Starting Strength Book Club (SSBC) - Chapter 3: The Press
MissHolidayGolightly
Posts: 857 Member
Here is the discussion on the *dreaded* overhead press 
I haven't read it yet but I saw on the first page there is a picture of a man pressing over 300 lbs. I looked like I was going into labor pressing 60 yesterday. Can't even fathom.
I haven't read it yet but I saw on the first page there is a picture of a man pressing over 300 lbs. I looked like I was going into labor pressing 60 yesterday. Can't even fathom.
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I'm about half way through and wanted to jot down my thoughts before they flutter away.
It's funny how he disses physical therapists. I've always wondered if PTs really know what they're talking about. I went to PT for a knee injury in 2012 and though it was ultimately helpful, I though some of the things they said and had me do were weird if not unfounded. I remain agnostic on the subject but it's interesting hearing this opinion.
I like his comeback (paraphrased) that saying something is dangerous if done incorrectly and therefore you shouldn't do it is like saying you shouldn't drive because you could drive into a rock and die. I might use this next time a rogue coworker tells me that lifting is dangerous.
I giggled when he said to act like you're showing off your boobs at the bottom of the lift. Now I'm going to think, "tits up" every time I start a set
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I've given myself permission to skip the final 9000 pages of the Squats chapter and move on to the Press.
Can we please just revel in Ripp's calling pecs "chesticles"? Bahahahaha.
More serious thoughts to come.0 -
MissHolidayGolightly wrote: »Now I'm going to think, "tits up" every time I start a set
lol.
*********off topic *********
i lasted almost all the way through an infuriating bellydance class a few years ago, and the session on shrugging your boobs independently of all the rest of you had me in hysterical fits. i couldn't stand the woman who taught the class because she was less interested in teaching other people how to do what she knew how to do than she was in just showing off the fact that she knew how to do it herself. but when she gave us a quick mime of her doing the dishes and brushing her teeth with her boobs absent-mindedly going up and down like a cheap date's eyebrows at the same time . . . i was reeling all over the room for the rest of that class.
then i told my sister about it in gmail chat, and being her, she got fascinated. and then she said 'damn you. i'm in my office and now you've got me trying to do it as well. and my door has a window in it and there are students out there.' my sister's a respected university lecturer in some fairly serious grownup subject
***** back on topic *****
guess i'm kind of pt-obnoxious myself. i mean agnostic. but i'm also around 10% rippetoe-agnostic by this point - around chapter 4 in the book. not that i don't still think he's extremely good on pure mechanics, just that i'm starting to see he's got some strong opinions that are just his as well, just like anyone else. so i'm kind of getting my grains of salt all lined up beside me whenever i open the book.
the tits-up thing has helped me a lot too. on the other hand, i guess i've never really made that move much. i think of it almost as more of an 'evert your sternum' move than the boobs, because the first couple of times i did it, it really felt like . . . well, check this out. did you even know that there's 'soft' tissue between your breastbone and your ribs?
http://www.innerbody.com/anatomy/skeletal/costal-cartilage
because i sure didn't, but it sure felt like i was feeling it the first couple of times i did this ohp move. basically, i turned out this one simple little thing was a mobility/mobilization movement in its own right.
the other point that i'd like to make from experience is: it's awfully hard to get a proper chest-up position going if your pecs are so tight that your ribcage doesn't have very far it can go.0 -
That's eerily like a pole dancing class I went to with a bachelorette party a few years ago except we were isolating our butt cheeks. I actually got the hang of it pretty easily (I must have been a stripper in a past life) but the instructor spent most of the time turned away from us showing that she could do it expertly.0
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My PT experience was weird in that they both underestimated and overestimated my abilities. They would have me "warm up" on the stationary bike with no resistance for like 20 minutes even though I'd been walking around all day and my muscles weren't completely atrophied. Then they'd be like, "OK stand on the bosu ball with one leg, touch your toe then kick your other leg into my hand" (I'm exaggerating but not really) and when I'd inevitably fall over, they'd be like, "Yes, just as I thought - your hips are absolutely weak." They were also dismissive when I told them I like to run.
