I Want Basic Fitness, not a Special Reinforced Toilet Seat

I mentioned my hopes of adding a very short strength-exercise routine to my life, and a commenter directed me to a guy named Mark Rippetoe, who runs an outfit called Starting Strength. It looks like this man trains competitive lifters as well as people who just want to be strong and resistant to injury.

I don’t plan to make major changes to my life, because those tend not to be permanent, but today I looked Rippetoe up out of curiosity. I don’t think he’s for me.

While I was looking into strength exercises yesterday, I saw that deadlifts were recommended by many sources. To do a deadlift, you lift a barbell from the floor, drag it up your legs until your back is perpendicular to the floor, and lock it in place. This is my own description, which may be flawed.

To me, this is a scary exercise. Anything that involves putting a lot of strain on my back while it’s in a horizontal orientation could cause something in the lumbar region to pop and be ruined forever.

Bruce Lee crippled himself lifting with his lower back. He put a 135-pound bar on his shoulders, bent over, and then straightened up. Something popped, and he spent the next 6 months in bed. He was in pain for the rest of his life.

The pathetic thing is that Lee was doing something he didn’t need to do. He weighed around 135 pounds, just like the bar, so he was lifting a lot of weight for his size. He was trying to build freak strength in a part of his body that didn’t need to be freakishly strong in order for him to make martial arts movies.

He wasn’t a professional martial artist. He never fought in a competition because he knew a loss would kill his reputation. He was a martial arts teacher and an actor who used martial arts in films. Steven Seagal made a lot of money in martial arts movies, and I’m not sure he was even able to squeeze through a gym door. Betty White could have made martial arts movies. She could have beaten up Chuck Norris, Seagal, Jason Statham, and Iron Man.

Movies aren’t real.

My back is strong and straight. I really try to resist lifting anything that could change that, even when other people are watching and I feel the nonsensical and unrealistic male urge to try to look strong.

I was checking out Rippetoe videos today when I saw him talking about the trapezius bar, which is a frame that replaces a barbell for some exercises. You stand inside it, and you grab two handles that run from back to front outside your feet.

A trap bar is supposed to make deadlifts safer because it allows you to do a very similar motion without cantilevering your back as much. All sorts of gurus recommend it. The Army’s experts decided to recommend it for soldiers, and Rippetoe made his video because this didn’t sit well with him.

He said the trap bar was less safe than a barbell, which is the opposite of what just about everyone else says. He says that during a deadlift, the pressure against the legs keeps a barbell from swinging around. He said the swinging was not a big deal with a 135-pound bar, but it could be dangerous at 400.

He kind of lost me there as a potential follower. When am I ever going to lift 400 pounds?

If I ever deadlifted even 200 pounds, I would be a very happy and surprised old man.

I would think that a good strategy would be to use the safer trap bar to build up to big weights and then switch to a barbell when my body was ready for it, but I’m just guessing. It seems like it would be easy to ruin my back by bending over a barbell long before I got to the weight level where the swinging of a trap bar could hurt me.

Today I read that a trap bar is much better for developing “explosive” strength, which is supposedly something you need for sudden everyday movements requiring substantial force. Things like catching yourself when you start to fall. That sounds like a good kind of strength to have.

I also saw him talk to a competitive powerlifter who said he was 6’4″ tall and weighed 215. Rippetoe told him he needed to weigh over 300 pounds, and the way to get there was to overeat.

Rippetoe is an older guy. Looks like he might be 70. He is clearly and indisputably obese. He looks unhealthy. I don’t think he’ll set a longevity record.

He told the young guy that if he stuffed himself with food, he would only put on muscle. He had another obese guy in the studio with him, and they were pushing the idea that the young guy would never become overweight by following Rippetoe’s plan.

Two obese guys, giving that advice on camera.

I did not find it credible.

Yesterday I saw a guy named Mike Burch on Youtube. He was 65 when he made a video. It showed him bench-pressing 405 pounds in a flannel shirt with no trick gym clothing. He said he weighed 165 pounds.

I guess my standards are low, but I thought that was pretty good. I would be quite satisfied with that. Half of that would be pretty good.

I did some rooting around on the web yesterday, and I learned that my notions of what a good bench press was were inflated. I thought all sorts of people were lifting 300 pounds, but it turns out anything over maybe 220 is very good, and not many men are legitimately benching a 300-pound bar with no funny shirts, drugs, or short strokes.

Men lie a lot about what they lift, of course. Sonny Barger, the despicable Hells Angels leader, claimed he benched 500 pounds. Never happened. Richard Marcinko led SEAL Team Six, and he claimed they all benched 500 pounds. Never happened. Lyle Alzado was one of the strongest men in the NFL, he was huge, he was as full of roids as a Mexican drugstore, and regardless of his impressive claims, when he had to lift on camera, he only made it to 400.

A lot of guys lift a bar off the supports, lower it three inches, push it back up and say they benched 350 or 400 or whatever. If it didn’t touch your chest, you didn’t bench it.

Yesterday I wrote about Volodimir Shmondenko, the Ukrainian lifter who weight about 175 pounds and benches 330. Again, I consider this acceptable. Right now I’m more like 330 with the decimal point moved one space to the left.

Both Burch and Shmondenko compete effectively, so I don’t know if Rippetoe’s advice makes any sense at all. Maybe it does, though. He’s a professional, after all.

If you deliberately make yourself 100 pounds overweight, you have some things to look forward to.

1. Insulin resistance
2. High blood pressure
3. Arthritis, especially in the knees
4. Exacerbated prostate enlargement
5. Blocked arteries
6. Diabetes
7. Impotence
8. Dementia
9. Reduced testosterone
10. Increased estrogen
11. Breasts

There are others.

My impression is that Rippetoe is looking to give people optimal, and I mean optimal, strength at any cost, and he seems pretty excited about competition, which is a bad mindset for a person who trains old ladies and dentists. I would think it would be hard to prevent advice for competitors from leaking into his advice for normal people who would like to live to be older than 60.

I would like to do very little work, take as little risk as possible, and get pretty decent results in comparison to the effort I put in. That would be great.

If there is one thing I know about exercise, it’s that the topic leads to constant feuds. Gym people are more obnoxious than the rest of us, and every trainer thinks the other trainers are wrong. Some people think Rippetoe is a genius. Others insiste he’s a moron. I don’t expect to be certain of the truth about his methods during this lifetime.