CRUSH THE BAR

If you're going to grab a barbell, grab the barbell. According to Rusty, Starting Strength coach at the Wichita Falls Athletic Club, you should be squeezing the barbell while lifting. "Crushing the bar" is a coaching cue that he uses a lot with kids and clients that are kind of beginning because everybody just kind of grabs a hold of bar like they're picking something light up off the ground. They just kind of hold on to it as much as they feel they need to not as hard as they can.

Anytime you have a bar in your hand, you want to be crushing it. That's going to do a few things:

1. It's going to stabilize your wrist because we want to be in a compression grip.
2. If we're pushing on the bar as in a bench press or a press, we want the bar over our bones.
3. It's going to help stabilize our elbow because the entire forearm is tight.

In the blue book, "Starting Strength: Basic Barbell Training, 3rd Edition", there's a graphic of someone ringing out a towel. That's what you need to think about: you're ringing out a towel the entire time, trying to crush the bar. Coach Rusty sees so many people just grab a hold of the bar and they're just barely hanging on to it. So crush the bar. It's going to help your lift. You'll be surprised of with how much faster the bar speed picks up when you are actually crushing the bar.

This also pertains to deadlift. In the novice linear progression (NLP), Starting Strength coaches teach their trainees to double overhand grip on the starting the deadlift. Then, they switch the grip or hook grip is taught later on, but beginning, we like to do double overhand. Coach Rusty sees this all the time where people will actually have the bar hanging from their fingers because it gets them more comfortable in the bottom position. It gives them that extra inch to kind of set their chest up where they're not bent over as much. So crush the bar. You can only pick up what your hand knows it can hold on to. If you're barely holding on to a bar or it's creeping out of your fingers, you're not going to be able to break it off the floor.

So, crush the bar. Anytime you have a bar in your hand, that's the cue you need to be telling yourself if you don't have a coach telling you to crush the bar. I hope this helps.

Bibliographic references:

• Starting Strength. (2026). CrUSh the Bar [Video file]. YouTube. https://youtu.be/-Nwnjlq3eog?si=hcc0OUB1RYov7cIi
• Rippetoe M. (2011). Starting Strength: Basic Barbell Training, 3rd Edition. The Aasgaard Company.