Starting Strenght, do I have it right?

[Gerald Boggs]

Good day Rip

I sent this email to a friend of mine. How well did I present it?

Good Day Mate

Here's a bit about what I'm doing in the gym:

I'm following the Novice strength training program as developed by Mark Rippetoe. Here's a link to the forum, but the book is what you really need.
http://startingstrength.com/resources/forum/forum.php

What makes this interesting, is most of what he teaches goes contrary to almost thing out there in the gym world. However, it's really just a refinement of how the strongmen of old trained. Pick up heavy stuff and lift it over your head.


Which exercises to do?
Whole body movements are best. The more parts of the body involved in a movement, the stronger the body will grow.
Hence: Squat, deadlift, press, bench press, and power clean. Pullups and chinups are added after a few weeks.

Sets, reps, and weight?
If too little is done, the body doesn't need to adapt and grow stronger, if too much is done, the body is overwhelmed and can't adapt. However, if you stay in-between, if you do enough to stress the body, but not to it's limits, the body will adapt and grow stronger. What that means: work a weight that is hard, but never to failure. To effect this in Novice training, we warm-up and then do 3 sets of 5 reps as our working sets. The weight used should take hard effort to do, but if you had to, you should have been able to do one rep. Never go to failure.


The workouts: Alternate between them, Monday, Wednesday, Friday.

A: Squat 3x5, Press 3x5, Deadlift 1x5
B: Squat3x5 Bench Press 3x5, Power Clean 3x5

Note: The deadlift is so stressful, that after you do your warm-up sets, you only do one working set.

Eight weeks ago, I was feeling pretty down, started doing Starting Strength and am now quite happy.
Here's my progression:
Squat 115-225
Press 45-80 My shoulder is very weak, so progress is slow.
Deadlift 135-275
Because of my shoulder, I don't do bench and power clean. I don't miss the bench and don't need to do it to get strong, but the power clean is hard to replace.

I've not yet near my limits. I hope to see before the summer, a squat of 315 and a deadlift well above that.

I've come to think of Mark Rippetoe as the Mark Aspery of strength training, or is it the other way around?

Fair Winds
Gerald

[Mark Rippetoe]

Pretty good, but you have to emphasize the incremental increase every workout. So, yeah, everything but the spelling.

[Brian Zahn]

Its all about LP!!!!!

[Gerald Boggs]

Bloody hell!, how did I forget about Linear Progression?

Spelling, could be better, but I think I do OK (maybe) for the kid they put in the janitor's closet in the sixth grade. :-)

[Domjo54]

Gerald, power cleans are done for 5x3, not 3x5.