Hi guys, I recently got back to training after a few years layoff. Anyway I’m currently doing Starting Strength and linear progression is going well. I’ll do 1 or two back off periods like the practical programming book says. I was just wondering what do you recommend when linear progression come to an end?
Thanks for you help.
Braggadocio,
Thanks for the post and welcome back to the gym. I think that if you’re enjoying the Novice Linear Progression (NLP), you could keep doing that until you’re unable to make progress at the intended rate, e.g. session to session. After that, I would not recommend resetting and continuing the program, as it is unlikely to generate a significant amount of new adaptations for the time investment. I also think the program has a number of compromises that are unacceptable for long-term training. I’m not concerned with the specialization (in exercises, rep ranges, etc), the lack of autoregulation (since performance varies day to day), lack of conditioning, and so on for a few months…but I wouldn’t choose to keep running that program any longer than it’s main use case, which is way to get people into the gym and using a barbell.
After NLP, you’ll need to determine what your goals our and pick a training setup that’s reflective. We generated a quiz to help you pick one of our templates based on your experience and goals:
Alternatively, you could run our free Bridge program to help you suss out your next move: