After my wife started a new workout routine, I resumed lifting weights again in 2025 after an entire decade of not doing so. I was previously just doing linear progression for bench press, squat, deadlift, and sitting overhead press -- do 3-5 sets of each and if I succeeded, add 5 lbs for the next session.
I haven't kept my records from back then, but I want to say my estimated 1RM (rep max) was 225lb for squat, 250 for deadlift, 165lb bench press, and I have no idea what for overhead press. I had followed the program for about a year. But I found it very taxing basically to always be trying to exceed your previous record and I did not enjoy the sessions and did not feel they were worth the time. So, I stopped.
Today, my 1RM (actual, not estimated) is 280lb for the squat, 325lb for the deadlift, 215lb for bench press and 145lb for a seated overhead press. I made it past my goals of reaching the "intermediate" level of strength as listed in Strength Level. I'm no expert, but I wanted to write about what I learned this year that let me progress so much further.
Learning Approach
After trying linear progression and reaching a similar point as I did a decade ago, I decided to go beyond Starting Strength and just read a large variety of material and watched a lot of different YouTube videos. While there are general principals that hold true for nearly everyone, there's also a lot of individual variation, so I found it informative to see what people advocated for and why they thought it worked for them.
Goals
- Do some sort of regular routine because I thought it might help my wife stick with her goals. Most activities are more fun when people you know do them, even if you aren't quite doing them together.
- Chase higher strength numbers.
- Look better for my wife. It's not something she asked for or anything, but I figured it would be appreciated.
Ten years ago, I only had the second goal. But I got to the point where I was thinking--being stronger hasn't actually been more useful. Mark Rippetoe, in Starting Strength, notes that people are happier when they are stronger. But I determined that I was happier not feeling beat up from really tough workouts and was happier spending my time doing something else.
Looking better seemed like a kind of superficial and vain thing back then, but it's been much more motivating to look fit than to be stronger. I still have strength goals and most of my training is structured around increasing the amount I can lift, but I no longer think of it as a useful thing. It rarely comes up in practice. But it's fun to chase a higher number.
Anyway, figuring out your goals is important because it really affects what your training program should look like. While being able to lift more weight and having bigger muscles are clearly correlated with each other, there's some key differences in approach that I'll explain later.
Key concepts: Stimulus, Fatigue, Recovery
Your muscles do not actually get stronger when you are working out. Working out provides the stimulus for your body to get stronger and your body actually gets stronger during recovery.
Recovery is largely rest, lack of stress, and nutrition. For me, I aim for 8 hours of sleep and 1g per lb of body weight of protein a day. I also take 5g of creatine a day, a capsule of fish oil, and half a dose of multi-vitamin. If you don't have your recovery sorted out, some of your exercise is going to waste.
The amount of useful stimulus you can provide is limited by fatigue. There's various types of fatigue.
- Muscle fatigue. You do actually want to achieve this in a session because it turns out that's what is most stimulating, but beyond 5-10 sets to failure or close to it per session for a target muscle you are increasing recovery time without increasing growth. You want your muscle to adapt and recover before you stimulate it again, which ranges between 24-72 hours depending on the muscle.
- Soft tissue fatigue. This is stress to joints and tendons. This usually accumulates more slowly compared to muscle fatigue across the course of multiple sessions during your more high intensity sets, but also recovers more slowly. This is the reason why I periodize my training -- where I ramp up the intensity over the course of 5 weeks and drop back down to something only slightly higher than where I started. Some people prefer to take a deload week instead.
- Systemic fatigue. If you do enough hard exercise, you'll get to the point where anything physical seems daunting, even if it uses different muscles than the ones you worked out with. If you continue working out some fresh muscle group when you've reached your systemic limit, any growth to that muscle group will come at the expense of growth to other stimulated muscle groups.
You'll reach a systemic limit before you reach muscle fatigue for every muscle group, so this means there's some prioritization to be done. I find I usually reach a daily system limit around 6 exercises in a session and that I need to take rest days to manage this
Strength vs Hypertrophy
If you ask for training advice, people will tend to ask if your goals are more about increasing your strength or doing hypertrophy. Strength is measured by the amount that you can lift. Hypertrophy is measured by the size of your muscles, often for looks. But wait, isn't getting your muscles bigger also how you lift more? Why does the difference matter?
If your goal is strength, of course larger muscles will help, but there's a lot of other factors as well. Technique matters a lot and a more efficient movement can let you lift a lot more weight without actually requiring your muscles to exert more force.
How this manifests in your exercise routine is that maximum muscle stimulus is from going to failure or near it. So, for hypertrophy, you are going hard all the time and you don't actually care if what you are doing is efficient for moving a large amount of weight. But for strength, it's beneficial to do some lighter work to practice technique. You just can't practice a movement a lot if you're going at it hard. You want it heavy enough that you can tell if the movement feels easier or not, but not so heavy that you get tired too quickly.
