Intro
One of the most common questions I get asked since parting ways with Starting Strength a few years back, is a variation of: “What do you disagree with Rippetoe about?” I’ve mentioned several times over the course of writing this substack that although I’m no longer formally associated with the company, I still think the SS method is excellent, I still use its core concepts to coach my own clients and in my own training, and my approach to lifting/coaching is still largely aligned with SS to this day. I still recommend the books and the seminar to people, and I also align more with Rip’s approach to exercise science and epistemology, than I do with the so-called evidence based approach. But I’ve also mentioned that I don’t agree 100% down to the dotted i’s and crossed t’s with every last thing Rip says.
So I guess people are curious about which things a former Starting Strength Coach, who is now #notanSSC, disagrees with his former associates. I suspect part of the curiosity is because I still like the SS approach in general and don’t have an axe to grind with it, so am reliable enough not have any ulterior motives and can just give my honest opinion.
And that leads me to our main topic: the extreme layback in the press that we see coming from SS lifters and gyms, is one of the things I definitely disagree about. Excessive layback in the press is contrary to the purpose of why we train and contest the press in the first place, at least insofar as this extreme layback is being done and encouraged as a primary form of the lift. Massive layback is directly in opposition to the primary reason we use press as a main lift: to either train or display strength of the upper body musculature.
First let’s explore some physical culture history and look at what the olympic press and massive layback are, and then I’ll explain why, though a cool trick, it’s contrary to the purpose of why pressing is included and emphasized in the SS program in the first place.
Background: What is the Olympic Press?
Before I make my case for that view, let’s take a look at what I mean by a massive layback press. Normally in a press, the barbell is pushed overhead primarily with the upper body. Since we’re not doing a ramrod strict ‘military press,’ but just a regular press, a small amount of torso movement to get the bar started with a little bounce is no big deal. That’s a normal part of the press. What we’re referring to here is a huge amount of layback akin to what we saw from the Olympic lifters doing the clean and press in the 60s and early 70s. These laybacks were so excessive and hard to judge that they eventually resulted in the clean and press being eliminated from the sport altogether, and olympic lifting now consists of only the snatch and clean and jerk. A lot of weightlifting fans today don’t even seem to know that prior to 1972, the clean and press was contested in olympic lifting. So let’s take a look at some big laybacks from back then. We’ll start with some of the heaviest weights ever clean and pressed in human history, courtesy of IG account vintagelifts_. Each one of these was taken at the ‘apex’ of the layback, the most laid back point.
Here’s American great Ken Patera with 212kg (467 lb):
Serge Reding with 228kg (503 lb):
And Russian legend Vasily Alekseyev with 230kg (507 lb):
Before we look at some other pictures and videos of this technique, notice that each man is laying back more than the one before, as the weight gets successively heavier. That will be a point we come back to later.
To watch some full clean and presses performed at the actual olympic games, watch the first minute and half or so of this clip from the 1968 games in Mexico City:
Here’s a few more pictures highlighting the extreme laid-back position assumed by these lifters in the course of performing the press. Hungarian great Gyozo Veres with 160kg:
and Vladimir Golovanov of the former USSR, who won gold in the 1964 olympics:
Finally, I’m not sure who this is, but it’s a great picture to cap this section off, showing just how far lifters were laying back in competition in order to lift more weight and win meets:
And that’s the point I want to end on in this section. Once lifters figured out this trick, it was an inevitable race to see who could layback most and quickest, because this allowed so much more weight to be lifted. You can’t blame the lifters. In the absence of rules forbidding or severely curtailing it, the layback gamesmanship was inevitable.
I don’t know why they didn’t change the rules instead of eliminating the lift altogether. Maybe they wanted to reduce the meets down to two lifts anyway, and this was a convenient excuse, but whatever the case may be, after 1972, the (clean and) press was no longer a contested, competitive lift in olympic weightlifting.
