Basic Barbell Training
Effective Strength Training
For most people, strength training is an important first step to developing a strong and healthy body. Strength is important for everyone. Simply, strength allows us to live well. It allows you to do the things you love without the need to take a break and retain your independence as you age. Without strength, we can’t do anything.
Basic barbell training is one of, if not the best, ways to develop strength: the ability to produce force with your muscles on objects in the environment. Basic barbell training uses a small selection of basic exercises: the squat, overhead press, bench press, deadlift, row, and chin-up. Possibly the power clean, depending on who you ask and who they’re standing around when you ask them.
A basic bench press.
60 lbs, five sets of five reps.
Lifter Age: A literal child (12)
Occupation: Student, athlete
Athletic Background: 2 years, Brazilian Jiujitsu
Together, these basic movements form a comprehensive system of strength training for all of the body’s major muscle groups. Using that small menu, basic barbell training gradually adds weight to the bar each session as you gain skill with each lift. Slowly increasing the weight of the barbell over time is a simple and effective way to improve force production.
Barbell Training is Infinitely Scalable
Barbells are scalable to the individual. The Olympic standard barbell weighs 20 kg (~45 lbs), but lighter barbells exist for the smaller-framed, the untrained, or the deconditioned. A good gym would have barbells ranging from over 45 lbs to PVC pipe bars that weigh less than one lb. Further, you can progress as fast or as slow as you need to. Weight plates for barbells come as light as 0.25 lbs to as heavy as 100 lbs. Some people make slower progress than others and need smaller plates to keep their basic barbell training going reasonably. If your gym doesn’t have several barbell options or does not offer plates that are lighter than 2.5 lbs, it is not a good gym.
A basic deadlift.
250 lbs, three sets of five reps.
Lifter Age: 30s.
Occupation: US Coast Guard, Super Mom
Athletic Background: Competitive Powerlifting
Measuring Progress is Obvious
Further, progress in barbell training is objectively measurable. If you begin your training with an overhead press at 50 lbs and, over a period of several weeks, raise it 100 lbs, you have doubled your strength in the overhead press. Ask a local powerlifter how many people they’d willingly assassinate to double their strength on a lift in 12 weeks. (The answer is all of them. They’d assassinate all the people.) If you’re the kind of person who needs numbers to define progress, basic barbell training will light up your dopamine receptors like a laser show.
Barbell Training is Safe
Lastly, barbell training is safe. The safety of lifting weights has been studied for a long time. Compared to the same duration of training across different sports, general weight training is demonstrably less likely to injure you than other sports. This is true as long as what you’re doing in the gym isn’t dumb or overtly incorrect. Doing a thing wrong and then saying the wrong thing you did is bad is the peak of stupid things you could say. You don’t get to be wrong first and then cast blame.
A basic neutral-grip chin-up.
Bodyweight, five sets of ten reps.
Lifter Age: 20s
Occupation: Student
Athletic Background: HS track & field
It is important to acknowledge, however, that all physical training comes with a risk of injury - basic barbell training included. There is a very low risk with strength training, as shown below. The cost of a sedentary lifestyle, devoid of good training, comes with a significant increase in the development of preventable metabolic diseases and subsequently an increase in death from any cause.
Hamill, B. P. (1994). Relative safety of weightlifting and weight training. The Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, 8(1), 53.
Given the incredibly low risk of injury that comes from strength training methods like basic barbell training, and the near guarantee of a miserable physical existence with a long, slow, sick, and painful death from sitting on your tushie doing nothing, the choice should be obvious. You need to train.
So if you need help learning how to get started with basic barbell training, let’s work together. There’s no time like the present. I provide custom, individualized programming and rapid feedback within 24 hours on every workout through Barbell Logic and hybrid in-person+online coaching out of FitBodies Unlimited, Yorktown. FitBodies members, with any contracted membership, can receive a month of coaching and one private session completely free.
I never use contracts for coaching either: cancel anytime you like.
