Starting Strength

which he is not adapted, and adaptation will thus occur if he provides for recovery. And this stress will always produce more strength, because that is the most basic physical adaptation to any physical stress that requires the body to produce force. For a rank novice trainee, riding a bicycle will make his bench press increase – for a short time. This does not mean that cycling is a good program for the bench press; it just means that for an utterly unadapted person, the cycling served as an adaptive stimulus. The problem with cycling for a novice bench-presser is that it rapidly loses its ability to act as an efficient enough systemic force-production stress to continue driving improvement on the bench, since it does not produce a force-production stress specific to the bench press.
    The thing that differentiates a good program from a less-good program is its ability to continue stimulating the desired adaptation. So, by definition, a program that requires a regular increase in some aspect of its stress is an effective program for a novice, and one that doesn’t is less effective. For a novice, any program is better than no program at all, so all programs work with varying degrees of efficiency. This is why everybody thinks their program works, and why you’ll always find perfectly honest testimonials for every new exercise program on TV or the Internet. But nothing works as well as moderately increasing some loading parameter each time, for as long as an adaptation to the increase continues to occur, because it is specifically designed to produce both stress and adaptation.
    And since the best way to produce athletic improvement in novices is to increase strength, a program that increases total-body strength in a linear fashion is the best one for a novice athlete to use if he is to improve his performance the most in the shortest time possible. It seems rather apparent that there can be only one efficient way to program barbell training for a novice, and that is to apply a linear increase in force-production stress while using basic exercises that work the whole body. If applied in a way that can be supported by adequate recovery from the stress in a timeframe that efficiently produces progress, this approach always produces a linear increase in strength because it takes advantage of the most basic rule of biology: organisms adapt to their environment if the stress causes an adaptation and if the stress is not overwhelming in its magnitude.
    Rank novices can be trained close to the limit of their ability every time they train, precisely because that ability is at such a low level relative to their genetic potential. As a result of this relatively hard training, novices get strong very quickly. (Novices can recover from relatively hard training because they are weak, and the training is not really that hard in absolute terms.) Weak people can obviously get stronger faster than strong people can. But that changes rapidly, and as you progress through your training career, your program should get more and more complicated as a result of the changing nature of your adaptive response. The intermediate trainee has advanced to the point where the stress required for change is high enough that when that stress is applied in consecutive workouts, it exceeds the trainee’s capacity for recovery within that period of time. Intermediate trainees are capable of training hard enough that some allowances for active recovery must be incorporated into the training program, but progress still comes faster for these athletes when they are challenged often by maximum efforts. Advanced athletes are working at levels close enough to their genetic potential that great care should be taken to ensure enough variability in the intensity and volume that overtraining does not become a problem. These principles are illustrated in Figure 8-1 and are discussed at length in Practical Programming for Strength Training, Second Edition (The Aasgaard Company, 2009).

    Figure 8-1. The generalized relationship between performance improvement and training complexity relative to time. Note that the rate of adaptation to training slows over a training career.

    So, as a general rule, you need to try to add weight to the work sets of the exercise every time you train, until you can’t do this anymore. This is the basic tenet of “progressive resistance training,” and setting up the program this way is what makes it different from exercise. For as