If there’s one thing that never changes with people who reach out saying they’re doing Starting Strength, it’s this: they ran the LP, the bar slowed down and shit got hard, so they bailed out and jumped straight into the Texas Method or some other intermediate setup they cherry-picked out of Practical Programming. And I get it: people want to keep getting stronger, and on paper the reaction to make sweeping changes makes sense. But this knee-jerk jump to intermediate training is one of the most common – and costly – mistakes lifters make and it almost never works out.

You Only Get to be a Novice Once

The Novice Linear Progression, or NLP, is the most efficient way to get strong, fast. It’s simple, hard, brutally effective, and it works every single time it is applied and followed correctly. After all, there's a reason why a lot of times Rip gives the same answer to folks having issues in their LP – YNDTP (You're not doing the program). If you do the fucking thing as it's laid out, it always does what it says it will do.

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The novice effect – meaning the ability to add weight to the bar every single session – is real, and it’s powerful. You only get to be a novice lifter once in your life and once it's gone, it's gone. If you cut it short, like way too many people do, because of impatience, boredom, or temptation, you’ve thrown away the low hanging fruit of easily won strength gains that are a pain to get back.

The Problem with Jumping Straight to Intermediate Training

Intermediate programs are designed for lifters who can no longer recover from the workout-to-workout stress of the basic linear progression. These programs require more complexity to organize the stress/recovery/adaptation cycle over longer periods of time. They’re not magic, they’re not inherently better, and they're also not for you – just yet. They’re just necessary when the LP has fully run its course.

Switching to intermediate programming too early, and often abruptly from one workout to the next, makes it nearly impossible to know what’s actually working, if anything did. When you change exercise selection, frequency, volume, and intensity all at once, and performance either improves or goes down the shitter, you're left scratching your head for answers. You’ve altered everything simultaneously, so there’s no way to pinpoint what variable made the difference. Instead of adjusting the piece that needed attention, you overhauled the entire system, and now you’re flying blind and you will get yourself stuck, again.

Not only that, but intermediate programming comes with more training variables to manage, more stress to recover from, and more room for error. Navigating this phase of your training career takes experience that you just don't have, and if you haven’t squeezed all the progress you can from the LP, you’re simply not ready for it. Besides, simple > complex , despite what almost all personal trainers and “functional training” enthusiasts would have you believe, and if you have the choice between forging ahead with simplicity instead of complexity, you'd be wise to take advantage of it. I don't know about you but if I can keep getting stronger with sets of 5 and a relatively straightforward progression, I'll take that any day of the week over some 5-day powerlifting split I found online. Plus, running this fucking gym in Brussels is stripping years off my life one day at a time, so I need to be efficient with my training.

The Four Variables and Why You Don’t Touch Them All at Once

As a coach, we generally manipulate four training variables to continue driving progress and managing our lifters.

1. Load/Intensity – The weight on the bar

2. Volume – Total sets and reps

3. Frequency – How often we train

4. Exercise Selection – Duh

Change one variable, and others will shift whether you want them to or not. For example, increase intensity and you’ll likely have to reduce volume to facilitate recovery properly. Add accessory work? You’ve increased total training volume whether you realize it or not. Bump up training frequency with more days in the gym? That’s another hit of volume that affects recovery. Even something that seems simple – like swapping the Squat for a front squat on a light day – changes the exercise selection and lowers the load you can use, which alters the intensity and thus training stress. Everything’s connected, and small adjustments matter.

Making big, sweeping changes means you're trying to juggle all of these variables at once, introducing guess work and chaos instead of clarity. If, however, you make small changes, one at a time and based on the needs of the individual lift and the recovery capacity of the lifter, then you can figure out what’s working and what’s not. You can therefore avoid a major overhaul and derailing your hard earned progress.

Turn One Dial at a Time

Not all lifts stall at the same time or for the same reasons. Some use significantly less muscle mass and are extremely sensitive to bar path while others can overcome these issues because damn near everything is contributing to the exercise. So please, my friends, don’t change everything when only one thing is slowing down.

We try to make small, logical changes, one variable at a time so that the LP evolves smoothly, and over time, into more intermediate programming. After two or three of these small, well-timed changes, your LP has quietly become something else, something slightly more complex and very much like the programs folks tried to jump right into in the first place. You’ve arrived at some more advanced training gradually, methodically, and intelligently, instead of freaking out and overhauling your entire program the second something stalls. Let’s break it down:

The Press and Bench Press

These are often the first lifts to stall, because even though they aren’t as systemically stressful as squats and deadlifts, they use much less muscle mass and therefore have less contractile mass contributing to the lifts. When they do slow down, we don’t start throwing in back-off sets (which lowers the stress), reaching for the incline bench or doing a bunch of accessory work for the triceps. Instead, keep it simple:

1. Microload the weight – You can't make 5lb jumps forever, so start going up in smaller increments.

2. Switch from 3x5 to 5x3 – This keeps the overall rep count the same but running triples will allow us to drive the weight up longer, which is the name of the game in basic programming.

