Hey everyone. I recently started the SSLP a while back in July after having surgery. I have made progress and continue to make progress like I have never made before. I trusted the process and have been thinking about the next step. I had heard of BBM and a lot of the stuff that has helped me in the SSLP has been articles by Jordan like the “eat like a beast” article. I have been slowly trying to make my way through the SS book but i’m looking for some advice on the upper body lifts. I find I have made progress but some things have stalled or have always been a weak point. At this time i have yet to add in power cleans or pull ups or anything besides the basics. On day A I squat, press, Deadlift. Day B is squat bench deadlift. I notice my press has always been low and Im not sure what I can do about it. My bench is going up but its slow. I seem to hit a number than have to deload and work my way back up to add 5lbs and than after 3 attempts I deload and start again. Is there a way to fix this stuff?
I’m sure more experienced fellow board members and/or staff will provide better info but I wanted to chip in as well. You didn’t give any stats on yourself… age, height, weight, current lifts…? What kind of surgery did you have? You might want to listen to Jordan and Austins podcast (I’ll try to find which one it was) and decide that you do not have to do the power clean as it might not be necessary.
From what I’ve learned, when the stalls occur you should go through this simple checklist: 1. Are you resting enough between the sets? IF your lifts have gotten to medium heavy or heavy, then you need to rest 3, 4, 5 maybe even more minutes, to allow the fatigue to dissipate, to allow the lactate (?) to dissipate within the muscles and to get psyched up to doing the next set;
2. Are you eating properly for the increased training stress that you are now accumulating?
3. Are you sleeping and resting well? If all of those are fine and in check, I have learned that only then is it time to mess with your programming as you really might have moved into the advanced novice or even intermediate stage. With myself - these were the culprits.
No those 3 questions are Rip’s bandaids for deceiving people in his sales pitch about the expected average results of his program. If you’re not responding give the press plug in that @t_anteiras posted a shot. When that stops working swap to intermediate programming. Going through endless deloads, resting for 10 minutes between sets, and eating yourself fat are definitely not strategies that we would recommend to extend your LP by an extra fahve or two. It’s simply not worth the tradeoff. People respond differently to the LP. If you finish lower than you want to it’s totally ok. There is nothing wrong with you. Where you end is simply where you end. You’ve been doing it for 3-4 months already, you’re right at the point that most people hit a wall.
Yes.
Start The Bridge, or any other program that best aligns with your training goals.
Not worth the aggravation of prolonging a cookie cutter program that was never intended to be a long term proposition in the first place.
For stats I’m 33, 184 lbs 5’10”. I started at 180lbs. My squat started at 105lbs and is now at 190lbs, Press started at 70lbs and is 80lbs and I’ve reset once or twice. Deadlift started at 115 and today hit 220, bench started at 105 and today is 145. I had an aneurysm in my artery in my right wrist. I’ve listened to the podcast where Jordan and Austin speak about programming the upper body with more volume than the lower body due to stalling. I’ve always felt if I could do more reps it would give me more muscle building /strength than just doing the 3 sets of 5 but I also know if you don’t follow the program then results change or whatever. I have assessed the 3 areas rip discusses but I don’t see that as the issue. I work a job with weird hours and I won’t ever get a full 8 hours of sleep but I can get decent sleep and hit the gym and crush it.
With RPE as you will find in The Bridge, and the rest of BBM programming, a lack of sleep, or weird hours are auto-regulated in the training programs. I.e. you adjust the weights used that specific training day based on your performance as measured by RPE. I would suggest you move on to The Bridge and take it from there. Let the Rip questions lay where they lay.
I have been training for roughly 2 years and always brushed off starting strength but after the surgery I wanted to get back into the gym and get back to lifting and raise my numbers so I started doing the program but the response from the community was rough. I have made gains and enjoyed the program and I think I will try to continue it with some modifications I have seen recommended here. I’m reading the bridge now and is part of why I moved over here and away from the ss crew. It seems here most people back what they find with experience and science.
…what? Er, no. Resting, eating, and sleeping adequately are indeed three important things to ensure a novice is doing properly. Novices, by definition, often don’t know these things.
Just because you like BBM and thy ended their biz relationship with SS doesn’t mean you have to wage a holy war on their behalf.
Are they important? Yes. But Rip goes to the extreme on all the above. Nobody should be resting 10 minutes between sets and gaining 3-4lb per week in order to add 5lb to the bar… moreover, if someone is unable to continue to progress beyond his anecdotal average, his recommendation that people go on testosterone replacement therapy is both ridiculous and extremely harmful. A novice should be resting 3-4 minutes between sets, eating to gain, maintain, or even lose weight depending on what their waist measurement / body composition is and what their unique goals are. Of course everyone should sleep as much as their schedule and body will allow, I of course agree on that part. But I wholeheartedly stand by my claim that Rip’s extreme recommendations are a bandaid to cover up the exaggerated, deceptive, and false claims in his sales pitch, and that the only reason he has to tell people to go to those extremes is because his program and it’s load management are not as good as he claims it is. And that’s not picking sides in a war, that’s simply stating the truth.
I think there is something more going on here.
What you are saying, and the way you are presenting this “argument” is rational, and it is totallyfine. BUT. In a world which makes stupid people famous, ridiculous contraptions are being sold over internet in millions, new inefficient workouts poppin’ round every corner because everyone nowdays wants to be a fitness guru and make lotsa money and the regular folk want a solution and want it now - there really WAS a need for a charismatic, sometimes even dogmatic persona, which Ripp embodies.
He is really a great speaker and, at least in the beginning(s), he promoted a good thing - no bullshit, barbell training for strength. Getting stronger and healthier. Sometimes it really is needed to go a bit overboard, like GOMAD protocol 
, to prove a point. An example - when I was in high school, I thought “I really eat a lot”. Pizza slice for breakfast, grandma-lunch at home and (maybe) some light dinner. About 1500 kcal a day and movin around all day long. Needless to say - I was skinny as a bone and not progressing.
Had I had a coach like Ripp, showing me pretty explicitely what “eating a lot” mean’t I would today probably pull 500 and squat 405. AND be healthier along the way.
There is a need for dogma sometimes, but the trick is recognising when it went overboard.
I’m definitely not going to say that there was no good that came from the SS movement. That would be silly. I mean, it helped get me in to training for strength after-all. Before that I pretty much trained for endurance exclusively for all of my 20’s. So yes, I agree that Rip and SS did a lot of good for the fitness community as a whole, especially in the time period they came out in when T-Nation was considered the most reliable source for training info (this is laughable now, but sadly true). SS was a fresh old-school perspective that promised to actually use logic, reason, and research to help people get actual results. It was accessible to the average person in a way that westside (the most popular strength training style at the time) was not. It got rid of all the gimmicks and tag lines that had become the staple of bodybuilding magazines and websites everywhere. It was a breath of fresh air, and helped to usher in the modern renaissance of barbell training and raw powerlifting. It’s too bad that he failed to continue down that path. The SS community could have stayed on the cutting edge of strength training if their leader wasn’t too stubborn to change his mind in the face of new emerging research and evidence (or at least too worried about the financial hit that he would take if the community bought into opposing views, personally I think the root of the problem is that Rip the businessman gets in the way of Rip the coach).