In the Trenches:

An Interview with Mark Rippetoe

Meet Justin. Most of us involved in the strength and conditioningworld know lots of kids like Justin. Justin is an eighteen year old,5’10” gangly kid who weighs about 160lbs soaking wet. He’sworked out consistently in the gym for six months now. He’straining chest and arms several times a week and he even makestime to get some leg training in on the leg press or smith machineevery once in a while. Problem is, he isn’t really getting anystronger and he can’t gain weight to save his life.All of us know guys like Justin. Maybe you train kids like Justin.Hell, maybe you are “Justin.” As strength athletes and coaches we’ve all had kids like Justin ask us how to gain weight, and get bigger and stronger. We spend valuable time talking to these kids,giving them the information they need to succeed, and then a few days later we see them in thegym doing preacher curls and they say, “well I talked to my friend about what you said and hesaid he tried it once and overtrained so I decided to do this thing I read about.”Are you kidding me?I work at a gym where there are tons of “Justins” – skinny little kids doing curls, working out onmachines, never progressing. These same kids have the same bodies year-after-year and continueto do the same thing in the absence of results. Sure, they’ll switch from the EZ-bar curl to thehammer strength curl, but you couldn’t pay them enough money to put a bar on their back andsquat down to their heels. Have you met guys like Justin? Are you a Justin? Now meet Mark Rippetoe. Mark can take guys like Justin and put 40lbs of muscle on them in afew months. He’s the best there is at training novice lifters and increasing their strength and sizein a short amount of time. He’s had so much experience and success with novice lifters that he’s just released a book outlining his methodology called Starting Strength. Mark is a huge proponent of the basics: full squats, deadlifts, cleans, overhead presses, bench presses, etc., andthe book reflects that, teaching proper form on the lifts, how to coach them, and to program themfor success.Mark is the guy responsible for starting Wichita Falls Athletic Club – one of the most successfulgyms in America at producing national caliber athletes out of little kids. “Rip” (as his friends callhim) is one hell of a strength coach, but he isn’t the kind of guy you’re gonna see on the cover of Men’s Health. He’s gritty, hairy, and a little rough around the edges. He likes to eat dead animalsand drink dark beer. (His affinity for good beer is so strong that he “regards American Corporate

Beer and the people who prefer it as a serious cultural problem, much worse than homelessnessand poverty.”) Yeah, he has a way with words too.One of his fellow coaches described him as having “a weird Viking fetish, short shorts, and a no-non-sense type of smarts. He has many years under the bar, worked with a full metric shit-ton of athletes and has the academic wits to battle most PhD's.”And he can drink a gallon of milk in 15 minutes…and keep it down.You can’t do that.But more than anything else, he can take you skinny little kids and turn you into men. He cangive you pride and a sense of accomplishment. He can make you part of something special if youwant it bad enough.The question is…do you want it bad enough?

The Early YearsMatt:

Give us a little info on your background. What is your age, height, weight? Has WichitaFalls always been home? What is your educational background? Where and who do you coach?

Rip:

I am 49, tower over most other men at 5’8”, and weigh 215 with no noticeable abs. I amsingle, never been married, but that doesn’t mean that I am gay, necessarily. I hope my girlfriendStef will back me up on that. I have lived in Wichita Falls most of my life, except for a shortwhile spent in Colorado in the early 80s (the 1980s, not my 80s). I have a BS in PetroleumGeology from Midwestern State University, a thing I wish I was using just about now. But I amthe proud owner of the Wichita Falls Athletic Club, for 21 years now the best damn weighttraining facility in Central Wichita Falls, Texas. You’ll have to walk several blocks to find a better place to train. I primarily coach novices, meaning that I teach a lot of people how to squatand clean.

Matt:

What sports have you competed in? Did you play sports in high school and college? Howdid you get into strength training? How did you get into coaching?

Rip:

I played soccer in high school, back when soccer was regarded as “European.” I later competed in powerlifting, from 1979 through about 1988, and I actually managed to win theGreater Texas Classic in 1981. I was active in the sport until the late 90’s when I began devotingmy time and attention exclusively to weightlifting. Glenn Pendlay, Lon Kilgore, and I got the ball rolling in North Texas about that time, using WFAC as our training hall, lab, andheadquarters.I started lifting weights in college to look more like Conan, and never really succeeded. I wasslow to mature, in many ways. We had a rather large tornado here in 1979, an event that affectedmany people’s lives, certainly mine. Bill Starr was in town afterward, taking care of his oldestdaughter that had been injured in the tornado, and I ran into him at Midwestern’s weight room.He took me in as an understudy, and taught me many things.

I have always been a better coach than an athlete, since I was not gifted genetically and wasnever very coachable either. I don’t claim to be that good a coach, for that matter. But I cook adecent chicken fried steak.

Matt:

You mentioned Bill Starr. For those who aren’t aware of the greatest strength coachAmerica has ever seen, fill us in on Bill and your relationship with him.

Rip:

Starr is one of those guys that make a tremendous impact on the people he’s close to, inmore ways than you’d expect. He has a very highly developed personality. He and I have beenfriends for quite a while, and we have a lot of dirt on each other. I also function as his book warehouse, and have all the copies of Defying Gravity in print. But you’ll have to buy them fromhim.

Wichita Falls Athletic ClubMatt:

So you met Bill in 1979, and then a few years later you opened Wichita Falls AthleticClub. Can you tell us why you decided to open the gym, and how that came about?

Rip:

David Anderson, another friend of Bill’s and fellow Wichitan, gets the credit for that. Billyhelped him open Anderson’s Gym while I was in Colorado, he operated it until he could stand itno more, and I bought it from him in 1984. Seems like 1894. I moved it to a better location acouple of months later, expanded it twice there, and moved it to our current location in 2001. Weare a rather serious strength training facility, as serious as we can be within the context of gettingthe bills paid in a commercial gym in a small market. We have seven power racks and attached platforms, six competition benches, six weightlifting platforms, lots of good straight bars, York and Sonata plates, bumper plates of several makes, bands, chains, kettlebells, 2 reverse hypers, 2