THE
novice
linear
progression
WHY IT WORKS AND WHAT
TO DO WHEN IT DOESN’T
1
Table
of
Contents
1. The Novice Linear Progression
3
2. Structure and Usage
6
3. Lifting Form and Training History
14
4. The Training Log
17
5. Is the NLP a Cookie-Cutter Template?
24
6. Failing A Rep: Novice Troubleshooting
29
2
1. The Novice
Linear Progression
Whether you are new to strength training or an old hand, the
novice linear progression should be a staple of your training.
It’s a starting place when we are first introduced to barbell
training, giving anyone the opportunity to learn the main lifts
while they start to build the foundation for long-term gains.
It’s a reset button when you come back to training after time
off. It’s the core of your training log. If the proof of the pudding
is in the eating, the novice linear progression is where you
get to try out the theories of adaptation and strength training.
Perhaps the best thing about the novice linear progression is
that it works—for everyone, every time. It works because it is
so simple.
If you aren’t familiar with the novice linear progression (or
LP for short), let’s catch you up. Barbell training for strength
revolves around four main lifts: the squat, overhead press
(“press”), deadlift, and bench press. A basic LP organizes these
four lifts into two separate workouts, taking about an hour
each.
3
Workout AWorkout B
Squat: 3 x 5
Squat: 3 x 5
Press: 3 x 5
Bench Press: 3 x 5
Deadlift: 1 x 5
Deadlift: 1 x 5
“3 x 5” and “1 x 5” stands for “three sets of five repetitions” and
“one set of five repetitions.”
We call these the work sets for each lift. They tell you what
the focus is for that day’s workout. Following a warm-up, you
perform the prescribed number of sets and reps for the day at
the same weight, with a few minutes of rest between each set.
Then move on to the next lift. The weight is determined by what
you did in your last workout.
Simply alternate Workout A with Workout B each time you
train. Ideally, as a novice lifter, you want to have 48–72 hours
between training sessions, which fits nicely into a Monday,
Wednesday, Friday lifting schedule, as we’ve set out here.
TRAIN 3X PER WEEEK
MON
TUE
WED
THUR
FRI
WEEK 1
A
B
A
WEEK 2
B
A
B
4
Our goal is to add a little bit of weight—usually 2.5–5
pounds—each workout. If your prescribed workout for the
day is to squat 135 pounds for 3 x 5, you will do three sets of
five repetitions at 135 pounds. Next time you squat, your goal
would be to squat 140 pounds for 3x5. The amount of weight
you add to the bar each time can vary from person to person,
but adding five pounds each workout is a pretty good rule of
thumb for the lower body lifts. For the upper body lifts, most
men will start by adding five pounds each time they train but
will quickly switch to adding just 2.5 pounds; for women, the
increments are usually 2.5 pounds, then down to 1.25 or just
1 pound for the majority of the program. The sweet spot is
where you can balance adding enough weight to signal your
body to get stronger and preserving steady, linear progress
for as long as possible.
That’s the essence of the program, at least to start. Every lifter
is a little bit different, but a few things tend to hold true for the
novice linear progression: (1) it works for everyone when you
use it correctly, and (2) it does not work forever. What follows
is some discussion of when, how, and why to use the novice
linear progression, and what to do when it stops working.
5
2. structure
and usage
At Barbell Logic, we talk a lot about the “novice linear
progression,” enough so that “LP” is a commonly understood
term on the Barbell Logic podcast and in many of our
materials. The novice linear progression represents a
physiologically based, time-tested approach to strength
training for those whom we call “novice” lifters.
Starting with the idea that you want to get stronger, there are
several variables that you have to consider as to the “How” of
that goal. You are going to have to choose certain exercises
that make up the bulk of your training time, for example. Once
you figure those out, how often are you going to train? How
heavy are you going to lift? For how many repetitions?
The lifts we use are simple, hard, and effective for building
muscle. They are those that help us train the most muscle
mass, meaning they are big multi-joint movements with large
ranges of motion, and importantly for strength training, they
are lifts that allow the lifter to lift a lot of weight. The core
lifts for any serious strength training program are the squat,
overhead press, deadlift, and bench press. We also rely on
6
those lifts to help us measure strength. If you improve your
main barbell lifts, consistently and over a long enough period
of time, we know without a doubt that you got stronger.
Usually, a lot stronger.
A basic LP relies heavily on sets of five repetitions. When we
organize the main activity of lifting into sets, we presume
that the weight on the bar will be appropriate to the number
of repetitions performed. Someone will presumably lift a lot
more weight for a single repetition than for a set of twenty.
