Still Alive & Progressing Into the Intermediate Stage
Hey everyone, I’m still here and alive. I have been training non-stop and enjoying every minute of it. I have now progressed into the Intermediate stage of strength training, as Rippetoe’s Starting Strength routine was no longer effective (I have been following it for over a year and a half mind you). The gains I have achieved with the beginner program were phenomenal, and I have been grateful for finding about the routine at the right time. I have been reading Practical Programming for Strength Training for a while now and it’s great stuff. I am learning way too much to list about it in this small post, so I encourage everyone to grab a copy and check it out for themselves instead of waiting for me to spill the beans. 🙂 I recently found out that Mark Rippetoe released another book back in November, titled Strong Enough? Thoughts from Thirty Years of Barbell Training. I will be ordering it very soon alongside my fractional plates for micro-loading.
For those who are curious, I am following Bill Starr’s 5×5 program, featured on Madcow’s site.
August 15th, 2009 at 8:12 pm
Watsup. Glad to hear your training is going well. Just wanted to say that I enjoyed reading and learning from your blog posts. It’s nice to hear about another’s experiences with similar training goals.
I actually purchased Starting Strength and Practical Programming a few months back, started Novice training around late-June 2009 I believe. I’m still obviously in the Novice phase, it’s getting to be almost two months. I’m hoping that I still have plenty of ‘easy’ novice gains left, even though I’ve switched to 2.5 lb increments on squat, press, and bench. My deadlift is lagging behind my squat b/c I only do it once per week and had no deadlifting exp before this program.
Perhaps you could explain to me why you chose Bill Starr’s 5×5 program for your intermediate routine? I haven’t studied the Intermediate programming section of PracticalProgramming in detail, so I would be interested to hear why this routine works better for you.
Goodluck with all your training and life goals!
August 15th, 2009 at 8:29 pm
Hi, thanks for the comment!
I chose the 5×5 routine because of numerous suggestions from online forums. After trying it out for a couple months, I significantly improved my lifts.
Mind you, I replaced the barbell rows with power cleans, mostly because I don’t enjoy doing them as much. I’ve also noticed it kills my back (I’m pretty sure I’m doing them right too). Lastly, Mark Rippetoe himself dislikes barbell rows, so it was no brainer to switch it to the basic cleans.