Starting Strength, 3rd Edition - Mark Rippetoe [197]
If it is important for women and kids to make progress – and why would it not be? – it is important to have the right equipment to train them correctly. You might need to make the plates out of 2-inch flat washers, or have some 2½ lb plates milled down, but it is obviously necessary, so get it done. Small plates are available from various sources on the Web, and baseball bat weights will usually fit the bar quite well. It will be useful at some point for everybody to have access to light plates, since progress on the lifts will eventually slow to the point where they will be useful even for advanced men. Don’t be afraid to take small jumps – instead, do be afraid to stop improving.
Some very genetically gifted, heavier men can take bigger jumps of 15 or 20 pounds for the first two weeks. Anything more than this is usually excessive, even for the most gifted athlete, since an increase of 60 pounds per week in the squat is not going to be realistically sustainable for very long. Don’t be in a big hurry to find your sticking point early in your training progression. It is always preferable to take smaller jumps and sustain the progress than to take bigger jumps and get stuck early. Getting stuck means missing any of the reps of the prescribed work sets, since the weight cannot be increased until all of the reps have been done as prescribed. It is easier to not get stuck than it is to get unstuck.
In the bench press, the muscles used are smaller, so the increases will be smaller. If the first workout has properly determined their initial strength level, most men can do 5-pound jumps for a while, perhaps three to four weeks, if they are alternating bench presses and presses. Some talented, heavier men can make a few 10-pound jumps, but not many. Older 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.