Consider me your peer. I will not speak to you as an authority on strength training, but simply as someone who gets it. “It” being your experience as a novice lifter. This is not a customer testimonial. I will not talk about how I got great results from Starting Strength. What I will do, however, is validate for you what Starting Strength claims to be true – that it is the single best method for novice lifters to get strong. I only know this from years of doing anything but Starting Strength Method. I have made all of the mistakes. I have all of the regrets. I don't want you to make the same mistakes. Peer to peer, I want you to be highly successful and very strong.

If you have read Starting Strength: Basic Barbell Training, listened to Starting Strength Radio, train at a Starting Strength Gym, or attended a seminar, you have heard the that the Starting Strength Method was born from years of experience in training and coaching. That it is based on years of study of the phenomenology of strength training. That it is simply the best way to get strong. Why should we believe them? Starting Strength sells many products. Everyone says their product is the best. Certainly Starting Strength has many competitors. Which one is right for a new and developing lifter? Why does the advice from Starting Strength work when other approaches do not?

First, some backstory on me, laced with regrets.

I started lifting in 2018. I was skinny-fat, 35 years old, the mother of two young children, with abundant energy and a thirst for a hobby. I enjoyed being in my local commercial gym, and I wanted to be stronger, but I didn’t know how I was going to get there. In my naive state, I somehow latched onto a barbell-based strength program that I found in a very quick and limited web search. It was only a program that said it was right for beginners, with no focus on form for lifting. I struggled for a few months – I had no idea how to squat, bench, press, or deadlift – failing early and often, and developed searing hip flexor tendonitis along the way. Despite all this, my desire to succeed was high and I kept pushing forward. I now know that novices need far more than a program to follow, that a 5x5 program is too much volume for a novice, and that accessories are a waste of time and energy for a novice.

As I struggled with this cockamamie program to which I had dedicated myself, the head of personal training at my gym took notice. I had originally met him in a CrossFit-like exercise group where I was first introduced to barbell exercises. At this time, he took me under his wing and began to work with me one-on-one. He coached me through some technique in person once a week, hand-wrote a program for me, and encouraged me along the way. I thought this was my way forward. Until I discovered that it wasn’t. However this discovery only came to me many years later.

I will give my thanks to this individual for being the first person to expose me to barbell training. He is also the first person to expose me to Starting Strength. One day, while we were lifting, he began to cast a YouTube video on the TV in the weight room and said, “You gotta see this guy.” That guy was Mark Rippetoe. That video was dated 2013 and is no longer on YouTube. It was titled “Starting Strength: Full Seminar.”

Fast forward to 2024. I am 41 years old now. I have a better-looking and better-functioning body at age 41 than I had when I was 31 or 21. I have put on 25 pounds of lean mass and increased my total by more than 500 pounds. I placed 4th in my first national-level powerlifting meet this year. I also train Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and I am able to outwork and submit women many years younger than myself. I feel amazing and I sleep like a baby every night.

But how did I get here from that awful beginning? I would not be where I am without Starting Strength and my exceptional Starting Strength Coach. I made every mistake along the way before I invested in the Starting Strength method. I have many regrets about training before I started working with my SSC. Please, I beg you, do not make these mistakes. I now know that these are common pitfalls:

• Being on the wrong program or frequently changing programs

• Using bad technique

• Caring too much about the numbers

• Going rogue/Not doing the program

• Not eating enough/Not gaining weight

• Taking a break/Changing it up

• Not training with intensity

• Cutting weight

• Wrong Program/Program Hopping

Novices do not need custom programs. Do not buy one off the Internet. Do not pay a trainer at your gym to make one for you. Do not download an app and use a free program. Do not do a program that conveniently fits within the amount of time you have paid upfront for personal training (no program worth anything is only 4 weeks long – that's just the length of a monthly training package at a commercial gym.) Novices do not need assistance or accessory work either. Do not program-hop/abandon one program for another when you are only a few weeks in. Do not use your friend’s program just because she had success with it, unless it is the Starting Strength Novice Linear Progression. Borrow that or hop on to that right now. The NLP has everything you need, nothing you don’t, and it provides very dependable gains for many months.

