The SRA Cycle, Main Lifts, and Gains, Part 1: Why We Wait to Add Accessory Lifts to Your Program
Hypertrophy Bros HATE Him!
Background
“When should I add accessories to my program?” is one of the most common questions I get asked and see out there in the wild. Usually it’s asked by people who have completed a linear progression and are trying to wade through the murk of post-novice programming. But often people who have never even done an LP, or don’t even do the main lifts at all, don’t ask but instead very confidently inform me that I’m wrong for not programming accessory lifts for beginners under normal circumstances.
While the answer to the question of when to add accessories is ultimately individualized, a good guiding principle is to add them only when you can no longer make consistently predictable progress on your main lifts, measured by PRs in the 1-5 rep range, on a timeline of every ~2 weeks or less. At the very least, however, wait until you’ve completed a full, properly run linear progression that you take to its conclusion. But my view is that waiting a little longer, until your main lifts and a few select supplementary lifts + chins and rows, can no longer by themselves drive PRs on the main lifts every ~2 weeks or less. For most people this will be an LP (~3-6 months), followed by ~4-9 months of early intermediate style training, wherein regularly scheduled PRs are programmed and achieved every 1-2 weeks.
This approach seems to really rustle the jimmies of some people, especially in the hypertrophy-bro twitterverse, who often don’t like the main lifts at all, and even when they do, insist they should be done alongside accessory work right away, typically on training splits with each day designated for specific body parts or areas.
So in this article I will try to explain the thought process for why I disagree with this. Before I do so, I should add the background that I used to train and coach that way myself in my early years as a lifter and coach, so while I think I know where they’re coming from, I don’t think most of these people have taken even a few people through a full novice linear progression from Day 1 to finish, much less a thousand, so I’m not sure if they know where I’m coming from.
Physiological Reasoning
The basic reason why I advise to wait til this later point before adding accessories is that for practical purposes, if you can add more weight to your squat, bench, deadlift, and press; recover; and then do it again over and over again on a short timeline - nothing will be more stimulative than that. Nothing will make more of a rapid change in your physiological capacity and the physical structure that results from that physiological capacity change, than rapidly adding more weight to the main movements.
This is provided that you perform them with technique designed to 1) train the most overall muscle mass, 2) using the most weight, 3) over the longest effective range of motion (not always the same as the longest possible range of motion).
So in this regard all “squats” are not created equal: a just below parallel low bar squat with a moderate stance and toes and knees out, is better than a narrow stance ass to grass front squat for this purpose, because it trains more muscle mass using heavier weight - we don’t care, yet, about “focusing on the quads.”
A bench press with a moderate grip width and a small arch is better than a maximum width grip, high arch “powerlifting” bench, because it trains a lot more muscle mass over a much longer effective ROM, even if you use a little less weight. We don’t care, yet, about your powerlifting total in the SPF.
Adding Accessories: When and Why
Once you can no longer reliably and predictably make PRs about every 2 weeks or less, then using different exercises and different rep ranges outside of 1-5 becomes more useful.
At a physiological systems level, what’s happening is that the stress → recovery → adaptation (SRA) process is no longer “time-able” in the same way it used to be. It’s still happening of course, but the dividing lines between stress, recovery, and adaptation are no longer clearly visible. Stress and fatigue run concurrent with recovery and adaptation to some extent, and while you can sometimes time it with reasonably good reliability, like when peaking for a meet, you can’t do so with almost perfect predictability throughout the training year on any given day or week, as you once could.
Instead of one workout or one week’s workouts being the stimulus that - after a short recovery period - predictably leads to a new PR, the process is now murkier. You have better days and worse days. Days when you seem to struggle on your last warmup set, and other days when your planned work set flies up. You have to accumulate a bunch of work, a bunch of training stress driven by longer strings of workouts, to elicit the adaptations needed for your next PR. And while you’re accumulating this work, you also have the fatigue engendered by this work in greater or lesser degrees, pretty much all the time. So the SRA cycle process is now more amorphous than the predictable, rapid progress of the LP or early intermediate training.
