Starting Strength, 3rd Edition - Mark Rippetoe [48]
As a general rule, body cues draw the lifter’s attention to a component of the movement, while a bar cue refers to the whole movement or to a part of it that several components are engaged in. “Straight elbows” may fix a problem by calling attention to the specific problem addressed. In contrast, “Keep the bar vertical” describes a complicated process of adjusting the three diagnostic angles, which the lifter can easily do by visualizing one simple thing. A bar cue generally means that if you do certain things to the bar correctly, your body will solve the problem. Some people process bar cues better than body cues, and what works for one exercise might not work for another. Deciding which cues to use is just one of the skills that you will develop through experience.
Chapter 3: The Press
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The press is the oldest upper-body exercise done with a barbell. The day the barbell was invented, the guy who invented it figured out a way to pick it up and shove it over his head. After all, it is the logical thing to do with a barbell. Equipment has changed quite a bit over the past hundred or so years. We now have barbells that load with plates, racks we can set our bars in and adjust to various heights so that we don’t always have to clean the weight to our shoulders first, and even plates made out of rubber in case we need to drop the weight. But pressing the barbell overhead is still the most useful upper-body exercise in the weight room.
Prior to the rise of bodybuilding, the standard test of upper-body strength was the press or, more correctly, the two-hands press. The popularity of the bench press has changed this to the detriment of athletes and lifters who never obtain the benefits of the press, which is the more balanced exercise. Bench pressing, a contest lift in powerlifting, actually became popular among bodybuilders first, when large pectorals (“pecs,” or maybe “chesticles”) became the fashion in physique contests, starting in the 1950s. Powerlifting incorporated the bench press as a standard contest lift in the mid-1960s, thus diminishing the importance of the overhead version of the press among those training primarily for strength. The final nail in the coffin was the elimination of the clean and press from Olympic weightlifting competition after the 1972 Olympics. This unfortunate development changed the nature of Olympic weightlifting training, effectively removing upper-body strength training from the list of exercises perceived as necessary by most weightlifting coaches. The exercise has continued its decline in both popularity and familiarity, to the extent that today you are quite likely to hear a seated behind-the-neck press described as a “military press” by the personal trainers in big-box gyms.
Figure 3-1. Bill Starr, the father of modern strength coaching, presses 350 pounds in the gym.
So, a terminology lesson is in order. A press refers to a movement performed while standing, whereby a weight is extended to arms’ length overhead with the use of the shoulders and arms only. If a barbell is used, the exercise is properly a two-hands press, although it is understood that the unqualified term “press” refers to a barbell press done with both hands (since lifting a barbell one-handed is not the normal use of the equipment). Any deviation from this description warrants a qualifier. A seated press is a barbell press done in a seated position – an exercise that requires a special bench, unless the lifter is capable of cleaning the weight and sitting down with it on his shoulders, and then lowering it to the floor after the set. This restriction limits the amount of weight that can be lifted, and thus the ultimate usefulness of the exercise. A dumbbell press is a standing simultaneous two-hands movement,