3. Eventually increase frequency – Instead of alternating the press and bench every session, we go to pressing and benching twice per week each, using a Volume/Intensity split:

For example:

• Monday: Press 5x5 (usually strict)
• Wednesday: Bench 5x5
• Friday: Press 7-10 heavy singles, Bench 1x5

But again, this only happens after the basic LP tools (microloading and sets of 3) have stopped working or an astute coach notices that changes will be needed soon and makes adjustments before they become necessary.

The Deadlift

Folks assume the deadlift stalls early, but that’s not actually the case. The deadlift typically doesn’t stall, it just becomes too taxing to pull a heavy set of 5 three times a week. Because it starts from a dead stop, without the benefit of a stretch reflex, and involves the heaviest weight early on, it’s the most stressful lift in the program. That stress adds up fast, and it will start to impact the other lifts and your overall recovery if it's overused. Because of this, the frequency of pulling heavy needs to be reduced.

The first step is to reduce heavy pulling to twice per week by inserting a lighter pulling movement mid-week, usually the Power Clean (or another light pull if appropriate for the individual). We'll then reduce it further to pulling heavy once a week with lighter and medium pulls on the other days. This keeps progress moving on the deadlift on a weekly basis without burying the lifter in fatigue or jumping into overall intermediate programming prematurely.

For example:

• Monday: Deadlift 1x5
• Wednesday: Snatch 5x2
• Friday: Power Clean 5x3

Looks like an HLM setup, doesn't it? These small changes turn your LP into more intermediate programming for your pulls one step at a time while still maintaining increases in weight every week, without the need for a hard pivot.

The Squat

The Squat keeps moving for a while but eventually, the stress becomes too much to recover from three heavy days per week and we need to stay on top of it. When you change this thing, again, keep it simple:

1. Add a light day: Introduce a light squat in the middle of the week (around 80%) for 2–3 sets of 5. This maintains frequency and technique while facilitating recovery for Friday. Squatting heavy twice a week will work for some time, so take advantage of this fact.

2. Top set on Friday: Keep Monday at 3x5, Wednesday light, and turn Friday into a heavy top set of 5 followed by back-off sets at 90%. This allows further progress to continue twice per week while better managing fatigue.

3. Shift volume to Monday: As recovery demands increase, reduce Friday's volume to just the top set of 5 and add that extra work to Monday working into 4–5 sets of 5 at ~90% of Friday’s weight. Congrats, you’ve just morphed your LP into a proper HLM setup and you didn't have to blow your programming to hell to get there.

For clarity - after a few small changes:

• Monday: 4-5x5 (at 90%)
• Wednesday: 2-3x5 (at 80%)
• Friday: 1x5 (+5lbs from previous week), (possibly1-2x5 backoffs at 90%)

These small changes manage stress across the week, and we've successfully avoided overhauling the LP on a dime and jumping right into something more complex the lifter is not ready for. I can assure you, that if you dive into something like the Texas Method fresh off your LP and go too heavy, you'll dig yourself a recovery hole that can take a while to get out of. So don't be a dumbass and spring-clean the fuck out of your LP. Be smart and transition one step at a time.

As a caveat, it’s important to understand that each lift progresses at its own pace. It’s entirely possible, and quite common, to be on intermediate or even advanced programming on your upper body lifts while your squat or deadlift is still moving up just fine with a basic linear progression. One lift stalling does not mean the others are done too. This is exactly why we isolate the problem and adjust that lift’s programming, instead of panicking and blowing it up. Change the variable that needs changing, and leave everything else alone until it actually needs to be fixed. Again, don't be that guy.

Intermediate Programming is Earned, not Given

There’s a reason Practical Programming is hundreds of pages long: Intermediate and Advanced programming is nuanced and they are meant to be guidelines to follow, not a menu to choose from. If you’re jumping around between the sample programs before you’ve exhausted your LP or made the appropriate small changes, you’re just doing complicated shit for no reason and you will stall. I can assure you that Rip and Andy Baker didn’t write the fucking thing to be used as a choose-your-own-adventure guide.

You don’t need complexity until simplicity no longer works, my friends. Simple, hard, and effective is always preferred if it means we can continue adding weight to the bar. After all, we're in this to get stronger, are we not? Ask any advanced lifter how much they'd love to go back to making linear gains if they could. Believe me, it's the best time to be a lifter. And if you follow the LP, eat, sleep, and recover like you're supposed to, it works for a long time, so please don’t skip ahead. Make the smallest adjustments you can, keep your variables tight, and understand why you’re changing things.

You're get to be a novice lifter one time, so milk it for everything it’s worth. Don’t throw away the easy gains because you got bored, impatient, or things start feeling heavy. The complicated, individualized shit will be there when you actually need it and when that day comes, you’ll be stronger, more experienced, and will have actually earned the extra work that's coming.

Until then, keep it simple, and add weight to the bar, one workout at a time. That’s the game.

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