With the deluge of information out there I can’t imagine how difficult it is for a young lifter or someone new to training to decide which strength program to pick. It seems like everyone has a new program to sell, even those who are not remotely qualified. Then there’s the bashing of programming that seems to be in vogue these days confusing issues even further. Rarely a week goes by without someone taking a shot at Louie Simmons and West Side training. So now people have to wonder if conjugate training even works. Don’t worry, it does and so do many other programs.

I was lucky when I started training a million years ago because there were a very limited number of programs to choose from. Even more importantly, there was no internet causing paralysis through analysis. You just lifted weights.

My first exposure to actual programming happened when I was playing high school football. The coach implemented Bigger, Faster, Stronger. I know it is hard to believe, but that was a very novel thing for a high school to do back then. High schools did not have strength and conditioning coaches. Hell, I had never even heard of a strength and conditioning coach when I was a kid. Now kids think they themselves are strength and conditioning coaches. Anyway, the base of the program was squatting, deadlifting, and benching. So I learned the value of those exercises very early. That’s when I also learned the value of hard work.

Go figure, many decades later every quality strength training program is still based on those movements. In other words, not much has changed. People love to juggle numbers and percentages and pretend they invented something new. You can also talk about assistance until you are blue in the face. Breaking news, there’s no perfect exercise that will make your squat, bench, and deadlift go up.

As a powerlifter, I have used linear progression, metal militia (bench program), conjugate, block periodization, and now 5/3/1. I have also hit elite top ten lifts with each of them. So is it the program that got me there, or was it how I worked the program?

Too often people hop programs looking for the newest best thing. Then there are those who just think their “Gainz” are not coming fast enough. Some people have even told me they have training attention deficit disorder and just need to change things up. The art of grind is getting forgotten in this day and age of instant gratification.

A bunch of years ago I had a 585 lb raw bench. I desperately wanted to hit 600. I toiled through my conjugate training for three years to hit that elusive big six. How many of you would stick with a program that only yielded five lbs a year? Listen, somewhere along the line you hit the top of your strength curve and improvements move incrementally. I think a lot of people would have given up. Those who didn’t give up would have most likely changed their program. You know what I call those little five pound a year increases? The best f’ng 15 lbs I ever pushed in my life.

The journey of strength is a marathon. Embrace the grind and just stick to a good program. What do I mean when I say a good program? Any program with a little bit of science behind it is a good one. There are plenty of them. If enough other people are making progress with it, you should too. Here is something important to remember, you are not smarter than the person who developed it. Don’t change it, but that’s a different rant for a different time.

I will leave you all with this. I have had the good fortune of training, competing, and just hanging out with some of the strongest lifters on the planet. Do you know the one characteristic they all share regarding programming? They work their programming really friggin’ hard. We don’t talk about some magic rep and set scheme or that perfect assistance exercise. We talk about what we ripped off our bodies trying to get where we are. So sorry to break it to you all, there is no best program out there. It is hard work that will get you were you want to be.