Strength Coach, former Little League MVP. Link below for more thoughful, longer form articles on Substack
Joined September 2017
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Achieving The Standards 1.0 - 135 press, 225 bench, 315 squat, 405 deadlift - is more important and useful than getting down to 10% bodyfat and it's not even close.
I've seen a lot of lifters get wrapped up in micromanaging and technique-paralysis-by-analysis where they focus so much on little tiny things they did wrong that they start to overthink every rep and lose the ability to just push, pull, and brace hard against heavy weight.
Yes, technique matters. But:
- There is a difference between bad technique and a minor imperfect execution of a single rep.
- Driving hard also matters, and if technique is good enough then it probably matters more than losing drive to improve from good enough to great.
The order of operations for new lifter or someone really learning to do things well for the first time is:
1. Get basic technique down pat, to the point that it's your default setting.
2. Add weight in small, manageable increments so both nervous and muscular systems improve at a to which pace they can adapt. This will require you to drive progressively harder.
3. While adding weight, continue to work on reducing the delta between 'basic technique' and 'excellent technique,' but not at the expense of #2 as long as basic technique stays solid.
There can be a little individual variation where someone has a unique case, but that covers the vast majority of situations.
The definitive proof that I am right about The Standards 1.0 being for a single rep and @sam_gzstrength is wrong about them being for fahve is that, using a standard 1RM estimate, doing them for fahve yields an estimated 1RM of
155 press
260 bench
365 squat
470 deadlift
And even granting a few lbs either way of leeway for the estimate, those are too close to the actual Standards 2.0 to be a meaningful barrier and differentiation between what almost everyone can do in 1-2 years vs what some people will never get to in a lifetime.
Chessmate
Stole the picture for this one from @DisaffectedPod , whose post today reminded me of an article I wrote a few years back. Lightly edited and updated for today.
A good program executed with high consistency and high effort is better than the perfect program executed with inconsistency and low effort.
It’s astounding how many coaches will attribute these kind of problems - the hips are shooting up at the start of the lift! - to various muscular or positional weaknesses and prescribe complex programming to solve them, when the problem is simply that they do not know basic pulling mechanics and the standard pulling position
There are certain aspects of the main barbell lifts that exist no matter what you do, when the weight is relatively heavy for the lifter.
Your hip position in the deadlift is one of those things. I don't care what you think you can do, or what you think would be better for x, y or z; when the weight is heavy (something you can do for 1-5 reps, let's say) you CAN'T keep the hips artificially low.
It's funny that people still seem to present anti barbell posts as edgy and "unpopular opinion, but..." when that view has become the mainstream or even dominant view among the physique oriented community.
90% good technique with 100% aggressive effort gets you further than 100% good technique with 70% effort.
Saying that every man should strive to achieve The Standards 1.0 isn't derailed by the fact that people come in different sizes and strength potentials. It's a general statement that is generally true in the same way as saying every man should strive to graduate high school. You can find rare exceptions of cognitive deficiency, but we don't order society or our expectations around those exceptions.
We don't expect every man to achieve a 600 deadlift or 500 squat just like we don't expect everyone to get a PhD in physics. Not everyone has the capacity or interest level to sacrifice what it takes to do that.
But 135/225/315/405 is available to the vast overwhelming majority of men who put in the effort, and usually within a year or two if they do it right.
I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen people here and elsewhere say things like, “I ran starting strength for a couple years so I know what I’m talking about - it’s a bad program that will get you hurt/not make you aesthetic” or whatever, without realizing how profoundly they are telling on their own ignorance with that sole comment. Yet they have supreme confidence that they do in fact, know exactly what they’re talking about and should therefore be listened to.
For those not familiar, the length of the starting strength program varies person to person, but it typically lasts somewhere in the range of 3 to 5 months, maybe 6. Can be a little shorter for some and can last a little longer for others but if you’ve been doing it fora year or two l, it means you don’t actually know what you’re doing and most likely never even read the book to begin with, but just did a shortcut Internet version of it.
The program is open, ended and that it doesn’t end after a specific length of time like most programs, but after you have shown that you can no longer physiologically adapt quickly enough to continue it. This requires you to actually read about how to determine when that occurs and act accordingly, but since most people just do a simplified Internet version of the program, they never learned this, and yet are somehow still supremely confident that they know it inside and out.
They blame the program they never did for the results they didn’t get
This should be the general default position, but is increasingly less common, probably because of the general breakdown of social norms and everyone wearing headphones.
There are pieces of equipment that are difficult to work in with someone, especially if they are a significantly different height and/or different strength level - so it’s not a 100% absolute rule - but the general guideline is that when it’s at all reasonably possible, you work in with someone if asked and that someone asking to work in is a totally reasonable thing to do.
It’s a shared space where no one owns anything and everyone pays the same for access - and the only way to make that work is to treat it as such. It’s not someone else’s responsibility to, “Find something else that works the same body part” - number one for basic fairness/shared space reasons and number two because not everybody trains like a bodybuilder where “working the same body part” can be equivalently done with something else. Some people are specifically training and tracking objective progress over time on a specific movement rather than subjective working of a muscle group, and the fact that someone happened to get there 30 seconds earlier doesn’t entitle them to exclusive use for the next 20 or 30 minutes in a situation where it’s reasonable to share.
When I started going to the gym in the age of the dinosaurs over 25 years ago, this was pretty normal and widely understood. It has now become so rare as to be somewhat controversial to even say. And we are all the worse off for it.
Of the thousands of people I’ve instructed in barbell technique, I’d estimate that only 2 to 3% were doing it right such that I didn’t have to correct anything, or only the most minor little things. Another 5-7% were close enough that while we made some adjustments, they were close enough beforehand that their training would’ve basically still been fine even before we worked on anything. The other 90+ percent needed significant overhauls to their technique to reap the benefits of the program anywhere close to completely.
It has also been the case that none of the people who were very confident their form was already good were in either that 2 to 3% or even the 5 to 7% category - every single one of those was in the 90+ percent who needed a major overhaul
