Consider me your peer. I will not speak to you as an authority on
strength training, but simply as someone who gets it. “It” being
your experience as a novice lifter. This is not a customer
testimonial. I will not talk about how I got great results from
Starting Strength. What I will do, however, is validate for you what
Starting Strength claims to be true – that it is the single best
method for novice lifters to get strong. I only know this from years
of doing anything but Starting Strength Method. I have made all of
the mistakes. I have all of the regrets. I don’t want you to make the
same mistakes. Peer to peer, I want you to be highly successful and
very strong.
If you have read
Starting Strength: Basic Barbell Training, listened to
Starting Strength Radio, train at a Starting Strength Gym, or
attended a seminar, you have heard the that the Starting Strength
Method was born from years of experience in training and coaching.
That it is based on years of study of the phenomenology of strength
training. That it is simply the best way to get strong. Why should we
believe them? Starting Strength sells many products. Everyone says
their product is the best. Certainly Starting Strength has many
competitors. Which one is right for a new and developing lifter? Why
does the advice from Starting Strength work when other approaches do
not?
First, some backstory
on me, laced with regrets.
I started lifting in
2018. I was skinny-fat, 35 years old, the mother of two young
children, with abundant energy and a thirst for a hobby. I enjoyed
being in my local commercial gym, and I wanted to be stronger, but I
didn’t know how I was going to get there. In my naive state, I
somehow latched onto a barbell-based strength program that I found in
a very quick and limited web search. It was only a program that said
it was right for beginners, with no focus on form for lifting. I
struggled for a few months – I had no idea how to squat, bench,
press, or deadlift – failing early and often, and developed searing
hip flexor tendonitis along the way. Despite all this, my desire to
succeed was high and I kept pushing forward. I now know that novices
need far more than a program to follow, that a 5×5 program is too
much volume for a novice, and that accessories are a waste of time
and energy for a novice.
As I struggled with
this cockamamie program to which I had dedicated myself, the head of
personal training at my gym took notice. I had originally met him in
a CrossFit-like exercise group where I was first introduced to
barbell exercises. At this time, he took me under his wing and began
to work with me one-on-one. He coached me through some technique in
person once a week, hand-wrote a program for me, and encouraged me
along the way. I thought this was my way forward. Until I discovered
that it wasn’t. However this discovery only came to me many years
later.
I will give my thanks
to this individual for being the first person to expose me to barbell
training. He is also the first person to expose me to Starting
Strength. One day, while we were lifting, he began to cast a YouTube
video on the TV in the weight room and said, “You gotta see this
guy.” That guy was Mark Rippetoe. That video was dated 2013 and is
no longer on YouTube. It was titled “Starting Strength: Full
Seminar.”
Fast forward to 2024. I
am 41 years old now. I have a better-looking and better-functioning
body at age 41 than I had when I was 31 or 21. I have put on 25
pounds of lean mass and increased my total by more than 500 pounds. I
placed 4th in my first national-level powerlifting meet this year. I
also train Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and I am able to outwork and submit
women many years younger than myself. I feel amazing and I sleep like
a baby every night.
But how did I get here
from that awful beginning? I would not be where I am without Starting
Strength and my exceptional Starting Strength Coach. I made every
mistake along the way before I invested in the Starting Strength
method. I have many regrets about training before I started working
with my SSC. Please, I beg you, do not make these mistakes. I now
know that these are common pitfalls:
-
Being on the wrong
program or frequently changing programs -
Using bad
technique -
Caring too much
about the numbers -
Going rogue/Not
doing the program -
Not eating
enough/Not gaining weight -
Taking a
break/Changing it up -
Not training with
intensity -
Cutting weight
-
Wrong
Program/Program Hopping
Novices do not need
custom programs. Do not buy one off the Internet. Do not pay a
trainer at your gym to make one for you. Do not download an app and
use a free program. Do not do a program that conveniently fits within
the amount of time you have paid upfront for personal training (no
program worth anything is only 4 weeks long – that’s just the
length of a monthly training package at a commercial gym.) Novices
do not need assistance or accessory work either. Do not
program-hop/abandon one program for another when you are only a few
weeks in. Do not use your friend’s program just because she had
success with it, unless it is the Starting Strength Novice Linear
Progression. Borrow that or hop on to that right now. The NLP has
everything you need, nothing you don’t, and it provides very
dependable gains for many months.
