Hi all. I was wondering if any of you have tried Bill Starr’s heavy/light/med. approach where you train M-W-F, squatting at every session, and how did it work. I really like the looks of the program (no-frills basic heavy compound movements), and being the masochist I am, I love to squat (real squats too, not what you see in most gyms) but am concerned that 3x/week may be overtraining even though there is a light day and not too many work sets on each day. Thanks for any input.
This like any other program has it positives and its negitives. It will work for only a month or so. If you say " hey if I put on 30lbs on my sqaut in the first four weeks then the next four I will put on 30 more." You will lose what you just had gained. If you take it light on the rest of your lifts and only do the program for 4 weeks then it will not be over training.
I tried it but quickly abandoned it. The light day was just a waste of time. Its just psychologically too hard to lift “light.” So light day starts becoming a medium day. Which throws the program off. So I dropped the light day and adjusted the medium day a little. I squatted heavy on the medium day, because I recover quickly from squats, and I substituted inclines for flat bench (allowing me to go “heavy” while using a much lighter weight than benching). And, presto, my program is no longer the Bill Starr program. But, through trial and error, i found a program that worked for me that put 15lbs on in 4 months. So it may be a good place to start, but you’ll probably end up adjusting it to fit your own needs.
Thanks for the input. I too recover quickly from squats. I take a lot of antioxidants and supps. I would just assume deadlift on the “light day,” as this is what I did with a similar program which was a modified 5*5 (2 warm-ups, 3 work sets w. the same weight). On a related note, anyone have good experience with Dinosaur Training? I have a Dinosaur arm workout that was in one of the mags a while back that I was thinking about trying.
I used the system when I was younger (around 17) and had tremendous strength gains. To get the most out of the program you must follow it just as instructed.