Strength training is not bodybuilding, where the primary consideration is the individual muscle bellies and how to train them for appearance and aesthetics. Strength training improves aesthetics and the size of muscle bellies, but this happens as a side effect, not as the primary goal. The purpose of strength training is the increase in the ability of the whole body to produce force against an external resistance. This requires the use of as much muscle mass as possible – since more muscle mass produces more force than less muscle mass – operating all the skeletal levers over the longest effective range of motion, and quantitatively assessed by the amount of weight lifted.

The tool that satisfies these criteria is the barbell, which allows for incremental increases in weight over the entire spectrum of human ability, from small increases at very light weights to 900-pound deadlifts. No other equipment provides the flexibility to tailor training loads to the individual trainee's capacity – which is absolutely necessary for long-term progress in strength. Because if the loads cannot be adjusted to the trainee's current capacity and subsequent ability to adapt to heavier loads, strength cannot be increased for any significant length of time.

Strength training is a better use of time than anything else you can do in the gym. Strength training improves your endurance, because if you are stronger, every submaximal contraction, like running, or walking, or working in the yard, uses less of your force production capacity and is therefore less taxing. Strength training makes muscles grow because that's the way muscles get stronger, and more muscle mass creates a healthier body. Since most interactions with your environment are submaximal, strength training makes all interactions with your environment more submaximal, and therefore more efficient. And to top it off, a stronger person looks better than a weaker person, since millions of years of evolution and cultural development have programmed us to recognize this.

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The key to the program is the use of normal human movement patterns that can be incrementally loaded. These are movements to which the human musculoskeletal system has been adapted over the millions of years of evolution as a bipedal animal. Horses can be trained for strength, but their movement patterns are restricted to quadrupedal locomotion. Humans can produce force in a variety of movements that can be incrementally loaded – which leaves out running. Squatting down and standing back up, picking something up off the floor, pushing something overhead, pulling something toward you, pushing something away from you, and throwing something up and catching it are the basic loaded movements.

Barbells

The barbell exercises that correspond to these movements are the squat, the deadlift, the press, the chinup and the barbell row, the bench press, and the power clean and power snatch. They all have one thing in common, as does the majority of human movement: they are performed in a position of balance. We include the bench because of its beneficial effect on the press and general upper-body strength, and the chin because it ties together several aspects of upper-body strength.

They also have another thing in common: they work the muscle mass from the proximal to the distal – from the center of the body to the extremities, the feet and hands. This concept was first illustrated by Bill Starr in his famous strength text The Strongest Shall Survive, with a graphic that illustrated a human body embedded in concentric circles radiating out from the body's center of mass.

Note that the size and mass of the muscles decreases the further from the center of mass – which is really counterintuitive to the way most people think about human movement. The hands and the feet are typically the focus of an athlete's attention, and certainly the attention of most coaches. The reality is that human movement starts in the large muscle mass around the spine, and “radiates” toward the hands and feet. The feet react against the ground, and the hands transmit the intermediately generated force to the part of the environment you're applying force to.

We run and throw with all the musculoskeletal components that start at the spine and finally express motion at the hands and feet, while controlling our position in space against gravity. The barbell movements strengthen all the components of the kinetic chain that are crucial to the movements, while requiring the control of the body through unbalanced portions of the movement. The farther from the center of the body a muscle group is, the less critical it is for generating the force of the movement, the less affected the muscle group is by the basic barbell exercise, while the more important it may be for balance and coordinated motion. Calves and forearms are both worked very hard in a deadlift, even though you may not be aware of their contribution to the movement, but that doesn't mean they need special assistance exercises before your workout “feels” complete.

The fact that your entire workout consists of exercises that target individual muscle groups means that you do not really understand how the body functions in its physical environment, and how to better prepare it to do so – if “function” is even the reason you're training. This is the primary flaw in programs that target individual muscle groups: muscle groups do not function individually. Quadriceps, hamstrings, glutes, and calves work together, at the same time, and produce movement in the ankles, knees, and hips simultaneously. The only way to isolate the quads is to use a machine that generates a completely artificial movement pattern not found in normal human activity. And since strength is displayed in normal human movements, it cannot be effectively trained outside of those movements.

Again, we are not bodybuilders, and we do not care about the appearance of individual muscle groups. Your appearance is largely determined by your skeletal proportions, which are untrainable. I hate it as bad as you do, but aesthetics and appearance are largely genetic. Buddy Hackett would not have been a successful contest bodybuilder. But if aesthetics are your primary concern, you will find that the best improvements in your physique are the result of getting your squat, bench press, deadlift, and press stronger, because those exercises have the greatest impact on all of your muscle mass, and therefore cause the majority of the possible change in the appearance of your body.

The Squat

The squat is the most important barbell exercise for most people because it has the longest range of motion under load, and incorporates a stretch-reflex rebound at the bottom, the hardest part of the lift. At sufficiently heavy weights, it profoundly affects all the muscle mass in the body systemically, all at the same time, since nothing is relaxed under a heavy squat. And the biggest muscles in the body – the middle of Starr's diagram – are the primary movers of the load in the squat. 

