Starting Strength, 3rd Edition - Mark Rippetoe [198]
It is interesting that the power clean behaves more like the bench press than like the squat or deadlift, in terms of the way it increases over time. The reason for this involves the biomechanical nature of the movement and the factors limiting its progress. The power clean is explosive and technical, and it involves more than just absolute strength. It is limited at the top of the movement by the lifter’s ability to get the bar on the shoulders, and the heavier the weight, the more the power clean depends on the lifter’s ability to generate enough momentum to get the bar high enough to rack. This momentum is controlled by the lifter’s ability to explode – to recruit lots of motor units into contraction instantly – a physical attribute that is largely dependent on genetics and thus is less responsive to training than strength is. The power clean will move up maybe 5 pounds per workout for most men. If the power snatch is used, it will also move up slowly for the same reasons, albeit with a lighter weight than that used in the power clean. Women and younger, older, and lighter trainees will need to introduce smaller plates earlier in the progression.
Ancillary exercises, which are by their nature inefficient isolation-type exercises, produce very slow progress. Anybody claiming rapid gains on triceps extensions or barbell curls is not utilizing particularly strict form and should be criticized for such foolishness.
When these smaller jumps can no longer be sustained, a trainee can be considered an intermediate, and the fun begins with more complicated manipulation of training variables. This variation in exercises, tonnage, and intensity for the purpose of ensuring continued progress is referred to as periodization. It is unnecessary for rank beginners, since they get strong as fast as they can increase the weight every workout, and it is indispensable for advanced lifters, who cannot continue to make progress without it. Intermediates are, like the name says, somewhere in between, with some degree of training parameter manipulation necessary to allow for continued but slower progress. Programming beyond the novice phase is beyond the scope of this book and is dealt with in detail in Practical Programming for Strength Training, Second Edition (Aasgaard, 2009).
And all these guidelines apply only to committed trainees who do not miss workouts. Failure to train as scheduled is failure to follow the program, and if the program is not followed, progress cannot predictably occur. If you have to miss a couple of workouts due to severe illness, or possibly the death of a parent, spouse, or good dog, allowances can be made, and the last workout you completed should just be repeated set for set. But if you continually miss workouts, you are not actually training, and your obviously valuable time should be spent more productively elsewhere.
Likewise, trying to increase the weight faster than prescribed by the program and by common sense is also failure to follow the program. If you insist on attempting unrealistic increases between workouts, it is your fault when progress does not occur. Ambition is useful, greed is not. Most of human history and the science of economics demonstrate that the desire for more than is currently possessed drives improvement, both personally and for societies. But greed is an ugly thing when uncontrolled and untempered with wisdom, and it will result in your program’s progress coming to an ass-grinding halt. The exercises must increase in weight in order for progress to occur, by definition. But if you allow yourself to succumb to the temptation of 10-pound jumps on the bench press, or 50-pound increases on the squat, just because the heavier plates were handy (or the correct plates were inconvenient), you are going to get stuck. Too much weight on the bar is just as bad