Bad Technique/Overly Focused on Numbers over Form

How you lift is more important than how much you lift. Squatting 135lbs to depth with control is more important than quarter squatting 315 lbs or divebombing 225 lbs with horrific knee slide. Your form must be correct for you to continue to make progress for a long time. (Please note that I did not say your form must be perfect. Correct is good enough to keep going; perfect is a long-term project.) Do not let a trainer at your gym teach you how to squat, press, deadlift, or any other movement. He or she likely does not know how to lift. They just work at a gym. Anyone can get a job at a gym and get a low-value training certification. Personal training is a high turnover position for a reason.

I regret that I had the worst lifting form ever (I have video evidence) and the trainer I hired at my gym did not make it much better. He was only slightly interested in how well I lifted. To him, it probably looked good enough to keep me entertained and paying the bill. Honestly, I don’t think he knew much about coaching form. But he had a Nametag and a Certificate so I believed him. He started me off on high-bar squats. I did not even know what a low-bar squat was, let alone why it was preferable for training. It was not until a year into my training that I “got stuck” at 190 lbs with the high-bar squat and an overly wide stance. I could not get to full depth on a high-bar squat with more than 190 lbs on my back because a high-bar squat requires a vertical back angle and I could not maintain it at that weight.

It was only when I told my trainer that I had hit a wall on squats at 190 lbs that he showed me how to low-bar squat.

Why was this information withheld from me before? I realize now, and I regret, that I had a trainer who was only willing to show me something that would fit into a weekly 30-minute session and would keep me paying up every month. A good coach will invest the time to teach you good technique from the get-go. A good coach will watch you lift and cue you as needed. Apparently I was not worth the investment with the trainer I had. Needless to say I still had much to work on with my low-bar squat until I began working with my SSC years later.

I can repeat this story over and over again for each of the lifts. Like when I thought I “got stuck” on my deadlift at around 285 lbs, so I went to my trainer for advice, and all he told me was to stop being a pussy and just lift it. He had no technical advice for my deadlift whatsoever. I can now watch video of me deadlifting back then and tell you everything that was wrong with my deadlift – hips too low, high back angle, shoulders behind the bar, too much slack, yanking the bar up off the floor rather than pushing the floor away. I wasn’t a pussy – I was doing it wrong, and I was not being corrected. Once I learned from my SSC how to really deadlift, everything changed and my deadlift took off. I added 30 lbs to my deadlift in a few months as an intermediate lifter. Starting Strength was right.

Going Rogue/Not Doing The Program

As much as I loved training from the beginning, I was not highly compliant with the programs. My intentions were good, but if my trainer told me to do a working set on bench at 80 lbs, and I thought it was too easy, I would just do 85 lbs. But then the next bench workout would come and I would be physically unable to move 90lbs. I had moved the intensity up too quickly and I paid for it later. If I was programmed to deadlift, but all the barbells were in use, I would just use the trap bar. It didn't make a difference to me at the time; I got the workout done, didn’t I? Wrong. So wrong.

At that point I had gone rogue and was no longer training. I was exercising. Training would entail following the program step-by-step. Doing whatever I felt like that day was really just exercising for the effect it gave me that day. I was unable to think about consequences, either positive or negative. Do the program. Stay in compliance. Whatever your SSC says, do it. Do not deviate. You do not know more than your SSC. If you know better than your coach, why are you paying for coaching? You will only realize your mistake later.

Not Eating Enough/Not Gaining Weight

I was skinny-fat at 140 lb when I first started lifting. I wanted to build muscle size and strength but I was unwilling to change my diet and eat more. I will credit my original trainer for telling me I needed to eat more. Unfortunately, I did not act on this for 2-3 years. I did not understand – I wanted to be stronger, not fatter, so why the hell should I eat more? No one could explain this to me at the time.

I was also scared of being fat. In America, this is very common among females and not rare for males either. I now know that I needed to eat more just to fuel my training and recover. Only after I put on 15 lbs over the period of 5 months did I realize the benefits. I looked better and I was making more progress on my lifts.

If you are underweight or if you are skinny fat, you must eat more. You cannot continue to make gains in strength or size without eventually being in a caloric surplus. You will not become fat if you eat more and train with sufficient intensity. You will have more energy and bigger muscles and, perhaps, some more bodyfat. I guarantee that you will look and feel better bigger despite what your bodyfat percentage is. Most people look better with added muscle mass even if it is accompanied by an increase in bodyfat. Personally, my bodyfat percentage was the same at 170 lbs as it was at 140 lbs (25%, a normal and healthy range for a woman my age). Every extra calorie was worth it.

