Been on the Novice program a little more than a month. Everything has gotten really grindy (form breakdowns like one side coming up unevenly compared to the other, things like that), even though none of the weights have gone up much, aside from the squat. From what I've read, this doesn't seem to be right. The squat, unlike the other lifts, I started very conservatively with because I had no experience with it. The others, even though I had to make some tweaks to the form, I was much more confident with and so just started with numbers a somewhat lower than what I'd done in the past, to work back up to it. However, they haven't advanced very much. For example, I'd been able to do work sets with 160 on bench press before this current run, without even dropping the increments from 5 pounds. My bench workout yesterday, on the other hand, had me working with 157.5, up from 155, and the last rep of the last set was a trembling mess where one arm struggled to lift its end more than the other.
What I am debating doing is a fresh restart of the program, using the exact process outlined in the blue book to determine starting weight, because I am concerned I hit what the book describes as my "sticking point" earlier than I should have for the program to work as intended. I am curious what others think, should I try this approach or should I just keep trying to push through the grind?
I've read that and gone over those questions several times. Rest between sets has been increasing as needed. Press/Bench have been incremented using specially bought 1.25 plates, squat and deadlift have been getting raised at a rate of 5 a session. Recently pushed caloric intake over the 4000 line. My weight has been going up pretty steadily, not so much the weight on the bar. What's weird is that when I got that 160 on the bench when I first dipped my foot into this program before I had a bit of a lay-up, my diet was actually significantly less than what I'm getting now, both in protein and calories. And that was only a few months back.
Age/height/weight? What is your actual rest between sets?
34/6'2"/hovering around 240 (hard to peg down an "empty" point to weigh on since I've been eating so much stuff, but weight is definitely going up). I do 5 minutes rest minimum, after the warm ups before the work sets. Depending on how each work set goes I crank up the rest time. Usually gets to about 8 minutes, at least on the squats. I also do that before the deadlift work set. Should I be doing more than that? There's a factoid floating around out there that says 8 minutes should recover all the ATP that I've seen in a few places. Is that just another piece of "information" that is best disregarded?
Try 12 minutes and see what happens.
Will do. Coincidentally, I tried 8 minutes rest between all sets when I did my lifts yesterday, even after the final warm-up. Squat went much smoother. Still hard, but I wasn't running into the form issues.