I'm highlighting bad parts and it wasn't all that way but it was nice to hear someone who knows something about anatomy and mechanics of the body call them out.0 -
I'll definitely be making a list of all the things I need to check with regard to grip and starting position (tits up!) to take with me to the gym. Just so much to remember!
Thought the discussion of how important the barbell / overhead press was interesting, both on it's own, as a rehab option, and as relative to the bench press. And the fact that it can help with shoulder stuff makes me really want to nail the form on this one.0 -
MissHolidayGolightly wrote: »they'd be like, "Yes, just as I thought - your hips are absolutely weak."
that's kind of the way that i felt. i've had dealings with 3 physios that i can remember and maybe there were some others in there. i've honestly, so far, never met one that i liked.
or that i could understand. one of the things that hacked me off with all three of them was their sheer bloody rudeness. and a sort of narrowness or apparently lack of three-dimensional thinking that's hard to convey in short words. comments exactly like that. 'you have weird [body part]' and i'd think: don't you make a living out of understanding the huge diversity of human anatomy? starting a relationship by saying the part of me you're supposedly going to be guiding me on is something you've never met with before . . . not only rude, but not a confidence-builder either. i honestly felt like, if a physio couldn't get their head around the reality of my starting 'position', then we were doomed from the git.
never understood what they were talking about either. maybe i just got unlucky, but they all struck me as the kind of people who have no alternate ways of explaining something. so they instruct you to do something that you can't figure out how to do, and when you ask them to try and fill in your mental blanks, they just repeat it again.
it's one of hte reasons why i'm really hesitant to 'just' take this shoulder thing that i've got to a physio. the fact that i'd be paying for it out of my own personal pocket is only half of my thing. i'd do it if i had any confidence that it would result in some kind of meaningful change. but it doesn't seem like more than a 50-50 chance, to me.
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canadianlbs wrote: »MissHolidayGolightly wrote: »they'd be like, "Yes, just as I thought - your hips are absolutely weak."
'you have weird [body part]' and i'd think: don't you make a living out of understanding the huge diversity of human anatomy? starting a relationship by saying the part of me you're supposedly going to be guiding me on is something you've never met with before . . . not only rude, but not a confidence-builder either. i honestly felt like, if a physio couldn't get their head around the reality of my starting 'position', then we were doomed from the git.
Exactly this. It would seem like I was the only person on the planet with "weak hips" and I'd get no further explanation about how that related to my knee injury. That cause didn't even make sense to me since I'd experienced no other issues other than the pain and clicking in my left knee.
They'd have me do such strange movements that couldn't possibly relate to real life to supposedly assess me and I'd fail at it partly because I didn't really grasp what I was supposed to be doing. It was frustrating, like can you, PT do this movement right now? Can anyone do this?
I did like the ultrasound machine though. I should try and buy myself one of those.
Anyway, this has been a good rant but back to OHP. I want to finish the chapter tonight. I can only read a few pages at a time of this book without getting overloaded. I find that I'll be reading but not processing what I'm reading so it's best to break it up. I also like to practice the movement while reading the explanation to understand it and create some muscle memory.0 -
PTs are super hit and miss. I had a PT a few years ago for my ACL tear who was awful. Lots of machine workouts with very little supervision, and they basically shrugged and said "Oh well, you're at 60%, probably as good as you're gonna get". And I recovered fairly well despite that, and actually did quite well with running and such until I tore my meniscus in the same knee this summer.
This time around, I asked a friend of my wife's who was a PT and is now in medical school, and she gave me some suggestions about criteria to look for and even looked up someone in my area. I went to him, and HE ROCKED. Lots and lots of squats and one legged squats and lunges and clock lunges and steps and bodyweight work, and in a month of working with him I think we fixed several years worth of bad biomechanics.
Unfortunately, until you meet with a PT (and possibly are armed with some background on what you should be doing) you just don't know what's best.