Time and Stimulus to Fatigue Ratio
Time is a pretty major factor in determining what routine will work best for you. If you can only work out twice a week, two to three days apart, it's probably best for you to do full body workouts because you'll probably be recovered by the time of your next workout.
If your sessions are furthermore very short, something like 30 minutes, then you'll also probably need to favor big compound exercises that target many muscle groups at once, just because they're the most time efficient. These exercises tend to have a somewhat worse stimulus to fatigue ratio -- but with a limited amount of time, time is your bottleneck, not fatigue.
If you have a lot of time, you may favor exercises with really good stimulus to fatigue ratio. They will tend to have less raw stimulus per unit of time, but if your bottleneck is fatigue rather than time, that's just how it goes.
Most people can work out more than just twice a week, but can't spend that long each session, so they have to devise a split where some exercises are performed one day and different ones are performed a different day. A good routine takes into consideration your goals, the fatigue factors mentioned above, your personal experience in how quickly you can recover from various exercises, and the trade-off between raw stimulus and fatigue.
Fatigue and Recovery has a lot of individual variation
It seems generally true that bigger muscles take longer to recover after exhausting than smaller ones. But how much time it will take you may not be the same as the average person.
How comfortable a movement feels affects soft tissue fatigue and this will also vary from person to person. Some people find deadlifts beneficial for their backs. For others, it feels terrible. Some people have shoulder pain doing flat bench press, while others do not.
I'd recommend beginners to just try out one of the popular programs to establish a baseline, but at some point after a year or so, it's definitely worth tweaking things to fit your personal needs. Find exercises that are comfortable to you and hit the muscle groups you want to target. Figure out your recovery time -- if you feel sore when you are supposed to work out that muscle again, you either need more recovery or less stimulus. On the other hand, if your muscle has been feeling fresh for days, you should be taking less time or adding more stimulus.
Risk of injury goes up a lot if you work out while fatigued.
How many sets? How many reps per set? How much resting time between sets?
For the lighter technique practice work, I like doing 5x5 with 1 minute rests. It's not too fatiguing, it's heavy enough that you have a sense of what is working better or not, and you get enough total reps in that it's a decent amount of practice.
For most hypertrophy exercises, I do 3 sets and aim for getting to 0 reps in reserve (RIR) by the last set. The number of reps in each set I prefer between 5 and 12. Anything less than 5 and the gap between 0 and 1 RIR is sort of large and anything more than 12 it's hard to accurately estimate your RIR and it's more time consuming. But there are some exercises where I'll do more reps than that just due it being easier to superset (where you do multiple exercises in a row before resting, to save time), or because of some difficulty getting the weight safely into position, or because it's just annoying to add a 5lb increment instead of a 10lb increment with my adjustable dumbbells. I have a rest period of 2 minutes after my first set, and 2.5 minutes after my second. Any less than that, I'll often fail before hitting my last rep, which might actually be fine in terms of growth, but it's mentally taxing.
Consistency is key
Pretty much any routine you can stick to is going to be better than one you have trouble sticking to, so don't be afraid to sacrifice optimal growth for consistency, because it turns out consistency is optimal anyway. If something just isn't fun and you don't have the discipline to do it anyway, do something else.
Case study: breaking down my own routine
Let's see how I've applied some of these principles in practice.
Here's my current routine: I have a weekly rotation that I structure into a 5 week period. Here's what the last week of a period looks like for me:
Tuesday
- 1RM (215lb) bench press, 4x5@60% of 1RM.
- 1RM (280lb) squat, 4x5@60% of 1RM.
- 3 supersets of
- 8 weighted dips @ 0-2 RIR (reps in reserve) (55lb)
- 8-10 bulgarian split squats @ 0-2 RIR (75lb).
- 3 supersets of
- 16 reps of lateral raises @ 0-2 RIR (10lb)
- 12 weighted decline crunch @ 0-2 RIR (45lb)
Wednesday
- 5x5 deadlift@60% of 1RM. (sometimes paused deadlifts)
- 5x8 dumbbell press @ 0-2 RIR (55lb)
- 5x5 seated overhead press@70% of 1RM
- 3 supersets of
- 14 laying dumbbell curl @ 0-2 RIR (25lb)
- 14 dumbbell skull crushers @ 0-2 RIR (25lb)
Thursday
Rest day.
Friday
- 1RM (325lb) deadlift, 4x5@60% of 1RM
- 1RM (145lb) seated overhead press, 4x5@70% of 1RM
- 5x9 incline dumbbell press @ 0-2 RIR (45lb)
- 3 supersets of
- 8 weighted chin ups @ 0-2 RIR (45lb)
- 8 weighted dips @ 0-2 RIR (45lb)
Saturday
- 5x5@60% squat (sometimes pause squats, sometimes pin squats)
- 5x5@60% bench press (sometimes tempo bench)
- 3x9 bulgarian split squat
- 3 supersets of
- 14 laying dumbbell curl @ 0-2 RIR
- 14 dumbbell skull crushers @ 0-2 RIR
Sunday, Monday
Rest days.
