Top 50 Mark Rippetoe Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Strong people are harder to kill than weak people and more useful in general.”

— Mark Rippetoe

Featured in: Quotes About Strength, Stay Strong Quotes, Fitness Quotes, Motivational Bodybuilding Quotes

2. “An adult male weighs at least 200 pounds.”

— Mark Rippetoe

3. “Stronger people are harder to kill.”

— Mark Rippetoe

4. “I welcome you to the community of people who have decided that EASY will no longer suffice!”

— Mark Rippetoe

5. “The deadlift also serves as a way to train the mind to do things that are hard.”

— Mark Rippetoe

6. “There is never an absolute answer to everything, except of course that you have to do your squats.”

— Mark Rippetoe

7. “Physical strength is the most important thing in life. This is true whether we want it to be or not.”

— Mark Rippetoe

8. “A weak man is not as happy as that same man would be if he were strong. This reality is offensive to some people who would like the intellectual or spiritual to take precedence. It is instructive to see what happens to these very people as their squat strength goes up.”

— Mark Rippetoe

9. “You don’t get big and strong from lifting weights – you get big and strong from recovering from lifting weights.”

— Mark Rippetoe

10. “Humans are not physically normal in the absence of hard physical effort.”

— Mark Rippetoe

11. “If you insist on wearing gloves, make sure they match your purse.”

— Mark Rippetoe

12. “You can’t make people smarter. You can expose them to information, but your responsibility stops there.”

— Mark Rippetoe

13. “Exercise is not a thing we do to fix a problem – it is a thing we must do anyway, a thing without which there will always be problems.”

— Mark Rippetoe

14. “Your muscles cannot get “longer” without some rather radical orthopedic surgery.”

— Mark Rippetoe

15. “There is no such thing as “firming and toning.” There is only stronger and weaker.”

— Mark Rippetoe

16. “Most of the problems with the bodies and minds of the folks occupying the current culture involve an unwillingness to do anything hard, or anything that they’d rather not do. I applaud your resolve, and I welcome you to the community of people who have decided that EASY will no longer suffice.”

— Mark Rippetoe

17. “There is no substitute for milk. Sorry.”

— Mark Rippetoe

18. “Accumulating injuries are the price we pay for the thrill of not having sat around on our asses.”

— Mark Rippetoe

19. “Mediocre athletes that tried like hell to get good are the best coaches.”

— Mark Rippetoe

20. “There is simply no other exercise, and certainly no machine, that produces the level ofmuscular stimulation and growththan the correctly performed full squat.”

— Mark Rippetoe

21. “Bodybuilding is men on a stage in their underwear wearing brown paint showing other men their muscles. It is training for appearance only, and at the contest level requires a degree of vanity, narcissism, and self-absorption that I find distasteful and odd.”

— Mark Rippetoe

22. “Poor form in the gym is caused by insufficient yelling.”

— Mark Rippetoe

23. “Any idiot can get on a treadmill and watch TV and then take great pride in the fact they’ve ’exercised.”

— Mark Rippetoe

24. “Trust me, if you do an honest 20 rep program, at some point Jesus will talk to you. On the last day of the program, he asked if he could work in.”

— Mark Rippetoe

25. “A squat cannot be performed on a Smith machine any more than it can be performed in a small closet with a hamster.”

— Mark Rippetoe

26. “The Olympic Snatch is gymnastics with a bar.”

— Mark Rippetoe

27. “I can teach idiots to squat in ten minutes.”

— Mark Rippetoe

28. “Strength is an excellent example of a physical characteristic that drives improvement in other athletic parameters. More strength means more power, more endurance, better coordination, and better everything else. This is why, all other things being equal, the stronger athlete is the better athlete.”

— Mark Rippetoe

29. “The full-range-of-m otion exercise known as the squat is the single most useful exercise in the weight room, and our most valuable tool for building strength, power, and size.”

— Mark Rippetoe

30. “But a hot gym is where most of us have trained before. Learn to deal with it: more water, more minerals, bigger balls.”

— Mark Rippetoe

31. “Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not; it is the first lesson that ought to be learned; and however early a man’s training begins, it is probably the last lesson that he learns thoroughly.” Thomas H. Huxley.”

— Mark Rippetoe

32. “If you are so inflamed that you can’t train, and ibuprofen and fish oil help with inflammation, maybe you’d better take the ibuprofen and fish oil.”

— Mark Rippetoe

33. “I like musicianship, and it’s quite lacking in most modern popular music. You’re always safe with old Chicago, the Allman Brothers, Gov’t Mule, or Tower of Power.”

— Mark Rippetoe

34. “The spine is best at bearing a load in an arch.”

— Mark Rippetoe

35. “If a program of physical activity isn’t designed to get you stronger or faster or better conditioned by producing a specific stress to which a specific desirable adaptation can occur, you don’t get to call it training. It’s just exercise.”

— Mark Rippetoe

36. “There is simply no other exercise, and certainly no machine, that produces the level of central nervous system activity, improved balance and coordination, skeletal loading and bone density enhancement, muscular stimulation and growth, connective tissue stress and strength, psychological demand and toughness, and overall systemic conditioning than the correctly performed full squat.”

— Mark Rippetoe

37. “History tells us what works in the gym, and everything else walks down the road with a carrot in its ass.”

— Mark Rippetoe

38. “Women who do look like men have taken some rather drastic steps in that direction that have little to do with their exercise program.”

— Mark Rippetoe

39. “Since the trainee is both inefficient and unadapted, only a few basic exercises should be used, and they should be repeated frequently to establish the basic motor pathways and basic strength.”

— Mark Rippetoe

40. “People seem to have acquired the idea that they have the inalienable right to stroll through life without either having sweated, picked up anything heavy, worked hard, or eaten less than they wanted at every meal. This approach is, of course, wrong. And it has resulted in a lot of expensive, unattractive, and entirely preventable problems amongst people who seem puzzled about why things aren’t going well.”

— Mark Rippetoe

41. “Remember: lifting more weight is not always the same thing as getting stronger.”

— Mark Rippetoe

42. “I don’t even like Greg Glassman. I don’t have a cult like allegiance to the guy. I really don’t like him. He’s too hard to get on the phone and he doesn’t drink my kind of scotch.”

— Mark Rippetoe

43. “I recommend against a wooden squat rack, for much the same reason that I recommend against a wooden car.”

— Mark Rippetoe

44. “Big arms are fun, and if their training doesn’t interfere with the rest of the program, wait till everybody’s gone, like I do.”

— Mark Rippetoe

45. “If every day of your life you are told by authority figures that the Earth is flat, you will be scared of falling off the edge whether you want to be or not.”

— Mark Rippetoe

46. “Start training yourself. You don’t have to have been an elite lifter to be a good coach – I sure as hell wasn’t. But you have to at least have been under the bar enough to know why wedon’t look up at the bleeding ceiling when we squat!”

— Mark Rippetoe

47. “Opinions are like phasers – everybody ought to have one.”

— Mark Rippetoe

48. “I know that I’m an animal that displays bilateral symmetry. I understand that one side should be the mirror of the other, and that human perceptions of beauty are intimately associated with symmetry. For example, I am very handsome.”

— Mark Rippetoe

49. “If your gym makes a lot of money selling gloves, you have another reason to look for a different gym. And if you insist on using them, make sure they match your purse.”

— Mark Rippetoe

50. “I recommend that you change colleges.”

— Mark Rippetoe