Starting Strength, 3rd Edition - Mark Rippetoe [187]
But for athletes, an improvement in strength provides more improvement in performance than any other adaptation does, especially if the athlete is not already very strong. Strength is the basis of athletic ability. If you are a good athlete, you are stronger than a less-good athlete at the same level of skill. If you want to be a better athlete, you get stronger. If you are already very strong, you need to devote most of your attention to the development of other aspects of performance. But there is a very high likelihood that you are not that strong, since most people are not. You may think you’re very strong, but really, you know you could get stronger, don’t you? Sure you do. You may have convinced everybody else that you’re strong enough; you may even be convinced of this yourself. Your coach may have told you so, too. This deception is not productive, though, because if you can get stronger, you should do so, and a lack of strength may be why you’re not performing as well as you know you should be. If your progress is stuck, and has been for a while, get stronger and see what happens. And for a strength training program to actually work, you must do something that requires that you be stronger to get it done, and this requirement must be inherent in the program design.
The less experienced the athlete, the simpler the program should be, and the more advanced the athlete, the more complex the program must be. We are going to take advantage of a phenomenon I have called the “Novice Effect.” Simply described, this is what happens when a previously untrained person begins to lift weights – he gets stronger very quickly at first, and then improves less and less rapidly as he gets stronger and stronger. It is nothing more than the commonly observed principle of diminishing returns, applied to adaptive physiology. Rank novices are not strong enough to tax themselves beyond their ability to recover, because they are so thoroughly unadapted to stress; they have made almost no progress on the road to the fulfillment of their athletic potential, and almost anything they do that is not heinous abuse will cause an adaptation.
When an untrained person starts an exercise program, he gets stronger. He always does, no matter what the program is. He gets stronger because anything he does that is physically harder than what he’s been doing constitutes a stress to which he is not adapted, and adaptation will thus occur if he provides for recovery. And this stress will always produce more strength, because that is the most basic physical adaptation to any physical stress that requires the body to produce force. For a rank novice trainee, riding a bicycle will make his bench press increase – for a short time. This does not mean that cycling is a good program for the bench press; it just means that for an utterly unadapted person, the cycling served as an adaptive stimulus. The problem with cycling for a novice bench-presser is that it rapidly loses its ability to act as an efficient enough systemic force-production stress to continue driving improvement on the bench, since it does not produce a force-production stress specific to the bench press.
The thing that differentiates a good program from a less-good program is its ability to continue stimulating the desired adaptation. So, by definition, a program that requires a regular increase in some aspect of its stress is an effective program for a novice, and one that doesn’t is less effective. For a novice, any program is better than no program at all, so all programs work with varying degrees of efficiency. This is why everybody thinks their program works, and why you’ll always find perfectly honest testimonials for every new exercise program on