Bad
Technique/Overly Focused on Numbers over Form
How you lift is more
important than how much you lift. Squatting 135lbs to depth with
control is more important than quarter squatting 315 lbs or
divebombing 225 lbs with horrific knee slide. Your form must be
correct for you to continue to make progress for a long time. (Please
note that I did not say your form must be perfect. Correct is
good enough to keep going; perfect is a long-term project.) Do not
let a trainer at your gym teach you how to squat, press, deadlift, or
any other movement. He or she likely does not know how to lift. They
just work at a gym. Anyone can get a job at a gym and get a low-value
training certification. Personal training is a high turnover position
for a reason.
I regret that I had the
worst lifting form ever (I have video evidence) and the trainer I
hired at my gym did not make it much better. He was only slightly
interested in how well I lifted. To him, it probably looked good
enough to keep me entertained and paying the bill. Honestly, I don’t
think he knew much about coaching form. But he had a Nametag and a
Certificate so I believed him. He started me off on high-bar squats.
I did not even know what a low-bar squat was, let alone why it was
preferable for training. It was not until a year into my training
that I “got stuck” at 190 lbs with the high-bar squat and an
overly wide stance. I could not get to full depth on a high-bar squat
with more than 190 lbs on my back because a high-bar squat requires a
vertical back angle and I could not maintain it at that weight.
It was only when I told
my trainer that I had hit a wall on squats at 190 lbs that he showed
me how to low-bar squat.
Why was this
information withheld from me before? I realize now, and I regret,
that I had a trainer who was only willing to show me something that
would fit into a weekly 30-minute session and would keep me paying up
every month. A good coach will invest the time to teach you good
technique from the get-go. A good coach will watch you lift and cue
you as needed. Apparently I was not worth the investment with the
trainer I had. Needless to say I still had much to work on with my
low-bar squat until I began working with my SSC years later.
I can repeat this story
over and over again for each of the lifts. Like when I thought I “got
stuck” on my deadlift at around 285 lbs, so I went to my trainer
for advice, and all he told me was to stop being a pussy and just
lift it. He had no technical advice for my deadlift whatsoever. I can
now watch video of me deadlifting back then and tell you everything
that was wrong with my deadlift – hips too low, high back angle,
shoulders behind the bar, too much slack, yanking the bar up off the
floor rather than pushing the floor away. I wasn’t a pussy – I
was doing it wrong, and I was not being corrected. Once I learned
from my SSC how to really deadlift, everything changed and my
deadlift took off. I added 30 lbs to my deadlift in a few months as
an intermediate lifter. Starting Strength was right.
Going
Rogue/Not Doing The Program
As much as I loved
training from the beginning, I was not highly compliant with the
programs. My intentions were good, but if my trainer told me to do a
working set on bench at 80 lbs, and I thought it was too easy, I
would just do 85 lbs. But then the next bench workout would come and
I would be physically unable to move 90lbs. I had moved the intensity
up too quickly and I paid for it later. If I was programmed to
deadlift, but all the barbells were in use, I would just use the trap
bar. It didn’t make a difference to me at the time; I got the workout
done, didn’t I? Wrong. So wrong.
At that point I had
gone rogue and was no longer training. I was exercising. Training
would entail following the program step-by-step. Doing whatever I
felt like that day was really just exercising for the effect it gave
me that day. I was unable to think about consequences, either
positive or negative. Do the program. Stay in compliance. Whatever
your SSC says, do it. Do not deviate. You do not know more than your
SSC. If you know better than your coach, why are you paying for
coaching? You will only realize your mistake later.
Not
Eating Enough/Not Gaining Weight
I was skinny-fat at 140
lb when I first started lifting. I wanted to build muscle size and
strength but I was unwilling to change my diet and eat more. I will
credit my original trainer for telling me I needed to eat more.
Unfortunately, I did not act on this for 2-3 years. I did not
understand – I wanted to be stronger, not fatter, so why the hell
should I eat more? No one could explain this to me at the time.
I was also scared of
being fat. In America, this is very common among females and not rare
for males either. I now know that I needed to eat more just to fuel
my training and recover. Only after I put on 15 lbs over the period
of 5 months did I realize the benefits. I looked better and I was
making more progress on my lifts.
If you are underweight
or if you are skinny fat, you must eat more. You cannot continue to
make gains in strength or size without eventually being in a caloric
surplus. You will not become fat if you eat more and train with
sufficient intensity. You will have more energy and bigger muscles
and, perhaps, some more bodyfat. I guarantee that you will look and
feel better bigger despite what your bodyfat percentage is. Most
people look better with added muscle mass even if it is accompanied
by an increase in bodyfat. Personally, my bodyfat percentage was the
same at 170 lbs as it was at 140 lbs (25%, a normal and healthy range
for a woman my age). Every extra calorie was worth it.
I was not heavily
invested in my strength training for the first three years or so.