The different efforts for different rep ranges signal to us that
accumulating repetitions in different ranges leads to different
types of training effects. At one repetition, fatigue within the
set will be almost nonexistent. The entire focus of that set is
on how well your fresh muscles can produce force. At twenty
repetitions, the weight is relatively light and not nearly as
much of a challenge to your ability to produce force. Instead,
fatigue and the ability to continue rep-after-rep makes twentyrep sets mostly an act of muscular endurance. For our most
basic lifting program, we want to focus on training that will
allow us to accumulate training in a range that is biased
toward strength and muscle growth. Experience and the
evidence of thousands of lifters tells us that the optimal rep
range for general strength tends to revolve around sets of
five repetitions. Even as we make changes to the basic linear
7
progression program, the majority of a lifter’s training will be
in the three to six repetition range.
In addition to lifts, sets, and repetitions, a person’s level of
training advancement is one of the main organizing factors for
a training program. The term “novice” is a categorization of
training advancement that helps structure how we think about
a lifter’s program. Some people think “novice” means “weak,”
or “inexperienced,” giving it a negative connotation. “Novice,”
however, is a term of art in strength training that has little to
do with how strong you are and much more to do with how
trained you are. Someone may be very experienced—even
strong—but still relatively untrained. If there is any single goal
of the novice linear progression, it is to take someone from an
untrained state to a trained one as directly and efficiently as
possible.
Reasons to Use the Novice Linear Progression
A linear progression is not just for novices. We use the
program a lot for lifters who have plenty of experience under
their belts for many different reasons. It’s important, however,
to understand when someone can be treated like a novice
and put on a linear progression. It is not a blunt programming
default. In addition to the basic linear progression being a nofrills, simple program, there are three other reasons we will
8
use it. (1) Everyone is a novice sometimes (usually many times)
during their training career. (2) The program is the best way to
generate useful training history that informs the rest of your
training. And (3) in practice, a linear progression program is
individualized, based on actual training, and playing out in as
many different ways as the number of people who use it.
You Might Be a Novice If…
• You can recover from training and demonstrate an
improvement in strength in 24–48 hours.
• You’ve “lifted weights” regularly but have never used a
barbell linear progression program.
• You haven’t been using proper form.
• You haven’t touched a barbell in a month or more.
“Novice” is a term of art that refers to someone for whom the
first workout is generally light enough that he or she can come
back in two days and lift more weight using the same exercise,
sets, and reps.
There are many reasons why this first workout might be light:
1. New Lifters
If you are new to lifting, you do not need a lot of stress to get
a little bit stronger from a training session. This means that
the weights will be light relative to your absolute potential.
9
It might feel heavy because you are doing a lot of new
movements or you are unused to this kind of exercise, but
it will be light compared to what you could do and what you
will do eventually.
2. Setbacks
Injuries, illness, or anything else that undercuts your
physical potential so that you cannot return to training
exactly where you left off, can make you a situational novice.
Here, the first goal is usually to return to the standard linear
progression. In the case of rehab after an injury or surgery,
often the exercises will change until you can return to the
full range of motion. Once doing so, a linear progression
helps to return you to your pre-injured strength. Whether
the linear progression fits your setback needs is a
judgment-call, but this is one of the most common ways to
get yourself back to pre-setback levels quickly.
3. Time Off
A return to training after an extended time away from the
gym also often warrants a linear progression, at least a
short run of one (a “mini-LP”). Depending on how long you
took off from training, you may need to start light and give
yourself an “on-ramp” to your previously programmed
regimen.
10
4. New to This Type of Training
Many people have experience with weight training. Not many
have trained with the same focus of a linear progression
while using excellent form. Making incremental progress
on the biggest barbell lifts takes an intensity of focus and
dedication to your training and recovery practices that
aren’t necessary for more casual lifting. If you reorganize
your training based on these principles, you will be a novice
for at least a little while as you benefit from the newness
of the stress and get used to this type of focused strength
training.
A Linear Progression Meets You at Your
Current Level of Training
The most basic reason that a linear progression is useful is
that it meets you where you are at in your training. When you
walk into the gym on Day One, you do so with a certain level of
ability on that day. This program starts wherever you are on
that day. It doesn’t really matter if you are squatting several
plates or a broomstick. The point is you can do something.
Everybody, almost without exception, can cause stress
large enough to produce a physical change, right now. No
prerequisites required. The linear progression gives shape to
that stress, directs it toward strength gains, and puts it in a
context that allows you to get better over time and generate a
11
training history.