I was not heavily invested in my strength training for the first three years or so. Yes, when I was on a program, I enjoyed it despite my occasional frustrations. But these programs ended after 6-12 weeks because that is how templates and personal training agreements work. Quality coaching, on the other hand, never ends. Many times when a program came to a close, I would “take a break.” It was an easy out to “change it up” and do something else at the gym, cut weight (more on that later), or just go to the beach all summer.

The truth is, every time I went back to strength training, I was not at the same point where I had left off. Even after a few weeks I had noticeably detrained and had to earn back the gains I had forfeited. It took me years to realize this and I regret every break I ever took. If I had kept training through all time, I could have been the national champion this year. But I was #4, and #1 had been training consistently for many more years.

For some silly reason, I once thought that I could not strength train and do something else at the same time. For example, I was into obstacle course racing years ago. To prepare for a big race, I would stop my barbell training and do an obstacle-course specific training program. I mistakenly thought that a sport-specific training program I downloaded from the Internet was somehow better than barbell-based strength training. Now I know that there is indeed a two-factor model of sports performance whereby one can be most successful training for strength while simultaneously practicing their sport.

In hindsight, if I had to choose only one way to prepare for obstacle racing (there is no need to choose, but if you had to), it would be strength training. It was the long, steep mountain climbs that took most people out of the races I did. I went up the rocky slopes quickly and easily because I had been squatting heavy for the past 6 months before I abandoned that for 9 weeks of obstacle training. It was the strength from squatting that made me most successful, not the carrying of a sandbag while walking on a treadmill for 3 miles then doing ball slams on the floor. How stupid I was.

Not Training With Intensity

Eventually, training gets hard for everyone. Sometimes it gets really hard and you will have the desire to quit. You need to learn to dig deep and find a way to get every rep and set at the programmed weight. I can remember many times over the years that I quit on a rep that I should have ground out. I quit by skipping the last set on a workout because I thought it was too hard or unachievable. I have allowed myself to quit on a weight entirely by going lighter than what was programmed. None of this will make you stronger or more resilient. It only trains you to be a quitter or to settle for less. If you repeat this often enough, it becomes a pattern, and you will not be successful.

If you want to get stronger and move big weights, you have to get your head in the fucking game. My mental fortitude is all that stands between me and a 10lb PR as an intermediate lifter. Think of where I could be now if I hadn’t given myself a pass so many times over the years. I never truly trained with intensity until I started training with my SSC. It was then that I eeked out every goddamn rep of every blessed set at weights I had never even imagined.

Cutting Weight

So, yes, I did eventually put on weight. But after a long stretch of hard training and peaking for some powerlifting meets, I wanted to lean out. Even though I had added muscle mass, I was overly focused on how much fat I gained along with it. I fell victim to cutting for aesthetics. Both women and men fall victim to this, especially in America. I regret this, and I have learned my lesson that losing weight involves loss of both fat and muscle and thus the associated strength. When a normal person is in a caloric deficit, all metabolic tissue is on the chopping block. While there are ways to maximize fat loss and minimize muscle loss, there will be some muscle loss in a caloric deficit. Muscle is strength. Loss of muscle is loss of strength. Loss of muscle can be a loss of aesthetic characteristics, too.

I used to “cut” (lose weight) every summer after being on a long slow “bulk” (gaining weight/mass/strength) from fall through spring. But when I got to my goal weight in the summer, I would feel weak. My training numbers were down. Come fall, I would try to get back to the weight I had been before in the spring. All of this cycling up and down in body weight was highly unproductive, and it sacrificed my training progress. I did this for 4 years before I finally came to my senses. After competing at a national competition this year, I committed to staying at or near my “walking around weight” for the summer and I continued to lift heavy. I have no regrets about staying at this higher body weight. My training is going so well and I looked great in my swimsuit all summer.

I have been training for six years now. I am fortunate to be where I am now with my strength, health, and physique. I sometimes think about where I could be today if I had gotten it all right from the beginning. If I could go back again, I would do it all differently. In an ideal situation, I would start with Starting Strength and my SSC and be highly compliant from the beginning. I would put on the good weight and not try to lose it. I would never have taken a break or looked for other types of training. I cannot change the past, but I can be an advocate for what I now know is right. Many friends and acquaintances ask me for advice on how to start lifting, or how to get to the next level from where they started. I always tell them to read the blue book and give them my coach’s contact info. The most effective method is right there – you just have to follow it.

---

Discuss in Forums