I have a question about the how long the NLP lasts. I searched the forums and could not find a clear answer. I will try to frame the question so that it will be generally useful.
My question is: does the novice progression cease to be a productive training strategy after you can no longer add weight work out to work out, regardless of imperfect compliance?
My personal situation might make this clearer. I started out lifting approx. 1.5 years ago. I initially tried to run the SSLP but didn’t gain enough weight, didn’t get enougth sleep (5-6 hrs/night), missed a workout per week, and then injured my back, which put me behind for months. Lately I have been randomly resetting and working back up. At this point I am trying to assess what to do now. Would running the program correctly help me get past the sticking points? Or have I basically exhausted the ‘novice effect’?
I started out at a bodyweight of 160 lb and am now 185, if that is helpful.
It looks like you’re asking if it is a good idea to run SSLP with a consistent 3x/wk exposure to see if it works for you. That seems reasonable to me.
That said, when you’ve been consistently doing the program and it’s no longer working then I think you should find a better program unless their are other variables you can manipulate (but hadn’t previously).
Thanks for your reply. I guess I was asking because I was reading on this forum and read something that seemed to indicate that once you completely stalled on the novice progression you should switch programming- resetting and eating more would not be a productive strategy. I was wondering to what extent this is true for someone whose compliance with the SSLP was incomplete in training and recovery.
I have made gains- but as an adult male going from 70 lb to 140 lb on my squat is not where I wanted to be at the end of the program.
This led me down an interesting train of thought. Let’s say your lifestyle dictates that 6 hours of sleep is all you’re ever going to be able to get on average in the long term, but you can manipulate your situation such that you can average 8 hours for a short time, let’s say one month for the sake of the hypothetical. Afterward your sleep schedule returns to normal levels, or perhaps even a little bit less as you make up for the extra time you spent in bed over that month.
Obviously this would be a good strategy to peak for a competition, but are there any other circumstances where this month of improved sleep would be worthwhile to pursue? Could you make extra progress during this time that could be built upon long term? Or would you eventually return to the same level as if you’d maintained your 6 hour sleep schedule the entire time? Worse yet, would you possibly have to do a small reset as your body re-adjusts to the reduced recovery?
Essentially, is manipulating lifestyle factors beyond parameters you can sustain in the long term just another form of peaking? Or can it be used from time to time to increase long term progress?
Depends what you mean about “incomplete compliance.” The SSLP isn’t magic and other programs will allow steady increases in weight on the bar as well, but depending on your specific issue it might not be the best choice or, alternatively, it might be the best choice.
I think that given the multiple variables that go into performance, it would be hard to say what would happen in the short and long term across all training populations.
My take is that you might get an acute performance improvement and the effects of said improvement may be long lasting and you could theoretically manipulate training to reflect greater training resources for that period of time.
Yeah, what I meant by incomplete compliance was missing workouts and eating approx 100 g protein/ day instead of the 200 g I probably should have been eating.
I think I’ll just run an LP one more time and try to correct these things. Based on my previous experience I wouldn’t expect it to last more than a few weeks anyway.