We don’t really care how strong you are right now. We care
about making you stronger, starting right now.
For many people, this process through which the linear
progression takes them is the most difficult physical thing they
will ever have the opportunity to do. It’s imperative to stick
with it, though. It’s hard because you are playing catch-up,
and catching up requires a metaphorical sprint. It is also the
best way to generate useful training data that will inform your
training and programming decisions to help you continue to
make progress for a very long time.
It is Hard Because You are Playing Catch-up
Whether you are a true novice lifter, picking up a barbell for
the first time—or the first time in many years—or you are a
situational novice, returning to training after time off or an
injury, you are going to play catch-up. You can get stronger
quickly. Great! Watching the weight on the bar go up every
training session is a huge boost to anyone’s goals for training.
While enjoying the progress, you should also have a sense
of urgency. The fuzzy line that marks the end of your linear
progression is a baseline, not an end result. It marks the
strongest you can be with the least amount of complexity, the
least amount of time, and the simplest program. There is no
12
number that should tell you when you have met an acceptable
base level of strength. The novice linear progression not only
meets you where you are on Day One, but it also takes you to
a baseline level of strength—given your lifestyle, genetics, and
training habits.
Some people are constantly playing catch-up, perpetual
novices who will train for a while, then travel or get sick or
need some kind of layoff from training. Masters lifters tend
to de-train more quickly when these interruptions happen.
Coming back to training from even a short time off, they
require another bout of linear progress. The cycle tends to
repeat for some people, making them “novices” for years.
That’s okay. They still benefit from the process of training.
Every time they come back, the program meets them where
they are, and progress goes on from there. (When there is no
end goal other than getting stronger, the journey really is the
destination.) The novice linear progression is the best place to
start—or to start over—when you need to hit a reset button on
your training.
13
3. lifting form and
training history
“Simple. Hard. Effective.” characterizes most useful plans for
self-improvement. We’ve discussed what makes the novice
linear progression simple and hard and why everyone will
use, and often reuse, the program during their lifting careers:
loading the main barbell lifts in manageable increments with
some small variations, will quickly develop a base level of
strength. The novice linear progression teaches your body
to expect hard work and puts the processes that make you
stronger into overdrive, maximizing your body’s ability to adapt
and get strong in the shortest reasonable amount of time.
Intensity—determined by the amount of weight on the
barbell—increases at your rate of adaptation. You start
at your own baseline on the first day with a stress that is
new. The next training day, you add a little bit more weight,
increasing the magnitude of the stress. If you follow the
program outlined above and use modest weight increases,
you can add weight to the bar for a long while, driving your
strength upward as you get stronger and as you get better at
training.
14
The program gets hard at the end. Just as the final strides of
an all-out sprint turns your shoes to lead as you try to put one
foot in front of the other, lifting heavy weights, recovering, then
lifting heavier weights over a short period of time becomes a
very real struggle.
It Generates Useful Training Data
As you play catch-up and build your strength to the baseline
set by the novice linear progression, you are also creating
data and training history, something imperative to your longterm success. How you adapt to the lifts, sets and reps, and
loads lifted is an insight into your responses to each of the
training variables that will be useful down the road—as your
training becomes more complex and more narrowly focused
on your goals.
What you do in the gym today affects what you do tomorrow,
or the next day, or next month, or next year. And, because you
are human, your training will not always be perfect.
Moving from one workout to the next, making observations
about how you respond to small changes in training is a
scientific approach to training. The smallest change you
can make for progress is to increase the load on the bar
incrementally. The linear progression, therefore, creates
15
the best starting point for a Test-Observation-Analysis look
at your own training. The observations in your training log
inform many of the decisions about your training as you move
forward.
16
4. the training log
If you are at all serious about your training, you need to keep a
training log and fill it out by hand. It should be in some form of
hardcopy notebook. Everything else is a redundant backup—in
case fire, flood, hurricane, or force majeure ruins your hard
copy.
There are many reasons to keep a training log. Most are
practical, a few esoteric among lifters. Let’s get the latter out
of the way. At Barbell Logic, we believe that strength training
should be commonplace and training part of everyone’s weekly
regimen. The benefits of strength training are too great that
it should be otherwise. Yet, in most people’s circles, strength
training is fringe among various kinds of exercise, and barbell
training is still seen as extreme. Whether you intend it or not,
you are part of a relatively small population who gets what it
is like to actually train. You understand how a heavy set of five
repetitions can impact your whole day.