And, uh, back on topic, I hate the OHP and recognize that I need to read Starting Strength to better my form.0 -
From what I gather from my skimming (= looking at pictures) the rest of the chapter, I will no longer be keeping my body totally rigid when doing these. Such a change from what I've been doing. Looking forward to reading more -- will also be making my way through the book in small sections because of density and because of all the other stuff I have to do. Bear with me!0
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MissHolidayGolightly wrote: »the instructor spent most of the time turned away from us showing that she could do it expertly.
snort. bringing whole new realms of meaning to the phrase 'up her own *kitten*'. okay, back to the overhead press.
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short comment on this after today's workout.
i'd thought i'd been locking out fine at the top, shoulders shrugged and elbows locked and all that. and i sure seemed to have it in the right position since once it's up there i sometimes find it more peaceful to just stay up there rather than face controlling it while i bring it down.
but i may still have been keeping it a little in front of where it should be. when i had it up there tonight for some reason, i pushed my torso just a little bit further 'through' the bar than i usually do, so it was probably more over the 'back' of my shoulder joints than the front. like, above the nape of my neck instead of the top of my head. it felt seriously different, i'll tell you that. much more of a hit on everything in my mid/upper back.
i may have quasimodo'd myself and i'm too lazy to go look up whether rippetoe actually says anything about this tiny little point. but for right now it feels good, and i did get the impulse from some vague sort of flashback to something or other i'd seen in the book.0 -
I am watching this thread with interest for helpful hints. I am sure some form changes would help my OHP (l suck!).
The book costs a fortune in the UK and I never get on that well with reference books on the kindle, I prefer a hard copy to be able to flick through more easily. Maybe for my birthday
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questionfear wrote: »This time around, I asked a friend of my wife's who was a PT and is now in medical school, and she gave me some suggestions about criteria to look for
would you happen to remember what any of those criteria were?
also, i alluded to this in the daily thread already, but i'll just repeat in here that the day after trying that nape-of-neck lockout both my shoulders felt fantastic . there's some muscle soreness and i still have the tightness and tweaks that i've always had, but the joint itself feels really smooth and beautifully free of restriction.
and yeah, the book does say to get the bar into that position. i kind of wish he'd gone into the kind of obsessive detail full of mechanics and diagrams about ohp that he devotes to the deadlift and squat. i would have been really interested in a muscle-by-muscle analysis of the whole thing.
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just coming back to report my ohp factoid for the day: this workout, my brain somehow retained all the stuff about setting the grip angle. it's most of page 82 and in figure 3-10 on page 83.
i don't know if this is what did it, but it's a fact that i never considered grip angle an important factor at all. when i actually pay attention to the picture in 3-10, it basically places the bar 'diagonally' across your palm, whereas the default position for me was always just straight across, from side to side.
i've always had this unconscious idea in my head that you have to get into the same position just to take your grip that you intend to be in once you've unracked and you're holding the bar. elbows close; forearms straight; shoulders just a little bit up and forward to get the bar near my delts; great big tits. so i thought i was doing it 'right' by getting into pretty much that shape before i even put my hands on the bar. and my pickup has been pretty rigid because i've been thinking once i had that set i ought to hold onto it.
what i did today had a lot more movement involved and it was pretty different mechanically. instead of elbows in and forearms straight, you start out with elbows up and winged out, sort of like the bottom of the bench press. and then you 'rotate' them into position under the bar once your hands are all set on the bar. i'm pretty hyper-shoulder-conscious right now and i'm here to announce that the muscles that managed all that seemed to be everything in the rear shoulder zone. i'm speculating and i see nothing about it in the book, but my speculation is: moving through this path while you're getting your grip may be 'loading' the rear shoulder muscles in the same way that setting up for deadlifts loads your posterior chain.
