Starting Weights for another round of SS

[ajmarquis]

The guidelines in SS for choosing your starting weights are a bit qualitative and I am doubting my ability to find my starting weights well. I'm worried equally about starting too heavy and starting too light and undertraining while eating heavy.

I was wondering if you folks could look at my lifts as they were when I was lifting and suggest perhaps a range where it is likely I'll find my comfortable starting weights?

I forget the exact timeline, but here are the major waypoints during my training (male, age 30, 5'8"):

Started Out:
240 pounds, weak as hell

Dieted Down To:
sub-180 pounds, weak as hell (95 pound bench, failed a set of 145 squats)

Did Starting Strength:
205-210ish pounds, 265 squat, 350 deadlift, 165 bench, 105 press, forget my clean work sets

Broke rib, stopped lifting, got fat:
220 pounds, not sure of my lifts since I've not lifted for about a year

Where do you guys think my starting weights would be, about, were I to do another round of Starting Strength? I want to go as far as I can with LP, but don't want to be eating a ton while undertraining myself with light weights either.

[Anthony King]

I want to go as far as I can with LP, but don't want to be eating a ton while undertraining myself with light weights either.

Put the idea of starting too low out of your head. It is not a fruitful concern. Look up Jordan's "To Be a Beast" blog post (google it). Following the body recomposition diet plan will ensure you aren't eating too much. If your bodyfat percentage is very high right now, you don't need to "eat a ton" to do the LP anyway.

It is hard to start "too low" because with the LP you'll be get back to challenging weights quickly. If you start low and your bar speed is very fast on your work sets, make larger weight increases between training sessions until the weight seems appropriately challenging, then go back to the standard LP increases.

The much more common mistake is to start with weights that are too high and stall quickly.

[cph]

I'm in the same boat as you Restarting Strength. I'm not an expert, obviously, but "when bar speed starts to slow" seems pretty intuitive to me. I took conservative warmup jumps, and once the 4th or 5th rep was slower than the rest, I used that as my work set. The weight will probably be 20-30 pounds lower than you expect, but it should be higher than your original starting weights.

[Kyle Schuant]

This is a "how long is a piece of string" sort of question. It's one answered in two workouts by an experienced coach who watches you lift, but hard to do on your own. Get a coach.

Failing that, since you are not even confident enough to wander into the gym and just try things out, fuck it, start with the empty bar on squat, press, bench and clean, and with a 95lb deadlift. Generally speaking, however long it took you to get to your old work weights, it should only take half as long this time. Let's say you start at 45 and add 20lbs a session for the first 3, that's 105 at the end of the first week of 3 squat workouts. Then you go to 10lbs a session until 235, that's another 12 sessions. Now 5lbs a session until your old work weight of 265, that's another 6 sessions. So in 21 sessions or 7 weeks you've hit your old squat work weight.

Bench would progress at half this rate, and press half that of bench. Deadlifts you should do every second session and increase at the same rate as squats. Cleans you evidently didn't do more than once or twice or else you'd remember what you lifted (nobody simply forgets cleaning 225 for the first time, or even 135), and since you're shitting yourself just at the thought of squatting, if we tell you to do cleans you won't do them anyway, so let's forget about cleans for a bit and just do chinups every second session, or lat pulldowns if you can't knock out even a single chinup.

Anyway, if you actually get your arse into the gym 3 times a week and add weight to the bar, and eat some decent food, you should be back at your old lifts in 6-12 weeks.

Certainly with coaching you might return to and surpass your old lifts more quickly than this, but after not lifting at all for "about a year", a few weeks here or there shouldn't concern you.

Now stop thinking about it and get into the gym and squat. It is better to actually squat the empty bar than just think about squatting 405.

[ajmarquis]

"To Be A Beast", difficulty of starting too low

I've planned my diet based on Jordan's article, and my fear of starting too low was actually driven based on a question in the nutrition forum. It genuinely didn't occur to me to start low and jump up by 10's and 15's if things were quite easy, but that's what I'll do.

I'm in the same boat as you Restarting Strength. I'm not an expert, obviously, but "when bar speed starts to slow" seems pretty intuitive to me.

I felt like "slower last reps" occurred much closer to my work weights than people who were restarting SS were lifting (as a percentage of their last work weights) when I looked at folks' logs.

Good luck restartin'!

Stuff

Yep, the intent of the thread was "I'm too much of a pussy to go to the gym" and not "Hey, I've only lifted for like two months I might find value in the advice of more experienced lifters."

[Kyle Schuant]

You're not a pussy if you don't go to the gym. You're a pussy if you let a few words in a post distract you from the sensible advice: it is better to just get under the empty bar and start lifting it than to sit around on the internet wondering what weight to start with.

Nobody can judge your starting weights without seeing you lift. Nobody. But you lifted before, so at the least you will be able to start with the empty bar and build from there, and build more quickly than you did last time.

Most people, newbie or returning lifters both, start too high and get stuck early on. As it says in the book, it is better to start easy and not get stuck than start too hard and figure out how to get unstuck. Start easy. But start.

[James.Wierzba]

I would say start light and start light on the food stuffing also...adjust accordingly