Solitary and meditative if you want it to be; social and uplifting if you don't.
It's healthy in a variety of ways (including bone density; physical activity; higher BMR and glucose metabolism; improved cardiovascular function). Also being strong is useful surprisingly often.
Unlike many things in life, your progress is almost entirely dependent on your consistency and the effort invested, with the exception of (hopefully) temporary setbacks like injury. Hitting personal records and milestones feels particularly good because you know you've earned it. It's hard! But it's also not so hard that I'm liable to get discouraged.
Lots of people prefer bodybuilding style training, but there's something magic about the barbell for me. Olympic lifts are also a lot of fun, but they're more technical and you need more gear and space.
Also it's much easier to quantify your strength progress (I have a literal spreadsheet), and it feels less vain than focusing on looks (not that it isn't a significant bonus).
Dunno. Feels good. I'm gonna keep at it. Two thumbs up.
For anyone looking to get started I highly recommend the StrongLifts program and the associated app, both free [1].
I neglected strength training for a long time because every time I tried to get started I would feel overwhelmed. Then I tried StrongLifts and loved the fact that it's just 5 exercises, but provides pretty much a full body strength workout.
The guy who developed the program has put a ton of effort into making sure it's detailed and accessible so that pretty much any question you could have is answered.
The StrongLifts program, while still pretty good, is not for absolute beginners. The app and the website has videos and detailed instructions, but that doesn't replace a human coach being able to point out in real time mistakes in your form that you do not even realize. And if you are a beginner, any attempt to do these exercises will invariably contain so many mistakes that they are not worth doing any more.
Just find a human coach. An app is not a substitute.
Counterpoint: there's plenty of coaches out there that teach/reinforce bad form.
> And if you are a beginner, any attempt to do these exercises will invariably contain so many mistakes that they are not worth doing any more.
I totally disagree. StrongLifts (and the Starting Strength book it derives from) starts you with the empty bar. Unless you have a serious medical condition, putting 20kg on your back / chest is unlikely to result in serious bodily harm or damage to musculature. As you slowly and steadily increase the weight on the bar, you discover places where your form needs improvement. At least, that's how it worked for me (I only made it to ~100kg squats though).
Of course it's great if you can find a good coach. But I think an app like StrongLifts is a viable+reasonable substitute for a coach.
It's not that a beginner cannot put 20kg on their back or chest. It's that a beginner does not know how to safely put that 20kg on their back or chest. Especially the chest.
Also some exercises like the deadlift can't be done with an empty bar. Stronglifts would ask you to start with 95lbs which is too much.
To me your comment is toxic and reeks of a sense of superiority and elitism from your own experience. You labelled everyone who can't put 20kg to be someone having a serious medical condition. That's both untrue and disrespectful.
> As you slowly and steadily increase the weight on the bar, you discover places where your form needs improvement.
Please no. The beginner does not discover places where the form needs improvement. The beginner simply fails to lift after increasing the weight. The beginner injures themselves when they thought they could lift but they did not.
The StrongLifts program starting with an empty bar is not right. They should've started with a PVC pipe with the same dimensions as a bar to practice form.
My advice: find a coach and ask him/her to supervise you if you can afford it. If you can't, still find a coach for your first month doing these exercises and then switch to the app.
> Please no. The beginner does not discover places where the form needs improvement. The beginner simply fails to lift after increasing the weight. The beginner injures themselves when they thought they could lift but they did not.
This assertion is contradicted by the hundreds of thousands of people (myself included) who have progressed beyond the beginner stage after starting out with the 20kg bar and without ever requiring the intervention of a human coach.
That said, I would have benefited from one. I had to completely deload and relearn my squat form because I was consistently leaning forward and de-emphasizing my posterior chain (now it's my best lift).
Speaking from experience, it's really pretty difficult to cause yourself an acute injury (i.e., worse than a nasty bruise) with 20kg if your form even resembles the squat, bench, or deadlift.
Granted, 20kg can be a big starting weight for overhead press, and if you're a petite woman you may initially need an alternative to the Olympic barbell even for the others.
Also, deadlifts are kind of tricky: a bare bar on the floor is a deficit deadlift. But a couple of blocks can solve this issue.
