The SRA Cycle, Main Lifts, and Gains - Part 2: Why We Wait to Add Accessories to Your Program

Overcoming the main objection

Part 1 of this two-parter covered the physiological reasoning of why we start every lifter with a full body novice linear progression program using the basic barbell lifts, then move on to weekly progress on those lifts, before we add many accessories to the program or do body part splits like chest day, leg day, back day - even for people who want to get bigger, not just stronger.

Here in Part 2, I’ll discuss how this physiological reasoning matches all the evidence I’ve seen with my own eyes. I initially said in Part 1 that I’d get this out later the same week, so apologies for the ~3 week delay.

Overcoming the Main Objection

To reiterate: The most common argument against my position is pointing to a slew of lifters who started out with body part splits and successfully built impressive physiques, be they the more common aesthetic bro or the actual competitive bodybuilder. If their way didn’t work, and mine was better, how could that be? For example, the very jacked guys I’ve used in the pictures in Part 1 didn’t do a novice linear progression to begin their training careers, and they ended up jacked AF. Pro bodybuilders of all the various divisions tend to use body part splits. This being the case, why not start off your training that way from the beginning?

Once again a logical question, but one to which I fortunately have an answer. It’s not the kind of answer I could publish as proof in an exercise science journal, rather it’s matching my own personal experience observing and coaching tens of thousands of combined people in the gym over 20+ years with the physiological reasoning laid out in Part 1.

To backtrack to Part 1 again, part of the answer is that you will get more out of that kind of training split once you have a stronger base built. The guy who can bench 250 or 315 after a year or two of strength-oriented training, will get a lot more out of DB incline bench and cable decline flyes, than the guy on day 1 who can barely bench 115 for a single grindy rep.

But there’s another concept at play here too, called survivorship bias. Survivorship bias or survival bias is the logical error of concentrating on entities that passed a selection process while overlooking those that did not. This can lead to incorrect conclusions because of incomplete data.

This picture is one of the most famous depictions of survivorship bias in action. From Wikipedia:

During World War II, the statistician Abraham Wald took survivorship bias into his calculations when considering how to minimize bomber losses to enemy fire. The Statistical Research Group (SRG) at Columbia University, which Wald was a part of, examined the damage done to aircraft that had returned from missions and recommended adding armor to the areas that showed the least damage. The bullet holes in the returning aircraft represented areas where a bomber could take damage and still fly well enough to return safely to base. Therefore, Wald proposed that the Navy reinforce areas where the returning aircraft were unscathed, inferring that planes hit in those areas were the ones most likely to be lost. His work is considered seminal in the then nascent discipline of operational research.

In other words, contrary to intuition, it wasn’t the spots with bullet-holes on the returning planes that needed extra shielding. It was the places where no bullets had struck - because the planes struck there, didn’t make it back. Clever.

In our case, people who have good genetics and/or are enhanced, will respond well to basically any programming, as long as they work hard and are consistent. Sometimes even without those two things! The people who end up winning Mr. Olympia, or get on the cover of Flex Magazine, or even just look real good and post lots of flexing content on social media - garner a lot of attention. There’s a much greater number of people who tried using the same bodypart splits as the pros, but were untrained novices and so got very little out of them. These people fall by the wayside, never appearing on any magazine covers or “before/after” photoshoots on social media. And boy have I seen a lot of such people in my time - more on that below.

So the question isn’t what works well for someone in the top slice of genetics or who is also enhanced, but what works no matter what, for everyone.

Evidence For This Claim: My Own Eyes

My own background in the fitness industry provides evidence for this answer, so forgive me for indulging in a little bit of personal history, in order to provide evidence for this claim.

To begin with, I will clarify the claim I’m making, because a sleight of hand straw-man is often used to argue against it: The claim is NOT that every novice/beginner who does an LP will always have better results than every novice who does a body part split with lots of accessories. Obviously the guy with top 1% genetics and enhancement, will get further even as a novice on a body part split than a guy with 20th percentile genetics and no enhancement, doing “the perfect program.”

The claim is that the same person - even if his long term goal is purely in the hypertrophy/aesthetics realm - would be better off, for his first 3-6 months of lifting, doing a linear progression based on the main barbell lifts, rather than typical a body part bro split.

I think this is also likely true if he spends the next 4-9 months after the LP doing an early intermediate program that produces weekly and then bi-weekly progress still using primarily the main lifts as primary drivers, before moving into something more body part oriented.

Since we don’t have 2 genetically identical CBums or Arnolds to test with, nor a time machine, we can’t accelerate our DeLorean to 88 mph and go back in time to run the experiment.

When I watched this movie as a kid, I thought we’d definitely have flying cars by now, maybe time machines too.

But what we can do is observe reality around us and see if survivorship bias is likely here. This is where my personal history comes in.

