Beginner Training Programs

This is an article for beginners and novices in accordance with our mission to take people from a beginning level of fitness knowledge all the way through to a comprehensive higher understanding.

This article, in particular, is going to talk extensively about novice templated programs and their applicability as well as introducing intermediate templates that may be adopted once the novice phase has finished.

We will also introduce some concepts that you can use if you do not have access to weights.

As we noted in Skill Guidelines for Building Strong, Useful, Adaptable Athletes, there are 10 components of fitness that are relevant in all kinds of sports, combat, and physical activities.

Of the 10 attributes – cardiovascular/respiratory endurance, stamina, strength, flexibility, speed, power, coordination, agility, balance, accuracy – the one attribute that correlates the best to every athletic endeavor is strength. Thus, for the novice athlete or layperson looking to improve in their athletic or sports abilities this is the place to start.

For those looking to gain muscle, lose fat or just overall improve body composition we still recommend the same protocol. This is because Focused linear progression strength work is one of the best ways to gain muscle mass and encourage the body to lose fat. Coupled with a proper diet even physique minded people will see significant improvement with novice programs.

The main program we recommend is Starting Strength. We strongly suggest you purchase this book because it goes into much detail about proper technique – 50+ pages for the squat alone – which is critical for both athletic and physique success. This is because upping the intensity of exercise through programmed increases in weight is critical for stimulating neurological and muscular adaptations for strength and mass gain, and stimulating the hormonal release needed for reduction in body fat.

Mark Rippetoe, the author, on “the novice effect” which is an essay on why you should do Starting Strength for strength and mass gain.

If purchasing the book is not an option because of monetary problems ask for it as a gift for your birthday or the winter holidays.

The work around solution is the on-line writeup which is available here. Specific programs are located here.

What we have is a program of only 5 different exercises – the squat, deadlift, power clean, bench press, and press. This is important because

• these compounds all use large amounts of musculature which give the most “bang for buck” by eliminating excessive exercises,
• by focusing specifically on few compound exercises allows our bodies learn the movements easier when there are less motor patterns to distinguish,
• and they teach proper biomechanics that have a high translation to athletics and real world tasks.

The workouts are every other day (3x a week) and the weight is increased in each workout.

Beginners have poorer recovery than conditioned athletes which is why the recovery days are needed. However, they adapt very quickly to exercise such that they can add weight quickly and safely given proper technique is emphasized. This allows for very fast progression without the potential for giving a newer lifter overuse injuries or a program that is too slow for their needs.

Basically, it is effective because it employs the KISS principle – keep it simple, stupid. All good templates do this.

There are some alternative programs out there for novices.

The only other one I would recommend currently is the StrongLifts 5×5 program.

Other programs such as Westside for Skinny Bastards and Hypertrophy Specific Training (HST) may be effective. However, I do not personally recommend them for the fact that progress will not likely be as quick as Starting Strength or StrongLifts.

If you would like to know about other programs that you can try this is a compilation of links devoted to that.

This is problematic. I would strongly suggest purchasing a gym membership.

Bodyweight exercises can be used effectively to gain strength at least comparably in the upper body. However, without weights the lower body will suffer significantly because the muscles of locomotion are large that there is no way to decrease leverage enough to sufficiently overload them to produce adaptations like barbells do.

The key to improving strength with bodyweight exercises is progressive overload. This means decreasing the leverage angles for the exercises in question, or making them harder by making them unilateral (one arm) instead bilateral (two arms). Gymnastics provides a plethora of exercises focused on bodyweight progression for strength training. It is not necessarily nor is it optimal to increase the repetitions past 15-20 repetitions because they will not contribute significantly to strength.

Coach Sommer’s article on the planche and front lever discusses the aspects of how to specifically use bodyweight training for strength more in depth.

We will discuss this more thoroughly in later articles.

If you are beyond the beginner phase you should have at least researched the ability to attain approximately level 2 abilities in the weight training category in the skill standards.

This is about a 1.5-2x bodyweight deadlift and squat (with deadlift being a bit higher), a power clean and bench press between about 1.2-1.5x bodyweight, and a press of approximately .75x bodyweight.

From here we approach training variably depending on what your specific goals are since we have built a strong athletic base from which you can begin training seriously. We will talk about this more in the revamped “How to construct your own workout routine” which is next in the series.

For those interested in continuing to strength and mass gain or have goals aimed at lifting heavy, there are many intermediate templates that may suit your goals.

For those interested in learning more about programming for themselves, we recommend you purchase Practical Programming as it will teach you the basic concepts of how to put together effective routines.

We also have more resources in the recommended materials section that may be of interest.