The Revival of the Layback
Since the clean and press was removed from competition over 50 years ago, that style of pressing, along with pressing in general, went out of style. I went about 7 years at gyms as a member or personal trainer without seeing a single person take a heavy barbell out of the rack, or from the clean, and press it overhead. To show how degraded the overhead press had become: reading muscle magazines in the late 90s or early 2000s, I’m pretty sure they referred to a smith machine, seated overhead press using the back of an upright bench for support as a “military press.” But starting around 2008, I began to see actual presses in the gym now and then.
Over the 15 years since, via the increasing popularity of Starting Strength, CrossFit, and strongman competitions, training the press as a primary or important secondary movement has come back into fashion somewhat. It’s still far less common than the bench press, but isn’t unheard of or a rare unicorn event to see someone pressing out of the rack anymore. We’ve also seen a bit of revival of the big layback presses as well, but this has been primarily a niche phenomenon within the SS community, who pioneered formal strengthlifting meets about a decade ago, started an actual strengthlifting federation that was putting on over a dozen meets a year prior to 2020, and still holds them to this day, albeit no longer connected to any formal federation. Strengthlifting is characterized by contesting the squat (basically the same rules as raw IPF powerlifting), the press (rather than the bench press), and the conventional deadlift (no sumo).
Probably the best known exemplar of the revival of the olympic press today is Chase Lindley, a very strong lifter who pressed 405 in competition a few years back using the olympic press. Chase is next to me in the picture above, and got even bigger and stronger in the few years since then. He now pulls 700+ and squats well into the 600s in addition to his gargantuan press.
Let’s take a look at Chase’s press and see how it compares to the olympic presses of yore. Needless to say, none of this is to attack Chase at all. He’s an impressive lifter and an extremely strong dude, and is doing what makes sense - maximizing the weight he can lift within the rules of the sport he’s participating in. My disagreement is with the rules that allow this type of press, and the encouragement and promotion of it as the main way to press, not with any lifters who are logically responding to the incentives in front of them, or someone who does it just because they like it.
Here’s a video of Chase’s mighty 405 press from November 2020:
Here’s a frame of the furthermost point of layback:
Looks about as far as the biggest laybacks we saw above from old 1960s-1970s olympic days.
Now in order for me to say, “I disagree with Rip/SS about this,” it’s fair to ask me to show that this isn’t just something a lone lifter happened to do at a meet, but something promoted and encouraged by the brand. While you can find plenty of forum posts and comments across their media that indeed do show this, we don’t have to dig very deep: note that the official SS YouTube account made a special video for one lift and only one lift out of that entire meet: the 405 press, which has been viewed almost 100k times as of this writing. Chase then appeared on the SS Podcast with Rip a few weeks later specifically to discuss this:
As discussed in the podcast as well, Chase also basically grew up at Rip’s gym, WFAC, and learned to lift there from the time he was young. This isn’t just a guy gaming the press to Rip’s chagrin; he learned it at Rip’s gym and it’s promoted and encouraged by the brand.
For one more example, my friend Carl Raghavan also wrote an article for the SS website, entitled: The Double Layback: A Lifter’s Approach, in which this kind of press is encouraged and discussed.
To reiterate and make perfectly clear: none of this is meant as an attack on Chase, Rip, or Carl or anyone else. I am simply bringing the receipts to show that I’m not disagreeing with a strawman, but with what they actually say, do, encourage, and promote. I still respect all 3, and no matter how you press 405 overhead, doing so in any way is impressive as hell. I just disagree about this particular topic: the deliberate promotion and use of the extreme layback as a primary press technique for training and competition.
Having established all that, I’ll first compare this extreme layback press to the regular press and then explain why I disagree with these big laybacks.
The Regular Press
Now that we’ve seen what these extreme layback presses look like, we can discuss normal pressing. The regular press can use an optional stretch reflex or modest hip throw to start the rep, and this increases the weight you can lift by something like 2-5%, give or take. It does this using the body’s normal method of lifting something heavy - just like a touch-n-go bench press, or regular (unpaused) squat. So while the strict press, which I wrote about earlier this week, is a very useful supplement to the press, I don’t have any issue with using a modest hip throw or stretch reflex in the regular press and indeed I perform it this way as the main version in my own training as well.
