Intermediate programs, part two: RISE vs. Stronger by the Day vs. Momentum by Sohee
ASK A SWOLE WOMAN
This is the paid Sunday Ask A Swole Woman edition ofShe’s a Beast, a newsletter about being strong mentally/emotionally/physically.
The Question
Hi Casey! I love lifting, I like cardio (running, cycling, hiking), but I’ve never liked to do them together (HIIT/CrossFit for example). A few months ago I hit a bench press PR, felt amazing, and then (perhaps obviously) realized that after a certain point, lifting heavier weight doesn’t help me in my daily life — I have three kids age seven and under, and while sometimes I’m just picking one up and putting them down again, usually there’s an element of walking, running, jumping, throwing, etc while carrying them or their bikes/scooters/backpacks/accoutrements, and I’d love to keep up with them on the monkey bars!
I’m happy with the amount I lift for the big lifts, but instead of just continuing to go up in weight with low reps, I’m thinking of transitioning to a … “functional fitness” plan? I love the strength I’ve gained from lifting but I feel that I need some cardio element to make my strength more useful in my daily life - basically take the 5x5 or 3x8 plans I know and love and … reduce the rest time, more supersets, I don’t know!
There’s lots of weird advice I can find through a Google search. Is this even “real lifting” or does it go into Kayla Itsines territory? Do you have recommendations for a good plan? Help! Thank you so as always! - Megan
The Answer
A lot of intermediate programming out there does tend to be heavily or entirely focused on strength progress. That is, unless it’s a bodybuilding program, in which case it’s probably very time- and rep-intensive. So I’m going to take this opportunity to look closely at three popular intermediate-oriented subscription lifting programs, all of which might suit your purposes: RISE by Jason and Lauren Pak; Stronger by the Day by Megsquats/Strong Strong Friends; and Momentum by Sohee Carpenter. They are all hybrid programs that are not explicitly focused on either strength or aesthetics, but they will help you continue to work on lifting form, develop new skills, and get stronger.
But the short answer is: Yes, it is completely still “real lifting,” even if you are not pushing numbers! One of the nice things about all of these programs is that they will go a ways toward opening up your vision of what is possible once you’ve laid your strength base foundation.
First off: What is “intermediate”?
A great question. As with a lot of lifting things, there are not hard and fast rules. It also depends a lot on what your goals are, both in terms of achievement as well as what “havin’ a good time in the gym” means to you.
Beginner strength programs mostly operate on “linear progression,” adding a little weight to your lifts every session (in LIFTOFF, we call this “weights go up”). This is because, as a newb, you can build strength fast with relatively little time and effort investment, while you are also building your skills for form, failure, etc.
Intermediate programs almost always:
- require more time in the gym
- are more complex and diversified from the core compound movements of squat/bench/deadlift/row/overhead press
- measure progression across a training week, and more commonly across a training month
Someone who is not “ready” for an intermediate program could get frustrated by not only having to spend more time in the gym, but also having to learn more and different movements when they already don’t feel like they have the main ones down, all for a much more nebulous progress trajectory. If you can’t do a decent hip hinge, your time would be much better spent learning to do that properly first, before mixing in a ton of hip-hinge-based accessories as an intermediate program will do (single-leg deadlifts, RDLs, good mornings, etc. etc.).
Maybe none of those are you! Maybe you are dying to spend more time in the gym, try lots of different things, don’t feel very validated by the steady upward numbers of linear progression. I think that having a solid foundation in the compound movements is important, because both good strength and form in those will allow you to get the most out of the effort you put into all your future workouts, have the most carryover to your real life, have the most bang for your buck effort-wise. But! I’m not your mother, and you can spend your one precious life however you want.
If you are looking for numbers to go by, strength standards charts are of some help here. A decent rule of thumb I use is, you are “intermediate” if you can bench about 0.5x your body weight (or lean body mass, if you have more than ~30% body fat), squat 1x your body weight, and deadlift 1.5x body weight. Some people could do this in three months; for most people it would take six months to a year of steady training, maybe more.
But again: Don’t keep dragging through your beginner program for three years because only your deadlift is just shy of 1.5x, or whatever. These are rules of thumb. Likewise, I don’t think it’s the best idea to take up an intermediate program when you can only deadlift 20 pounds.
Related question: What is a “novice”? Someone whose form is good but strength is underdeveloped, or vice versa; probably someone who’s done six good months of training, but not more than that. Not a newb, not yet an intermediate. If you haven’t hit “novice” numbers yet, you can almost certainly get more out of your beginner linear program, young padawan. Dang it, I almost got the whole way through this section without saying “young padawan.”