The training log is a part of the lifting culture. Can you write
your training log in a spreadsheet and apply all kinds of cool
formulas to it? Sure, but you should still write it down. Can
17
you have your program delivered via email and automatically
logged? Also, yes, but you should still keep a hard copy at
home. The act of writing in a training log is part of the ritual of
training. You start every training session with a warm-up, and
you finish each with an entry in your logbook. Doing otherwise
breaks the cycle. While it may seem inconsequential, it is one
less thing you are doing consistently, one less practice that
keeps your training serious.
The act of writing something down on paper is an act of
organization and memory. When you write, your brain
engages the information you are writing down differently
than if you simply type or record it otherwise—called the
paper effect. When you write something down, you force the
information through a conscious organizational process,
attaching not only information to the writing but also your
impressions, sensations, and easily forgettable details. When
we type, the method is more about mindlessly recording
base information, but when we write more of our senses are
engaged in the act, making the information more memorable,
easier to recall, and easier to consider critically in different
contexts.
And that, really, is what a training log is for. It is the organic
memory of your training. At some point, there is no other
18
motivation to train than past progress. If you cannot recall
the feeling of your last PR, when it happened, or what was on
the bar, you cannot easily call up the motivation to struggle
for the next one. Your training past has value.
That past also affects your training future. Programming
decisions become more individualized and more complex the
further along you get in your training career. These decisions
are made more effective by a body of training data. Even the
basic recording of exercises, loads, sets, and reps, when
viewed over weeks, months, or years, provides a great deal of
insight into your unique responses to training variables.
Records Trends
Future training benefits from hindsight. There are always
more things going on in your life than just lifting, eating, and
sleeping. Remember how you trained when you had your first
child? (Probably not, because you also weren’t sleeping much)
When the second one comes along, or the third, you already
have a great source of data to show how you respond to the
additional stress and subtracted sleep. How about when
you had an injury? Or during last year’s competitive season?
What did your training look like? What worked? What didn’t?
The more complicated your life is, the more trial and error
there will be in your training. As you build a training history
19
and record the trends, you will help to reduce future trial and
error.
What Should Be in Your Training Log
You should put in your training log whatever you like. Some
people are minimalists and only want to record bare-bones,
essential data. Prolific others may want to “Stephen-King”
their training logs. Either approach is fine as long as you
always include a few essential details:
1. Date and Day of the Week
Include the basic organizing information. When you look
back, you won’t remember if October 24th was a Tuesday
or a Wednesday. If you trained on the scheduled day or it
was moved for some reason. The frequency of your training
is an important variable, so include it here.
2. Exercises, sets, and reps
The most basic and necessary information. Include the
lift, the load, and the work sets. This records not just the
training stress, but over time tells the story of the varying
stress and your progress.
3. Highlight your PRs
Make a note when you hit a new PR. An asterisk, highlighter,
20
gold star, anything works. Just make it easy to see. These
are your fuel when things get hard. Make it easy to find and
remember.
4. Basic Impressions
Include some brief descriptions of the workout, such as
how you felt or how long the session took to complete and
whether you did anything new or different during your
warm-ups, in rest periods, or with your form.
One of the most difficult things to do is to make training a
habit. Small rituals, like always keeping a training log, can
help. In that simple act, you elevate the priority your training
takes in your life, helping your stay consistent with training
because it matters to you. Consistency is key to making any
program work for you—that, and excellent lifting form.
The judicious use of the novice linear progression puts useful
numbers and information into your training log. Intentional
changes during the novice linear progression are small
changes. They include changes to the rate at which the load
increases, gradual additions to the pool of exercises you use
to get stronger, changes to the numbers of reps and sets you
will use on each lift. You may also have unintentional changes.
If something happens personally or at work, your ability to
21
recover from training may change. You may need to change
the frequency of your training as a result. Some hurdles
require you to reset the weight on the bar, backing up a little
bit and trying again with better food, nutrition, sleep, or lifting
form. Your physiology, lifestyle, and the evidence of your
training log will help dictate each of these decisions.
Lifting Form
The best training plan doesn’t mean anything if you aren’t
lifting with excellent form. Lifting form is an essential
assumption of your on-paper training program. The novice
linear progression works every time—assuming that your
lifting form is safe, correct, and consistent. So often, people
start training without investing time to learn good form. You
are not expected to have excellent form when you start, but if
you wait until the weight on the bar is heavy before you start
to worry about whether you are lifting correctly, you will end
up wasting a lot of time.
