KSC Texas Method adds 5 lbs/month?

[Booman]

Coming off the NLP, just bought Baker's KSC TM. If I'm reading this PDF right, week 4 intensity says to add 5 pounds to the weight of week 1. This sounds like adding 5 pounds a month. I thought intermediate training was defined by the weekly PR's, at least for the very beginning.

Am I missing something??

[Mark Rippetoe]

You'll have to ask Andy.

[Maybach]

The transition from intermediate to advanced is somewhat more subtle than from novice to intermediate. The different levels of advancement are defined not by time, but by units of training dose. A novice progresses with each workout, an intermediate progresses with multiple workouts, and an advanced trainee progresses with multiple sets of multiple workouts. That's why there's no "super advanced" training advancement, because that's the highest categorization of training events you can make. There's no such thing as "multiple sets of multiple sets of multiple workouts", because that's just "multiple sets of multiple workouts" again.

Intermediate status is relatively easy to achieve, to the point that pretty much everyone, even people who aren't training intelligently, can get there. It is a well known meme in lifting that "intermediate" is where most people are and where most people stay. As soon as you miss a workout to workout increase, congratulations: you are an intermediate.

What this means is that even an "advanced" lifter, at any point you find them, is going to be at some point along an intermediate progression. Each intermediate training cycle is it's own discrete period, which culminates in a final set of PRs each time.

The Texas method (as it's discussed in the grey book: I have not seen the KSC template) has some of this periodization built in. The two cycles of "running out" the Texas method recommended are effectively two advanced "periods."

The grey book includes several sample 8 week templates that I assume resemble the KSC TM template somewhat, and when you consider the function of a purchaseable template it makes good sense why they work the way they do: a lifter who picks them up can, like I said above, almost certainly started on some intermediate "period" right away. The 8 week template represents one such period. You buy the template, and then accumulate stress week to week hoping to arrive at an increase relative to your previous training cycles at the end. It's a unit of time that is easy I the eyes, easy to plan for (especially for example, for competitions), and all around well suited to be packaged as a discrete product.

The complicated part comes when actually looking for "weekly progress" within one of these training blocks. Obvious a straightforward intermediate program would just add five pounds to identical exercises. But oftentimes, this is used. This gets especially true when the weights get really heavy, and tax recovery.

Remember: the specific unit of time which constitutes each progression stage for intermediate training is not actually important. A week is usually used, but it could be two weeks or more. The thing that defines the end of each intermediate progression event isn't the end of the week, but rather the accumulation of necessary stress to produce the increase.

For example, let's look at the phase 3 Texas method, where the lifter alternates between fives, triples, and singles each week. The lifter is already somewhat advanced because they are on their third "period" of advancement, but put that aside for now. The "week" of a phase 3 TM lifter is, in fact, 3 weeks. The lifter sets a 5RM, a 3RM, and a 1RM in each period, and then *these three together* produce an increase in the 5RM that is exploited on week 4. The intermediate progression is a number of these 3 week "weeks" stacked on top of each other. Once this stops working, THAT'S when the "advanced" training begins. You might reset and begin the period all over again, you might change one or two small aspects (for example, as in TM phase 4, including DE work), or you might move to a whole different training style, depending on your goals.

These intermediate training periods might grow complicated: they might include higher volume work, variations, assistance exercises: the point is that the week 4 increase is being made by EACH of the exercises from weeks 1-3. An "advanced" increase is one produced both by the preceding intermediate "stage", and the entire intermediate *cycle* which preceded it.