Squat every day.

[Robnet]

Mr. Rippetoe,

Yesterday Jim Steel posted an article in his blog regarding his views on training more often (http://basbarbell.blogspot.com/2011/...ore-often.html).

I understand that he most likely intends the audience of this article to be intermediate or advanced lifters. Yet, his postulate that squatting a little on rest days serves to "grease the groove", and thus make the movement more natural, seems to be very sensible and could be helpful to a novice who has not mastered the movement.

However, I do not have thirty years training and coaching experience with which to properly evaluate this concept, hence my question here to you: Would you recommend to a novice, faithfully doing your Starting Strength program, light squats (herein defined as one set 50% 5RM as a point of reference) on a rest day; or, does this qualify as not resting and thus not doing the program?

[Mark Rippetoe]

Jim is correct about squatting every day. For advanced lifters. Our program works best when done as described in our books.

[james7454]

Hey, its Steel- The one guy that I have squatting every day is actually a beginner but the caveat is that on some days he is doing free hand squats, and some days with just the bar- using it as almost a dynamic mobility movement.

[johnny_blaze]

I have some experience squatting everyday. I'm not suggesting I have any sort of profound insight, I'm just offering my experience as a single data point.

I had a brief period in my life between jobs where I had a lot of free time and I was able to squat every day. I'd been doing the novice program as best I could for the past year with occasional failures due to travel. With the help of Rip's books (most useful books I've ever bought) and good squat coaching at a local CF gym I brought my squat from an above parallel 135 for 3 sets of 5 (I wasn't flexible enough in the beginning to go below parallel) to a legit-depth 335lbs for 3 sets of 5 reps.

After getting to 335 for 3 sets of 5 reps I tried the intermediate schedule for awhile, had recovery problems. I probably could have tweaked it if I'd been smarter or tried harder and read Rip's books more closely. Instead, as an experiment, I started squatting nearly every day in accordance with the guidelines laid out by John Broz.

I squatted 6 days/week, every day working up to a heavy single. I'd do about ten heavy singles ("heavy" changed greatly from day to day), then do ten sets of doubles, then ten sets of triples.

Over the 2 months I did this I brought my 1RM up from 355 to 395. (Really wanted to get to 405, but my job started and I could no longer justify going to the gym every day).

Also interesting, my 5 rep max went down. When I tried to do sets of 5 again I found that whatever weight I was doing would suddenly get much, much heavier from the 4th rep out. I was able to get 305 (30lbs less than my former working weight) for a set of 5, but it was a major struggle.

SUMMARY:
My experience with everyday squats: As a novice/intermediate with unlimited sleep and unlimited food and enough free time to work out daily I was able to make some great 1RM gains. Never doing any reps bigger than a triple I saw my 5rm degraded much more than I would have thought. But, the most interesting part of squatting every day is that my squat form REALLY improved. Squatting every day made some of Rip's points in his book really start to click. My bar path, which I'd thought was fine, became MUCH better. After getting the bar in position my routine of 2 steps out and foot placement was second nature and perfected.

[tdood]

For what it's worth, squatting feels awkward to me.

I have a short torso, very long femurs, patellar tendinitis, probably have OSD, and I'm making excuses. Squatting just isn't my lift, squats don't feel "natural" to me. But, I have found that doing a few sets of BW squats on days off helps "grease the groove" keeps them feeling "natural" when I do them. This is not extra work, and does not constitute training or effect recovery. It has taken me about 11 months to figure this out and what I know about squatting changes all the time, but this has helped me.

Tonight I squatted 405 as a PR 1rm and it was deep, smooth and painless (except my biceps tendon, but that's a different issue). I never thought I would get there when I got SS2 and started squatting 11 months ago at 95x5x3.

Thanks Rip.

On the way home from the gym I started thinking about 500.

[IndividualThoughtPatterns]

Most oly lifters don't have just 'max squats' everyday, instead their squats are more carefully and smartly planned... It just doesn't go good along with all those lifts from the floor... Programme of many countries is actually fairly similair to TM just that there might be 2 volume days and hitting max on some others...