Starting Strength

5' 9" and 155, and six weeks later you weigh 160, YNDTP. If you started at 5' 9" and 235, and six weeks later you’re only squatting 50 pounds more than you started with, still at a bodyweight of 235, YNDTP.
    Realistically, gains on the squat will slow after this period to an average of about 10 pounds per week due to the fact that most people will get sick occasionally, miss a workout or two because of school, work, family, etc., or get a minor injury that will need to be dealt with. Ideally, these interruptions do not occur, but you’ll find that in most cases, the extremely rapid growth in strength and size experienced during the first six to eight weeks is not sustained. But the program does not change, because 5-pound jumps are theoretically possible for this entire novice period. The bumps are dealt with on a case-by-case basis, and the diet is held constant as long as things are improving predictably. This will therefore usually mean that after 10–12 weeks on the program, another 40 pounds has been added to the squat, resulting in about 245–265 x 5 x 3 for our generalized guy’s squat. During this period, your bodyweight should be continuing to increase if you’re the skinny guy, or your bodyfat should be continuing to moderate if you were the fat guy. Skinny guys by now have added perhaps 40 pounds, and fat guys might have started to actually gain bodyweight after the initial loss, depending on how fat they were when they started.
    So, if you’re three months into the program and your squat has gone up 50 pounds, YNDTP. If you’re three months into the program at 10% bodyfat and you have gained only 6 pounds, YNDTP. If you’re three months into the program at 30% bodyfat, your waistline has not gone down 4 inches, and your squat is not up at least 150 pounds, YNDTP. Again, the program uses a diet that facilitates progress, and not everybody will use the same diet to progress toward the same goal of more muscle mass, since we don’t want to let bodyfat get out of control. And out of control is not the same thing as a moderate, necessary, healthy increase.
    After the first three or four months, a change will be necessary for most guys who started off skinny. If you have done the program correctly, you will have gained quite a bit of weight, about 60% of it being lean body mass (LBM) – muscle, tendon, and bone. This means that your bodyfat may have gone from ~10% to 18–19%. This is fine; it was necessary to produce the LBM increase. But now it’s time to modify the diet to reflect your body’s approach to its limit of fast LBM growth. All improvement rates taper off; improvement obviously can’t go on forever, but it must occur at first to get our goal accomplished. Now, we need to drop the milk down to a half-gallon a day for a while, and then perhaps less than that. At the same time, daily caloric intake should drop to about 4000 calories/day, which you accomplish by cleaning up the carb intake and focusing on dietary quality instead of quantity like you did at first. This adjustment will allow your bodyfat levels to drop back to where they need to be, in the range of 15–17%, normal for athletic males in our demographic. The fat guys should be approaching 20% by now as well, since their diet has been about the same since the beginning; but their body weight should have started back up by now, as bodyfat loss has slowed and LBM increases have begun to exceed the loss. In this way, the two extremes converge at about the same dietary intake levels, with the guys who were skinny maintaining a slightly higher caloric intake that reflects their natural tendency toward being skinny.
    Along with these changes have come another 30–40 pounds of squat. The program has not changed significantly, but the gains have begun to taper as the complexities of life and adaptation have accumulated to further interfere with your good intentions. But if you have persisted on the program and have not used these tapering results as an excuse to drop it and move “on” to super-slow, or HIT, or this year’s Pre-Olympia Contest Preparatory Routine, you’ll still be accumulating progress. This will mean that your squat may be up 200 pounds.
    So, if you’re still drinking a gallon of milk a day eight months into the program, YNDTP. If you have gained only 8 pounds, either as a skinny guy or above your low point when you were losing bodyfat, YNDTP. If your squat has increased only 50 pounds,