Mark Rippetoe Quotes

You can't make people smarter. You can expose them to information, but your responsibility stops there.

There is never an absolute answer to everything, except of course that you have to do your squats.

Strong people are harder to kill than weak people and more useful in general.

An adult male weighs at least 200 pounds

If you insist on wearing gloves, make sure they match your purse.

A squat cannot be performed on a Smith machine any more than it can be performed in a small closet with a hamster.

You don't get big and strong from lifting weights - you get big and strong from recovering from lifting weights

I welcome you to the community of people who have decided that EASY will no longer suffice!

There is no such thing as "firming and toning." There is only stronger and weaker.

The deadlift also serves as a way to train the mind to do things that are hard.

Your muscles cannot get "longer" without some rather radical orthopedic surgery.

Any idiot can get on a treadmill and watch TV and then take great pride in the fact they've ‘exercised.

I like musicianship, and it's quite lacking in most modern popular music. You're always safe with old Chicago, the Allman Brothers, Gov't Mule, or Tower of Power.

Poor form in the gym is caused by insufficient yelling.

There is simply no other exercise, and certainly no machine, that produces the level ofmuscular stimulation and growththan the correctly performed full squat.

Stronger people are harder to kill

The full-range-of-m otion exercise known as the squat is the single most useful exercise in the weight room, and our most valuable tool for building strength, power, and size.

The BEST training program in the entire world will be a DISMAL FAILURE if people fail to hold up their end of the deal. The success of ANY training program is ultimately the trainee's responsibility.

Humans are not physically normal in the absence of hard physical effort.

If every day of your life you are told by authority figures that the Earth is flat, you will be scared of falling off the edge whether you want to be or not.

But a hot gym is where most of us have trained before. Learn to deal with it: more water, more minerals, bigger balls.

Exercise is not a thing we do to fix a problem - it is a thing we must do anyway, a thing without which there will always be problems

Physical strength is the most important thing in life. This is true whether we want it to be or not.

I don't even like Greg Glassman. I don't have a cult like allegiance to the guy. I really don't like him. He's too hard to get on the phone and he doesn't drink my kind of scotch.

Big arms are fun, and if their training doesn't interfere with the rest of the program, wait till everybody's gone, like I do.

I recommend that you change colleges.

The spine is best at bearing a load in an arch

Opinions are like phasers - everybody ought to have one.

There is no substitute for milk. Sorry.

What we're trying to do is get things fixed, not allow them to stay broke.

I recommend against a wooden squat rack, for much the same reason that I recommend against a wooden car.

Your ideal body weight as an ectomorph at 6' 0" will be 214.378 lbs. There. Happy? And if you lose or gain a pound, I will have you killed. It is important to be ideal.

Women who do look like men have taken some rather drastic steps in that direction that have little to do with their exercise program.

Since the trainee is both inefficient and unadapted, only a few basic exercises should be used, and they should be repeated frequently to establish the basic motor pathways and basic strength.

If you are so inflamed that you can't train, and ibuprofen and fish oil help with inflammation, maybe you'd better take the ibuprofen and fish oil.

I can teach idiots to squat in ten minutes.

The Olympic Snatch is gymnastics with a bar

There is no easy way to do a deadlift—not involving actually picking up the bar—which explains their lack of popularity in gyms around the world.