, overhead dumbbell tricep extensions. The nature of these exercises makes them more difficult to perform precisely the same way each rep, and therefore more difficult to program with progressively higher weights. Additionally, you simply cannot add 5 pounds to a bicep curl each workout (most gyms have dumbbells in increments of 5 pounds). You can work around this by varying one factor at a time: working your way up to 3 sets / 15 reps / 25 pounds, then increasing the weight, decreasing the repetitions (3 sets / 8 reps / 30 pounds), and working your way back up to 15 reps per set across workouts. The first few workouts at the heavier weight with lower reps will promote a strength adaptation, but less efficiently than an equivalent increase in weight would for the Squat. The subsequent increase in repetitions per set will promote an adaptation for endurance at that particular weight in that particular exercise, a factor entirely different from strength. Mr. Rippetoe would probably advise (harshly) against these particular exercises and this method, in favor of other tools (like an EZ Curl Bar) that can be more precisely weighted, but you have to use the tools available to you, and I’ve had good luck adding mass to my arms (which has helped add weight to my Bench) with these assistance exercises.

In the end, you will never be able to cut-and-paste a workout program from the Internet and have it work perfectly for you, forever. You will reach a point where the simple linear progression is no longer sufficient, and you need more complex training methods to get stronger. The purpose of this primer is to equip you with some of the conceptual tools you need to begin to train independently, in true American fashion. If you can, it is always better to hire a professional strength coach (or make use of a service like Axios), but the responsibility for our own health and fitness ultimately falls on each of us alone as individuals, in the same way that the maintenance of our cars and homes is ours alone, even if we may from time to time hire professional help. Starting Strength is a great place to begin, but it’s on us to continue to learn and improve. So learn to Squat, Deadlift, and Bench Press. Hit the gym, lift heavy, eat lots, sleep plenty, do your fives, and keep adding weight a little at a time. It will make you big and strong, and that’s an American tradition worth preserving.