If you can add weight to your squat once every two weeks, just by squatting, no accessory movement you can do will be better than doing that. Done correctly, using the criteria outlined above, the squat works all the muscles associated with extending the knees and hips. Even though various other supplemental and accessory movements can target some of those muscles more specifically, adding 200 lbs to your full ROM squat in your first year of training will do more for your leg and hip musculature than any specific targeting that you might do with isolation work, in the absence of the adding 200 lbs to your squat. The stimulus of the weight itself, the systemic nature of the movement and the heavy weight and rapid additions in weight you can accumulate, make up for any lack of specific quad targeting at this stage. So accumulating these 5 lb increases as rapidly as you can is the main goal.
Why Not Both?
A logical question, and a common critique from some of our hypertrophy oriented friends who do respect the main lifts but still disagree with this approach: Why not do both? Why wait to get the best of both worlds, the targeting and the general, when you can get it now?
Let’s think about this a little bit, using the SRA cycle as our baseline principle. You provide a stress to your body in excess of what it’s currently adapted to. You recover from that stress. The next workout 2-3 days later, by doing a little more than you did last time, you both display the new adaptation and create the stress for the next adaptation. You do this using the technique criteria outlined earlier, so all body parts, all muscles involved in the movement are forced to work in their anatomically and biomechanically determined proportions for correct execution of the overall movement. You can’t do a low bar, just-below-parallel squat with a moderate stance and toes and knees out without working all of your knee and hip extensors, as well as your low back muscles, regardless of what you feel or connect to during the movement.
So all of these bodyparts and areas will get this good stress applied to them during your workout, squatting 5 lbs more than you did a few days earlier. You take 2-3 days to recover. Then you do the same thing again with 5 more lbs. What HAS to happen when you do this? The same muscles and areas and body parts HAD to do more work, had to have more stress applied, which elicits another round of the Stress → Recovery → Adaptation cycle.
Another 2-3 days later, you do it again, both demonstrating that the prior adaptation occurred, as well as creating the stimulus that will cause the next round of adaptations to occur, provided that you recover properly with adequate nutrition and sleep.
This is the process that’s happening in this early stage of your training journey. A bit simplified, but at a systems-level, this is what’s happening. As you advance a bit, this process occurs on a timeline of about a week instead of 2-3 times per week, and then later it takes about two weeks.
I used the squat as an example, but the same applies to the other basic barbell lifts: You can’t do a press correctly without the same thing happening with your entire deltoid complex, your triceps, even your traps if you shrug up at the top like you should. And the same with bench press and the pecs, shoulders, and triceps. The same with deadlift and the quads, hamstrings, your entire back, your traps, even your pecs and arms to some extent. Add in chin-ups and maybe some rows, and you’ve literally covered the entire body in this manner.
No, you won’t target your upper chest as much as you might doing an incline cable fly, just like you won’t target your vastus medialis as much as you can on the leg extension; but that doesn’t matter because just adding 100 lbs to your bench in the first year will still do more to grow your chest as a whole than those flyes will, at this point.
PR Frequency Over Your Training Career
My experience over the last 15 years of thinking about training this way, is that once you’re outside of reliably producing PRs every 2 weeks or so, certainly outside of a month - most people no longer hit PRs on a regular, repeating, reliable schedule. PRs will still come on a more frequent basis for a lifter 18 months in than they will for advanced lifters with 10 years under their belt, but it’s not just like clockwork anymore wherein you move from a reliable PR every 2 weeks to a reliable PR every 2 months on the dot. Instead, your PRs not only become further apart on average, but also less predictable in terms of if you’ll make them or not, if they’ll be there on the day you want them to be there. And sometimes they’re there on days you don’t expect!
You can usually still produce them fairly reliably for a meet if you have a good training cycle and peak well, but even that’s not 100% guaranteed, and is usually done a few times a year at most. But when it comes to your regular, day to day, grind of training - you will still hit PRs, but your ability to reliably produce them on a regular repeating schedule, where you almost always make them and only rarely miss, is significantly reduced after you finish the PR-every 2-weeks phase of your training.
And that’s exactly when I say is a good time for most people to start adding accessories. Just a little at first, but to start.
Adding Accessories Too Early
What would happen to this process if you listened to the hypertrophy bros and added them right away? Well, after the first few weeks of a linear progression type of training, you’re walking a narrow tightrope between stimulus and fatigue. You’re trying to add 10-15 lbs a week to your squat, 5-10 to your deadlift, and 2.5-5 lbs to your bench and press, EVERY SINGLE WEEK.
