Starting Strength

Is this a fit?

Starting Strength is Mark Rippetoe’s program for people starting barbell training or returning to a structured novice program. Three days a week, three or four lifts a session, and the same instruction every time: add weight. It works because a new lifter recovers from a session in two days and can lift more at the next one, and it keeps working for as long as that stays true. Rippetoe: “every time you train – every single workout until this is no longer possible – you go up in weight on every exercise.”

The program

Train three days a week on non-consecutive days: Monday, Wednesday, Friday, or any pattern with a day off between sessions. Two workouts alternate, so one week is A-B-A and the next is B-A-B. Every session is the whole body. “3×5” is three sets of five at one weight, after warm-ups.

Phase 1, usually one to three weeks

The two days are the same except that the press and the bench alternate: press Monday, bench Wednesday, press Friday, then bench, press, bench the next week. The deadlift is one work set. “ONE. Really.”

Phase 2, several weeks to several months

You move here when, in the official page’s words, “Your deadlift is now heavy enough that doing it 3 days per week is difficult to recover from.” The power clean takes the deadlift’s place on Day B. Rippetoe wants the clean, not a row: “Rows are not a substitute, and power cleans are not hard to learn.”

Phase 3

Deadlifts and cleans now alternate on Day A; chin-ups take Day B. Once you can do 3 sets of 10 chin-ups at bodyweight, every other chin-up day becomes 3×5 weighted. This is also where the presses usually need 2.5 lb jumps, and where the “advanced novice” squats heavy on Monday and Friday with a lighter Wednesday, about 80% of Monday’s weight for the same 3×5.

Rippetoe’s own article lays the program out with cleans and chin-ups from day one (A: squat, press, deadlift, chins; B: squat, bench, power clean). The phased version above is what startingstrength.com publishes now; the two agree on everything else.

The first day

There is no test and no percentage. Rippetoe: “start with an empty bar doing sets of 5, and go up in small jumps. When you reach a weight that feels heavy, but not so heavy that your form has changed, stay there and do two more sets. The next workout, go up to a weight that is a little heavier than your previous work sets.” If you cannot press the 45 lb bar for five, use a lighter bar.

How much to add

The official page’s numbers for healthy men between 18 and about 35:

Women and lifters over 35 or 40 take smaller jumps from the start: “perhaps a single 10 lb jump in the squat, two or three 10 lb jumps in the deadlift, and immediate 5 lb jumps in the other exercises,” then 2.5 lb or smaller sooner. “There is no single prescription for everyone.”

In kilograms the official page gives no numbers; the nearest plates are 5, 2.5 and 1.25 kg, and a pair of 0.5 kg plates for the press before long. The plate calculator tells you what to load.

By the end of Phase 1 the official page expects the 18 to 35 male lifter to be up 40 to 50 lb on the squat, 50 to 70 on the deadlift, and 15 to 20 on each press.

Worked example

A first day worked up to squat 95, press 65, deadlift 135 lb. Two 10 lb squat jumps then 5s; two 15 lb deadlift jumps, two 10s, then 5s; the presses 5 lb every time.

Three weeks: squat up 50, deadlift up 70, press up 20 and bench up 15. Pulling 205 for five three times a week is where this lifter moves to Phase 2: week four is squat 150, bench 115 and a first power-clean session, then squat 155, press 90, deadlift 210.

The same shape in kilograms with the smaller jumps: squat from 35 with one 5 kg jump then 2.5 kg, deadlift from 50 with two 5 kg jumps then 2.5 kg, press from the 20 kg bar at 2.5 kg and then 1.25 kg. After nine sessions that lifter squats 57.5, deadlifts 75, presses 27.5 and benches 37.5.

When you miss a rep

A miss is information, not a verdict. Starting Strength’s own coaching material answers it in a fixed order. First the three questions: are you eating enough, are you sleeping enough, is your form what it was. Scott Acosta’s rule for his lifters: “Do not make a program change before answering the questions. If you identify and make appropriate changes and still miss reps, move to the next phase.” The next phase is the thing that keeps the bar moving: smaller jumps, the light squat day, cleans and chin-ups in place of a third heavy pull. The press is the exception; most press misses are technique, so fix the elbows and the bar path before anything else.

Many lifters online use a flat rule of dropping 10% and working back up. It is not on the official page or in the articles this guide is built from, so it is not in the rules here. When the last phase runs out, Acosta recommends a reset to an earlier phase rather than a jump to an intermediate template: “there is still a lot of progress to be made by doing a simple reset.”

Eating

Rippetoe is blunt about it. “Most people who do this program wrong don’t eat and sleep enough.” His gallon of milk a day is his prescription for “severely underweight young men,” and he says himself that “Not every trainee needs to drink a gallon of milk a day.” The numbers behind eating for strength, with their sources, are on the eating for lifting page.

Mistakes

• Starting where you think you should be, not where the bar tells you. The first-day rule exists so that the first weeks are easy. Those easy weeks are the fastest progress you will ever make. Rippetoe: “It’s far better to make slow, steady increases in all your lifts for months than it is to make fast, unsustainable increases for weeks.”
• Three sets of deadlifts. One heavy set. The squat volume is already there.
• Changing the program before answering the three questions. Most stalls are food and sleep.
• Rowing instead of cleaning because the clean is unfamiliar. Learn it with the bar in Phase 2 while the weight is light.
• Adding exercises. Rippetoe’s article: “do only the basic exercises for the first few months.” Curls, if you must, “today, heavy, for 3 sets of 10,” and he would rather you waited.
• Staying a novice past the end. When the phases are done and resets stop adding up, the official page’s own next step is intermediate programming. The intermediate programming page explains what changes.

Why 3×5 and not 5×5

Karl Schudt’s answer on the Starting Strength site is the program’s whole philosophy in one line: “Strive to be strategically lazy, to do the minimum amount of work that will achieve your goals.” Three sets of five is enough stress to force an adaptation in a new lifter and little enough to recover from in 48 hours. The weight on the bar is the variable, not the number of sets. Where this sits in the bigger picture is on the linear progression page.