What do the previous 4 weeks of the period look like?
The only thing that changes is the top singles of bench, squat, deadlift, and seated overhead press. I start the period at 40lbs less than my 1RM and increase it by 10lb each week. The 1RM generate the most soft tissue and systemic fatigue, so I periodize to deal with that. I also found that I was failing my PR attempts when I was only doing a 4 week period but I have not yet since switching to 5 week periods.
This approach is most heavily influenced by Ben Johnson, whose YouTube channel introduced me to the concepts of a top set backoff, doing lighter skill work, and periodizing as a way to manage soft tissue and systemic fatigue.
Why does my routine look like this?
- The thing I'm happiest about is that this routine is feels both easier and more effective than the linear progression route I was doing before. I was feeling beat up and every session was a challenge with linear progression and hit a plateau, whereas with this approach I only really have one really challenging PR attempt every 5 weeks and I haven't hit a plateau yet.
- Because my bench press numbers a year ago was lagging behind percentile-wise compared to my other lifts, I wanted to prioritize that. So, it's the only lift where it or a direct variation happens every session. There's only one heavy top single and the rest of it is either lighter skill work, or hypertrophy with dumbbells that don't add a lot to soft tissue or systemic fatigue for me.
- Notice that there's a lot of light sets of 5 at 60% of 1RM for the big lifts where I care about the numbers. This is the lighter skill work where you practice getting better at the movement more so than just increasing the size of the muscle.
- When I followed Starting Strength, I used to do squats every session, but it's not a priority for me. Also, my deadlift seemed strangely low compared to my squat, only 20lb higher or so and I have normal length arms. Separating my 1RM for squat and deadlift to different days made a tremendous difference to my deadlift numbers.
- Dips are there as an an assistance exercise for bench press.
- Bulgarian split squats are there as assistance exercise for squats and deadlift.
- Dumbbell presses I find much easier on the shoulders and to recover from than barbell presses, so that's why I go near failure and do hypertrophy work with dumbbells instead of barbells.
- I found I had to increase the weight for seated overhead press from 60% of 1RM to 70% because I didn't really have any direct assistance exercises for that movement and it lead to failures during PR attempts. If you feel fresh for a PR attempt and you fail despite plenty of recovery time, it probably means you need more stimulus.
- Curls, weighted chin ups, skull crushers, lateral raises, and weighted decline crunches are all purely for looks. They all deal with muscles that I felt weren't adequately developing with the strength lifts.
- Put the lifts you care about the numbers for the most first when you are the most fresh. This means PR attempts go first. Assistance and hypertrophy stuff goes last.
- I've changed exercises around and which order I do them based upon experimentation. Which exercises feel better? Seem easier to recover from? Allow you to progress on your lifts? Are time efficient?
Other notes
Equipment
I got a lifting belt, Cobra grips, wrist wraps, and lifting shoes. The belt and grips make a big difference. I'm not as sure about the shoes, but I definitely feel more comfortable with them on. Some people say that a belt or grips means you aren't working out your core or your grip as much, but I say why let those bottleneck your progress if you aren't explicitly trying to improve those? And if you are explicitly trying to improve those, why aren't you picking exercises that target those aspects more directly?
I also got safety straps, which let me do pin squats without clanging noise and also let me set the bar at the exact correct height to load the deadlift.
Technique
I did improve in technique quite a bit. Instead of including specific tips here, I would say that what cues work will vary from person to person and just watch a large variety of content and do some experimentation. Make sure to do some lighter skill practice sets -- heavy enough that you can tell if there's a difference, but light enough that there's plenty of repetition.
Injury prevention
I always warm up starting with just the bar and tend to load up in no more than 50lb increments (except the deadlift, where I jump from just the bar straight to 135lb). I've experimented with faster and found that my lifts got less consistent. I've never injured myself doing a working set, but I have going too fast and sloppy during a warm up. As you get older, the more important this is.
Always lift with good technique. Don't overreach and perform heavy lifts when you are already tired. I'd stick to the less fatiguing and lighter lifts for going to failure, not barbell movements aside from failed 1RM attempts.
At some point, I started getting some degree of shoulder pain from both the barbell bench press and overhead press. It stopped after I started doing shoulder dislocates (which is a terrible name because they don't actually dislocate the shoulders) between each set.
Sometimes I get back tension from squats or deadlifts and I find dead hangs to help, or actually just doing more deadlifts at 60% of 1RM for some reason. I think sometimes discomfort is not due to actual damage, but is a preventative mechanism your body employs and you just have to carefully remind it that some movements are still safe to do.
