Starting Strength

an adaptation to occur – one set will not provide enough. Third and most important, one intense set adapts the body to work hard for one intense set, since exercise, as we know, is specific. It is true that strength is the most general athletic adaptation, and the more force you can produce, the better. But for a novice trainee, the context in which strength is produced is quite important, and for the same reasons we don’t train novices with 1RM work, we don’t use 2–5RM-level efforts either (to be discussed immediately below). Except for sumo wrestling and a couple of others, sports do not usually involve one isolated, relatively brief intense effort, but generally involve repeated bouts of work. And one single set at very high intensity is not the best way to build force-production capacity if you lack the experience to effectively produce enough force in one low-volume set. A sets-across routine more closely mimics the effort usually involved in sports and more effectively allows the trainee to learn to work hard, and therefore produces a more useful adaptation.
    In fact, one of the most effective strategies for intermediates is to do the squat, bench, and press for five sets across of five reps, once a week as one of the three workouts, increasing the weight used by very small manageable amounts each week.
    The easiest way to stop your progress between workouts is to fail to finish all the reps of all the prescribed work sets. And the easiest way to make this happen is to fail to rest long enough between work sets to allow fatigue from the previous set to dissipate before you start the next set. If fatigue accumulates as the work sets progress, the predictable outcome will be that instead of 5-5-5 reps, you will do 5-4-3 when 5-5-5 was actually possible had you waited long enough between sets. This is the most common error made by novice trainees: the confusion of strength training with conditioning work. The program requires that you increase weight every workout for as long as possible, and if you fail to complete all the reps of all the work sets, you cannot increase the weight in your next workout. Make sure you give yourself enough time to complete your reps. If the weight is actually too heavy – because you took too big a jump or you have not recovered from the previous workout – then your programming must change. But impatience is a poor reason to allow progress to come to a halt.
    How many reps should a work set consist of? It depends on the adaptation desired. Five reps is a good number for most purposes, but an understanding of the reasons for this is essential so that special circumstances can be accommodated correctly.
    When you’re trying to understand the nature of any given set of variables, it is often helpful to start with the extremes, the limits of which can reveal things about the stuff in the middle. In this case, let’s compare a one-rep max, or 1RM, squat to a 20RM squat and look at the different physiological requirements for doing each set. Credit for this explanation goes to Glenn Pendlay, from a conversation that yielded perhaps the most useful model of adaptation to exercise ever developed.
    The single most important contributing factor to the successful heavy one-rep attempt is the ability of the muscles involved to produce force. The heavier the weight, the more force required to move it, as should be obvious. The one-rep set doesn’t take very long to do, so muscular endurance is not a factor, and neither is cardiovascular capacity, for the same reason. Even a bone-on-bone limit attempt doesn’t take more than a few seconds. The only thing the muscles must do is produce sufficient force to overcome the weight on the bar as it moves through the range of motion of the lift one time. So, in response to 1RM training, the body adapts by getting better at producing high amounts of force, one rep at a time. It does this by adjusting the components of the system that produce the force: the nervous system, the neuromuscular system, and the muscles themselves, specifically the components of the muscle that actually produce the contraction.
    There are other adaptations that are secondary to the main ones, but they all involve helping the body perform a brief, intense effort. Psychological adaptations enable the lifter to overcome his fear of a heavy weight. The heart adapts by getting better at working with a huge load on the back, and the blood vessels adapt by becoming capable