Yes, when I was on a program, I enjoyed it despite my occasional
frustrations. But these programs ended after 6-12 weeks because that
is how templates and personal training agreements work. Quality
coaching, on the other hand, never ends. Many times when a program
came to a close, I would “take a break.” It was an easy out to
“change it up” and do something else at the gym, cut weight (more
on that later), or just go to the beach all summer.
The truth is, every
time I went back to strength training, I was not at the same point
where I had left off. Even after a few weeks I had noticeably
detrained and had to earn back the gains I had forfeited. It took me
years to realize this and I regret every break I ever took. If I had
kept training through all time, I could have been the national
champion this year. But I was #4, and #1 had been training
consistently for many more years.
For some silly reason,
I once thought that I could not strength train and do something else
at the same time. For example, I was into obstacle course racing
years ago. To prepare for a big race, I would stop my barbell
training and do an obstacle-course specific training program. I
mistakenly thought that a sport-specific training program I
downloaded from the Internet was somehow better than barbell-based
strength training. Now I know that there is indeed a two-factor model
of sports performance whereby one can be most successful training for
strength while simultaneously practicing their sport.
In hindsight, if I had
to choose only one way to prepare for obstacle racing (there is no
need to choose, but if you had to), it would be strength training. It
was the long, steep mountain climbs that took most people out of the
races I did. I went up the rocky slopes quickly and easily because I
had been squatting heavy for the past 6 months before I abandoned
that for 9 weeks of obstacle training. It was the strength from
squatting that made me most successful, not the carrying of a sandbag
while walking on a treadmill for 3 miles then doing ball slams on the
floor. How stupid I was.
Not
Training With Intensity
Eventually, training
gets hard for everyone. Sometimes it gets really hard and you will
have the desire to quit. You need to learn to dig deep and find a way
to get every rep and set at the programmed weight. I can remember
many times over the years that I quit on a rep that I should have
ground out. I quit by skipping the last set on a workout because I
thought it was too hard or unachievable. I have allowed myself to
quit on a weight entirely by going lighter than what was programmed.
None of this will make you stronger or more resilient. It only trains
you to be a quitter or to settle for less. If you repeat this often
enough, it becomes a pattern, and you will not be successful.
If you want to get
stronger and move big weights, you have to get your head in the
fucking game. My mental fortitude is all that stands between me and a
10lb PR as an intermediate lifter. Think of where I could be now if I
hadn’t given myself a pass so many times over the years. I never
truly trained with intensity until I started training with my SSC. It
was then that I eeked out every goddamn rep of every blessed set at
weights I had never even imagined.
Cutting
Weight
So, yes, I did
eventually put on weight. But after a long stretch of hard training
and peaking for some powerlifting meets, I wanted to lean out. Even
though I had added muscle mass, I was overly focused on how much fat
I gained along with it. I fell victim to cutting for aesthetics. Both
women and men fall victim to this, especially in America. I regret
this, and I have learned my lesson that losing weight involves loss
of both fat and muscle and thus the associated strength. When a
normal person is in a caloric deficit, all metabolic tissue is on the
chopping block. While there are ways to maximize fat loss and
minimize muscle loss, there will be some muscle loss in a caloric
deficit. Muscle is strength. Loss of muscle is loss of strength. Loss
of muscle can be a loss of aesthetic characteristics, too.
I used to “cut”
(lose weight) every summer after being on a long slow “bulk”
(gaining weight/mass/strength) from fall through spring. But when I
got to my goal weight in the summer, I would feel weak. My training
numbers were down. Come fall, I would try to get back to the weight I
had been before in the spring. All of this cycling up and down in
body weight was highly unproductive, and it sacrificed my training
progress. I did this for 4 years before I finally came to my senses.
After competing at a national competition this year, I committed to
staying at or near my “walking around weight” for the summer and
I continued to lift heavy. I have no regrets about staying at this
higher body weight. My training is going so well and I looked great
in my swimsuit all summer.
I have been training
for six years now. I am fortunate to be where I am now with my
strength, health, and physique. I sometimes think about where I could
be today if I had gotten it all right from the beginning. If I could
go back again, I would do it all differently. In an ideal situation,
I would start with Starting Strength and my SSC and be highly
compliant from the beginning. I would put on the good weight and not
try to lose it. I would never have taken a break or looked for other
types of training. I cannot change the past, but I can be an advocate
for what I now know is right. Many friends and acquaintances ask me
for advice on how to start lifting, or how to get to the next level
from where they started. I always tell them to read the blue book and
give them my coach’s contact info. The most effective method is
right there – you just have to follow it.
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