If I could refine the Starting Strength lifter category of “Advanced” in one way, it would be to change it from predictable planned monthly progress, to sporadic progress with long bouts of recovery and stagnation in between where you just keep training, and even though you’re not hitting PR’s, if you keep at it, eventually you’ll break through.
For those unfamiliar, the categories of Novice, Intermediate, and Advanced are defined by Starting Strength not by how much weight you can lift but how quickly you go through the stress—> recovery —> adaptation cycle to produce a new PR.
A summary of how SS defines it follows:
Novices can do this every time or almost every time they perform a given lift, as long as they have 2-3 days rest in between bouts. The famous Novice Linear Progression that has gotten tens of thousands of people much stronger in a matter of months, is based on this concept.
Intermediate can typically do this every 1-2 weeks. Programs like the Texas Method are based on this concept, as are many iterations of HLM programs (though it should be noted that HLM is more of a template than a program and can be adapted to Advanced lifters as well).
Advanced lifters are defined by their ability to do this on a longer timeline of about once a month, or perhaps after a while, on an even longer but still planned and predictable timeline.
But my experience is that this isn’t usually how the Advanced category actually works in practice for most lifters who get to this point. Instead, it looks something more like what I’ll describe below with two examples: First, my own training of the press and second, my friend Robert Santana’s1 quest for a 315 bench press.
My Press
I first hit 265 on the (overhead) press in early 2015. For the rest of 2015, I didn’t surpass that. I was close to hitting a new PR at the end of the year but badly injured my shoulder in a freak accident outside the gym in late November. After trying rehab to avoid surgery, ultimately in April 2016 I got surgery to repair it. The recovery and rehab process took the rest of 2016, and I finally matched my old PR of 265 in December of 2016. Then, I didn’t hit a new PR until spring 2017, about 2 years since my last press PR.
But when I finally did PR, I didn’t just hit 270 or even 275, but over the course of a month or so of PRs, built by all the prior work, I got all the way to 290 in a spurt of progress.
My PR remained at 290 for the rest of 2017 and almost all of 2018, as I went through various ebbs and flows of training. I didn’t hit 300 till the tail end of 2018, in December - but when I did, I once again soon surpassed it by running up to 315 in January 2019, in another spurt of progress. I pressed 315 twice, once in training and once at a meet with official calibrated kilo iron and all:
My strength in the press remained about the same through the next few years of training and I didn’t surpass it again until late 2022, when I hit new five and two rep maxes in the press. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a chance to hit a new one rep max before my surgically repaired shoulder started giving me trouble again. Despite getting an MRI and consulting with an orthopedist, as well as consulting with several lifting-based physical therapists, along with applying everything I know about the subject, it remained a problem for almost 2 years. For about 20 months, I couldn’t bench at all, and my other upper body training was limited to about 80% or less of max at best, usually more like 60-70%.
When it finally healed enough to resume heavier training in late summer 2024, I started building it back up again - hopefully for another run at a PR in 2025.
The main point I’m trying to get across with this story isn’t, “Look at me, I press 3 plates!” or how I persevered despite setbacks. Rather, it’s that despite actively working on this lift for an entire 10 year period, most of my progress during that time came in 3 distinct spurts: spring 2017, winter 2018-2019, and Fall 2022. I didn’t add 0.5 lbs to the bar every month for 4 years to get 25 more lbs on my press. Instead, I worked on it the whole time but mostly without visible results or PRs, but then suddenly after 2 years, in a flurry of PRs over the course of a month or so, my press went from 265 to 290; then similarly a couple years later from 290 to 315. Then again a few years later - with 10-15 lb PRs on my 5 and 2 rep maxes set over the course of a shorter period of time, though I never got to find out what my new 1 rep max was in the last case.
It was not regularly planned, steady progress but months or even years of work to produce a few PRs over a short period when all the dice landed just right.