Most people’s form needs work and a constant feedback
loop to keep the person lifting in a repeatable manner that
produces the best training results. Sometimes fixing your
form will warrant a short-term return to the novice linear
progression as a way to gauge the new and improved
stimulus. You’ve opened a path to get stronger more quickly
22
by making your lifts better.
The novice linear progression starts light enough to anticipate
the learning curve for most people, and you can adjust your
weight increases to accommodate the learning process. No
matter how advanced you are, now is the time to really focus
on your form. And with breakthroughs in how you lift will
come a return to linear progress, for at least a little while.
23
5. Is the Novice Linear
Progression a CookieCutter Template?
If everyone is different, why should an elderly, untrained
grandmother be on the same program as a teenage athlete?
Even though the basic structure is the same, the novice linear
progression is a starting point. It provides organization to the
goal that someone wants to get generally stronger. From that
starting point, people diverge—a little bit at first and more
significantly as they make progress. All good strength training
starts basic and general and becomes more individualized
over time and even in managing the novice linear progression
is an individualized process that relies solely on what you do in
the gym and not at all on what anyone else has done.
Linear Progression Works Because It Adapts to You
The changes that accommodate your individual needs do
not start with the overall structure of the novice linear
progression. The exercise selection, set and rep schemes,
and frequency do not change when someone is first starting
out. We value having a standard place to start that gives us
good data and steady progress. Your responses to training
then inform small, measured changes to the program,
which preserve the ability to test, observe, and analyze your
24
response to the changing variables.
When people consider a training program, they tend to focus
first on exercise selection. “What lifts should I do to get
stronger?” There is a myth that the exercises we do in training
should mimic the activities we perform in our daily lives. At the
most basic level, however, your muscles do not know whether
you are running or jumping, picking up groceries, or carrying
a child up the stairs. Your muscles only contract; they pull.
Sometimes they contract and shorten, moving your skeleton,
sometimes they contract and hold your bones in place, and
sometimes they contract and pull while lengthening to resist
movement. But they only have one job. If you want to make
the muscles that are responsible for running, jumping, and
picking up and carrying things stronger, you need to make
your muscles better at their job. We do this with exercise
selection, picking the lifts that train the most muscle mass,
across the largest effective range of motion, and allow us to
lift the most weight.
But there is more to consider with exercise selection. Each
lift is part of an overall program because we aren’t just trying
to train individual muscles; we are trying to train the whole
body. And the response to training that makes us stronger is a
system-wide response. We not only need to train the muscles
25
that need to get stronger in a coordinated manner according
to the normal function of the body, but we also need to create
systemic stress throughout the body that initiates the cascade
of recovery processes that lead to us getting stronger.
What Does Change?
The novice linear progression is a program of change. You
start in one place, and you get stronger from there. The
rate of change and the ability to continue changing are what
differentiate each person who trains in this manner. Very
strong, athletic people can make faster progress, maybe
adding 10 pounds per training session to their squats for
several weeks. Others will progress at a slower pace.
There is a misunderstanding about the novice linear
progression that we “just add five pounds next time.” Most
people will, at some point during their linear progression,
add five-pound jumps to a lift for several consecutive training
sessions. But many people add more or less weight, depending
on where they are in their progress and how they respond to
the training.
The rate of adding weight depends on your actual
performance in the gym. If the bar is moving fast and you
aren’t causing enough stress to drive adaptation, then you
26
might need to add more weight than the standard five-pound
jump next time. If you are older, you might need to add a lot
less weight. For example, many lifters will benefit from a longterm loading strategy in which they add one pound to the bar
each time they press. As you generate training history, you
learn what increases are both tolerable and productive for
your training.
Other changes that might be necessary for you are to your
sets and reps, or even your training frequency. Some people
benefit from training sets of threes after a while. For some
people, a heavy set of three repetitions provides similar
training stress to a heavy set of five. Others, usually those
with diminished recovery capacities, will benefit from training
twice a week, or every 72-hours.
There are also progressions to the novice linear progression,
changes that will take a novice lifter into the stage of
intermediate training. This progression reduces the frequency
of certain lifts or changes the intensity on one lift for one
day of the week. How you manage both of those changes will
depend on the lifter. The number of ways people go through
a linear progression is almost as varied as the number of
people who do it. We know the general trends, but the actual
program requires subtle alterations and many small decisions
27
that aren’t reflected in the on-paper program.
The signal to make changes is stalled progress or a failed
rep or workout. Early on, we said that the novice linear
progression would not last forever. The big question is, “what
do you do when these linear gains run out or stall?” The last
section of this book discusses how to treat failure as a novice
lifter. We discuss the considerations you must make and the
changes that will come with the natural slowing down or
progress that happens as you get stronger.