Before we dive in here, I’ll note that there are a bounty of free intermediate programs online that I already documented here. You don’t have to pay for programming to make progress, by any stretch. But doing most of these programs involves quite a bit of tinkering and doing your own research, which is not everyone’s cup of tea.
Casey Johnston
Okay, onto the programs. I’m going to evaluate them as programs for intermediate lifters, but also give my personal take as a lifelong and shiftless intermediate with, now, almost a decade (!) of lifting under my belt.
Nice things about all of these programs
I love and respect all of these trainers. I’ve followed all of them for years at this point (particularly Meg and Sohee). I consider myself a decent judge of online character, and I feel all three of these folks have a good, balanced attitude toward fitness and health; their hearts are in the right place; and it’s easy to tell their top priority is helping people to get stronger, never to guilt or to motivate by making clients feel inferior. They are upbeat and positive while also being reasonable.
They rotate movements in a manageable way. In good program design, you need to balance a few keeping the program feeling fresh, with keeping movements around long enough for users to meaningfully learn them and make a little progress. Some trainers go absolutely bonkers on variety; some are basically slapping their brand on a very basic, boring template and calling it their own. A good program falls somewhere in between these two extremes, and all three here do that well.
They communicate the programming very clearly. Communicating programming, whether in person or online, is a super-information-intensive task. There needs to be instruction, demos, reps, sets, RPE/RIR/percentage of a 1RM, for every movement. And all of that, but for alternate movements, too, in case the user doesn’t have the right equipment or can’t do pull-ups or whatever. For instance, in the case of RISE, this info is included for every warm-up movement, too, and the warmups are 5-6 (very brief) movements long, in addition to the 7-10 movements of the workout itself, plus multiple substitutions for every movement. That’s a lot of freaking content to organize and try and present in as digestible a way as possible!
Programming doesn’t have to have all of these details. But the fewer of them it has, the more room there is for interpretation and/or confusion. I think you could argue that none of these programs need to be as intensively instructed as they are, but touches like including a demo video for every exercise greatly increase their accessibility to a non-expert audience.
All of these programs do this very well. All three programs have great and short demo videos for every exercise, provide instruction on RPEs and reps and other more subjective elements of the experience, and offer substitute exercises. They are as good as remote/template-style programming gets.
They all have a “low-gear” mode. The primary audience for these programs is “people who are excited to work out, and have a good chunk of time to give to it every week.” But we also all have tough and busy weeks where we need to scale things back. For those occasions, all three programs have a modified lower-time-commitment version packaged in: SBTD has “Express” and bodyweight options; Momentum has “turbo mode”; and RISE has a “lite” version.
The price is right, especially for the high quality. I see trainers charging absolutely Looney-Tunes amounts of money for their programming, hundreds of dollars a month in some cases. I’ve paid for a couple of them, for research purposes. And then I get sent a spreadsheet or PDF that is super cookie-cutter, and oftentimes it’s on me to pick my movements from a pre-programmed mega-list of outdated exercises. That’s total bullshit.
These programs, by contrast, are all killer no filler, and I can tell all of these folks are working and putting in the time to design intelligently balanced, challenging, manageable, varied workouts. For $12-$20 a month, you get all your exercises picked. Online reviews aren’t everything (I will get into some of the critiques), but for the most part, these programs are pretty widely beloved, and people see good results from them. You will get stronger on any of these programs, even if you don’t do them completely to a T every day.
They have built-in communities. I will note that our Liftcord has subsets of subscribers who are involved with all of these programs (mostly RISE and SBTD). But independently of our little group, all three have Facebook groups for participants to find each other, ask each other questions, and give each other support.
They have apps. Okay, look, I’ve been all over the place with how and where I track my workouts. I just find apps too fiddly, personally, and often too useless when you don’t input every single bit of info correctly and to a T. They also make it hard to review a lot of past training at a flip. I’ve gone back to paper notebooks, and I like it that way.
That said, I respect an app. Lifting programming involves trying to organize and give options for an absolutely staggering amount of information. If you tried to think through making a lifting app, it would make your head hurt. There are options in the SBTD app where I can’t even figure out what they do. All three apps let you request support right in there.
I’ve looked into this, and apps are also insanely expensive to develop and maintain. It takes a tremendous amount of care for a trainer to roll and maintain and keep adding features to their own app. SBTD has the fullest-featured app, followed by Momentum. RISE uses a platform with an app called TrueCoach, which doesn’t track numbers like the first two, but gives you an account where you can see all the workout content and mark tasks “complete.” Momentum and RISE programming is also accessible on a computer (Momentum provides PDFs), and SBTD is app-only.