Post SSLP

[Eric Schexnayder]

You have so much room to grow it makes me want to shake you

I genuinely laughed the whole way home yesterday when I read this.

[Mark Rippetoe]

What do you guys charge for babysitting? Well, that's not enough.

[Eric Schexnayder]

What do you guys charge for babysitting? Well, that's not enough.

I get to practice convincing a stubborn teenager that he needs to eat and lift weights. This may actually come in handy in about 10 years.

[Erik Y]

If I were you I would try to gain at least three pounds per week. This will not last long, and soon you’ll be eating a lot and only putting on a pound or two per week. Remember, you’re putting on muscle mass now. Imagine yourself at 200 pounds, with 70% of new weight being muscle mass. You would be super strong and in great shape. If you gain a pound or less per week, it will take you at least a year and a half to get there, and you will stall out way early. If you eat, you could fuel your LP for months. Think about what your squat numbers would be then. With those kinds of numbers, you wouldn’t have to worry about becoming pudgy.

When I was your age, I ate enough and drank lots of milk, but I didn’t know anything about barbells, and by the time I did my first set of squats in my twenties, I didn’t have that much runway. You’ve done a great job getting your weight down, and I’m absolutely envious of the opportunity you have to get big and strong, with lots of room to gain lean mass and the best hormonal milieu you’ll ever have. I’m sure plenty of other guys on here feel the same way. Do what we didn’t do. Eat well. Lift heavy weights. Get strong.

[DoinFives]

If I were you I would try to gain at least three pounds per week. This will not last long, and soon you’ll be eating a lot and only putting on a pound or two per week. Remember, you’re putting on muscle mass now. Imagine yourself at 200 pounds, with 70% of new weight being muscle mass. You would be super strong and in great shape. If you gain a pound or less per week, it will take you at least a year and a half to get there, and you will stall out way early. If you eat, you could fuel your LP for months. Think about what your squat numbers would be then. With those kinds of numbers, you wouldn’t have to worry about becoming pudgy.

When I was your age, I ate enough and drank lots of milk, but I didn’t know anything about barbells, and by the time I did my first set of squats in my twenties, I didn’t have that much runway. You’ve done a great job getting your weight down, and I’m absolutely envious of the opportunity you have to get big and strong, with lots of room to gain lean mass and the best hormonal milieu you’ll ever have. I’m sure plenty of other guys on here feel the same way. Do what we didn’t do. Eat well. Lift heavy weights. Get strong.

Yea he’s gonna put on 45 Lbs of muscle... and only 20 lbs of fat...

[Satch12879]

Yea he’s gonna put on 45 Lbs of muscle... and only 20 lbs of fat...

Please stop with this nonsense.

[VivekSaini007]

What Satch said! Please!

[DoinFives]

What Satch said! Please!

I was being sarcastic, im not saying thats what would actually happen.

[Erik Y]

Yea he’s gonna put on 45 Lbs of muscle... and only 20 lbs of fat...

I stand by this nonsense. Why? Even the NSCA thinks that he can gain fifteen pounds of muscle in six months using their regimen of single-joint exercises and eating at or near maintenance. Meanwhile this kid is in the middle of his growth spurt, has just lost a ton of weight, and is committed to using effective barbell training. A sixteen year-old kid will put on muscle in six months sitting around and playing video games. It’s all his body wants to do.

Instead, here he is stalling out at around 200 pounds. That’s a lot of weight for a guy who is 135 pounds, but it’s not a lot of weight for a guy who is 5’8”, which is probably a good clip shorter than where he’ll be this time next year. I do know a guy who is around 155 and strong... but he’s also five foot even and has been barbell training for more than fifteen years.

Another friend of mine is about 5’4” and was around 135 until he started gaining weight about six months ago. He’s put on about 30 pounds as an intermediate and still has visible abs. He doesn’t eat properly - not enough protein - but he is in his early twenties and so he is deadlifting twice his body weight and continuing to put on muscle regardless. So by doing things wrong, with a couple years of experience, well past his growth spurt, he’s managed to put on somewhere in the neighborhood of 25 pounds of muscle.

Let’s say for the sake of argument that 45 pounds of muscle during a properly executed novice LP coinciding with a growth spurt is really beyond the pale. Let’s look at the alternative that is being recommended. Saying that this kid puts on twenty pounds in six months and does HLM with no stalling or misses. Six months from now he’ll weigh 155, be 5’9” or 5’10”, and he’ll be getting ready to squat 330. Does this really seem like a plausible scenario - that a guy that height and that weight is squatting twice his body weight for five reps in his first year of lifting, even as 200 eludes him now at only 20 pounds lighter?

Remember that the novice LP fails both because the stress of the weight is too much and because there is not enough stress to elicit a strength increase by the next training session. That is exactly what is happening right now - weights under 200 are still really heavy for a guy who is only 135, but they’re not heavy enough to push him to 205 given his frame. When he comes back to hit the same weight a week later with an extra pound on him, is that pound of body weight going to allow him to put five more pounds on the bar? And saying it does, how long can he keep things up at that rate? Or is it more likely that he shows up to hit 200 now weighing 136, just barely grinds it out, stalls again at 205, and struggles for another six months before finishing at 155 with 220 on the bar?

