Anadromous Edition – Starting Strength Weekly Report November 18, 2024

Fivex3 member, Manny Rechthand, competed in the USAPL Virginia State Championship as a Masters IVB (75-79) in the 67.5kg weight class. He made two American records in the Squat and Deadlift, finishing with a 113 kg squat, 57.5 bench and 170 kg deadlift. [photo courtesy of Fivex3 Training]

Addi squats 122.5 lb for triples on Monday afternoon at Testify Strength & Conditioning in Omaha, NE while being spotted by her grandpa, Rich, on her left, and her “shoe-twin,” Diana, on her right. Addi will endeavor to utterly annihilate both of her spotters at this year’s Testify Barbell Blizzard event on December 14 since all three of these people are competing on different 4-person teams. “Merry Christmas, ya filthy animal!” [photo courtesy of Phil Meggers]

Sister Act: Former strongwoman competitor April Fraleigh got back under the bar at Starting Strength Atlanta, then invited her sister Molly to become her training partner there. [photo courtesy of Adam Martin]

Sister Act 2: Molly Sugarman reaches the one-plate milestone on her deadlift at Starting Strength Atlanta, inspired by her training partner and sister, April. [photo courtesy of Adam Martin]

Meet Report

Lifters competed in the squat, press, and deadlift at the 2024 WFAC Strengthlifting Fall Classic this past Saturday in Wichita Falls, TX.

[photos courtesy of stef bradford]

Matt Nieveen

Male, 33, 5’6.25”, 188

Deadlift 430 x 5

Squat 395 x 5

Bench 265 x 5

Press 165 x 5

In the last month my deadlift came to a screeching halt. I worked up to 430 x 5, then when I put on 435 I could barely do 1.

I have to train at 5 am. I backed up to 405, ran it up to 430 and on that day I had to train in the afternoon therefore I was able to properly fuel a few hours before training and 430 x 5 flew off the floor. A week later (in the morning) could barely move 435. Before I went to bed I ate some oats to try to be as un-fasted as possible. I always eat a banana immediately after wake up and put 2 tbsp of sugar in my pre workout.

Program is currently as follows-

Monday

Bench or Press 5 x 5

Bench or press 3 x 8

LTE 3 x 12

Tuesday

Deadlift 1 set 5 reps

Squat 5 x 5

Chins 3 set x up to 15

Thursday

Bench or press running it out

Bench or press 3-5 rm

Weighted dips 3 sets x 5 reps

LTE 3 x 12

Friday

Squat running it out (have been able to stick with 1 set of 5 so far)

Clean 5 sets x 3 reps

Chins 3 sets x up to 15

Everything but my deadlift is progressing like it should. My current solution is figure out a way to train later in the day on Tuesdays so I can get properly fueled. Looking for other suggestions

Jason Donaldson

Your bodyweight is low – are you working on moving that up? Adding some daily protein and calories might be the one change you need. I can think of ideas for programming, but I’d recommend trying that first and see what happens.

Matt Nieveen

I could try harder to gain weight.

Mark Rippetoe

Why haven’t you?

Matt Nieveen

Any answer I have is an excuse. I’ll gain weight.

Steven Kalin

I think you just redeemed yourself.

Devyn Stewart

I’m of the understanding that the traditional bodybuilding model of nutrition goes a little bit like this:

Calculate your TDEE. Add/subtract calories if you want to gain/lose weight. Once you reach your goal, add back in/take back out calories to reach your TDEE, which may be slightly higher or lower depending on your new calculated TDEE given your new body weight.

This has not bee my experience at all, though my experience is limited. The way I have experienced it happening is that my body will adapt to a given amount of calories and then stay at the body weight it adapted to. For example, if my TDEE as their calculators put it is 3500, if I get 4000 calories, I will not gain a pound a week for many weeks in a row. I might gain 3 pounds the first week, 2 the second, and then stop entirely. And then if I were to cut down to 2000 calories, I would not lose 4 pounds week for many weeks. I would lose 6 pounds the first week, maybe 4th the second and third and then stop. I guess I’ve experienced calories kind of as a state function rather than a path function. That is to say that if I eat 5100 calories, my body will gain up to 235 whether I slowly add the calories to 5100 or simply start eating that much immediately, the resulting weight will be the same. Has this been your experience as well? Is the traditional viewpoint wrong, and what makes it wrong? Thanks for your input.

Robert Santana

It has been my experience that the TDEE calculators are not always accurate and do not account for individual variability. It has also been my experience that clients tend to report what they eat on one day or “the weekdays” and neglect to mention that they were not consuming the same amount of food on “the weekends.” It is rarely the case that an uncoached person eats XXX number of calories for 7 consecutive days per week. The traditional viewpoint is that these calculators are an estimate and not meant to be taken as gospel. It will work for most for establishing nutrient needs but changes will need to be tailored as time goes on, training advances, and other factors influence metabolic rate.

Devyn Stewart

I see. Has it been your experience that, once you have an established daily maintenance calories, the traditional idea of 500 calories per day resulting in 1 pound per week has worked in practice? You see, it hasn’t normally worked that way for me, so I was wondering if that idea is something that exists mostly in textbooks and that experts use different heuristics to determine an appropriate deficit and its adjustments along a weight loss period.

Robert Santana

No most certainly not. The “3500-calories-equals-1-lb-of-fat” rule is the result of a misinterpretation of research conducted in the early 20th century. I covered this at my presentation at the 2017 SSCA. In short, the biochemical studies of the early 1900s looked at the fat content of adipose tissue biopsies, bombed it, and reported a mean caloric content of ~3000 calories. In the 1930s Strang and colleagues conducted metabolic chamber studies where pre-measured food was provided, participants resided in a metabolic chamber, and using gas exchange they determined how many calories they had to overfeed to induce 1 lb of weight gain and how many calories they had to restrict to induce 1 lb of weight loss. The mean restriction was ~3700 calories per week. So we had ~3000 from the biochemical studies, ~3700 from the metabolic ward studies; 3500 sounded like a pretty good number to use as a “rule of thumb.” However, the range of values in the metabolic chamber studies was as low as 1400 and as high as 6900 meaning that some individuals only needed to restrict 200 calories per day to induce 1 lb of weight loss and others needed to restrict nearly 1000 calories per day to achieve the same result. The conclusion: Lots of biological variability here. The only way to determine an appropriate deficit is to subtract calories until you lose weight and keep records of it. Then see if it holds true in subsequent cuts.