Reader,

Stringing together week after week, month after month, year after year of consistent, effective, well executed training is where the magic happens. You do that long enough and you wake up one day annd weights that used to staple you to the floor are now just warm ups. You've mutated.

I want to walk through what that actually looks like for a real client, because the timeline matters here.

A guy in his 50s trained with me about 10 months on NLP and into intermediate programming, progressing as he should whole way through this process. He had tried the NLP on his own, but wanted to get it right this time. His lifts rocketed up during the initial 10 month stretch, then progress slowed and he started feeling beat up, which is exactly what you'd expect a year into a lifter's development.

We transitioned into to a more gradual approach, with the goal of steady forward progress instead of forcing weight on the bar each week.

Since we transitioned him to that type of programming, he's gone on to tie together five straight seven week cycles, hitting new PRs on at least some lifts every single cycle. That's 35 straight weeks of training without missing, on top of everything he built in year one, and he's added somewhere around 15 to 25 pounds on all his lifts during that stretch alone. No bodyweight gain, just solid training stacked on solid training. He feels fresh, isn't beat up, hasn't been injured, and staying consistent is easier because of it.

Now, from a pure numbers standpoint, this isn't some crazy progress that you see with guys hitting a 500 deadlift in two months, which looks a lot more impressive on paper.

But for a dedicated recreational lifter ~2 years into training, this is exceptional. And it's exceptional specifically because most people don't have the patience to execute even this long. They get a few slow cycles, or stall on the novice program, decide the program isn't working, and go chase the next shiny thing instead of trusting the process that's actually built for where they are.

The guys who stick with the boring version of this, cycle after cycle, are the ones who end up somewhere completely different a year or two later while everyone else keeps "starting back up" again
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If you're a few years into training and progress has slowed to the point where you're not sure the program you're running is actually built for where you're at anymore, that's exactly what coaching fixes. I'll look at what's actually going wrong, whether that's programming, recovery, or breakdowns in your form and execution, and build a plan around where you really are. Then I adjust it in real time based on how you're recovering and progressing, keeping you moving forward without blowing yourself up.

Talk with you soon,
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Sam Krapf, SSC
Ground Zero Strength

Build Your Base™️