The Starting Strength Training Registry | John Petrizzo

by John Petrizzo

The stated purpose of the SSTR was to investigate the effects of a free weight resistance training program on healthy participants between the ages of 18 and 80 by creating an anonymous registry of individuals who were voluntarily partaking in a formalized version of the “Starting Strength Novice Linear Progression” (SSNLP).

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Interesting how the females shrunk, while getting heavier.

Also the bench:squat ratio in males vs. females.

I am unfamiliar with the custom in the biomedical / ex phys literature. Do those quoted error bars represent 1/2/3 sigma (68 / 95 / 99.7% CI) or something else?

“While I am disappointed that all of our hard work was not initially received the way I had hoped it would be....”

You are casting pearls before swine. To write a paper that is acceptable for peer review by academics about the program would seem to be an impossible task. But you can get a study funded and accepted for publication if you compare two types of leg press machines, it seems. John, you are doing the Lords Work compiling the data and writing it up.

What would the control group do - nothing?

Great work - are you planning to dig deeper into the data?

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Originally Posted by TommyGun

“While I am disappointed that all of our hard work was not initially received the way I had hoped it would be....”

You are casting pearls before swine. To write a paper that is acceptable for peer review by academics about the program would seem to be an impossible task. But you can get a study funded and accepted for publication if you compare two types of leg press machines, it seems. John, you are doing the Lords Work compiling the data and writing it up.

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Thank you, Tommy. I appreciate it.

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Originally Posted by stlrick

What would the control group do - nothing?

Great work - are you planning to dig deeper into the data?

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That is an interesting question. Since the purpose of the study was specifically to examine the effects of a linearly progressed barbell training program, I never really thought about what I would have a control group do. Regardless, the next study I am planning on working on will be a high load versus low load protocol since that seems to be all the rage in the literature over the last few years. The only problem is the high load groups never really lift heavy or with barbells. Robert Santana and I will hopefully get something off the ground this spring.

As far as this data goes, I think I am pretty much done with it at this point.

Dr. Petrizzo, thank you very much for the publication above.

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Originally Posted by John Petrizzo

…the results of this data set clearly show that a barbell-based, linearly progressed resistance training program such as the SSNLP is a safe and effective way for a novice to quickly improve their strength and positively impact their anthropometric characteristics during the first several months of their training career. It is my hope that the data presented above as well as the initial paper published last October will be just the beginning of a growing body of research that supports the use of progressively loaded barbell exercises to improve a wide array of fitness and health related characteristics across a broad spectrum of the population."

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I'm currently searching for a PhD topic, and it's a great reference point. I've been training clients for strength via SS method for about three years now, and I'm especially interested in training the elderly population. Relating to this post Starting strength as a protocol for reseach in elderly populations, I believe that aside influencing individuals on the platform via training, an adequate scientific research is worth pursuing for, despite the many obstacles that may appear on the way.

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Originally Posted by John Petrizzo

…The first issue that arose during the review process was that I had a hard time convincing readers that there was anything novel about our protocol or results. Essentially, the thought process was that all resistance training programs result in improvements in strength, especially in novices, so why should our paper get published? Apparently, the fact that we used a protocol and loading scheme that was unique to the literature and that we obtained greater improvements in strength than any other paper I could find that utilized a non-periodized protocol was not convincing enough."

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Is recruiting a control group enough to address this issue? Also, it's interesting to consider what would the control group be instructed to do ("conventional" resistance training via machines?).

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Originally Posted by John Petrizzo

…the fact that the squat was the only exercise performed at every session, the lack in uniformity in training days per week"

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Do you think that this issue can be addressed by selecting only one press for all the training sessions during a twice-a-week intervention period (with equal weekly increments)? a long term three day intervention is quite challenging to apply.

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Originally Posted by John Petrizzo

…and finally, the fact that there were not uniform load increases for all subjects throughout the training period."

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Even tough workload is the only parameter being changed? Isn't it enough to methodologically define that load increases of each session are calculated by adding 5-10% of last session's weight on that particular lift, considering participant's ability?

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Originally Posted by John Petrizzo

…Our thought process behind these decisions, while well intentioned and an attempt to foster greater subject compliance and applicability to the real world, ultimately caused tremendous difficulty in getting our paper published and lead to the paper having to be significantly re-written, with an entirely new statistical analysis that left out nearly all the data presented above.

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Thank you for sincerely sharing these issues. I'd love to discuss further the methodologies and data collection.

Hi Vick,

Thank you so much for your comments. I would be happy to discuss future research possibilities with you and how you could potentially avoid some of the mistakes that I made. Feel free to message me privately and we can set up a time to speak.

All the best,

John