Explore Quotes by Mark Rippetoe

For young males that weigh between 150-200 lbs., deadlifts can move up 15-20 lbs. per workout, squats 10-15 lbs., with continued steady progress for 3-4 weeks before slowing down to half that rate. Bench presses, presses, and cleans can move up 5-10 lbs. per workout, with progress on these exercises slowing down to 2.5-5 lbs. per workout after only 2-3 weeks. Young women make progress on the squat and the deadlift at about the same rate, adjusted for bodyweight, but much slower on the press, the bench press, cleans, and assistance exercises.

You guys that worry about eating clean are actually merely bodybuilders looking for justification for your obsession with abs. You cannot get big and strong on 3000 kcal/day. And you cannot eat 7000/day and eat perfectly “clean”.

You can't make people smarter. You can expose them to information, but your responsibility stops there.

There is no substitute for milk. Sorry.

Poor form in the gym is caused by insufficient yelling.

I recommend against a wooden squat rack, for much the same reason that I recommend against a wooden car.

The only legitimate use for a glove is to cover an injury... A desire to prevent callus formation (possibly so as to not snag one's pantyhose) does not constitute a legitimate use. And if you do insist on wearing gloves, make sure they match your purse.

There are few things graven in stone, except that you have to squat or you're a pussy.

Opinions are like phasers - everybody ought to have one.

I can teach idiots to squat in ten minutes.

Any idiot can get on a treadmill and watch TV and then take great pride in the fact they've ‘exercised.

Accumulating injuries are the price we pay for the thrill of not having sat around on our asses.

An adult male weighs at least 200 pounds

If every day of your life you are told by authority figures that the Earth is flat, you will be scared of falling off the edge whether you want to be or not.

Big arms are fun, and if their training doesn't interfere with the rest of the program, wait till everybody's gone, like I do.

Humans are not physically normal in the absence of hard physical effort.

You do not need to do many different exercises to get strong - you need to get strong on a very few important exercises, movements that train the whole body as a system, not as a collection of separate body parts. The problem with the programs advocated by all the national exercise organizations is that they fail to recognize this basic principle: the body best adapts as a whole organism to stress applied to the whole organism. The more stress that can be applied to as much of the body at one time as possible, the more effective and productive the adaptation will be.

There is simply no other exercise, and certainly no machine, that produces the level of central nervous system activity, improved balance and coordination, skeletal loading and bone density enhancement, muscular stimulation and growth, connective tissue stress and strength, psychological demand and toughness, and overall systemic conditioning than the correctly performed full squat.

A weak man is not as happy as that same man would be if he were strong. This reality is offensive to some people who would like the intellectual or spiritual to take precedence. It is instructive to see what happens to these very people as their squat strength goes up.

Physical strength is the most important thing in life. This is true whether we want it to be or not.

Trust me, if you do an honest 20 rep program, at some point Jesus will talk to you. On the last day of the program, he asked if he could work in.