This is critically important: systemic stress affecting the whole body produces profound changes in the anabolic environment that are similar to the effects of anabolic steroids. Isolation exercises cannot produce this effect, and that is why small bodybuilders who only use bodypart-based programs are essentially forced to use steroids if they want to get bigger and stronger. In other words, heavy squats make your arms bigger than dumbbell curls, even though they do not isolate the biceps.

The Deadlift

An impressive male physique is quite visible in clothes (purple bathing suits are not necessary). The hallmarks are big traps, big forearms, wide lats, deep hips, and thighs that fill the pant-legs. This is the most direct result of a big deadlift, which actually makes more difference in the appearance of your physique than even the squat. Unless there is a serious problem with grip strength or weird anthropometry, deadlifts are almost always trained with heavier weight than the squat, because both novice and intermediate lifters can pull more than they can squat for several years of training. I have started women who could not squat their own unloaded bodyweight below parallel, but could deadlift 135 on Day One.

Squats prepare the ground for the deadlift, and vice versa. The deadlift is correctly performed by thinking about pushing the floor with the feet – pushing the bar away from the floor. The deadlift is a hip and knee extension from an advantageous position of leverage, and this is what permits such heavy weights to be trained. The traps, spinal erectors, hip extensors, and the grip are all involved in a heavy deadlift, and at limit weights there are no uncontracted muscles in the human body.

A big deadlifter has big abs, obliques, and erectors. If he doesn't, he's not a big deadlifter. This muscle mass is necessary to stabilize the spine, and an unstable spine does not permit a big deadlift. If you start with light weights as a novice and progress normally to over 600, your waist size will have grown, because it has to. It's not fat – it's very important muscle mass required for the lift. It grows as the weight goes up. Don't fight the process, and don't think that a bunch of situps will keep your “abs” “razor-sharp.” Razor abs are for other men to look at, because women don't care about silly shit like this, which should give you pause.

The Press

Presses are hard, and that's why most people won't do them. They appear to be an upper-body lift, and while its true that they are a shoulder exercise, they are quite thoroughly beating the hell out of everything between the floor and your hands. In fact, the press benefits from the belt every bit as much as the squat and deadlift, since spinal stability is absolutely necessary for force transfer between the hips and the shoulders. If part of that kinetic chain loosens, force transfer breaks down and the bar stops moving. 

The abs are the main stabilizers of the spine in the press, since the load is anterior to the spine and the abs are the anterior muscle mass of the trunk musculature. A belt is essential for heavy presses, while situps are not just optional, but completely unnecessary and perhaps counterproductive if they interfere with recovery. The function of the abdominal muscle mass is to provide isometric tension against the embedded spinal anatomy so that it doesn't move under a load – and thus lose its position during a force-transfer event, like a standing barbell press. If you are squatting heavy, deadlifting heavy, and pressing heavy, your abs are being worked, and situps are an unnecessary vanity project.

The traps are the main stabilizers of the bar overhead at lockout – they may be considered the “hips” of the upper body in a press. The traps originate from T12 to the base of the skull, and insert on the scapulas. They support and protect the shoulders when any weight is applied to them, from above or below. They are seldom regarded as an important part of the press – and for that matter the jerk and the snatch – but their contribution to a heavy press lockout had best not be disregarded.

Bench Press

If you think of the bench press as a simple upper body exercise for the pecs, you will never bench heavy weights. If you want to do sets of 10 with 185, go ahead, but heavy bench presses are braced between your shoulders on the bench and your feet on the floor, with all the muscle mass between this two points in hard isometric contraction. The back is arched, the hips are in extension, the knees are extending against the floor with feet planted and braced, and all this muscle mass is in active contraction to control the position on the surface of the bench. Yes, the shoulders and arms move the bar, but at heavy weights the rest of the body is the foundation of this movement.

For example, if your feet lose contact with the floor during the rep, the bar comes back down – I know this from experience. Even the bench press is a total-body movement at heavy weights, using all the muscle mass between the bench and the feet as a support structure. And it allows more weight to be lifted than the press, thus strengthening the upper body more effectively.

The Rest

The power clean and the power snatch are important parts of the program, added after the previous exercises have been mastered. They are more complicated movement patterns because they must be executed explosively and correctly, and their range of motion is longer than the other lifts, with more room for errors to occur. And they allow you to practice holding a correct position while executing a complex movement quickly. Barbell rows are useful for more advanced trainees, for the reasons already discussed about the barbell exercises. They do not replace cleans and snatches, but they are useful when added to the rest of the program. Chins are good for arms and lats, even though we don't really care about arms and lats as such. If you can't do them when you start training, get your deadlift up over 400 and an amazing thing will happen. A man ought to be able to chin himself 10 times, after all, and the fact that deadlifts drive this adaptation tells you more about deadlifts than it does chins.

The View From 50,000 Feet

Your body is not a disparate collection of parts. It is an integrated system that has evolved over hundreds of millions of years, and it has adapted over that time to the environment it occupies – as has every other animal on earth. No component of your body can be considered in isolation from the other structures associated with it. Strength training must be regarded as a process of increasing the force production capacity of the body as it applies to the external environment, which involves the whole damn thing, not just the “bis and tris” and the “quads.” The skeletal levers are an integrated system of bones operated by muscles, all working at the same time. It is not difficult to understand that if their normal function is integrated, training them for the best effect must be integrated as well, and that requires the loading of basic human movement patterns. This is barbell training.

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