The 3 Phases of Training - A Bird's-eye View

When you start out on your journey of strength, you are in what we call the novice phase. Simply put, this means you make progress on a workout-by-workout basis, and for convenience, let’s call this daily progress. The novice phase is the most fun because it represents the fastest strength improvement you will ever experience - you get to add weight to the bar every time you enter the weight room, which means you are setting PRs every single day.

After a few months, your progress starts to slow due to the law of diminishing returns. In other words, the stronger you get, the more work you have to put in to get even stronger, and thus it takes longer to make progress. You are still adding weight to the bar, but you’re now adding 5 lbs to your squat every Monday (i.e., every week) instead of every single workout. You’ve moved from daily progress to weekly progress, and we refer to this phase as the intermediate phase.

As you continue to train, progress continues and you keep getting stronger, but - no surprise here - the rate of improvement slows even more. Now, you are able to make progress on a monthly basis instead of on a weekly basis, and we now refer to this phase as the advanced phase.

It is worth noting that your lifts will rarely progress through these states at the same rate. For example, your pressing and bench pressing may be in the intermediate phase while your squat is still in the novice phase. This is normal and not a cause for concern.

To sum up, novice = daily progress, intermediate = weekly progress, and advanced = monthly progress. In reality, of course, things are not quite so clearly delineated (after all, what about someone who sets PRs every other week?); nonetheless, the concepts of novice, intermediate, and advanced still provide an extremely useful framework for thinking about your training, your progress, and your programming.

Next up - training is a highway.