Hi BBM
I was wandering If an athlete is pass the novice progression and can not put weight on the bar every day/week how does he/she know that the program works?
The obvious answer is to finish the program and see the result but isn’t that a waste of time ?
Progress is measured the exact same way, e.g. improvements in strength, muscle size, conditioning, etc. over a series of weeks, but the time course for that to happen is different. I would argue that the novice progression doesn’t really last that long or work as advertised either, e.g. you’re not actually getting 5lbs stronger 3x/wk. That’s for another discussion though.
As far as when to start tweaking things based on stagnation, I’d give it 4-6 weeks and see how it goes. This assumes that everything else is more or less in-check, e.g. nutrition, sleep, stress, motivation, etc.