Wow, weight lifting is seriously ‘gate-kept’. GP needs to chill, he’s being elitist, and forgetting PTs are super expensive. I followed Stronglifts to 110kg, and just started again after 4 years. It’s fun. It’s easy. You focus on few, simple exercises, so form is easy to do well if you try.
Sorry I don't mean to offend, but this comment rubs me entirely the wrong way. This attitude strikes me as gatekeeping and turning people away from barbell training.
> mistakes in your form that you do not even realize.
form is entirely overrated in lifting. There's little evidence that a particular way of moving in the gym is more or less injurious, even if it looks funny.
Efficiency is another matter, but don't nocebo anyone into not touching barbells in fear of "bad form".
And while coaching is surely useful, it is entirely unnecessary for a beginner who just wants to get started. You can make plenty progress for years without a coach, but it might be faster with one.
> And if you are a beginner, any attempt to do these exercises will invariably contain so many mistakes that they are not worth doing any more.
this is also clearly untrue and way too generic. Even inefficient lifting is healthy.
Youtube is all you need to get started. There's plenty dumb info there, but plenty good also
Yep, the modern view is that injuries happen due to doing too much too soon rather than any technique problems. Either way injuries are super rare if you follow a program with a good build up of stress over time.
> bad form will absolutely lead to at least tiny injuries that you will notice the latest after a few months.
(Citation needed)
> youtubers who want people to fail with free programs and ignoring proper form or even teaching slightly wrong form so that they have to get coaches and see doctors at some point.
(Citation needed)
What is your personal experience with lifting? Have you learned these lessons the hard way, or are these just common myths in the bodyweight fitness community that you've regurgitated without any critical thought in order to justify why you aren't enjoying the benefits of progressive resistance training?
I don't know any bodyweight fitness myths and I do not exercise with my bodyweight alone.
The amount of critical thought I have put into the things I have not elaborated on is insane.
I cannot back up my statements with data. Partially due to laziness, partially because the data does not exist yet and mostly because athletes lie too much.
never start with lifting weights except if you have somewhat athletic hobbies or if you did more than a bit of physical labor.
your joints and tendons can't do their jobs properly yet and you have no feeling for your skeleton and the correct positions of shoulders, hips and spine. your nerves will get pinched and your muscles will push to grow into their genetically intended position while you will bring nerves and tendons in bad positions due to habit.
joint strength, posture, bodyweight core training, 200 bodyweight squats in two sets, 200 pushups in 4 - 6 sets, 2 - 3 min hang from bar or rope (holding it as tight as possible all the time) and be sure you can roll forward and backward and wrestle with a big dog or young and strong child for fun on the ground without hurting yourself. now you can start lifting low weights.
> Unlike many things in life, your progress is almost entirely dependent on your consistency and the effort invested
This really resonates with me. Not powerlifting myself, but I have a strength training routine at the gym with the goal of improving my right knee pain. I have to take things very slow (increase by 1 rep each session, up the weight every ~2 weeks by the smallest possible increment) but looking at my graph this year is very satisfying. This little corner of my life feels a lot more under my control than anything else right now
> This little corner of my life feels a lot more under my control than anything else right now
Yes that's exactly it! It's something of a refuge from whatever other chaos I'm dealing with. I get to feel good about trying and even better about succeeding.
The body is incredibly resilient, and given enough stimulus and patient consistency, it's pretty amazing how strong average people are capable of becoming.
I'm reminded of this quote from Socrates:
"No man has the right to be an amateur in the matter of physical training. It is a shame for a man to grow old without seeking the beauty and strength of which his body is capable."
I am not young anymore, but I'm not old, either, and I've come to the conclusion it's certainly better to start late than to never discover my limits at all.
Powerlifting can be very dangerous. You can really, permanently, mess up your body, specifically your back and neck. What steps do you take to mitigate that risk?
First of all, your statement is absolutely accurate. The weights involved can cause injury and can possibly be dangerous or even fatal when not handled correctly. On the other hand, exactly what is meant by "injury" can vary widely, so we have to be precise in our language.
Acute, serious injuries typically come about due to poor form, carelessness, failure to use safety mechanisms, or irresponsible selection of load. They are the most easily preventable type of injury, and unsurprisingly they are most common among novice lifters.
I address these risks by being deliberate about my form, consistent about my use of safety devices, and reasonable about loads and progression in my training. I also use a belt with proper abdominal bracing technique.
