The First Three Questions

by Mark Rippetoe “I get asked about this a lot: what do I do when I get stuck? Go to an intermediate program? I’d rather ask this question: Why are you stuck when you shouldn’t be? And then I always ask these 3 very important questions, in this order…” Read More var addthis_config = {"data_track_addressbar":true}; “I get asked about this a lot: what do I do when I get stuck? Go to an intermediate program? I’d rather ask this question: Why are you stuck when you shouldn’t be? And then I always ask these 3 very important questions, in this order…” By now, lots of people have done “the program,” and lots of people have gotten stuck – their progress has stalled at some point, having done what they thought was “the program” discussed in Starting Strength: Basic Barbell Training and Practical Programming for Strength Training to the letter. Let’s examine the problem more closely, and find a way to keep this from happening.Strength is simply the production of force against an external resistance – in this case, the loaded barbell. If the load on the barbell you’re lifting increases over time, you’ve gotten stronger. The simple idea is that, for untrained people, strength accumulates rather quickly if you ask it to, and the stronger you get/the longer you’ve trained, the slower your strength increases. We force the process to occur by adding a little weight every time you train, until that stops working. At that point it becomes more complicated.But not until then. You just do the program and use every means at your disposal to keep from getting stuck. By “the program”, I mean the novice progression detailed in both books. For a young novice training 3 days a week, the squat and deadlift will increase a little each workout for a while – 5 pound jumps work well for several months. Sets of 5 reps have proven their value over decades of experimentation, to the extent that the experiment is over. Likewise, 3 sets of 5 have proven to work for everything except the deadlift, which gets only one set of 5. Press and bench press alternate, each increasing a little every time they’re trained, albeit with smaller increments – perhaps 1.5 to 2 pounds – because the limiting muscle groups are smaller and fewer in number. Shortly after you start, the power clean is introduced and alternates with the deadlift; it goes up a little every time too, 5 pounds at first and then slowing to resemble the press and bench press increments. Since the deadlift is always stronger than the squat at first, its head start keeps it ahead of the squat even though it gets trained half as often after the clean is introduced.By “stuck”, I mean that the trainee becomes incapable of making workout-to-workout increases in weight on the basic exercises. No program in the world works forever. A human obviously cannot add 5 pounds to his squat 3 times per week for 15 years. He can for several months, the number of which depends on his ability to correctly execute the spirit and the details of the program. It is better to remain unstuck and making slow progress than it is to have to figure out how to get unstuck.Most people have problems with the spirit and the details, and getting prematurely stuck is quite common. By “prematurely”, I mean within the first 3 months, surely, and probably the first 4 months, which can almost always be sustained by just paying attention. So I get asked about this a lot: what do I do when I get stuck? Go to an intermediate program?I’d rather ask this question: Why are you stuck when you shouldn’t be? And then I always ask these 3 very important questions, in this order.Question 1How long are you resting between sets? This is usually the reason a kid is stuck, because he’ll usually say, “Oh, at least 2 or 3 minutes.” Strength training is not conditioning, and if you do not recover from the fatigue induced by the previous set, then accumulating fatigue limits your ability to complete the sets and reps required by the program. In a novice program, fatigue is not a variable we wish to introduce, because force production is the adaptation we want, not conditioning.