anyway, imagination or not, today's presses at the same 45lbs as last time did feel different to me. i really didn't do well at getting under the bar and locking out today, but the first part of the upward bar path felt almost confusingly easy, by comparison. usually it's the other way round, in my world.0 -
okay, so i feel kind of lame to still be coming back to this thread and posting in it when it seems like i'm the only one still interested, but eh. just call it my personal ohp blog, i suppose.
anyway, point/comment/lesson possibly learned from today: DO this one thing. lift your elbows while you're placing your hands on the bar, just like rippetoe's selfie. and then close your fingers and just like he says - rotate your elbows down and forward under the bar. but start with your upper arms practically parallel with it as you're placing your thumbs in position, like a penguin.
i don't understand why but doing that one little minuscule thing made the bar feel like nothing when i picked it up and stepped backwards with it. and also, it seemed like it just did the whole 'starting position' thing for me, for free. nothing left to do but tits up.0 -
I keep lurking here, so please don't stop posting! I've read this chapter so many times I feel as if I have it memorized, yet when I get in front of the bar, all of a sudden I can't remember what I'm supposed to do. "Like a penguin" is helpful.0
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Keep it alive! I promise I'll post soon.0
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I'm still interested - just busy. And as much as I love Rippetozzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. What?! What did I miss?0
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canadianlbs wrote: »okay, so i feel kind of lame to still be coming back to this thread and posting in it when it seems like i'm the only one still interested, but eh. just call it my personal ohp blog, i suppose.
anyway, point/comment/lesson possibly learned from today: DO this one thing. lift your elbows while you're placing your hands on the bar, just like rippetoe's selfie. and then close your fingers and just like he says - rotate your elbows down and forward under the bar. but start with your upper arms practically parallel with it as you're placing your thumbs in position, like a penguin.
i don't understand why but doing that one little minuscule thing made the bar feel like nothing when i picked it up and stepped backwards with it. and also, it seemed like it just did the whole 'starting position' thing for me, for free. nothing left to do but tits up.
Worked like a charm! I think it gives me a better grip position and also just a firmer grip on the bar. Whatever--definitely a big improvement, so thank you for mentioning it. I looked at the photo just before stepping up to the bar.0 -
fothers365 wrote: »I am watching this thread with interest for helpful hints. I am sure some form changes would help my OHP (l suck!).
The book costs a fortune in the UK and I never get on that well with reference books on the kindle, I prefer a hard copy to be able to flick through more easily. Maybe for my birthday
I bought mine from Amazon in the US and had it sent over. That was two or three years ago, and it worked cheaper doing it that way than trying to buy from the UK.
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Forgot to mention that I tried a thumbless grip on the OHP the other day and I liked it. Felt like I had more power pushing the bar up.0
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Doesn't the book say a thumbless grip is only for the squat? Edit: found the bit I was thinking of here:
The thumbless grip is never used when pressing, not because of the danger – which is obviously not there when the bar can be dropped to the floor. Rather, the thumbs-around grip permits the “squeeze” in the forearms that increases the tightness of the muscles, making the drive from the start position more efficient and increasing motor unit recruitment throughout the arms and upper body. Except for the squat, there is no thumbless grip in barbell training.
Rippetoe, Mark (2012-01-13). Starting Strength (Kindle Locations 2132-2135). The Aasgaard Company. Kindle Edition.
Also this video here
I've been trying to work on my hand position in press and bench press, because I'm not sure I had it right. There's a bit at the start of this Jonathon Sullivan ("Sully") video here which explains it well, I think.0 -
Rippetoe does say that but other resources say otherwise. I tried thumbless and liked it. I seem to have no trouble with the forearm squeeze. I seem to do it naturally from practicing yoga. When you're on all fours, in downward dog, in a handstand, or any position where you're holding yourself up with your arms, squeezing your arms and rotating them internally takes the pressure off the wrists and shoulders. Translates to OHP.0
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Ah, I see. I'd noticed that other people recommend thumbless - was just posting the above because it's the book discussion thread, and I thought you meant that the book recommended it. Do you still use the Starting Strength hand position if you're using thumbless?
I really struggle with this lift, above all others!
