Linear progression and instant gratification

One of the things I like best about linear progression strength training is the instant gratification. It's exciting! Every workout you get to do better than your last workout... Instant progress! (not to mention getting strong is great. Strong people are more useful in general and harder to kill)

For those of you who don't know what I'm talking about I will give you the run down. Linear progression means you are a beginner or novice trainee. This has nothing to do with your experience, but has everything to do with your level of adaptation. If you can adapt workout to workout you are a novice. The best training program for a novice who can adapt that quickly is a linear progression.

Here is a basic program taken from Coach Rip;'s "Starting Strength". 2 workouts, A and B. You perform 3 a week on Mon, Wed, Fri. So week 1 is ABA, week 2 is BAB, etc... Workout A is Squat, Press, Power Clean. B is Squat, Bench Press and Deadlift. Work sets are 3 sets of 5, except deadlift which is 1 set of 5, and power cleans are 5 sets of 3.

Every workout session you add weight to the bar from last time. To find your starting weight, on your first workout you do sets of 5, gradually increasing weight until the bar slows down a bit, finish your 3 sets of 5 there and that's it. Next workout add 5lbs to that weight for your work sets. (work sets as described above do not include warmup sets).

That's where the "linear" comes in. If you make a graph of your progress, it will be a steady slope up. So every workout you beat your last effort. Every workout you see progress. It's exciting! And we have a few people now who meet on Mondays and Wednesdays to work on this.