Santana’s Bench Press
I asked Robert to describe the journey he took to get his bench up to 315 in his own words:
The dream of a 315 bench press has entered the minds of many gym goers for decades. It may, for many people, hold more importance than breathing air. For me, it was essentially a driver’s license. A man cannot refer to himself as a gym owner without adequate street credibility and the “3 plate bench press” serves as just that. I started bench pressing when I was 15 and kept it in all of my training programs in my 20s and 30s like most men who lift weights tend to do. Upon receiving proper barbell training instruction in 2013, I directed my focus onto the squat, press, and deadlift, since I had already been benching for years. But that 315 lingered in my mind as a goal.
I made a real run at it in 2020, working my way up over many months to a 267.5x5 PR and a 310 single, but I failed 315. It took me 4 years to get back there again.
By the time I decided the 3 plate bench press just needed to happen, I long had the 5 plate deadlift, 4 plate squat, and 2 plate pressed checked off the list of necessary milestones. It was time to finally earn that last plate milestone.
I started out bench pressing three times per week and pressing once per week. The volume started out high, and weight was added to the bar weekly. But this was mostly only regaining the ground I had first hit in 2020.
An entire year later I was down to two bench press workouts per week. One workout was heavy, one workout was light. The intensity varied by week, with “week A” being a heavy week and “week B” being a light week. After over a year of effort, I finally hit a new PR in the bench with 270 x 5, but just could not squeeze out a set of 5 at 272.5 despite multiple attempts. Following this, I completed a “quick and dirty” peak, hit a new 3RM of 285, and then did a combination of singles and doubles for a few weeks, resulting in the long sought-after 315 bench press.
The most interesting and important observation in this run was that, unlike when I was a novice or early intermediate lifter, progress on the bench press did not happen in a linear fashion. Once I was close to my previous PRs, weight was not added to the bar on a consistent weekly basis anymore for successfully completed sets. I tried to add weight every other week, sometimes successfully and sometimes unsuccessfully. Sometimes heavy-but-sub-maximal weights that I had previously lifted in prior training cycles when I couldn’t yet do 315, were missed on my way up to successfully making 315 this time around. I constantly went back to the drawing board (including a few long conversations with Wolf!) to troubleshoot the unpredictable nature of being an advanced lifter. In fact, it took about a year to hit that new 5-rep max at 270x5, a mere 2.5 lb PR, and it was in the most nonlinear manner that one can imagine.
I learned many lessons that could be compiled into a short novel. The short version is that I learned that fatigue takes much longer to dissipate now that I’m an advanced lifter. Bench press, similar to the squat and deadlift, is incredibly fatiguing as heavier absolute loads are lifted. My peaking cycle could have been cleaner and more textbook, but I made a judgement call because the psychological burnout at that stage (13 months on the same program) became overwhelming. Had I fully rehabbed ongoing medial epicondylitis that existed prior to starting this training cycle and shortened the accumulation phase by getting ahead of the fatigue and bench pressing every other week sooner, I may have been able to put more weight on the bar. We will never know but, more importantly, finally getting the 3 plate bench was far more important than all other factors. Every gym bro in the world will vouch for me on this universal truth. Until next time.
Conclusion
In my experience, both of these two cases resemble the more common way that advanced lifters make progress, as opposed to hitting PR’s at planned, repeated, standardized intervals of a month, a quarter, or even bi-annually. Rather, progress ebbs and flows through training, often hitting a PR or flurry of PRs, then having to come back down from that and recover through lighter training not just for days or weeks, but often months and sometimes years. Then eventually you start your next run at a PR and it takes months to build back up to it. Then maybe you hit it, maybe you don’t.
Some people can do it on a more regular repeating schedule of standardized intervals, sure, but the way it happened for me as described above for my press, is the much more common way that advanced lifters make and display progress, in my experience as both a lifter and a coach.
Robert Santana is a Starting Strength Coach and Registered Dietician. He owns and operates the Weights and Plates gym in Phoenix, AZ, and is a nutrition coach with Renaissance Periodization. He can be found online on Instagram at @ the_robert_santana; at his website, Weights and Plates; and his Weights and Plates Podcast.