To illustrate, here’s my own 315 press on the same platform in the 2019 meet referenced earlier:
I use a very small hip throw and rebound at the start, then stay upright and straight for the remainder of the lift, as described above.
Here’s the equivalent freeze frame of my most laid back point of the drive up:
In case the difference between the two press styles wasn’t clear, here’s a direct comparison, from almost the same angle and the bar in almost the exact same spot in the lift - note the barbell’s position relative to the rack.
The Disagreement
So why does pressing with a massive layback specifically circumvent the primary purpose of why we press at all?
Recall as I have written about before - on the Starting Strength website itself, no less - SS teaches that we use 4 main criteria to determine which lifts to include in the program, and why.
We choose exercises that:
Train the most muscle mass
Over the longest effective range of motion
In a way that allows us to use the most weight
And thus get stronger
This is taught every Saturday morning at every Starting Strength seminar as a core concept of the method, and undergirds a significant portion of how exercises are selected and programming is done within the SS framework. This is not a tangential throwaway point, but a central one to the SS philosophy.
My argument is that the regular press meets these criteria better than the olympic press, which circumvents them in a significant way.
In fact to show this, I don’t even really have to make a novel argument. The case against the massive layback is made quite well on the Starting Strength website itself, in an article from 2019 about the push press, explaining why the press fits our criteria for basic strength building exercises better than the push press. I simply consistently apply this same basic analysis to the massive layback press as well as to the push press, instead of selectively applying it only to the push press.
Author Brent Carter, a former student and longtime friend of mine, writes:
…the Press is one of our two upper-body exercises. The range of motion for the upper body in a push press seems quite long. However, in the push press the upper body does not bear the brunt of the work until the bar has already been driven up by the lower body. This essentially turns the lift into a very short quarter squat combined with a pin press – the range of motion of the upper body is not as complete as the press.
The key point of this segment is that, while the push press utilizes more muscle mass and weight through the same range of motion compared to the press, it doesn’t TRAIN it. The quads don’t get enough ROM or load to be trained by the relatively light (for the quads) push press with just a quarter squat knee dip. At the same time, using the quads to initiate the push-press means that the upper body musculature likewise isn’t trained for the first 1/3 to 1/2 of the ROM. The upper body may be utilized through that ROM, and the bar has to go through that ROM, but the upper body muscles aren’t TRAINED through that ROM. And neither are the quads, because the ROM they work through and the weight lifted is too light to train the quads. Thus, the push press doesn’t fulfill our criteria as well as the press.
Later Brent writes:
Any basic barbell exercise will have very discrete criteria for its completion. The squat is defined as going from lockout down to the crease of the hips just below the top of the patella and back to lockout. The bench press touches the chest and is returned to lockout. This allows you to effectively compare your current numbers with those previously handled. If you did not have discreet criteria for each lift, how would you assess whether or not progress is being made? This is one of the problems with allowing your squats to creep up above parallel. If you are using the push press as one of your main upper body lifts how do you know if your upper body is in fact stronger or if you are simply using your legs more/squatting deeper into the initial drive of the press?
Emphasis mine.
The same idea applies to a huge layback press. Remember earlier when I pointed out that the layback got relatively bigger from Patera’s 212 to Reding’s 228 to Alekseyev’s 230? Exactly.
Additionally, if you watch a big layback press closely, you can basically see that the layback is skillfully applied to avoid the bottleneck of the normal sticking point caused by the small upper body musculature in the lift. It’s a brilliant workaround in which the skilled layback lifter extends his arms without the bottleneck limiting factor of upper body musculature and strength, by laying back deeply so the arms extend via this layback without having to push the bar upwards, without having to produce more force than the external resistance of the barbell’s weight, using the muscles of the shoulders and arms. Instead, the lifter can produce enough force with the upper body just to more or less hold the bar in place, and lay back against that weight, which allows the arms to straighten up without actually pushing the bar up much or at all. Then once arms are fully or almost fully extended, the lifter straightens up again mostly via the torso. This requires a lot more work from the trunk muscles than a regular press, but similar to getting a huge pop from the quads in the push press, takes the work and emphasis away from the upper body, which is the primary point of the lift in the first place, as Brent wrote. A brilliant workaround, yes, but one that circumvents the reason why we press in the first place.
