Starting Strength

been to the gym to bench or to your sincerest hope that it will get stronger. It adapts to the stress imposed on it by the work done with the barbell. Furthermore, it adapts to exactly the kind of stress imposed on it. If you do sets of 20, you get good at doing 20s. If you do heavy singles, you get better at doing those. But singles and 20s are very different; the muscles and nervous system function differently when doing these two things, and they require two different sets of physiological capacities, and thus cause the body to adapt differently. The adaptation occurs in response to the stress, and specifically to that stress, because the stress is what causes the adaptation. This is why calluses form where the bar rubs on the hand, and not on the other parts of the hand, or on your face, or all over your body. It can obviously be no other way.
    Furthermore, the stress must be capable of being recovered from. Unlike the 2 hours of sun the first day or the 55 bench reps once a month, the stress must be appropriate for the trainee receiving it. If the stress is so overwhelming that you cannot recover from it in time to apply more of it in a timeframe which permits accumulated adaptation, it is useless as a beneficial tool that drives progress.
    An awareness of this central organizing principle of physiology as it applies to physical activity is essential to program design. Exercise and training are two different things. Exercise is physical activity for its own sake, a workout done for the effect it produces today, during the workout or right after you’re through. Training is physical activity done with a longer-term goal in mind, the constituent workouts of which are specifically designed to achieve that goal. If a program of physical activity is not 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 is just exercise. For most people, exercise is perfectly adequate – it’s certainly better than sitting on your ass.
    But for athletes, an improvement in strength provides more improvement in performance than any other adaptation does, especially if the athlete is not already very strong. Strength is the basis of athletic ability. If you are a good athlete, you are stronger than a less-good athlete at the same level of skill. If you want to be a better athlete, you get stronger. If you are already very strong, you need to devote most of your attention to the development of other aspects of performance. But there is a very high likelihood that you are not that strong, since most people are not. You may think you’re very strong, but really, you know you could get stronger, don’t you? Sure you do. You may have convinced everybody else that you’re strong enough; you may even be convinced of this yourself. Your coach may have told you so, too. This deception is not productive, though, because if you can get stronger, you should do so, and a lack of strength may be why you’re not performing as well as you know you should be. If your progress is stuck, and has been for a while, get stronger and see what happens. And for a strength training program to actually work, you must do something that requires that you be stronger to get it done, and this requirement must be inherent in the program design.
    The less experienced the athlete, the simpler the program should be, and the more advanced the athlete, the more complex the program must be. We are going to take advantage of a phenomenon I have called the “Novice Effect.” Simply described, this is what happens when a previously untrained person begins to lift weights – he gets stronger very quickly at first, and then improves less and less rapidly as he gets stronger and stronger. It is nothing more than the commonly observed principle of diminishing returns, applied to adaptive physiology. Rank novices are not strong enough to tax themselves beyond their ability to recover, because they are so thoroughly unadapted to stress; they have made almost no progress on the road to the fulfillment of their athletic potential, and almost anything they do that is not heinous abuse will cause an adaptation.
    When an untrained person starts an exercise program, he gets stronger. He always does, no matter what the program is. He gets stronger because anything he does that is physically harder than what he’s been doing constitutes a stress to