(Also, is there a bench press thread? I've been re-reading that chapter).0 -
Yes everything is the same. There's a video in the OHP form resources thread back in the group that has a very detailed breakdown of the lift. Don't beat yourself up - it's one of the most difficult lifts for women and a lot of us have trouble with it.
As for the bench chapter, there is no thread yet but please start one if you wish. I and others will definitely join in!0 -
So glad I found this thread. My OHP sucks. Always heard about this book but never bought it...YET. Anywho I tried to OHP 55 pounds on monday and pulled a muscle on my neck. maybe i will re start with just the bar and watch marks video before trying tomorrow.
Ladies do NOT stop posting I am reading everything you're putting down I will update you tomorrow after soaking up all the info you guys just gave me 0 -
Ladies do NOT stop posting I am reading everything you're putting down
well, on that note . . .
for context if you haven't heard me grumbling yet, i just found out last weekend that i have (had?) an internal impingement in my left shoulder. i took most of last week off and this is my first week back, plus the first serious ohp workout since then.
so, allowing for the fact that i'm rested and nothing is angry on the left side and all that, here is what i've found out.
- triceps-to-lats was my this-time lightbulb. i've always been fixated on rippetoe's thing about 'bring your shoulders up and forward a bit' to make your front delts into a bit of a platform, until now. but i must have been over-understanding and over-following it. being told by the physio that i actually need to keep my collarbones pulled a little back and tilted a little upwards in order to give my ac joint more room changed all of that by complete accident. i was just thinking about trying not to saw through my own left deltoid with my own bones, when i suddenly realised i could have been holding a brick in each armpit and they would have been safe.
just that one little thing plus the tighter trapezius muscles holding my shoulderblades stable - they isolated and locked everything in my entire upper back from the shoulderblades up, and when i launched the bar it went up like a bird. what i'm thinking here is: pulling all of that stuff tight felt like it was concentrating all my strength into that one little segment of me. it was like giving myself an artificial 'floor' to push off against that was much much closer to the joints doing the work than the real floor is. somewhere around the zone of my diaphragm. so i may take all of this back again next time around, or it may be the rest that i've had. but tonight i felt fiercely strong. 45lbs was easy. i cleaned the bar at the start of each set, but once i had it up there i was just repping it out for the first four or five sets ( i failed one set, so there was an extra ;-))
- other point is: idk if this is normal or not but i can lock that bar out like nobody's business once it's up there. it almost bounces, my elbows kick in so hard. but i don't think i've been shrugging upwards enough, so i was trying to get that done as well. what i found was that when i do shrug, the whole 'slam torso under bar' things starts to come into focus for me in a whole extra way.
- i still haven't figured out how to do the hip-bounce he talks about to start it all off. i just stand still and shove the bar up, so it has to curve itself to get round my face. i'm not coordinated enough or too distractible or something, so never gotten the bounce part of it right. is anyone able to do this without simultaneously losing everything about their upper-body setup?0 -
I just ordered this book from amazon last week and can't wait until it arrives (I am in Australia and it's being shipped from US).
Have been finding ohp the toughest so hoping the book and these threads will help
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Ok so I have to update from this mornings session. My squat improved dramatically by listening to Mark's advice. Butt up in the air and driving the hip up. I was doing that before but also like he said concentrating too much on my back when i needed to focus on the hips.
Also the OHP damn...just damn. LOL. If I had only known that how I was gripping the bar was so incorrect I would have stopped sooner. I felt the workout where it was supposed to be felt. Also squeezed my armpits and back muscles. It was alot easier. BUT I was still clumsy and focusing on these knew techniques I wasn't paying attention to where I was gripping the bar (it was a bit uneven tilting to my left.)
Also I can't figure out his hip driving thing either. Do I hump before or after I throw the bar in the air ?
I want to add that even though my lifts have improved I'm still having a bit of knee pain and can still feel that my whole body isn't locked" and is still loose. But i am learning.0
This discussion has been closed.