Beginners and progress

Mark Rippetoe had an article up on T-Nation this week. If you're read his books or prior articles, you probably know everything that is in there already. But there is a short pair of take-away points in this one gem of a paragraph:

"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; do the math and you'll see the point. There will be plenty of time later for more exercises and more elaborate programming, but as long as simple works, complex is neither necessary nor desirable."

Point one: Slow, steady for a long period beats as fast as you can for a short period.

Point two: Keep it as simple as it can be to get you the results you are after. Complicate things only when the simple approach doesn't work.

Those two points apply to any trainee at any stage - use the minimum complexity needed to make progress and "settle" for slow and steady long-term progress over seeing how fast you can stall out. That works for training and diet alike.

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