Starting Strength

guys, the very young, and women will need to start with small jumps, and the special light plates are particularly important for these trainees to keep making progress on the bench. Do not be afraid to slow the increases down to very small jumps on the bench; remember that an increase of even 2 pounds per week means a 104-pound increase in a year, not a shameful amount of progress for the bench press.
    The press will behave similarly to the bench press, since the muscles involved in moving the bar are small relative to the squatting and deadlifting muscles. The press uses lots of muscles, true, but the limiting factors are the strength and the efficiency of the mechanics of the smaller upper-body muscles, and no chain is stronger than its weakest link, as the saying goes. The same jumps used for the bench can usually be used for the press, although the press will start off at somewhere between 50% to 70% of the weight used in the bench press. Since you are alternating the two exercises, they will stay about the same weight apart as they increase.
    The deadlift will progress faster than any of the other lifts, because the start position, basically a half-squat or above, is very efficient mechanically, and because virtually every muscle in the body is involved in the movement. Most men can add 15 pounds to the deadlift each workout for a couple of weeks, with the very young, women, and older guys taking a more conservative approach. But 5-pound jumps in the deadlift should be sustainable for several months. This being the case, the deadlift will start out with heavier weights than the other lifts for all trainees, should get stronger faster, and will continue to be stronger than the other lifts (unless you become an advanced powerlifting competitor). A trainee who benches more than he deadlifts needs to stop avoiding his deadlift workouts. But since the deadlift involves more muscles and more weight than the other lifts, it is easier to overtrain. For a novice, the deadlift should not be trained using sets across. It is really easy to get really beat-up doing a lot of heavy deadlifts. One work set at the intensity of a real work set is quite sufficient to produce improvement.
    It is interesting that the power clean behaves more like the bench press than like the squat or deadlift, in terms of the way it increases over time. The reason for this involves the biomechanical nature of the movement and the factors limiting its progress. The power clean is explosive and technical, and it involves more than just absolute strength. It is limited at the top of the movement by the lifter’s ability to get the bar on the shoulders, and the heavier the weight, the more the power clean depends on the lifter’s ability to generate enough momentum to get the bar high enough to rack. This momentum is controlled by the lifter’s ability to explode – to recruit lots of motor units into contraction instantly – a physical attribute that is largely dependent on genetics and thus is less responsive to training than strength is. The power clean will move up maybe 5 pounds per workout for most men. If the power snatch is used, it will also move up slowly for the same reasons, albeit with a lighter weight than that used in the power clean. Women and younger, older, and lighter trainees will need to introduce smaller plates earlier in the progression.
    Ancillary exercises, which are by their nature inefficient isolation-type exercises, produce very slow progress. Anybody claiming rapid gains on triceps extensions or barbell curls is not utilizing particularly strict form and should be criticized for such foolishness.
    When these smaller jumps can no longer be sustained, a trainee can be considered an intermediate, and the fun begins with more complicated manipulation of training variables. This variation in exercises, tonnage, and intensity for the purpose of ensuring continued progress is referred to as periodization . It is unnecessary for rank beginners, since they get strong as fast as they can increase the weight every workout, and it is indispensable for advanced lifters, who cannot continue to make progress without it. Intermediates are, like the name says, somewhere in between, with some degree of training parameter manipulation necessary to allow for continued but slower progress. Programming beyond the novice phase is beyond the scope of this book and is dealt with in detail in Practical Programming for Strength Training, Second