The delts and especially the triceps, are relatively small muscles and normally they limit how much you can press. This is most noticeable around the typical sticking point at and slightly above the top of the head where the delts have done a lot of their work of shoulder flexion, the triceps need to kick in and carry a bunch of the load, but are in a poor mechanical position to do so. It’s that very upper body musculature, the delts and triceps - the muscles the press is specifically supposed to train, and the display of strength the press is specifically supposed to highlight - that are snuck around and avoided by a huge layback. Sure, the extra work is still done by the body - here the trunk - just like in the push press that work still must be done, there by the quads. But in both cases, the end result is a circumventing of the main reason we do the lift in the first place.
And indeed just like in the push press where you can just use more quad and become a better ‘pusher’ vs getting stronger in the upper body, you can also lay back further and/or faster and become a more skilled lay-backer to lift more weight, rather than get your upper body stronger. This is not true about the regular press, which is a more accurate measure of whether upper body strength has increased.
Towards the end of the article, Brent continues:
Let me clarify: we are not opposed to using the push press (or any other accessory lift) as a supplemental tool for strength training provided its use is well warranted (as in not during the novice linear progression and not until well into late intermediate training). In fact, an Olympic lifter will most certainly need to incorporate push presses into their training for developing the jerk.
I kind of agree with this regarding huge layback presses, provided the lifter’s back can tolerate them (more on that below). So in my schema, you might see an occasional strong/advanced lifter doing them the way some people do overloaded pin presses or slingshot bench work, once they get to be advanced. But not all over the place, in the gyms and on social media being done by older or younger women pressing 70 lbs. (Sorry Grant, love you brother, just disagree about this one)
So although I wrote in the subtitle to “make the olympic press extinct again,” that was more of a fun jab than a literal call for extinction. We might still see them, but they’d be rare, like a 650+ deadlift or something.
The point here is that even though the olympic press MOVES the bar through as much range of motion as in a regular press, and possibly even utilizes more overall muscle mass - it doesn’t TRAIN the upper body musculature through that entire ROM, and is a workaround to avoid having to use the delts and triceps etc to push the bar up. This is why it was created and spread like wildfire back 60 years ago - specifically because it bypassed the bottleneck of upper body strength in the press with a neat trick.
One Way Ticket to Snap City?
What about safety? Looking at these presses, most people assume they must be a veritable gateway to back pain and ruined spines. But how something looks isn’t always a good barometer. A lot of people who do and coach them say they don’t see any issue at all in practice. My own experience is that these kinds of presses are less injurious than one would infer just by looking at them, but slightly more injurious than regular presses. I’ve been coaching the barbell lifts for 15 years and don’t recall a single lifter of the thousands I’ve worked with, who has had a single back injury from a regular press, even though the vast majority use that style. Whereas I can recall 2 times I had a lifter tweak their back using a big layback - neither was a bad injury, but compared to zero, it’s at least suggestive if not dispositive. And this is despite the fact that the sample size for the regular press is in the thousands and for the layback press only in the low hundreds.
That said, your mileage may vary; safety is something to take note of for laybacks, but not an automatic disqualification, since even there, the rate I’ve seen is pretty low. More important is the fact that the huge layback is a trick to bypass the primary purpose of why we press at all: to train and/or display upper body strength.
Starting Strength Used to Recognize This, Too
I first bought Starting Strength 2nd edition in early 2008, which was soon after it was published in 2007. On page 150, it states:
One of the reasons the Press was eliminated from Olympic weightlifting was the difficulty the judges had in bringing themselves to judge an excessively weird press. Referred to by the term “Olympic Press” …Some very adept practitioners could lean back to a point almost equivalent to a bench press, rendering the description of the lift as a “press from the shoulders” rather inaccurate.
