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I've been doing Starting Strength for a month now and am still progressing fine. However, I'd have time to lift every weekday, and really want to. Is there a similar, well-tested program that I could switch to? I suppose trying to make my own would just end in disaster. |
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Rest is as important to your progress as the exercising itself (if not more). If you added in any extra workouts you'll just compromise your progress. This is even emphasized by Rippetoe in the book. |
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It doesn't matter how much time you can invest, there's simply no point to it. Your body grows muscles while you're resting, as long as there's a sufficient impulse. Maintaining that impulse does not require a lot of time. The reason many strength programs are not 5-day programs is not because most people don't have enough time, but because it can actually be more effective to train less. And I do not mean more effective per time investment (that would be more efficient), but more effective overall. When you train what you do is you strain your muscles to the extent that your body needs to repair them (just like a small wound). This repair process overcompensates so that your muscles are larger and stronger than before. The repair process is what grows your muscles, and it takes several days. Now of course you don't have to wait for the repair to finish completely (otherwise you couldn't train more than once a week or so), but you need to wait long enough to make sure that muscle growth is maximized. If you continue to damage your muscles too early during the repair, you risk losing strength instead of gaining it, and your risk of injury increases. |
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(Your question is very similar to this one, and the answers are the same.) Wanting to work out more frequently is not a very good reason to modify the program. If you've been doing Starting Strength for a month, you're just about to really get started with the hard part. Keep at it. Investing more time in working out will take time away from the real thing giving you progress: rest. You don't get strong by working out, you get strong by recovering after working out. At the moment, a month into the program, I bet you're feeling underworked. That will change drastically if you follow the program and keep adding weight to the bar every workout. That's when you'll understand why it has three weekly workouts and not five. |
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If you're a novice, I recommend my other answer, to wit: keep doing orthodox Starting Strength. But there is an alternative. Normally used only in Olympic lifting programs (snatch and clean & jerk), Bulgarian programming is designed for working out every day, usually multiple times a day. They work only with very heavy weights and use very few exercises. It requires a lot of dedication and I don't think it's normally recommended for novices. |
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