28
6. Failing a Rep: Novice
Troubleshooting
Training for strength is an act of self-experimentation, taking
the idea that we can direct physical changes to our bodies and
that lifting heavy weights followed by food and sleep will create
structure, building muscle mass and improve our ability to lift
heavy weights in the future, ultimately making us stronger,
more capable human beings. Few other physical pursuits
take a theoretical framework and apply it with the same
cost of effort and as does strength training. This act of selfexperimentation tends to bond communities of lifters together
because we have those shared hardships and shared failures.
Or, at least, perceived failures. If we extend out the idea
of self-experimentation with us both as scientists and test
subjects, then the question of failure is an interesting one. If
you are a novice lifter, adding a little bit of the weight to the
bar every training session. You will come to the point in which
you know that your plan is non-sustainable. Eventually, you
will add weight to the bar and simply be unable to complete all
the sets and reps you were supposed to lift that day. As the
subject of your experiment, this may be a letdown. No one likes
to set expectations for themselves and fail to meet them, but as
29
the scientist, the failed set, rep, or workout is a data-point.
When it comes to training for strength, the concept is simple—
your body adapts to the specific demands you put on it—but
over the course of your entire lifting career most training
must find a balance between performance (what you can do
in the gym) and stress (what you need to do in order to signal
your body that it needs to adapt and get stronger). Strength
is built upon variables like the exercises we choose to do, the
number of repetitions and sets included in a workout, and the
absolute and objective weight on the barbell.
Failing in a workout for a novice lifter isn’t a problem, it is a
signal. It tells you that there is something in your experiment
that requires attention. Where people tend to get stuck is in
trying to back up and repeat the same experiment over and
over again. This can become akin to running into a wall, then
backing up to do it again; when that doesn’t work, you back up
farther for a better running start. The problem isn’t that there
is a wall in your path; it’s that you failed to see the ladder that
allows you to climb over the wall.
Failing a lift or struggling as you get stronger is the paradox
of progress; the more you do, the stronger you get, the more
difficult training becomes. Training can and should be fun, but
it will rarely be easy. There is tension between knowing that
30
training is difficult and the reality that you cannot continue
on the same program indefinitely. We start every new lifter
on some version of a linear progression program because
novices respond to direct training better than any other
lifter and this novice linear progression is the most direct
expression of the theory of strength training there is:
Novice gains on a linear progression are the low-hanging
fruit of training. There is no simpler, more effective program
that works for just about everyone as they first start to lift
weights. This program can last from a few weeks to several
months, depending on the lifter, but eventually, something
has to change. You know you have reached that point when
either you fail to complete your planned workout or you
struggle mightily enough that continuing to add weight to
the bar no longer makes sense. How you go about making
changes depends on how or why you failed to make continued
progress.
Troubleshooting Failure
Failing a rep happens for one of three reasons, most of
the time. Either you have been lifting with poor form, your
recovery has been subpar, or the organization of your
training needs to change to allow you both to recover and to
continue to make progress. In order of priority, you need to
31
address form problems first, recovery issues next, and the
organization of your training third. The organization of your
training (your program) sets the theoretical bounds of your
progress. It is a building plan for your strength. Your form
and how you treat your recovery are the materials you use
to build. You can have the best-planned house in the world,
but if you are building with straw, you are wasting your time.
When you fail a rep, the first thing to do is to make sure the
substance of your training is solid: your form is correct, and
you are doing all the things outside of the gym that will help
you succeed.
Form
A beautifully executed squat to a depth below parallel is a
mathematically different event than a half squat. Using your
legs when you press, rounding your back when you deadlift,
driving your butt up off the bench when you bench press,
and other major form errors take away from the efficacy
of the lifts and court setbacks in training. Though getting
injured from training is rare, consistently poor training is
neither useful nor safe. If you are doing the lifts differently
every time you train, there is no way to tell whether you are
getting stronger as you add weight to the bar. You may have
simply improved your form, for example, or done the opposite
and started shorting reps or “cheating” with your form as
32
the weight got heavier. Form muddies the data of the selfexperiment, and you can’t make meaningful progress without
at least a baseline of excellent lifting form.
It is a myth that all lifters can or should lift with absolutely
textbook perfect form, every single rep, in every single
workout. You should have excellent form before you progress
beyond the basest novice stage, but even highly experienced
lifters struggle to demonstrate perfect form all the time.
Excellent form means you execute your lifts consistently with
a full range of motion, with the ability to set and hold your
back in extension, and in a manner that allows you to adjust
for improvements rep-to-rep, set-to-set, and workout-toworkout.
