Did my miss my only chance at being a novice?

Hello, doctors.

I am 24, male, 180 cm, currently at a bodyweight of 70 Kg.

I have been interested in gaining size and strength for about two years now, but if we consider the first period — when I was jumping around in the gym and doing silly s**t — we could say that I have been training for the last year or so.

Even when I started to train somewhat properly, though, unfortunately my first contact with resistance and barbell training was not through starting strength, but through another program that made my progress stall quickly (after reading Starting Strength, I understood all the mistakes I may have done then, like resting too little between sets, doing too many sets, poor technique, etc.).

To make things even worse, I am cursed with a very fast metabolism: at my heaviest I was 77 Kg and I had to eat 4000 kcal/day just to maintain my weight, and I could not — for the life of me — eat more than that. I threw up twice in a month and was very prone to getting stomach sickness. I was also suffering from a horrible eczema. Eczema is still pretty mysterious in its origin, aside from a genetic component, but I strongly suspect that it was somehow connected to the stress of eating so goddamn much all the time.

So — after months of 0 progress both in strength performance and weight gain — I said “screw it” and went on a 3 months cut. While this move may be very controversial at a light bodyweight like mine, this was what I would call the only real success in my lifting “career”: I lost 7 Kg without losing any strength, and — according to the us navy body fat calculator (http://fitness.bizcalcs.com/Calculator.asp?Calc=Body-Fat-Navy) — pretty much without losing any muscle, too. My eczema, by the way, is gone. By the end of the cut, I was eating in a much more sustainable way (2000-2300 kcal/day).

So I now am at 70 Kg, 63 Kg being lean mass and 7 Kg being fat (approximately 10% bf).

The problem is that I am pretty weak… here are my last working sets (3 sets, 5 reps… 1 set for the deadlift): Deadlift-100 Kg, Squat-90 Kg, Bench-64 Kg, Press-45 Kg.

So my situation is this: although I am weak, I fear that I am now an intermediate lifter, considering all the time that I gave my body to get used to resistance training. I don’t seem to be able to recover and adapt in 48 hours.

I don’t know what I should do: should I try to reset the weights and give another go at a starting strength linear progression, while trying to gain as much body weight as possible?

Or should I go on an intermediate program like The Bridge?

Don’t overthink this. If you can use a reasonable work weight and make progress within 48 hours, you’re a novice. If not, you don’t need to beat yourself up about it. Just move on to an intermediate program.

Train consistently for the next 10 years and you’ll look back on this and realize it’s not as big of a deal as you think.

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I will, thanks :slight_smile: