I’m concerned that some of you might be under the impression that the Starting Strength Seminar is only for people who want to coach this method. Nothing could be further from the truth, so I thought I’d take the opportunity to explain why YOU need to come to the seminar.
The SS Seminar is the full presentation of the SS method and is the flagship educational product. You can’t get this much information about barbell training at one time anywhere else. The Starting Strength Seminar started in January of 2010 as a monthly course of barbell training study at gyms around the country, and got trimmed down to every other month during the Covid-19 hoax. Traffic hasn’t fully recovered, so until it does we are now only holding the course in Wichita Falls at WFAC, where the equipment is perfect for the job.
The purpose of the seminar is for every attendee to understand the how and why of doing Starting Strength – both the execution of the lifts and the basis for accumulating a strength adaptation through programming them correctly. It is not primarily designed to certify coaches. The format just makes it convenient for the evaluation of new coaches to happen, but that’s a secondary purpose. The staff is there to ensure that every attendee learns and gets coached on the lifts. You will absolutely not be ignored if you are not signed up for coaching evaluation.
We start at 5:00pm Friday with 3 lectures that end at 9:00. We cover some basic coaching and training material, and we introduce the mechanical analysis of the physical relationship between barbells and humans that determines the most efficient way to move loads within natural human movement patterns. The correct techniques for the barbell exercises are derived from this analysis, which is explained again for each of the lifts on the platform. Incrementally loading these movement patterns increases the ability to produce force in these movements, making any human stronger. It’s so simple it’s almost silly.
Saturday morning, we start with the squat. There is a 2½ hour lecture of squat anatomy and mechanics, that explains in great detail why you should squat the way we teach the lift (yes, it’s a little different). Then we squat, from warmups up to 3 work sets across. After lunch, we have a video-based lecture on the deadlift/pulling the bar off the floor, where we go into great detail on the similarities and differences between the deadlift and the Olympic pulls. This lecture is very important in establishing our reasoning for the Starting Strength Method.
After
the lecture we deadlift, take a break, and then bench press following
the same general format, wrapping up about 8:00. We come back at 8:00
Sunday morning to power clean, using the mechanical analysis we
started with Saturday afternoon. Power cleans take longer because we
teach them in more steps than we used for the other lifts, generally
wrapping up about 11:30. Then we press, which takes us till about
1:00. We break for lunch and come back about 2:00.
Each
lift has it’s own session, and the attendees both coach the lifts and
are coached on them, under the supervision of our experienced staff.
The staff is in turn supervised by Rip, to ensure the accurate
transfer of the model of each lift to all the lifters in attendance.
Sunday afternoon is a rather long discussion of the basis of
programming barbell exercises for an increase in strength, based on
the stress/recovery/adaptation model of physiology. This is the
purpose of your DNA – it allows the organism to adapt to its
environment.
The
result is a detailed familiarity with the basis of strength training,
the ability to analyze the various approaches to training and
exercise, and the information necessary to make your own decisions
about the best way to spend your time in the gym. Since our approach
proceeds a priori,
from a first-principles argument – gravity, force production,
leverage and moment, human physiology, and logic – and not a
posteriori, from
the way Joe Weider trained, you know, Arnold and those guys.
So
if you’re wondering whether you should come to a seminar, you should.
You need to know about training before you waste a bunch of time
doing it wrong. Or rather, you need to stop wasting your time now,
before you waste any more. Even if you have a coach, the ultimate
responsibility for your training is on you,
not the coach. If he’s got you doing a bunch of stupid shit like 5
sets of 10 dumbbell lunges and 3 different arm exercises, you already
know you’re not getting stronger. We will teach you why
you’re not getting stronger, and how to fix the problem.
Most
importantly: even if you want to be a strength coach, coaches must be
lifters first or they cannot be effective coaches. You cannot
effectively coach something you yourself do not understand at the
physical level, and the only way to develop this understanding is to
do it yourself, while striving to attain the highest level of
performance you can. Only by going through this process can you know
what your trainee needs to experience.
Our
premise is that there is an optimal way to get stronger that applies
to all humans regardless of age or sex, that this method is
discoverable, and that we have discovered it. I encourage you to find
out for yourself whether we have. And we have a very
good time at the seminar. You’ll be pleasantly surprised.
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