Nothing “Basic” About the Basics, by Lou Schuler

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I don't think I've ever met a beginner in a gym. The beauty and curse of strength training is its apparent simplicity. There's no obvious right or wrong way to do it. If you feel your muscles engorge with blood during a workout, and if you feel tightness in your muscles a day or two later, then clearly it's working, and clearly you did it right.

Hard as I try, I can't think of any other type of exercise in which expertise is so casually bestowed upon himself by a novice. Entry-level runners know they aren't good at running by virtue of the fact they can't very run very far, can't get there very fast, and feel absolutely awful in the process of running neither far nor fast. Beginner cyclists know they aren't good because of the unfortunate consequence of their nonexpertise: falling off the bike. And yoga is cruelest of all to the unitiated, who quickly realize they can't come within 30 degrees of the joint angles achieved by their instructors and veteran classmates.

Strength training, conversely, is deceptively easy. The smiling trainer at your gym shows you how to work the pins and levers on a circuit of machines, and you're off. If you're curious enough to pick up a fitness magazine, you won't even notice that your form on the featured exercises diverges widely from what's shown in the photos. Your form is perfect until proven otherwise, and who's going to bother proving to you that you aren't yet the expert you imagine yourself to be?

This can go on for years. I know, because I lifted close to 30 years before I felt as if I understood the basics.

In The New Rules of Lifting, which came out in paperback last week, my coauthor and I emphasize what we call six "basic" movements that form the basis of all useful strength-training exercises. Those six - squat, deadlift, lunge, push, pull, twist - are uncontroversial among experienced lifters. The problem is that the first three tend to be ignored by inexperienced lifters.

Why? I think it comes back to trusting instincts that haven't yet been honed with experience. Instead, lifters trust meaningless physiological cues like the aforementioned pump and post-workout soreness. Sometimes the best workouts won't produce either. They will, however, make you stronger, and with strength comes muscle mass. Muscle mass, properly manipulated with diet and physical activity, can help you get or stay lean.

But it takes experience for a lifter to learn to trust a long-term strategy more than short-term gratification. That's why the basics of strength training remain elusive to all but the veterans who, after years of trial and error, are finally ready to embrace them.