Starting Strength and only primarily targets the ability to lift heavy objects. On its own it does nothing to improve your cardio fitness and it doesn't directly help with postural problems or injury prevention. And if your
main interest is in gaining muscle and looking better, there are much better routines. In all the gyms I've been to, I've yet to see a big guy who was doing a stripped down strength focused routine... Finally, it also has to be noted that many people do not have good experiences with the big barbell exercises, especially if they have pre-existing issues with their knees/back/shoulders, even if they use good form.
Deadlifts, one of the core exercises of SS, is famous for improving posture when performed correctly.
Lifting weights in general has been shown to improve cardiovascular health; obviously not as much as pure cardiovascular training, but the science is pretty conclusive that it has a positive impact on your heart.
Lifting weights prevents injuries by improving bone density, strengthening connective tissue around troublesome joints (knees, rotator cuff, hips, etc.) and preventing the use of poor posture to accomplish everyday tasks (e.g., instead of hunching your back and stressing your spine to carry a heavy ice chest, you can use the muscles of your upper back). It also adds muscle, which increases your BMR (AKA metabolism).
If your main interest is in gaining muscle and looking better, there may be better routines. But Starting Strength is about one thing ... strength. Pure and simple. It never claims otherwise.
Starting Strength has been used as a fundamental building block by athletic trainers for years; it is often modified to be sport specific, but its fundamental lifts have proven effective over and over. After one has reached strength standards, it is typical (and recommended) to move on to a more advanced strength routine, which may explain why many of the big guys you have met are no longer doing a stripped down strength routine.
Yes, those with serious pre-existing injuries may want to opt for a different program (probably machine based), but that will be true of almost any strength training program. Those with only minor injuries can just start SS at a lower weight and improve more slowly.
> Lifting weights in general has been shown to improve cardiovascular health; obviously not as much as pure cardiovascular training, but the science is pretty conclusive that it has a positive impact on your heart.
It is worth noting that the adaptation of the heart to weight training is different to the adaptation caused by traditional "cardio".
Weight training causes the heart walls to thicken because, during muscular contraction, blood pressure spikes and the heart must beat against that pressure. For heavy compound exercises the spike can be very high (which is why weight training is contraindicated for some trainees).
Cardio training however is aerobic -- the muscles begin to use blood-borne glucose and oxygen. This means that the heart must deliver more blood per stroke and so ultimately, the heart chambers grow larger.
Both adaptations have a positive impact on heart health. For most people doing both strength and some conditioning work is good.
Good info, thanks for sharing. Are you knowledgeable about how much time to spend on cardio and strength training per week for optimal heart health? It's difficult to find reliable information about this subject.
Some claim that elevating one's heart rate (170+ BPM for late 20s individual) for 20-30 minutes three times a week is a good 80/20 solution for aerobic exercise. My current routine is to lift for 50 minutes MWF, jog for 45 minutes Tuesday, interval sprint for 25 minutes Thursday, and take a long hike Saturday. I also bike to work MWF (11 miles round trip) and walk 12k steps a day, so I figure that cancels the need for a third weekly intense aerobic exercise session. Curious to know if you have any heart health improvement suggestions.
If you don't have a particular special goal, a spectrum is good. I think yours sounds OK. Some weights, some jogging, some sprints.
My conditioning requirements basically are to get my breath back within 90 seconds of attempting a 1RM snatch / clean & jerk, so most of my conditioning is timed KB swings.
I love how you cut off the sentence in order to mislead:
> While no epidemiological evidence supports that nicotine alone acts as a carcinogen in the formation of human cancer, research over the last decade has identified nicotine's carcinogenic potential in animal models and cell culture.
