I recommend against a wooden squat rack, for much the same reason that I recommend against a wooden car.
I know that I’m an animal that displays bilateral symmetry. I understand that one side should be the mirror of the other, and that human perceptions of beauty are intimately associated with symmetry. For example, I am very handsome.
If you are so inflamed that you can’t train, and ibuprofen and fish oil help with inflammation, maybe you’d better take the ibuprofen and fish oil.
Your muscles cannot get “longer” without some rather radical orthopedic surgery.
Your ideal body weight as an ectomorph at 6? 0" will be 214.378 lbs. There. Happy? And if you lose or gain a pound, I will have you killed. It is important to be ideal.
The deadlift also serves as a way to train the mind to do things that are hard.
The Olympic Snatch is gymnastics with a bar.
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.
I can teach idiots to squat in ten minutes.
There is simply no other exercise, and certainly no machine, that produces the level ofmuscular stimulation and growththan the correctly performed full squat.
History tells us what works in the gym, and everything else walks down the road with a carrot in its ass.
Opinions are like phasers – everybody ought to have one.
I recommend that you change colleges.
Start training yourself. You don’t have to have been an elite lifter to be a good coach – I sure as hell wasn’t. But you have to at least have been under the bar enough to know why wedon’t look up at the bleeding ceiling when we squat!
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.
There is no easy way to do a deadlift – not involving actually picking up the bar – which explains their lack of popularity in gyms around the world.
Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not; it is the first lesson that ought to be learned; and however early a man’s training begins, it is probably the last lesson that he learns thoroughly.” Thomas H. Huxley.
People seem to have acquired the idea that they have the inalienable right to stroll through life without either having sweated, picked up anything heavy, worked hard, or eaten less than they wanted at every meal. This approach is, of course, wrong. And it has resulted in a lot of expensive, unattractive, and entirely preventable problems amongst people who seem puzzled about why things aren’t going well.
Remember: lifting more weight is not always the same thing as getting stronger.
If your gym makes a lot of money selling gloves, you have another reason to look for a different gym. And if you insist on using them, make sure they match your purse.
If it’s too heavy to squat below parallel, it’s too heavy to have on your back.