I started lifting as a young teenager at a small gym in the pre-internet era. My only source of information back then were the muscle magazines and the biggest guys in the gym - all of whom promoted and did the classic body part split type of training. This being all I knew, I did the same thing too and got pretty good results - but I was also the strongest kid in my class even before I started lifting and a pretty good athlete too. Both my parents were also pretty good athletes. So even back before I knew anything about physiology, I could intuit that I had pretty good genetics. Though I noticed that a lot of people coming to the gym were doing more or less the same things I was doing but without nearly as good results, I didn’t think much about it at the time. But I did notice it.

I trained this way for some years, and at the start of my senior year of college, got a work-study job as weight room supervisor. This gave me the opportunity to watch, and informally help, more people. The dominant paradigm was still the bodybuilding/ body part split style of training. The same pattern held. A few people seemed to get really good results, while the majority got mediocre to very little, often times leading them to give up after a few months. I still didn’t really know what to do with this observation, but it was there simmering in the back of my mind.

After finishing school, I got a personal training job at Equinox. What I learned there was that I’d been “doing everything wrong” by focusing on body parts and muscle groups. No no, I was told - you need to focus on movements, not muscles, because the body works in the real world based on coordinated movements, not isolated muscle groups. There’s some good logic in this, but in hindsight, the application was poor: instead of focusing on mastering and progressing fundamental movements like squat, bench, deadlift, press, power clean, row, and chin-up - the emphasis was on how to make things more complex and less stable.

For example: instead of mastering the squat then adding weight to get stronger, the squat was treated cursorily as a simple movement with almost no time dedicated to its inherent intricacies, and instead the focus was how to make squats more complex and less stable. So some of the ‘master trainers’ would have their clients doing things like a squat with one leg on a bosu and one leg on the floor, holding a dumbbell in one hand while the other hand held a cable handle, doing a single arm cable row when they stood up. More often than not, the squat wasn’t even below parallel. Stuff like this was considered the pinnacle of progression, instead of getting a novice from an 85 lb squat to a 275 in his first 3-6 months.

Since I’d seen shortcomings in the body part approach, I tried out and worked within this paradigm for a little while; but observing thousands of sessions around me, plus my own clients, I quickly noticed this stuff didn’t produce impressive results either.

To summarize the next bunch of years: I ended up working at 4 different Equinox gyms, first as a trainer then as a personal training manager, ultimately supervising a staff of 35+ trainers doing about 25,000 personal training sessions per year while still training my own clients as well. I was at the gym 50-60 hours most weeks, and saw tens of thousands of general gym goers and individual sessions, as it was my job to do so. The vast majority of these personal training sessions and general members were working within the body part split paradigm, with some of the trainers themselves being former competitive bodybuilders - but I also got to see some crossfit style, olympic lifting, a lot of functional training and prehab/rehab type approaches.

During this time I also became an instructor in a college PE program and did some work as S&C coach for a few years as well. I became certified by USAW, and later after I was no longer working at Equinox or in the college system anymore, I founded and ran the strength program for 4+ years at the biggest crossfit gym in Manhattan. In doing all these things, I both tried myself, and had a lot of opportunity to observe, a large sample size of just about every training paradigm under the sun: From crossfit to olympic lifting, functional training and the sport-specific paradigm and the rehab/prehab focus. And what I noticed is that in every one of them, when dealing with a large population of people rather than a selectively small group of elite athletes, a lot of people made little to no progress on them, some people did OK, while a small number - who you could usually pick out in advance by their obviously more athletic genes - did very well.

Enter the SSLP

When I starting coaching people using the Starting Strength Novice Linear Progression, its superiority to the other paradigms I’d observed and used was immediately obvious. This was important to me because while I had adopted most of the SS technique paradigm several years earlier, I had resisted the novice programming paradigm for years, thinking it was too simple to possibly work.

But when I finally implemented it in a dedicated systemic way across my client base, I noticed something amazing: It works every single time it’s done correctly. Now of course, genetic differences still play a big role: the average guy might get his squat to 265-300 and his bench to 185-200 on an LP, while a good athlete can get to 500 and 335 or more on nothing more than an LP. Meanwhile the guy stuck with terrible genes for training only gets to 225 and 135, respectively, on his novice LP.

But unlike the body part split paradigm, compared to where they start, every single person makes an unmistakably huge amount of objective progress on the LP.

That unfortunate guy who only gets to 225 and 135? The most he could do on day 1 was the empty bar on bench and 55 lbs on squat - yes, I have a real life client who did exactly this. A few years later he squatted 315, deadlifted 350, and benched 185. None of those numbers are impressive for a hardcore lifter, but it’s rather exceptional that they are about 6x, 7x, and 4x what he could do on his first day.

