Starting Strength, 3rd Edition - Mark Rippetoe [188]
And since the best way to produce athletic improvement in novices is to increase strength, a program that increases total-body strength in a linear fashion is the best one for a novice athlete to use if he is to improve his performance the most in the shortest time possible. It seems rather apparent that there can be only one efficient way to program barbell training for a novice, and that is to apply a linear increase in force-production stress while using basic exercises that work the whole body. If applied in a way that can be supported by adequate recovery from the stress in a timeframe that efficiently produces progress, this approach always produces a linear increase in strength because it takes advantage of the most basic rule of biology: organisms adapt to their environment if the stress causes an adaptation and if the stress is not overwhelming in its magnitude.
Rank novices can be trained close to the limit of their ability every time they train, precisely because that ability is at such a low level relative to their genetic potential. As a result of this relatively hard training, novices get strong very quickly. (Novices can recover from relatively hard training because they are weak, and the training is not really that hard in absolute terms.) Weak people can obviously get stronger faster than strong people can. But that changes rapidly, and as you progress through your training career, your program should get more and more complicated as a result of the changing nature of your adaptive response. The intermediate trainee has advanced to the point where the stress required for change is high enough that when that stress is applied in consecutive workouts, it exceeds the trainee’s capacity for recovery within that period of time. Intermediate trainees are capable of training hard enough that some allowances for active recovery must be incorporated into the training program, but progress still comes faster for these athletes when they are challenged often by maximum efforts. Advanced athletes are working at levels close enough to their genetic potential that great care should be taken to ensure enough variability in the intensity and volume that overtraining does not become a problem. These principles are illustrated in Figure 8-1 and are discussed at length in Practical Programming for Strength Training, Second Edition (The Aasgaard Company, 2009).
Figure 8-1. The generalized relationship between performance improvement and training complexity relative to time. Note that the rate of adaptation to training slows over a training career.
So, as a general rule, you need to try to add weight to the work sets of the exercise every time you train, until you can’t do this anymore. This is the basic tenet of “progressive resistance training,” and setting up the program this way is what makes it different from exercise. For as long as possible, make sure that you lift a little more weight each time. Everyone can do this for a while, and some can do it for longer than others, depending on individual genetic capability, diet, and rest. If you are challenged, you will adapt, and if you are not, you won’t. Training makes the challenge a scheduled event instead of an accident of mood or whim, and certainly not a random occurrence within an exercise program.
Before you even get through the door of the weight room, you should already know every single thing you will do while you are there, the order in which you will do it, how much weight you will do it with, and how to determine the next workout based on what you do today. No one should ever arrive to train not knowing exactly what to do. Wandering around the gym, deciding what looks fun, doing it until the fun stops, and then doing something else is not training. Each training session must have a definite achievable goal,