Who wants to be a novice? Well, you do. At any given time, most of the guys training in gyms around the country are novices.

And by most, I mean the vast, overwhelming majority, like 95%. This means you, probably. But it's not necessarily bad news, not at all. It's true because most people who join a gym quit within a month. You know the type. You see them every time you train, cluttering up the area in front of the dumbbell rack

in most commercial gyms, wandering aimlessly, playing with the weights, watching everybody else

train, wishing that getting big and strong were easy. Most of the ones that don't quit

are guys who haven't been training very long

and fully intend to keep at it, but who haven't yet settled into a program that works like

they envision a program working, producing rapid gains in size and strength. This may be you, but you might quit too if you get tired of seeing no results.

Since most guys in the gym are not big and strong, most are therefore novices.

Now it's not bad to be a novice, I wish like hell I were a novice again,

knowing what I know now. Your novice months, done correctly, will show you the fastest gains

in size and strength you'll ever make in the weight room, quite literally faster than advanced guys using steroids.

But done the way most people do it, your first weeks in the gym,

will merely lead you to join the ranks of the guys who quit, out of frustration and boredom.

First, let's state the universal truth of training as applied to the weight room.

You do not get big and strong by lifting weights. You get big and strong by recovering from lifting weights.

Everything else is derived from this simple restatement of the principle of stress recovery

adaptation. Do not forget it. A novice lifter is a trainee who is so unadapted to the stress of lifting

weights that he can make progress as rapidly as he can stress himself

and get recovered, a process that actually takes no more than 48 to 72 hours for a novice.

When an 18-year-old kid starts training without a background in exercise, anything harder than what he's doing now

acts as a stimulus for adaptation. Riding a bicycle will make his bench go up. As he accumulates

adaptation, moving from completely untrained, to several months into a correctly designed program to several years

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