In all the other programs and paradigms I’ve observed, across 20 years and tens of thousands of people, this kind of result never materialized at scale. Some people did well, some did OK, and many people made little to no progress, even doing things “right.”

There was a cohort of young guys at my gym who provide a perfect example of this. A group of guys, all in the prime gaining years of 17-22 years old, joined the gym around the same time about 2.5 years ago, going into the summer of 2022. All of them trained very dedicatedly using the body part paradigm, several of them even getting professional coaching from competitive bodybuilders. Two-three years later they all look about the same and lift about the same weights as they did when they started, except for two: both of whom are not shy about the fact that they started using gear during this time. They both made visible progress, unlike the rest of the group. It will never be easier to gain muscle at any time in your life than your late teens and early 20s, yet this group of guys in this cohort utterly failed to do so following this training paradigm.

Now you can believe me about this story or not, but anyone honestly observing the situation in gyms, across tens of thousands of people for many years, will observe the same thing. People who have good genetics and/or are enhanced, will get good - sometimes even amazing - results using this paradigm. People who are not in that group will sometimes do ok, but sometimes get almost no results at all, coming in week after week, month after month, with little to show for their efforts.

Whereas the LP approach works every time it’s done correctly. Whenever I post about it on Twitter, people voluntarily jump in to comment how they trained with the body part paradigm sometimes for months or years, and then quickly eclipsed all those years of work with a few months on LP/early intermediate style barbell training. Here’s one great example:

Who is this guy and what has he done? Well, try a 640 squat from a couple months ago, and it wasn’t even very hard:

Now, is his bodyfat % higher than most of the hypertrophy and aesthetic guys like to have? Sure. But that doesn’t change the fact that a) he can cut whenever he wants to, and b) he built way more strength and muscle by doing the kind of training I’m promoting here, than he did the other way.

In this specific case, Jim is definitely strong enough to where if he wants to do a body part split now, he’d gain way more from it and make it way more productive, than when he was actually doing it back then at the bodybuilding gym, 55+ lbs of bodyweight ago.

Now Jim obviously has pretty good genetics - most people won’t squat 640 even enhanced, much less natural. But here we have an example of even a guy with good genetics getting much better results - in terms of building muscle specifically - when going back after the fact, to rebuild his base using the kind of training I’m advocating for.

Let’s say he was lean, 10% bodyfat at 195. That would be about 175 lbs of lean bodyweight. Now he’s 18% at 250 - that’s about 205 lbs of lean weight. This is a big difference in hypertrophy, not just strength.

So sure, we can’t run a controlled experiment in parallel with 2 CBums, 2 Arnolds, etc to see how they end up after their first 6 or 18 months by doing this kind of training before moving to body part splits vs doing the body part paradigm from day 1. But we can observe what we see with our own eyes. Many beginners, even in the stage of training advancement and age at which success is easiest, nevertheless don’t succeed using the body part paradigm. Not just because they miss workouts, but even “doing everything right,” sometimes even under the guidance of competitive bodybuilders as some of the guys at my gym were.

Of course this doesn’t mean by doing an LP, you’ll look anything like a peak 1973 Arnold, or 2024 CBum. But you’ll be better off than you otherwise would be if you used a different approach, including a body part split.

Implications

I believe this is very strongly suggestive as to which paradigm works better for novices and beginners. Yes, if you have good genetics and/or are enhanced, you will achieve good results doing almost any program. But if the question is which works better for people in general, at this early stage of their training advancement, I think we can be pretty confident in answering this question. The reality I’ve seen across a sample size of tens of thousands that I laid out here, matches the physiological reasoning I laid out in Part 1 the other week.

You can of course claim I’m just making this up to bolster the kind of training I personally prefer, but you’d have to explain why I would switch from what I had been using successfully for years in my own training, to learn and become an advocate of a totally different approach that makes me much less popular, puts me at odds with most of the people in my field, and reduces my audience. Why would I do that unless I really saw what I claim, both with regards to the splits not working and the LP always working?

Does the totality of my nearly 100 published articles and hundreds of lifting and technique videos suggest I make things up for cheap clicks?

Regardless, if you spend 10-12 hours a day for a year in commercial gyms and just observe what you see, you’ll notice the same thing: the majority of general members and personal training clients doing body part splits who don’t look or perform much differently after a year than they did at the start, and a small % who do. Survivorship bias and the physiological reasoning I’ve laid out in this article explain why.

As I mentioned above, I have yet to meet a strong critic of this approach that advocates for the body part focus paradigm for beginners, who has himself run even a solid 100 people through a novice LP as I’ve described, from Day 1 to completion, much less around 1000, to have the same basis for comparison as I do. Maybe such a person exists, but I haven’t met him yet.

So do your fives, get strong, then after you finish the early intermediate phase, go do whatever style of training you like. You’ll be better off for it.