Muscle for Life

What’s the best way to get big and strong? Some people say that the only way to get big is to get strong, and the best way to get strong is to stick to the big lifts. Do a lot of heavy compound weightlifting, and you’ll naturally get bigger as you gain strength. In other words, anything that’s not the squat, bench press, overhead press, and deadlift is a more or less a waste of time and effort. On the flip side of the coin, some claim that if you want to get big, you need to blast your muscles with tons of reps on isolation exercises to really concretize the “mind-muscle connection” and gain size. In fact, they claim, you don’t have to do any compound lifts to get bigger and doing big lifts like deadlifts and squats cause more fatigue than necessary, limiting how much work you can do on accessory exercises. Who’s right? As is usually the case, the truth is somewhere in the middle, and in this episode, I speak with Mark Rippetoe on the best ways to incorporate assistance exercises in a strength training routin