Starting Strength, 3rd Edition - Mark Rippetoe [185]
Keep the bar as close to the top of your head as possible while stretching down to the bench, and lead up with the stretch reflex, like you’re throwing the bar at the ceiling and using your elbows to start the throw. The stretch reflex adds a lot of range of motion – and power, if you move explosively – to the movement, making the LTE much more useful than the standard “skullcrusher.” If you keep your elbows too straight and let the bar go back too far away from the top of your head, you lose some of the ROM around the elbows. A big breath at the top inflates the chest and makes the stretch reflex at the bottom more effective. When the LTE is done in this way, both shoulder extension and elbow extension are used, and more triceps mass is stressed over a longer ROM. Do sets of 10–15 reps with this exercise.
Barbell Training: There’s Just No Substitute
There are lots of useless assistance exercises which contribute nothing to the performance of the major exercises or of sports activities, and which might do worse than merely waste time. Exercises that use only one joint, and that usually require machines to do, are non-functional in the sense that they do not follow a normal human movement pattern. They also quite often predispose the joint to overuse injuries, and the vast majority of weight room injuries are produced by these exercises. This is true not only by default, since it is obvious that in a world where most people only use machines, most of the injuries will occur on machines. Isolation exercises cause tendinitis because human joints are not designed to be subjected to the stress of movements in which all of the shock, moment force, tension, and compression are exclusively applied to one joint. There is no movement that can be performed outside the modern health club that involves only the quadriceps; the only way to isolate the quads is to do an exercise on a machine designed for that purpose. This is a function that hundreds of millions of years of vertebrate evolution did not anticipate. The knee is the home of many muscles, all of which have developed while working at the same time. Any exercise that deviates from the function for which the joint is designed contributes very little to the function of that joint and is a potential source of problems.
Exercise machines have made several people a lot of money, and while there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that, they have been a very large diversion from more productive forms of training. The pendulum swings, and barbell training is once again being recognized as the superior form of exercise. Glad we could help.
Chapter 8: Programming
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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 spare the neighbors and innocent passersby) 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