Adding 3x12 leg extensions to your workout might not seem like much, but it can generate enough fatigue to prevent you from hitting that new 5 lb jump in the squat 2 days later, without being nearly as stimulative at this stage. Whereas when you’re working on a long timeline, when you’re accumulating training stress and adaptations over many workouts and weeks, then using accessory movements for all their various benefits of targeting certain areas or muscle groups, bringing up lagging points, etc - becomes useful.
These movements can add to the stress in a unique or novel way, target specific areas or different ROMs than the main lifts can. They are indeed useful, but they’re side dishes. Think of it this way. Take the same guy, with exactly average genetics for training, never lifted before in his life. One guy does a linear progression with bench and press, no accessories. Starts with a 65x5 press and 105x5 bench. Ends 4 mos later with 125x5 and 185x5 respectively. Very average, nothing special about this LP, we see it every day - but the musculature gained across the entire upper body will be clearly visible and apparent with clothes on. He won’t need to take his shirt off and flex, it will just show on him because he’s added a bunch of meat.
Then take the same guy and imagine you didn’t do that. Instead you did 3x10-12 lateral raises and cable flyes. Could he add 60 and 80 lbs to those lifts, respectively? How easy are they to progressively overload in a systemic manner? Do they have the same tissue building potential in a novice as adding 60 lbs to his press and 80 to his bench, in 4 months? Of course not. This guy, with the same genetics and diet and sleep etc, will not look nearly as different, will not have changed his body nearly as much, as the guy who added 60 and 80 lbs to his structural lifts.
The point of this thought experiment is not to say the accessories are useless and that main lifts are forever and always so superior to accessories, that you never even should do them. Rather, it’s to consider the context in which accessories are used.
Who can more easily progressively overload flyes for sets of 10-15 reps - the guy who max benches 120 lbs (105x5), or the guy who benches 215 (185x5)? Take that same guy who ended his LP at 215 and have him add weight to his bench on a weekly and then bi-weekly basis for another 6-9 months or so, which can usually be done pretty reliably - and with some re-sets and light weeks, say he now benches 215 or 220 for 5 reps, around 250x1, which is a pretty normal result for such a person. How well can he now progressively overload the flyes compared to when he could only bench 120? The difference is massive. One barely moves the needle, the other can do real, productive accessory work.
So if adding the flyes in right away causes enough fatigue to prevent these rapid increases on the bench, which it does, without being stimulative enough - at this stage of his strength level and training - to create similarly productive levels of adaptation, then adding them in early doesn’t give you the best of both worlds. It merely retards your level of bench development, the thing which will ultimately get you faster to where the flyes are useful in the first place.
Adding Accessories at the Right Time
But once you’re accumulating adaptations over longer period of time, once you can no longer reliably add weight to the main lifts on a rapid basis, then not only have you built a base solid enough to get more out of the accessories in terms of stimulus, but you also now have some clay to mold, some tissue to carve. So the targeted nature of a lateral raise or an incline cable flye, a knee extension or a sissy squat - can all become useful additions to the stress, in the Stress → Recovery → Adaptation cycle model of a well designed program appropriate for your goals and training advancement.
Instead of getting in the way of your next weight increase on the bench which you could otherwise do in a week, accessories NOW help accumulate good stress, fill in the corners on spots that bench hits only peripherally, in a way that can help you hit that new PR in a couple months, or just look more like the way you want to look.
Overcoming the Main Objection
The primary argument against what I’ve written here is usually 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 for this article didn’t do a novice linear progression to begin their training careers, and they ended up jacked AF.
Once again a logical question, but one to which I fortunately have an answer. And that, Dear Reader, will be what Part 2 of this article covers, later this week.
Evaluating Your Training Advancement
When evaluating whether you’re still in this category of making PRs every 2 weeks, you need to use some wisdom. For example, allowing for a reset or low stress week here and there. So if you can make a PR every other week for 6 weeks, then you need to take a light week, then do a ramp-up week from the light week - but after that, you can do another round of making a PR every other week for 6 weeks - yes, you’re still making regular predictable PRs and just continue what you’re doing.
The ultimate determination is more one of wisdom than a hard line in the sand. Hopefully using the explanations in this article, along with your training experience, you’ll better be able to make this determination successfully.
What does a schedule look like for someone hitting PRs every two weeks? There really aren't any examples of biweekly progression in the grey book. Goes straight from weekly (with TM, four-day splits, HLM, etc) to monthly (rep cycling and the advanced section).