It has been said that using Rate of Perceived Exertion (RPE) is useless for strength and conditioning, which has caused quite a stir between the Barbell Medicine crew and other coaching organizations because we had been using this tool with our clients to manage loading, training fatigue, and the intensity of conditioning efforts up until […]
A 2014 paper by Draganich & Erdal studied the effect of sleep on cognitive functioning in 164 undergraduate students – with an interesting twist. Participants were given a questionnaire in which they ranked how deeply they had slept the prior night on a scale of 1-10. Subjects received education about REM sleep and cognitive function, […]
In late February, 2018 of this year, after a series of back and forth emails, I informed Rip et al that I was resigning from Starting Strength. Since then, there has been a large amount of chatter on the Internet about what happened and what’s next. This letter aims to address both topics. To really […]
A little over one year ago I reached out to Austin Baraki in desperate need of coaching. Thankfully, he didn’t hesitate to accept the task and we immediately got to work. At first, he “triaged” my situation by correcting a number of technical errors that he observed after watching some of my training footage. After […]
“How do I increase my press?”- The Internet Fresh on the heels of the 2017 USSF Fall Classic, a strengthlifting meet that contests the press instead of the bench press seen in powerlifting meets, there has been a big uptick in folks asking how to increase their press. After seeing some of the big presses this […]
Dr. Feigenbaum: Hey, welcome back to the Barbell Medicine Podcast. I’m Dr. Feigenbaum, I’m joined here with Dr. Baraki. This is another Q&A episode, and we like doing these things- Dr. Baraki: Or episodes. Dr. Feigenbaum: Episodes, potentially. [00:00:30] We have a lot of questions to get through, so we’re going to have a slightly […]
By Austin Baraki Recall from our prior articles that a decline in skeletal muscle mass is just one criterion for sarcopenia; in addition, there must also be a loss of strength or physical performance (1). This second criterion was added because the relationship between muscle cross-sectional area (i.e. size) and force production (i.e. strength) is […]
By Jordan Feigenbaum The Texas Method may be one of the most popular intermediate training programs in existence. Developed by happenstance in Texas (duh) and popularized as a follow-up program to Mark Rippetoe’s Starting Strength Novice Progression (seen here), it’s based on a three-day split that is originally structured as follows: Week 1 Day 1 […]
By Jordan Feigenbaum MS Anatomy and Physiology, Starting Strength Staff, HFS, CSCS, USAW Club Coach In part three of this series, we’re going to discuss the practical application of the previous two concepts we discussed, e.g. training specificity and fatigue, to an outcome hypertrophy. Hypertrophy refers to the increased size of a tissue and in our […]