Mark Rippetoe - Mean Ol Mr. Gravity: Conversations on Strength Training

The Aasgaard Company
Wichita Falls

2009 The Aasgaard Company

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in a form by means, electronic, mechanical, photocopied, recorded, or otherwise without prior written consent of the publisher. The author and publisher disclaim any responsibility for any adverse effects or consequences from the misapplication or injudicious use of the information presented in this text.

Electronic edition, Kindle version 1, 2012

Print edition, ISBN-13: 978-0-9825227-1-4, ISBN-10: 0-9825227-1-1

The Aasgaard Company
3118 Buchanan St
Wichita Falls TX 76308

The older I get, the more I realize how fortunate I was to have made the acquaintance of Bill Starr when I was a young lifter. He taught me how to train, how to coach, and how to compete. He also taught me how to party, how to tell a story, and he encouraged me to write and thought it was fine that I stayed self-employed. He was a bit "wilder" at times than I am prone to be, but he was a good counterbalance to my precious mother Judy Rippetoe, who was a perfect angel every day of her life, who never had a cross word for or about anyone (except Nikita Khrushchev), who raised me to be a very good boy, and whom I miss very much. This book is dedicated to them.

The Kindle edition has been reformatted from the printed book to include greater organization of content into lists. Errors have been preserved to retain the flavor of the original internet posts and because many times part of the humor is carried with those typos and other mistakes. Links to resources have been added so that supplementary content is easily accessible. Since these resources may be moved or removed, some dead ends may appear over time. Please of any that you encounter so they may be updated where possible.

Please note that since Mean Ol' Mr. Gravity was published before the 3rd edition of Starting Strength, specific page references in this text will not correspond directly.

Back in 1985 when Bill Starr was staying with me for a while out at my little rent house on the Bondurant in Wichita County, I brought home a video one night. He was already asleep in the middle bedroom when I got there, so I cooked a batch of stuff to eat and put the tape in. It was "Hey Vern! It's My Family Album" starring the most underappreciated American comic actor in modern history, Jim Varney. We were watching a lot of movies and at the time the concept of movie rental was new enough that we had burned through most of the interesting stuff at the store in front of the gym. This one looked interesting, but I had no idea what I was about to see. The first part of the tape was a collection of his commercials, which at the time composed most of his work (this predates the Ernest Goes To movies). The rest of the tape was a series of sketch comedy put together by the agency he worked for, Carden and Cherry. All of it is brilliant, the work of a master character actor with an extraordinary talent for voice control, comic timing, and facial expression.

One of the sketches remains to this day the funniest short piece I have ever seen, featuring Varney as Uncle Lloyd Worrell, the Meanest Man in the World. I was on the couch watching it after I ate supper, and got to laughing so hard that I fell off the couch onto the floor. This woke Bill up, and he walked out of the bedroom, blinking in the light of the kitchen, wondering what the hell was going on. All I could do was point at the screen. He said he'd just watch it tomorrow, which he did after I left for the gym the next day. He called me from the couch, laughing his ass off, and to this day the lines from this sketch remain an inside joke amongst us and our friends that have enjoyed it for the past 25 years. It is not nearly popular enough to suit me, so I've included glimpses of it in this book.

It was about this time that I came into a position of actual responsibility for other peoples' training, when I bought Anderson's Gym from David Anderson and changed the name to Wichita Falls Athletic Club. I made this rather sudden transition from trainee to gym owner in 1984, on April 1 as a matter of actual fact. Going from asking for help to providing it for a fee should be a humbling experience for any psychologically normal person that realizes his limitations. Although I had worked in a couple of clubs off and on since 1978, there is just something different about being The Gym Owner. I proceeded rather carefully, sticking to what I knew while trying some things out that I felt might be helpful, keeping the stuff that worked and eventually accumulating what might be termed a "method" for dealing with new members that was quite a bit different from the things we'd all been told in the magazines.

I began to read as much technical material about physiology and exercise as I could find, prepared to understand it by a fairly broad science education in geology and biology. I found that the method I was developing was different than what I was reading as the accepted practices of those with advanced degrees in Biomechanics, Exercise Physiology, Kinesiology, Physical Therapy, and Physical Education. It took many years to purge myself of the doubt I had about what I was doing with my members, the result of my respect for the advanced degrees, published research, and academic gravitas that forms the basis of the conventional wisdom to this day. For instance, in contrast to the entrenched idea that it was only possible to gain 7-10 lbs. of muscle a year, I found that my members could easily gain 30 lbs. of lean bodyweight in 6-8 months with correct diet and adherence to my program of regularly increasing work set weights on the basic barbell exercises.

Some gained much more than that in a year. Virtually every male that even tried to eat correctly gained 5 lbs. the first week. This was, of course, impossible according to both the magazines and the textbooks. I stopped reading the magazines many years ago, and I learned to take what I read in the textbooks and journals with a big tablespoonful of salt.

The process of learning about my little corner of applied physiology continues to this day, as I teach our barbell training seminars and answer questions for people about their training problems posted on the web. This book is essentially a compilation of examples of the interactive process of my helping and learning at the same time. As anyone who has coached can attest, the explaining of a movement pattern to someone who has never done it teaches something about it to the coach as well. Questions about training work the same way, in that every time I have to process even familiar concepts into an explanation specific to a personal question, that synthesis teaches me.

In July of 2007 Phil Hammarberg began hosting my Q&A board on his Strengthmill.net site [Note: Transferred to and now hosted on StartingStrength.com]. The readership has grown steadily over the past 2 years, and as of tonight the board has accumulated over 3200 threads and almost 19,000 posts. This representing a tremendous amount of information and a pretty decent investment of my time, I decided to edit the material into a book. Now, this may seem incredibly stupid, since the information is obviously already available free on the web, and will continue to be. But the editing is the key here. With the help of my buddy David Patrick, who initially did the grunt work of pulling all this text off the website, I have ingeniously removed all the posts that primarily pertain to the many videos that are posted for me to critique, which you'll have to admit would be pretty damned useless in this format. The posts have been much further edited for redundancy, stupidity, and uselessness, and in certain instances my replies have been updated, cleaned, revised, corrected, or otherwise improved. But pretty much, this is the good stuff from the entire corpus of the board, arranged in a helpful, interesting way into what we believe to be the first book of its type - a printed volume compiled from internet posts. My hope is that you will find it interesting even if you have been reading the board for a while, and that the organization will provide the added value that makes it worth the money you've spent over and above the computer electricity.