Starting Strength

Back in the old days - I'm talking about the eighties here - we used to head over to Sorrenson's Gym and Swim, a dank cinderblock building off of East 14th Street in Des Moines to move around some iron.  Back in them dark ages weight lifting equipment consisted of a straight York bar, a curling bar, plates, a rack, a bench and a preacher's bench.

I recently decided to get back to basics with respect to strength training and thus picked up Starting Strength - Basic Barbell Training by Mark Rippetoe.  The book is opinionated, sometimes funny and always long-winded.  Basically this book could be boiled down to a pamphlet.  If you're going to go into the free-weight section of the gym you should start light and learn proper technique.  Rippetoe goes to great lengths to describe proper technique, and I mean great lengths - over sixty pages on how to perform a squat.  He could have done it all with three paragraphs and half a dozen photos.

Rippetoe's description on how to build a program is very educational, but his discussion on nutrition is worthless to the cyclist.  Rippetoe isn't concerned with strength to weight ratio, he's only concern is strength, and in his world you put on strength by putting on body mass.  He recommends drinking a gallon of milk a day.

I'd recommend that cyclists interested in building a strength training program skim the text, study the photos and read the chapter on how to put together a comprehensive program.