Coaches will often use the terms novice, beginner, intermediate, and advanced to better match the ability level of a client to the demands of a program.
It works both ways. If you are well trained, but you choose a program that is targeted for somebody with much less ability and lower fitness levels, despite training regularly, you can actually experience detraining.
On the other hand, you might truly be a beginner or intermediate but think that you are more experienced than you really are, and you may risk exhaustion, over training, or even injury by attempting programs that have been designed for individuals with extremely high ability levels and fitness.
This is commonly seen when professional athletes post their workouts and mere immortals try and follow what they’re doing only to burn out and experience overuse injuries within the first week of attempting the hero workloads.
So how do we determine who is a novice, a beginner, an intermediate or an advanced client. There will obviously be a large arbitrary component, with different coaches having different definitions.
A novice trainee is someone who is completely new to training or who has trained in the past, but has taken a significant amount of time off. If you have haven't been training or have only been training for 6 months, you would be considered a novice. The goal for a novice is to learn the basic movement patterns and develop awareness of their bodies.
If you have been training regularly under 12 months, then you are beginner. The goal of your first year of training is to prepare your body for the demands of the future decades of exercise. It takes many months, if not up to a year, to condition your bones, tendons, and ligaments. Muscles actually take up to 3 months before the muscle actually ‘knows’ how to turn on muscle protein synthesis to grow new muscle. This means is that all of the gains we experience from the weights room in the first 12 weeks are largely brain to muscle connection, rather than true architectural changes in the muscles’ cross-sectional area.
The other goals of your first year of training is to build an exercise habit and consistency, to create some semblance of balance in both strength and flexibility between limbs, between the front and back of limbs, to increase the strength of the small stabilizing muscles, and to lay down a solid knowledge base of correct technique for all major muscle groups. Believe it or not this process is roughly 12 months. And this is why we always recommend a Foundations Program to establish the best possible start to your lifting journey.
An intermediate level would include everything that we have just discussed plus another 12 months of training where you explore advanced exercise techniques, a variety of overload techniques and some variation in program design. An intermediate lifter will have explored programs using a variety of high reps, moderate reps, and low reps, along with marked exercise variation and a number of basic overload techniques. To summarize, an intermediate lifter would be somebody with over one year of training experience but less than two, who is now competent on most major lifts and basic overload techniques.
An advanced trainee will have had more than two years of regular lifting experience. Full range of motion would be expected on all major muscle groups and all exercise variations. Mastery of both double leg and single leg exercises, and they would have experienced, and can tolerate, high volume and frequency training and are adept at using advanced overload techniques on complex exercise selections.
The stratification of novice, beginner, intermediate, and advanced allows the individual and the coach to pitch the right level of intensity, volume, frequency, exercise selection and overload technique for your fitness and ability level. It is the furthest thing away from a judgement call, but rather a helpful descriptor to pick the right level of exercise and program for your ability and needs.
We hope this is helpful when selecting one of our workout plans. If you ever find a plan is too easy or too hard, reach out to our support team at support@haileyhappensfitness.com and we would be happy to exchange your plan if you request the exchange within a week of purchase.
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