Mark Rippetoe Interview
August 14th, 2008
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by Jerry Hill · Filed Under: Audio Interview · Barbell Strength · Coaching Tip · Training · crossfit in alexandria
I did an audio interview with Rip a few months back and finally transcribed it here it is;
Mark Rippetoe Interview
If your athlete’s life depended on getting in top shape in record time, what would be the most important thing you would do?
Jerry Hill: Hey, this is Jerry Hill from CrossFit Oldtown in Alexandria, VA, and I’m here with Mark Rippetoe from Wichita Falls Athletic Club. Mark, why don’t you give us a quick bio, and we’ll get rolling with some good content here.
Mark Rippetoe: Well, I am the author of a couple of books that have been pretty well received on the topic of barbell training, and that’s about all I claim to know anything about.
Jerry: [laughs]
Mark: I’ve got a degree in petroleum geology. If anybody is interested in my opinion on their prospect, I’d be glad to offer that, free of charge, but other than that, I’ve just been a gym owner for a very long time, and have dealt with a whole bunch of people with a whole bunch of problems, and taken it upon myself to figure out ways to solve them. Then I just wrote all that shit down, and that’s where we are.
Jerry: Yeah. Two great books, I’ve got them both. Starting Strength and Practical Programming.
Mark: Strong Enough ? now we’re real proud of that, that’s our compilation of our CrossFit Journal articles over the course of about a year and a half, and I’ve talked to my friend Bill Star about that, and Bill thinks that’s my better writing. He liked that book better than the other two, because it’s a little bit more, oh, personal, I suppose. There are anecdotes in it; it has a little different flavor than the other two textbooks.
Jerry: Well, with the books you’ve wrote and your experience of being in the gym every day training people your writing style comes right out and your experience comes right out where there’s a lot of gurus out there who write quite a bit, but haven’t been in the trenches. So that’s why I wanted to have you on the call and get your input. Here in Alexandria, Virginia we’ve got a lot of people deploying to Afghanistan and Iraq some might not be in top shape right now, and they see that date coming up, and they want to get in top shape. So I’m wondering if your athlete’s life depended on getting in top shape in record time, what would be the most important one or two things you would do.
Mark: Well, excuse my… [coughs] I’ve got this deadly virus that everybody seems to have, so my voice is kind of screwed up, so I apologize in advance. [coughs] I’m sorry. I probably would have to say that it has been my experience that an immediate increase in strength makes more difference to a person’s physical ability than any other single improvement they can make, and it is also, if it is done correctly, one of the things that happens most quickly, when a correctly designed program is undertaken. A strength increase enables everything else to function more efficiently.
If I was speaking specifically to someone being deployed, and their strength was not good, I would say that a three?month strength program focused primarily on increasing absolute strength, with the five basic barbell exercises, would make more difference in a shorter period of time than anything else they could do.
Jerry: So would you stick with some of the big exercises that you emphasize ? the strict press, the deadlift, the back squat, power clean?
Mark: That’s all I think you need to do. Especially in a situation like you’re describing ? a person that’s trying to obtain usable functional strength for a specific task that they intend to pursue, not a bodybuilder that’s interested in his medial bicep. For useful strength, the major barbell exercises have proven themselves over the decades to be the most functional, most useful ways to gain strength.
Jerry: So, when the proverbial shit hits the fan, it’s good to have a reserve of strength.
Mark: If I were in a situation where shit could hit the fan, I’d want to be strong enough to get done whatever needed to be done. I might have to load the truck, might have to pick up my buddy, I might have to carry my 85?pound kit a little further than I had first intended, I might have to push somebody off of me, might have to win… [chuckles] …an important contest of physical strength… If you are dependent on your body for your job, then your body will always function better in that job if it’s strong. Strength is an easily affected parameter ? it’s easily improved, it’s not complicated, it’s not difficult, it responds quickly to a linear increase program ? and that is by far… my choice in things to start working on if something needs work.
Jerry: Would this program be the classic SS three days a week with barbells, maintain some kind of CrossFit conditioning on other days, or would you throw some of those CrossFit circuits in at the end of your strength work? Could you give a quick program example of say someone with a fitness background in the military, with that time crunch in mind?
Mark: Well, let’s say we have three months. The person comes to me in shape. The first question that would have to be answered is, if a person is already in shape, and we put them on a strength program by itself, how much is the rest of their conditioning going to be trained in that three months? The answer is, not really very much, because they’re not going sedentary. They’re just changing their emphasis from metcon to strength training. You don’t lose all of your metcon, because metcon is a relatively persistent adaptation.
The question would then become, do we need to do metcon while we’re building strength for this three?month period of time? The answer is, maybe not.
Jerry: Hmm.
Mark: Now if it is decided that you do in fact want to do some metcon while you’re doing it, we have to prioritize, because strength training is going to suffer in terms of the amount of time spent on it, if you’re trying to do three metcon workouts and three strength training workouts per week. You just can’t get recovered from all that. If it was decided that we needed to continue some metcon, what I’d like to do on a novice program for this sort of thing is I would put people on three strength training workout a week, and then one brief metcon workout. So, a four?day. Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and then a Saturday metcon works fine. Gives them Sunday to recover and then back to the bar on Monday.
For a three?month period of time, it’s not conceivable to me that it would be necessary to go to two metcon workouts. Because, again, you’re positing to me a situation in which a person has three months to radically increase their strength. If that is the case, then there must be a good reason to need to do so. Depending on how good the reason is, the optimum situation is strength training by itself. Slightly less than optimum with that would be time spent doing metcon in addition to this.
Now, that’s for the first three months. Say a person has exhausted the potential of our novice program to put 10 pounds on the bar and squat it for three sets of five, ten pounds a bar more every workout. Say a person has plateaued that at the end of, say, three or four months, and desires to get a little bit more complicated in the programming, then that would be the time to go back to more metcon. Because all of those easy initial strength increases have been made, and then it would be more appropriate to get more diverse in training. But in the situation where we want to radically increase strength quickly over a short period of time; attention should strictly be paid to that type of training.
Jerry: That’s great, Rip. Sometimes people with a time crunch want to cram it all in ? they want to run, want to lift, want to do metcon, they want to do a little bit of everything. I could tell you from personal experience when I was in the Marine Corps on my first med float, six months on ship, we didn’t have much to do on ship besides lift, eat, and sleep. Man, did I get strong.
Mark: Ideal situation. I’ll bet you that you realized after you had done that how valuable that strength base was to you when you later came to more metabolic conditioning stuff.
Jerry: Yes, yes absolutely.
Mark: It’s the universal experience of everybody that coaches these athletes that people that come into CrossFit stronger do better at metcon, than people who come into CrossFit from an endurance background.
Jerry: Yes.
Mark: They just… they’re more powerful to begin with, because they can produce greater amounts of force, and it’s not as big a job to channel that force production into a rate of force production, in terms of generation of power over a certain period of time, than it is to deal with someone who can’t produce enough force to begin with. That’s certainly been my experience and that of a lot of the coaches around the country that I talk to that are familiar with this.
Jerry: Awesome. Well, I appreciate your input on this, Rip. Obviously there are a lot of other things that we could talk about, but I want to keep it at one quick hard?hitting tip, so I’m going to close. Thanks.
You can find all three of Mark Rippetoe’s books; Starting Strength, Practical Programming, and Strong Enough? here; http://www.aasgaardco.com/
Rip also has a Basic Barbell Certification, details can be found at http://www.crossfit.com/
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