The text goes on to suggest a remedy for this problem with a diagram to illustrate it. The diagram can be seen below: Take the plane formed between A) the anterior-most point of the armpit and B) the posterior-most point of the buttocks. If that plane moved such that A) was behind the vertical - the anterior most point of the armpit went behind the buttocks - this would constitute excessive layback, and be disqualified. Seems reasonable to me.
Using this criteria, every olympic press shown earlier in the article would be disqualified. Ken Patera’s looks close but still too laid back, and the rest are clearly way too far to qualify under these criteria.
In the updated 3rd edition of Starting Strength, which I own the very first printing of from December 2011, almost the same verbiage about the “excessively weird” press is used, but the illustrative diagram for correcting this problem was removed. Despite its absence from the new edition of the book, in the first few years years of Strengthlifting meets, this judging standard for the Press still used, and any lifter who laid back further than armpits behind buttocks would be red lighted.
This can be seen from this 2015 rulebook of the Starting Strength Fall Classic Stregthlifting meet. I remember this rulebook well, because I competed in this meet as a lifter, so read the rules carefully beforehand:
Here’s page one of the rules, showing they were prepared and approved by Rip himself:
and here’s page 5, where the rules restricting the press layback are articulated, along with the diagram from the 2nd edition of Starting Strength.
So as of Fall 2015, this was still the way the press was being considered within the organization: excessive layback was something to be avoided, not promoted. As of this writing, the rulebook for this meet is still publicly available to view online, so you can check it out for yourself here: Starting Strength Fall Classic 2015 Rules.
What happened to later change this approach? Even though I was still intimately involved with the company until 2019, I honestly don’t know and any attempt on my part to give an answer would only be speculation.
I do know that not long before I joined the seminar staff, Tommy Suggs came to WFAC and taught the Olympic Press:
and this did change the way we approached the press, resulting in the 3rd edition’s introduction of that little “hip throw” to start the movement, shown in my presses above, in contrast to 2nd edition instruction of the first rep being a “strict press” and then the subsequent reps using a ‘touch-n’-go’ style stretch reflex at the bottom.
We had some trouble figuring out how to coach this at first, leading to the famous 2012 Learning to Press 2.0 video that’s been viewed by almost 400,000 times now. Yours truly shows up at 22:15, so you can see that I was involved in the early iterations of this process, even though I don’t know why the attitude toward the excessive layback changed seemingly sometime between 2016 and 2018.
Anyway, the Suggs Olympic Press instruction from ~2011 slightly changed the way we did and taught the press, but 2015 was years later, and the excessive layback was still being discouraged and red-lighted at the meets we ran. So I’m not sure what caused that to change at some point in the next few years, but clearly it did change and by 2019, Carl had written his article about the big layback olympic press for the website, and in 2020 Chase was celebrated for using this type of press to conquer 405.
Search Your Feelings, You Know It To Be True
As you probably already figured out by now, I’m still friends with a lot of Starting Strength Coaches. I asked one of them what he thinks about the big layback presses, and received the following reply:
I don't know If I have a well thought out quote, but ultimately it boils down to realizing it's as silly as the Sumo Deadlift. The justifications I made for it doing it were the same coping mechanisms that sumo pullers make.
I also don't really think it fits with our exercise selection criteria very well. We want to "train the most muscle mass possible." Well I was getting to the point where I could nearly lock out my elbows on the second lay back. Was I really "training" the muscle mass in that case?
We have a lot of logical arguments as to why the push press and the sumo deadlift are not part of the program, but suddenly, we don't have that criteria for the double lay back.
That’s a succinct summary of my arguments here, without all the background and detail. And I hadn’t yet mentioned any of my arguments or the approach I was taking for this article. Because deep down, it’s just pretty obvious.
How it feels when the realization hits:
Conclusion
Yes, the olympic press is a cool trick. Yes, it allows us to lift more weight. Yes, it is technically demanding. Yes, experienced practitioners develop very strong abs. Yes, anyone who can press 405 lbs overhead in any manner is very strong, and impressive. All of this is true.
