Three Pillars of Lifter Development

First Principles: Absolute or Approximate

Arguing about lifting online can be a gigantic waste of time, but that certainly doesn’t stop me from doing it. I sometimes try to parse the underlying assumptions of my interlocutors instead of just their surface disagreements, to glean some insight into the broader ideas and trends of the field, even when (as is usually the case), they haven’t thought about and can’t even identify those underlying assumptions themselves.

For the most part Starting Strength and SS-adjacent coaches like myself, try to make our first principles and underlying assumptions clear, and most of what we say follows from those principles, rather than either just copying what worked for some genetic outliers on enough steroids to kill a rhinoceros, or insisting that a few studies with half a dozen crucial uncontrolled variables, performed on a sample size of 17 college aged men for 12 weeks, constitutes such strong evidence that everything else should be discounted out of hand.

One of the ways in which I’ve changed over the years, is that I see these principles mostly as first approximations, rather than absolutes. Some of the basic physics and anatomy is just true in the plainest sense, but a lot of the best analysis to date is more correct than any other analysis, without being a Law Of The Universe to be extrapolated from to the ultimate logical endpoint, which must be accepted regardless of how well or poorly such an extrapolation matches what I see in the real world.

For example, my two articles about the Four Criteria, which you can read here and here, were about this topic and trying to grapple with applying this adjacent but slightly different viewpoint in the real world of training. So for example, while I see using movements that train the most muscle mass, over the longest effective ROM, in a way that allows us to use the most weight - to be a highly effective organizing principle in how to manage training and prioritize which lifts to do, and what technique to do them with, I don’t see it as an absolute law of the universe that can never be violated.

It’s apparent to me, for example, from just observing the real world around me that if you want to maximally develop the hamstrings muscle group, you will eventually need to do things other than just low bar squat and deadlift, even though those other things don’t meet the four criteria. But it is also apparent to me through vast experience that if a rank novice can add 100 to 200 pounds each in the squat and deadlift in his first 4 to 6 months of training, and doing other exercises for the hamstrings will get in the way of that by adding fatigue that disrupts the stress -> recovery -> adaptation cycle that a rank novice can uniquely take advantage of, then he shouldn’t do those other exercises until after adding 100 to 200 pounds each to the squat and deadlift in 4-6 months. Or whatever the number ends up being for any particular person, as it will vary by genetics and such.

These principles seem to me something like the four rules of gun safety.

Everyone who ever took a beginner firearms class had to memorize and repeat these rules back. Everyone who ever took a more advanced class learned about dry firing practice at home, which always violates one, and often more than one of these rules.

You have to teach them to beginners as if they’re absolute, and beginners need to follow them as such. But they are not really absolute truths in the real world, they are the best, closest thing we can come up with, but they are really first approximations, for which there can be exceptions. But you’ll only learn enough to know and have experience to understand the exceptions if you treat them as absolute when you’re first starting out.

The most obvious analog to the hamstring example above is dry firing practice at home, which is almost universally recommended. This violates the rule of treating every gun as if it’s loaded, and depending on your living situation, it also might be impossible to know what’s behind your target. Dry firing is not for beginners, but once you have enough experience and knowledge, you are capable of understanding narrow contexts within which ‘rules’ can be broken to benefit.

Specifics Follow from General Principles

With that introduction now behind us, the insistence of our cadre of coaches on doing things A Certain Way makes more sense. Even if, like me, you view these principles as first approximations rather than as absolute laws of the universe to make logical extrapolations from to the utmost nth degree that must be followed no matter what, they still should be taught to beginners as if they are absolute. Because without the experience and knowledge gained by following them, you won’t later have the understanding to know when, contextually, the first approximation doesn’t apply.

So all that said, here are three big pillars that form the foundation of why I do things the way I do, why I advocate so strongly for doing a linear progression with the basic barbell lifts no matter what the future goals of the lifter are, and why starting out with unnecessary specificity and complexity is counterproductive.

Pillars: Good for architecture, good for training

Pillar 1

A Novice lifter is a trainee who is so unadapted to the stress of lifting weights that he can make progress as rapidly as he can stress himself and get recovered (sometimes referred to as the Stress → Recovery → Adaptation cycle), a process that generally takes no more than 48-72 hours.

An Intermediate lifter is a trainee who goes through this process on a longer, but still mostly predictable and 'timeable' basis of every 1-2 weeks, or every month at most.

An Advanced lifter is a trainee who goes through this process on a timeline of a month or longer, and for whom it's harder to perfectly predict or time exactly when it will occur.

Pillar 2

Simple before complex, general before specific, basic before individualized.

As defined above, Novice lifters progress best on simple, general, and basic training because they are unadapted to training: thus, their needs are inherently simple, general, and basic.

Complexity, specificity, and individualized aspects of training only begin to be relevant at the Intermediate level, and only slightly so until later in the Intermediate stage and into Advanced.

This is the same way we develop other traits and skills, from language to basketball to piano playing. We don’t take the practice routine of the best concert pianist in the world and give it to our 8 year old on his first lesson. We don’t take Steph Curry’s 35- foot shot pre-game warmup and give it to 8th graders who don’t yet know how to do a proper layup. We don’t teach Milton’s Paradise Lost to middle schoolers who can’t diagram a sentence.

For some reason when it comes to training, people don’t want this to be the case. Everyone wants to copy CBum’s program without either the genetics, supplements, or 10-15 years of training background that got him to where that program worked so well for him. That’s now how development works in any other area, and it’s not how development works in lifting.

Simple, general, and basic before complex, specific, and individualized.

Pillar 3

During the simple, general, and basic phase: The exercises we program, and the specific technique we use for those exercises, are most effective when they train the most overall muscle mass, over the longest effective ROM, with the most weight.

Thus: Low bar squat > front squat > leg press.

Bench press > dumbbell bench press > chest press machine.

Deadlift > RDL > hamstring curl.

As discussed above with how the rules are more first approximations than absolute laws of the universe - this becomes less absolutely important as a lifter advances into intermediate and advanced levels and his needs become more specific, individual, and complex, but is still a good general guideline for exercise selection of main lifts.

In other words, we can generalize that for the Novice, low bar squat is better than leg press. And in fact, since adding leg presses can interfere with the Novice’s ability to add 5 lbs to his low bar squat for sets of 5 reps, two to three times every week, the Novice should not even leg press at all (unless he is a remedial student who can't even squat his own bodyweight yet).

But we can't say the same about an advanced lifter, who needs a bunch of complex, specific, and individualized work to accumulate the overall stress needed to spur further adaptation, and for whom adding some leg press might be just the ticket to balance stress and recovery.