Without a doubt, one of the best programs for first-time gym-goers: Bill Starr’s 5×5 for Beginners. A program that first of all makes you stronger, but certainly also bigger. Except for beginners, it is also suitable for someone coming back from an injury or as a change from a bodybuilding program.
Bill Starr’s 5×5 for Beginners is a full body routine, meaning you train your whole body three times a week. Because of the high training frequency, this is the best way for beginners to get stronger and bigger quickly.
The most effective and efficient way to train your whole body is with compound exercises, which involve multiple joints and thus multiple muscle groups. Examples of compound exercises include the squat and deadlift, which target all the muscles in your waist and lower body: your abs, lower back, glutes, quadriceps, hamstrings…
Can you imagine how many different isolation exercises you would have to do to replace these two exercises? And even then you would not achieve the same effect, because the benefit of training several muscle groups at the same time extends much further than just saving time. By training your muscles together, you also learn them to work together.
A full body workout like Bill Starr’s 5×5 for Beginners therefore provides you with a complete and functional training in minimal time. But enough about this. The program:
So you train your whole body three times a week, on non-consecutive days. For example on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. You then have the weekend off. If that suits you better, you can of course also train on other days.
The squat and bench press, as the number one exercise for your lower body and upper body respectively, are the fixed elements of every workout and you switch from workout to workout between the deadlift, pull-ups, and barbell rows.
As you can see, we have called Monday a heavy day, Wednesday a light day and Friday a medium day. That heavy, light and medium refers to the weights you will be working with that day.
On Monday you work for all three exercises in five sets to a weight with which you can do five repetitions with some effort. We say “with some effort” and not “maximum” on purpose, because you have to approach this program conservatively to get maximum benefit from it. This will be roughly equivalent to 85% of the weight that you can’t do more than one rep with.
For the Monday squat, this could look like:
Set 1: 5 x 60 kg
Set 2: 5 x 70 kg
Set 3: 5 x 80 kg
Set 4: 5 x 90 kg
Set 5: 5 x 100 kg
You approach the bench press and deadlift in the same way.
On Wednesday, the light day, do five sets for the squat and bench press with 60% of the weight of your heaviest set on Monday. So for the squat that is 60% of 100 kg, or five sets with 60 kg. You approach your bench press in the same way.
The pullups, the ‘new’ exercise, are approached the same as the deadlift on Monday, so work up to a heavy final set in five sets. Mind you, pullups are an exercise with your body weight, so we are talking about weighted pullups here. Can you barely do five pullups? Then stick to five sets of pullups with your body weight. Each next set will be heavier than the previous one because of the pre-fatigue.
Friday, the medium day, is very similar to the light day, except that you now use 80% of the weight of your heaviest set on Monday (80 kg in the case of your squat) for the squat and bench press. The barbell rows are approached in the same way as the deadlift on Monday and pullups on Wednesday.
As you’ve no doubt noticed by now, the heavy, light, and medium applies to the squat and bench press. The third, variable exercise is always heavy.
What about progress now? Well, very simple. You add about 2.5 to 5 kg to each exercise every week. Simple, right? So on Monday in week two you work towards a top set of five reps with 102.5 kg or 105 kg on the squat. If you start conservatively, you can easily continue to add weight to your exercises weekly for two or three months.
If you can’t add weight to any of the exercises for a few weeks in a row after several months, it’s time to stop the program. You can then progress for quite some time afterwards with Bill Starr’s 5×5 for Intermediate Lifters. Or maybe you want to take a program for a while that focuses more on hypertrophy (muscle growth) than on strength. Whatever the case, Bill Starr’s 5×5 for Beginners will get you off to the best possible start in the gym.
Finally, a critical remark: the program lacks a horizontal pressure movement. Something Mark Rippetoe, a student of Bill Starr, had also noticed. In his own Starting Strength and Wichita Falls Novice Program he overcomes this problem by replacing one bench press with the overhead press.