Starting Strength

dropping the deadlift frequency to every fifth workout, alternated with power cleans. This might be necessary if recovery is becoming a problem, as it might be for an older trainee, a female trainee, or someone who just refuses to eat and sleep enough. Now the program looks like this:
     

    This makes the next two weeks look like this:

    Any supplemental exercises other than chin-ups should be chosen very carefully so as not to interfere with progress on these five crucial movements. Remember: if progress is being made on the primary exercises, you are getting stronger and your objective is being accomplished. If in doubt, leave it out. Ha.
    After you progress beyond the novice phase, you can still use this workout, with very few additions. The variety is introduced into the programming of each lift, and variations are made in the workload. Even for more advanced trainees, it is unnecessary to add lots of different exercises to the workout, as the purpose is always served when strength levels increase on the basic lifts. Any assistance exercises that are added must be kept in their proper perspective; they are there to help you get stronger in the basic lifts, not as an end in themselves. The press and the bench press, for example, will always be more important than arm work, and if curls and triceps exercises interfere with your recovery from pressing or benching, instead of adding to your strength in these lifts, they are being misused.
    Most Olympic weightlifting coaches will use a workout order that places faster movements before slower movements, so that the explosive lifts – the snatch, the clean and jerk, and their variations – are performed before the strength exercises, like the squat and the pressing movements. This order makes sense if the competitive lifts are the emphasis of the program, even though some of the most competitive nations in Olympic weightlifting don’t always do it this way. Our program uses the power clean as the explosive movement, but since none of the exercises in this novice program are approached as competitive lifts, doing the power clean as the last exercise in the workout is more productive for strength development because it leaves the emphasis on the squat. Doing the squat first provides a superior warm-up for all the subsequent movements, and doing the squat while you’re fresh grants it the attention it deserves as the most important exercise in the program.
     
    Warm-up sets
     
    Warm-ups serve two very important purposes. First, warm-ups actually make the soft tissue – the muscles and tendons, and the ligaments that comprise the joints – warmer. General warm-up exercises increase the temperature in the soft tissue and mobilize the synovial fluid in the joints. These exercises include walking fast or jogging, riding an exercise bike (a better method, due to the greater range of motion the knees are exposed to during the exercise, better preparing them for the squat), or using a rowing machine (the best method, due to its range of motion and the full involvement of the back and arms as well as the legs). Specific warm-ups, like the empty-bar sets of the barbell exercise itself, also serve to warm, mobilize, and stretch the specific tissues involved in that particular movement. This step is important for injury prevention, since it is more difficult to injure a warm body than a cold one.
    The elevation of tissue temperature is very important and requires that several variables be kept in mind. The temperature of the training facility should be considered as a factor in this phase of warm-up. A cold room interferes with effective warm-up, while a hot room aids it. Winter months and summer months produce different warm-up requirements for most athletes, who will usually arrive at training feeling different in August than they do in January. A healing injury needs extra warm-up for the affected tissues. And the age of the trainee affects warm-up requirements as well. Younger people are less sensitive to a lack of warm-up than adults are, and the older the adult, the more time is needed for pre-workout preparation.
    The second function of warm-ups is especially important in barbell training: it allows you to practice the movement before the weight gets heavy. Light warm-up sets, done first with the empty bar and then progressively heavier until the work sets are loaded, prepare the movement pattern itself so that when the weight gets heavy, you can focus your attention on