But just like hitting a baseball 550 feet foul is still a foul ball, this isn’t what a press is supposed to be. Encouraging this press style in general and for the general population, and sanctioning it in competition, is counter to the primary purpose of why we press in the first place.
Post Script: Is ANY Layback OK?
What about small or moderate layback? Is anything OK, or should the torso be ramrod straight, like my demonstrated 315 press above? Here’s how I manage this subject with my own clients, based on my analysis and experience to date.
I don’t teach the second layback to any of my lifters. But a few naturally pick it up on their own, usually by accident: through the process of struggling and fighting through a max effort set at the end of their LP or sometime in the early intermediate phase, a small percent naturally lay back against the weight, instead of solely pushing through with their upper bodies.
I’m not one of these post-modern coaches who says regarding technique, “Just do what works for you, whatever feels good.” I believe good technique can be derived from first principles and coached to competence, while striving for - if not ever quite achieving - perfection.
However, good technique isn’t always a binary good/bad and doesn’t always exist at specific point, but sometimes can exist within an acceptable range. As an example of the difference: in the press, pushing the bar out away from you even the slightest bit is inefficient and counterproductive, period. This is a case of binary, good/bad. Keeping it close is good, pushing it out away, no matter how slightly, is bad.
Contrast this to your squat stance. We start everyone with their heels at shoulder width, and toes turned out about 35 degrees. But some people end up with heels an inch outside shoulders and toes out at 40 degrees, others end up with their heels an inch outside their shoulders and toes out at 25 or 30, and others an inch INSIDE their shoulders but toes out at 40. No one is gonna have their heels 3 inches apart, and no one is going to have their toes out at 75 degrees - but within a fairly narrow range, it’s up to the individual to start with the average baseline of heels at shoulder width and toes out at 35, and find what works over time.
We see parallels of this all over the culture wars right now. Post modernists try to argue that a tiny amount of fuzziness around the boundary means that entire categories are meaningless, whereas the truth is that the fact that there’s a tiny fuzz around the boundary means everyone sees and understands that there is a boundary. Within the small range of the fuzz, there is room for discussion.
I often use the example of drivers’ licenses. No one thinks 7 year olds are ready for them, and no one thinks you should have to wait til you’re 30. There’s a small amount of fuzz, depending on the place, the individual kid’s development, and the time in history, around the 15-18 range. No one thinks it should be 6. Or 35.
Same deal here. A small to moderate amount of layback can be OK. You’ll still get the intended training effect. It’s the massive layback that you want to avoid.
In my earlier cited SS.com article about the 4 criteria, as well as the follow-up I wrote here on substack in April, I try to reframe the 4 criteria not as a math equation that can be solved with a single correct answer, but more as good guidelines to be applied with wisdom, logic, and experience. There will be a little fuzz around the boundary, but also clear answers to most questions.
In this light, the tradeoff between “trains the upper body musculature” vs “uses more weight” or “trains more muscle mass” is sometimes clearly on one side of the boundary - like in an extreme layback olympic press. But other times, the tradeoff sits right at the fuzzy boundary, like a small amount of layback. It can’t be solved via first principles, but only by experience and noting empirically how lifters respond.
My experience so far is that a small to moderate layback, not done all the time, but reserved for the last reps of the hardest sets, only when necessary, doesn’t detract from this tradeoff and produces the intended training effect just as well as not laying back at all. I don’t feel confident enough to say if it produces an even better one, but it’s close enough that I haven’t noticed any detriment. Whereas either resorting to the massive layback, OR using a moderate one but using it all the time, every rep of every set and never forcing yourself to push through with your upper body, produces inferior training for the upper body musculature that represent the essential reason why we press to begin with.
If even a big layback happens here and there on a really tough set or a PR, I don’t freak out about it. I would write the rules to red light it at meets if I was in charge, like we saw above in the 2015 Fall Classic, but just like if you slightly hitch a deadlift PR or your butt comes 1/4 inch off the bench on a bench PR at the gym, you don’t freak out about it. You may or may not count it as a gym PR, knowing it wouldn’t fly at a meet, and you work on improving it for the future.