Haphazard lifting is the biggest obstacle to progress beyond
the very early novice gains that you will face, and it must be
dealt with. If you fail because of poor lifting form, then your
first step should be to set up a process for fixing it. Whether
you are a novice or not, the best investment to your long-term
success that you can make is to have a system by which you
analyze and work on your form.
Every time you train, video your work sets and review your
lifts. Watch your lifts immediately, while the lift is still fresh
33
in your mind. Evaluate your lifts, implement cues to improve
them, and practice and evaluate your own movement. There is
a feedback loop to learning and perfecting these lifts—learn,
see, practice, and repeat. The more often you engage the
feedback loop, the better potential you have for consistently
excellent form.
Learn
The models for each movement contain visual markers. An
experienced eye can pick out the relationships between
the bar and your various body parts, such as the angles
your limbs make at certain joints. The goal is to start seeing
yourself as a stick figure of connected articulating points and
to learn what movement and angles constitute “correct” form.
See
While everyone looks a little bit different when they perform
the lifts, you look like you. If you have a long torso and
short femurs, you will squat with a more vertical torso than
someone of the opposite build. But you will do so consistently,
and you can learn what you should look like. An experienced
coach can help you confirm or correct your visual perception
of your lift, but over time, you will get better at picking out
your form errors and learning what cues or fixes work.
34
Practice
Every rep is a practice rep. Every time you train, you are
practicing the skill of lifting. Resist the urge to “just lift,”
especially during your warm-up and on lighter days. You
should never just go through the motions. Every rep has a
goal. Those goals will become more narrowly defined as you
become more experienced, learning the fixes for common
errors and the best practices for focusing before each rep.
The weight on the bar will try to distract you from the lift.
The practice of a skill eventually wears the path to natural
movement.
Baseline Form for Progress
• You can feel when the lift is correct. As a novice, you may
not be able to consistently execute a lift correctly as the
weight gets heavier and heavier, but there should be some
“aha!” moments where you feel the correct movement.
• You have a basic understanding of what your correct form
looks like. Videoing every work set is a valuable tool to bring
together your “aha!” moments with the visual description
of your form. Doing this allows you to see pieces of the
movement and experiment with corrections.
• You start to learn your habits and how to correct your
35
mistakes.
• You consistently execute lighter weight and warm-up sets
with perfect form.
• Mistakes are not tied to the weight on the bar. If you find
that once you get to a certain weight on the bar, you cannot
squat to depth, you have a form error that you must correct
before manipulating your programming to make progress.
Recovery and Outside the Gym Stress
When you put your lifting shoes away, store your plates, and
replace the barbell, you haven’t stopped training for the day.
You have only switched from the “stress” part of training to
the recovery part—the part where you start building strength.
The assumption from classical mechanics that matter can
neither be created nor destroyed holds true for training. Your
goal is to build muscle mass. In the long run, that is the only
change that will reliably improve your strength. That mass
has to come from somewhere, and we cannot grow through
deficits. Only excess energy, nutrients, and bodily processes
allow you to build muscle mass.
When you lift weights, you aren’t ingesting or creating energy
in your body, you are using energy and causing a particular
36
type of stress. That stress signals to your brain and body that
it needs to engage the process that will make you stronger.
Those processes require fuel and the co-opting of some
of your systems to work. We can give them those things
by eating enough calories, eating enough protein, drinking
plenty of water, and getting enough sleep at night. One of the
first things a lifter who wants to make progress beyond the
novice phase must learn is that what you do in the gym will not
automatically lead to strength gains.
We can have ad hoc instances of recovery problems such as
several nights of poor sleep, illness, poor eating (not enough),
and mental or physical stress from somewhere outside of the
gym. When you fail a workout as a novice, and you suspect
recovery or stress issues, then the first thing to try is to
simply repeat that workout next time you train. Big changes in
performances for a novice are usually either form issues or
issues from the recovery end of the cycle.
The remedy is to fix your recovery problems and repeat the
problematic workout or week. Repetition with better recovery
helps control for external factors that may have caused you
to fail a rep or workout. You will either continue to make
progress or not. If not, and if you are confident that you are
recovering as well as you can from training. Then it is time to
37
manage the organization of your training.
