The basics are often boring, monotonous, slow changing things that you can’t slap on a billboard and expect a big return from. Big wins often require a series of small, incremental, and repetitive tasks that accumulate over long periods of time. Put more succinctly, if you show up, lather, rinse, and repeat, you will come out with more than you came in with. Yet, the micro-variables get all the attention, and we seem to have an endless stream of people fixating on them for failure to make progress.

Unfortunately, telling someone to master the basics is not a winning strategy, whereas focusing on the minutia is quite lucrative. Ask your favorite bodybuilder with millions of YouTube subscribers. So, let’s get down to business, kiddos, and see if we can get your panties out of a twist and keep the ball moving forward.

The novice effect, honeymoon phase, newbie gains, and a host of other terms to describe the phenomenon of making rapid progress by simply learning a new skill, is quite fun, addicting, predictable, and something we all want to continue indefinitely. However, the law of impermanence prohibits such a thing, and we all reach a point where we grow up and realize that “shit has changed.” In this case, stable, predictable, and relatively easy linear progress ceases to continue and we are now tasked with figuring out how to adapt the stress-recovery-adaptation cycle for our own situation. Let’s list the most common ways many of you are going to mess up, and end up on the programming hamster wheel. First, a disclaimer:

Post-Novice training is for a lifter, not an exerciser. Once the linear progress ends the trainee must decide whether to become a lifter or not. If he desires additional strength training progress, it only happens if he becomes a lifter. This means that he makes every effort to find reasons to Do The Program and not succumb to reasons to Not Do the Program. To reiterate: if you are no longer a novice, you must approach training through the lens of a lifter if more weight on the bar is the goal. If this is not you, skip the rest of this article and go play pickleball or whatever the latest exercise trend is. If this is you, read on.

#1. Skipping workouts entirely

Contrary to popular belief, as we get stronger, squats and deadlifts do not require as much frequency and volume to continue progressing. It’s easy to get seduced by the reality that if you skip a workout here and there, those two are likely to keep moving if you are strong enough. However, bench press, press, and overhead pulls are not as forgiving. If you are scheduled to train 3 times in a week and you skip one that leaves you with 1-2 bench presses or presses for that week, which for most post-novice lifters is insufficient.  

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The gym bros know this, which is why there is a 3-year long waiting list for benches at most commercial gyms. If they know this, surely you can figure it out. All roads will lead to “arms and chest everyday” if you seek to continue gaining upper body strength. This means showing up 3-4 days per week, for months and years.

#2) Skipping pulls

The most common error I see in late novices and early intermediates is the skipping of deadlifts, power cleans, and overhead pulls (i.e. chin-ups, pull-ups, and pulldowns). These are main lifts that work a large majority of your upper body musculature. If your goal is to become a squat specialist, that’s fine – just don’t complain that “Starting Strength is a lower-body program” when you’ve made the decision to skip exercises that build a large percentage of your upper-body musculature.

The deadlift works every muscle from your neck down to your ankles and around your waist, along with the forearms and biceps. Your torso is growing more from deadlifts than it is from bench pressing and pressing, so have some dignity and do not skip the deadlift. The vertical pulls grow your biceps and forearms along with your lats. They are also the inverse of press, so if the press is a main lift, so are your overhead pulls. If you skip them, your lack of biceps growth is on you and nobody else.

#3) Taking too much time off

This is an addendum to #1. Many of you travel for work or for personal reasons. Lifters find gyms when they travel. If you have chosen this path, then you need to do the same and if you can locate a real gym that provides reasonably good equipment, then do it. Vacationing once a year is one thing, frequent trips, like work related travel, falls into the routine responsibilities category along with lifting. Find a gym, get something done, and make sure that attendance streak remains unperturbed. Otherwise, you spend most of your year resetting and working back up.

Remember, you read the disclaimer above. If you think this is not practical, then go back and re-read the disclaimer. 1,2, or even 3 weeks off is not practical for a lifter with goals. You don’t get to be shocked when your 3^rd bench press warm up barely moves after 2 weeks off. That is precisely what is expected from that many days off.

#4) Under-eating

This error has been beat to hell but sometimes the 1,234,115^th time strikes the right nerve. Following a vegan diet, doing keto, eating 1200 calories, forgetting to eat because you were busy, and all the other silly things people have reported on their diets is simply insufficient if you are a post-novice lifter. Your body needs to recover, and this means ~200 grams of protein and ~300 g carbs for adult men, 100 grams of protein and ~150 g carbs for adult women need to be met on a daily basis. If you are older or have a chronic disease that interferes with recovery, then you need more than this.

Before you ask, these are not precise numbers for 100% of human beings who do barbell training. These are you-are-unlikely-to-fuck-things-up estimates, meaning if you eat that much you’ll probably train well even if it’s a little more than what is needed. We are not professional researchers looking to publish manuscripts, we are lifters looking to hit PRs and grow muscles. Start with an estimate and adjust based on your lifting performance. Then repeat this process daily from the start of a training cycle to the end of it. Then do the same on the next training cycle and the one after that. You see a theme here? You are a lifter with lifter responsibilities that do not go away because you feel like dog shit. On the contrary, you need to own them more when you feel like dog shit.

#5 Adding other activities

In the old days, we were worried about young men doing too many curls and triceps extensions or women doing too much conditioning work outside of their strength program. While we still deal with those things, we now have people of all ages doing a variety of different things, some silly some not, at levels that disrupt recovery from lifting. Combat sports, cycling, running, pickleball, bootcamp, dancing, traditional recreational sports, and a list longer than my word count allows for.

Since most of today’s workforce spends their time in a sedentary position throughout the day, activities outside of lifting will compliment lifting by keeping a reasonable aerobic baseline and keeping the joints and connective tissues from getting stiff from sitting all day but only to a point. If a little bit is good, more is not better. If you push to the limit in an aerobic activity, you will not recover to lift heavier weights, especially as a post novice. You can do them but spending several hours per week on them is not productive for a lifter who wants more weight on the bar. Use them for conditioning but do not train them unless you plan to move away from lifting, in which case, see the disclaimer.

If you are a post-novice lifter spinning your wheels on the programming hamster wheel, go through this list and do an honest assessment of your situation. If you are guilty of one or more of these things, address them before program hopping or blaming your coach for hitting the same sticking point every time you run up your lifts. Programming, and thus applying stress, is often simple for most humans. Recovery is where the complications arise, and the complexity often stems from human behavior and motivation.

Start by being honest with yourself about your goals, your bottlenecks, and what you are willing to do about them. If you need help or an additional kick in the ass hire or consult with a coach to turn things up a notch. Otherwise, you can play the blame game and retire to sitting on your phone watching your favorite internet expert sell you the next SECRET TO SUCCESS with his favorite program he never followed taking his favorite supplement he never took. The results of that approach speak for themselves. Otherwise, own whatever silly things you have been doing, stop doing them, and get to work. You may surprise yourself and see a return on your investment.

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