It then goes on to say:
> Nicotine has been noted to directly cause cancer through a number of different mechanisms such as the activation of MAP Kinases.[76] Indirectly, nicotine increases cholinergic signalling (and adrenergic signalling in the case of colon cancer[77]), thereby impeding apoptosis (programmed cell death), promoting tumor growth, and activating growth factors and cellular mitogenic factors such as 5-LOX, and EGF. Nicotine also promotes cancer growth by stimulating angiogenesis and neovascularization.[78][79] In one study, nicotine administered to mice with tumors caused increases in tumor size (twofold increase), metastasis (nine-fold increase), and tumor recurrence (threefold increase).
While it was dishonest to cut the sentence off in the middle, the lack of epidemiological evidence basically puts nicotine in the same camp as a ton of other substances that have "carcinogenic potential" but aren't considered a risk. Basically, it's plausible that nicotine is carcinogenic to some degree, but with the carcinogenicity of tobacco explained entirely by other factors, there's no real reason to believe that it's a significant risk, especially for bystanders.
In reality it is simply not possible to create such gains on average. SAT score is still a very good predictor of future academic performance.
"Does test preparation help improve student performance on the SAT and ACT? For students that have taken the test before and would like to boost their scores, coaching seems to help, but by a rather small amount. After controlling for group differences, the average coaching boost on the math section of the SAT is 14 to 15 points. The boost is smaller on the verbal section of the test, just 6 to 8 points. The combined effect of coaching on the SAT for the NELS sample is about 20 points."
"Does test preparation help improve student performance on the SAT and ACT? For students that have taken the test before and would like to boost their scores, coaching seems to help, but by a rather small amount. After controlling for group differences, the average coaching boost on the math section of the SAT is 14 to 15 points. The boost is smaller on the verbal section of the test, just 6 to 8 points. The combined effect of coaching on the SAT for the NELS sample is about 20 points."
(2) Many forms of "coaching" are lumped together here. In fact some may only add 30 pts or less while others add over 100.
(3) Controlling for self-selection is self-defeating here since poor black/hispanic/native american kids don't have the same opportunity to self select into say private schools with test prep programs.
(4) Taking post PSAT gains ignores coaching received prior to this.
(5) This only measures indirect coaching. The effects of a superior school itself could be large.
The effect "could be large". Do you have any data to support this?
Some forms of coaching "add over 100". Do you have data to support this?
Poor black/hispanic kids don't have test prep programs in school. So they are unable to get privately provided test prep or have no incentive to do so, and therefore receive a smaller amount of test prep than other racial groups. Do you have any data to support this?
The effects of a superior school "could be large". Do you have any data to support this?
You also say that you learned a lot from black and hispanic pupils. Would you have learned less from white pupils?
Do you really contest that private schools have better outcomes on the SAT? Or that poor kids have less test prep? Maybe you should do some basic googling on the subject before you start tossing around strident conclusions.
Having a worthwhile discussion requires a basic standard of reasonableness. Some of the perfectly reasonable claims I made could have also benefited from citations, sure. OTOH you've given me at least 5 data points that say you've just decided to be a pedantic troll about this topic. Good luck with that.
This sort of hype article pops up every few years in the British press. Perhaps there is an increasing trend in students attending US universities, but it is always going to be a small number, and almost all of them will be private school pupils with rich parents.
I suspect it isn't hard to find papers that show a link between high debt levels and weak economic growth. Or do you think the consensus among economists is that no such relationship exists?
There's a difference between "papers" and "every other paper". Instead of a consensus, economists are split into camps over the question whether austerity harms or improves economic growth. There's been criticism of austerity even from the IMF, for instance. Discrediting Reinhart and Rogoff's paper (published without peer-review, by the way) in particular is important because they were the first to collect and analyse data from so many sources and their results couldn't be replicated and are now shown to be incorrect.
There is no serious rebuttal or debunking of Mcintyre contained within that post. Even if we ignore the details of that specific controversy, it is still obvious that there are
1) big problems in the climate science community with regard to data and replicability (see climateaudit for more than you could ever want)
2) massive statistical problems with reconstructions. See Mcshane and Wyner 2011.