So my fear is that after a couple months plateauing at around 200 due to a lack of real systemic disruption he gets frustrated and starts program hopping, decides to do a push-pull-legs split, then tempo work, maybe a Smolov Junior cycle... Meanwhile the competing concern is that he would gain mostly fat putting on two to three pounds per week and become demotivated that way. For a teenage boy, which of these scenarios is more plausible? Which one have we all seen play out before?

I can’t understand why people on a strength training forum are advising a teenager that he might get fat lifting weights. And I think that the recommendation to a skinny, under-muscled kid who is currently undergoing a growth spurt to switch to intermediate programming when he is 5’8” and can’t squat 200 pounds for sets across is profoundly bad advice. I don’t believe the fat loss is a major problem - he lost the weight before, why would it be harder when he is stronger? - and frankly speaking I doubt that he will manage to put on two to three pounds a week for more than a couple of months, since this is hard to do and I haven’t seen many people manage it. But if he wants to get big and strong, he is going to have to gain a lot of weight, and he will have a very hard time putting weight on the bar at his current rate of weight gain, and this is not going to get easier over time.

[sgarciac]

I stand by this nonsense. Why? Even the NSCA thinks that he can gain fifteen pounds of muscle in six months using their regimen of single-joint exercises and eating at or near maintenance. Meanwhile this kid is in the middle of his growth spurt, has just lost a ton of weight, and is committed to using effective barbell training. A sixteen year-old kid will put on muscle in six months sitting around and playing video games. It’s all his body wants to do.

Instead, here he is stalling out at around 200 pounds. That’s a lot of weight for a guy who is 135 pounds, but it’s not a lot of weight for a guy who is 5’8”, which is probably a good clip shorter than where he’ll be this time next year. I do know a guy who is around 155 and strong... but he’s also five foot even and has been barbell training for more than fifteen years.

Another friend of mine is about 5’4” and was around 135 until he started gaining weight about six months ago. He’s put on about 30 pounds as an intermediate and still has visible abs. He doesn’t eat properly - not enough protein - but he is in his early twenties and so he is deadlifting twice his body weight and continuing to put on muscle regardless. So by doing things wrong, with a couple years of experience, well past his growth spurt, he’s managed to put on somewhere in the neighborhood of 25 pounds of muscle.

Let’s say for the sake of argument that 45 pounds of muscle during a properly executed novice LP coinciding with a growth spurt is really beyond the pale. Let’s look at the alternative that is being recommended. Saying that this kid puts on twenty pounds in six months and does HLM with no stalling or misses. Six months from now he’ll weigh 155, be 5’9” or 5’10”, and he’ll be getting ready to squat 330. Does this really seem like a plausible scenario - that a guy that height and that weight is squatting twice his body weight for five reps in his first year of lifting, even as 200 eludes him now at only 20 pounds lighter?

Remember that the novice LP fails both because the stress of the weight is too much and because there is not enough stress to elicit a strength increase by the next training session. That is exactly what is happening right now - weights under 200 are still really heavy for a guy who is only 135, but they’re not heavy enough to push him to 205 given his frame. When he comes back to hit the same weight a week later with an extra pound on him, is that pound of body weight going to allow him to put five more pounds on the bar? And saying it does, how long can he keep things up at that rate? Or is it more likely that he shows up to hit 200 now weighing 136, just barely grinds it out, stalls again at 205, and struggles for another six months before finishing at 155 with 220 on the bar?

So my fear is that after a couple months plateauing at around 200 due to a lack of real systemic disruption he gets frustrated and starts program hopping, decides to do a push-pull-legs split, then tempo work, maybe a Smolov Junior cycle... Meanwhile the competing concern is that he would gain mostly fat putting on two to three pounds per week and become demotivated that way. For a teenage boy, which of these scenarios is more plausible? Which one have we all seen play out before?

I can’t understand why people on a strength training forum are advising a teenager that he might get fat lifting weights. And I think that the recommendation to a skinny, under-muscled kid who is currently undergoing a growth spurt to switch to intermediate programming when he is 5’8” and can’t squat 200 pounds for sets across is profoundly bad advice. I don’t believe the fat loss is a major problem - he lost the weight before, why would it be harder when he is stronger? - and frankly speaking I doubt that he will manage to put on two to three pounds a week for more than a couple of months, since this is hard to do and I haven’t seen many people manage it. But if he wants to get big and strong, he is going to have to gain a lot of weight, and he will have a very hard time putting weight on the bar at his current rate of weight gain, and this is not going to get easier over time.

Pretty clear with your statements, thank you. However I don't get if your're recommending me to gain weight at a more accelerated pace of witch of program?.
Thanks a lot.