Managing Stress, Fatigue, and Progress
For the novice lifter, progress is measured as more weight on
the bar within the structure of the training program. Moving
three sets of five repetitions at heavier and heavier weights
requires more and more effort from the lifter. As the weight
on the bar goes ever upward, the lifter has to produce more
force to move it. This isn’t the only way to measure force
production, but it is the one most directly tied both to our goal
and to the method we are using to achieve that goal. New,
heavier loads are the measure of progress; the goal is weight
on the bar, more than you had to lift last time.
The changes that follow your first plateau as a novice are
those that allow you to add weight to the bar. There are many
different things you can do to troubleshoot here. We like
to prioritize small, simple changes over more complicated
solutions and focus on increasing the weight on the bar. These
changes follow the Minimum Effective Dose principles for
programming, which you can learn much more about here:
• #265 – The MED Masterclass #1: A Simple Approach to
Programming
• #267 – The MED Masterclass #2: The Ultimate Guide to
Programming After LP
38
Weight on the Bar
The first change to make is to reduce the amount of weight
you are adding to the bar each training session. If you had
been adding ten pounds, switch to five pounds. If you had
been adding five pounds, switch to two and a half pounds.
For most men under sixty years old (yes, that’s somewhat
arbitrary), adding less than five pounds per increment is
counterproductive for the squat and deadlift; the same goes
for less than two and a half pounds with the upper body lifts.
Everyone else is on a case-by-case basis, but simple, linear
progress is efficient and worth preserving as long as it is
possible to do so with smaller jumps in weight.
The next weight change for the squat and deadlift is to
introduce a light day in the middle of your training week. This
allows you some more recovery time and a structure that will
still prioritize the progress you had been making twice per
week.
39
Table 1. A sample novice linear progression with a light day in
the middle of the week.
Rearranging Volume to Add Weight to the Bar
After you have adjusted the increments and added a light day
to your squat and deadlift, the next change is to maintain the
overall volume of your training but to organize it in a way that
allows you to continue to add the same weight-increments to
the bar. There are a few different ways to do this:
• You can change from 3 x 5 (three sets of five repetitions) to
1 x 5 (one set of five repetitions) with two back-off sets, a
40
change preferred most often for your lower body lifts.
• Or, you can flip 3 x 5 to 5 x 3. This tends to work well for the
upper body lifts. It is the same total volume, but most people
can lift more weight for five sets of three than they can for
three sets of five.
In each of these changes, the total volume in each workout did
not change.
Change Volume Last
41
After manipulating the sets and reps, you may need to change
the volume lifted in each workout. At this point, you should
start to look at your week as a whole training unit with the
goal of preserving your overall weekly volume while making
changes that allow you to still add weight to the bar regularly.
There are different ways to make changes and maintain
progress, but the basic idea is a reduction in volume or the
number of reps-per-set that will allow you to add weight to
the bar on one of your heavier days in the week: switching
to 2 x 3 or 1x5 or 1x3 with back-off sets or 2 x 5, etc. are all
acceptable changes. But you want to make up that change in
volume on your other heavy training day in the week. In the
above example, the first change occurs on Friday, where the
weight on the bar goes up, and the volume goes down. The
following Monday, we’ve added a set of five to the workout to
make up for Friday’s change.
Keep in mind that personal records (PRs) are not just for the
intensity but also for the volume day. If you move from 3 x 5 to
4 x 5 or 4 x 4, continue to treat more weight lifted for a given
amount of volume as PRs. By tracking multiple rep ranges, you
will better track your own progress and where your intensity
and volume work should fall as you need to accumulate
stress.
42
Know Where You are Going
The above changes point pretty typically toward an
organization of training known as “Heavy, Light, Medium,”
which is one typical way to organize post novice training, at
least for a while. In particular, the changes above would lead
you toward a program known as the Texas Method, which
may look something like the following:
We’ve written about these programs more extensively, as well
as other intermediate and advanced programming issues.
For more on intermediate programming, read the following
articles:
• Heavy Light Medium (HLM): A Common-Sense Framework
43
• The Texas Method: Clear Goals, Measurable Changes, and
Applicability
• Four Day Split Programming: Using MED Principles to Tame
the Beast
Just like a scientist, observe the data and make one small
change that will help you continue adding weight to the bar.
Training becomes more complex the stronger you get, but you
learn more about yourself, becoming a better scientist of your
own strength-experiment. If you approach all of this as one
big important experiment, you can never really fail a workout.
You just learn.
Getting Help
We hope that this exploration of the novice linear progression
was helpful to you. Training is “simple, hard, and effective,” but
it can also be difficult to troubleshoot your own lifting form or
your own programming. For free feedback, answers to your
training questions, and a look into how Barbell Logic deals
with these issues, contact experience@barbell-logic.com.
44