Chronic injuries, on the other hand, are much less preventable and much more common among experienced lifters. I've worked through several, including a soft tissue injury in my hips and a nagging tendonitis in my left elbow. Managing these types of injuries comes down almost entirely to sensible training.
Powerlifting in general is associated with a lower injury rate than other sports[1]. That's not to imply that injuries aren't a reality of powerlifting -- they are -- but more that I do not believe they constitute a good reason to forego the benefits of lifting.
I have been into powerlifting since the 90s. I think it is a convenient myth that form prevents injury. "Form" is just something that everyone thinks they do well and everyone else does poorly.
It is ultimately a trade off. I don't know any long term powerlifter who doesn't have a ton of injury.
Ultimately, it isn't a good idea to load your spine with 400lbs+ over long periods of time. There is no mystery what is going to happen here regardless of "form".
Just a couple of weeks ago I saw a video of a guy who got internally decapitated by the barbell during a high bar squat because he leaned forward and came up onto his toes rather than sitting back.
That's a freak accident, and it's certainly turned out that stuff like deadlift hyperextension is not nearly as dangerous as originally thought, but "form" also means "keeping the bar path under control and in a safe range".
Just because most people have figured that out before they graduate to handling potentially dangerous weights doesn't mean it's not still a critical piece of the safety equation.
> Chronic injuries, on the other hand, are much less preventable and much more common among experienced lifters. I've worked through several, including a soft tissue injury in my hips and a nagging tendonitis in my left elbow.
Honestly -- not really! Several people encouraged me to go to a specialist or PT but I was stubborn so I never got a diagnosis (my GP was clueless).
My self-diagnosis was some kind of muscle and/or tendon strain in my psoas / hip flexors. I squat very wide and deep so it wasn't a huge shock.
Net result was I couldn't squat properly for 4-6 weeks. I've added "prehab" stretches and it's mostly managed now, although if I go too crazy with volume I can feel it flare up.
citation desperately needed. Injury rates for resistance training is very very low. The far higher risk is in not training.
If you start juicing and compete to the absolute max, then maybe? Even then I am skeptical that the data supports this.
I don't know where this weird belief comes from, while the universal recommendation is to do both resistance training and conditioning to reduce a whole bunch of risk factors for health and longevity.
> What steps do you take to mitigate that risk?
Well, we train to make our tissues resilient, of course.
Powerlifting is probably the safest "sport" there is, which is why many of us nerds do it kind of like people do long-distance running. You pretty much control every variable. Obviously if you aren't ego lifting and "know what you are doing" to some degree.
It's dangerous if you get really strong and keeping pushing the envelope, but at "gen pop" levels if your form is good, you use safeties, get a spotter where needed etc you should be fine.
Personally, good coaching. I joined the Starting Strength gym near me and enjoyed having an incredibly high quality coach monitor nearly every lift. Rippetoe has some obnoxious views but the local gyms usually have coaches which are a great fit for the local culture. Our gym was very inclusive.
I just began the 5/3/1 strength training method. I’d like to use gymnastic rings for most of my accessory work to try and get a nice balance of strength and flexibility.
5/3/1 is good, but it's not a novice programme. It's more intermediate. I started on 5/3/1 and did OK but would have got stronger faster at the start of my lifting if I had followed the Novice Linear Progression in Starting Strength.
What? If you start light like Wendler recommends, the program is completely manageable. In fact, most people I know think there is too little training volume at first. I used it for several months in a row a few years ago and it led to great strength gains in every lift.
Solitary and meditative if you want it to be; social and uplifting if you don't.
It's healthy in a variety of ways (including bone density; physical activity; higher BMR and glucose metabolism; improved cardiovascular function). Also being strong is useful surprisingly often.
Unlike many things in life, your progress is almost entirely dependent on your consistency and the effort invested, with the exception of (hopefully) temporary setbacks like injury. Hitting personal records and milestones feels particularly good because you know you've earned it. It's hard! But it's also not so hard that I'm liable to get discouraged.
Lots of people prefer bodybuilding style training, but there's something magic about the barbell for me. Olympic lifts are also a lot of fun, but they're more technical and you need more gear and space.
Also it's much easier to quantify your strength progress (I have a literal spreadsheet), and it feels less vain than focusing on looks (not that it isn't a significant bonus).
Dunno. Feels good. I'm gonna keep at it. Two thumbs up.