Episode 63: Newbie Gains, Plateaus, and PRs: What to Expect at Every Stage of Lifting
Whether you’re just starting your fitness journey or you’ve been lifting for years, understanding your training age is key to optimizing your workouts. Let’s break down the key differences between beginner, intermediate, and advanced lifters—specifically when it comes to building muscle, gaining strength, and designing an effective program.
💪 What Is "Training Age"?
Your training age refers to how long you’ve been consistently following a structured strength training program. It's not about how long you've been "going to the gym," but how long you've been progressively training with purpose.
🟢 Beginner Lifters
Training Age: 0–6 months (sometimes up to 1 year)
Muscle Gain Potential: 1–1.5% of bodyweight per month
Strength Gains: Rapid — often weekly PRs
Focus: Learning movement patterns, building consistency
Program Design:
Frequency: 2–3 full-body workouts per week
Progression: Linear (add weight each session)
Exercises: Compound-focused (squat, deadlift, press, row, pull-up)
Reps/Sets: 3x8–12, moderate intensity
Goal: Build a base of strength, coordination, and confidence
Sample Weekly Split:
Mon: Squat, Bench Press, Row
Wed: Deadlift, Overhead Press, Pull-up
Fri: Repeat A or B, slightly heavier
🟡 Intermediate Lifters
Training Age: 6 months to ~2–3 years
Muscle Gain Potential: 0.5–1% of bodyweight per month
Strength Gains: Slower but steady with planning
Focus: Progressive overload, muscle balance, addressing weak points
Program Design:
Frequency: 4–6x/week using Upper/Lower or Push/Pull/Legs splits
Progression: Linear or undulating periodization
Reps/Sets: Mix of strength and hypertrophy (6–15 reps)
Goal: Improve both size and performance with variety and structure
Sample Weekly Split (Upper/Lower 4-day):
Mon: Upper (Strength)
Tue: Lower (Strength)
Thu: Upper (Hypertrophy)
Fri: Lower (Hypertrophy)
🔴 Advanced Lifters
Training Age: 3+ years of structured training
Muscle Gain Potential: 0.25–0.5% of bodyweight per month (or less)
Strength Gains: Hard-fought and incremental
Focus: Peak performance, fatigue management, precise programming
Program Design:
Frequency: 5–6x/week with high volume and specialization
Progression: Block periodization (accumulation, intensification, peaking)
Reps/Sets: Wide range, includes advanced techniques (e.g., rest-pause, tempo work)
Goal: Squeeze out every last ounce of progress through precision
Sample Weekly Split (Body Part Focused):
Mon: Chest/Triceps (Heavy Press)
Tue: Back/Biceps (Volume)
Wed: Legs (Squat Focus)
Thu: Shoulders/Arms
Fri: Legs (Deadlift Focus)
Sat: Conditioning or Mobility
Sun: Rest
🎯 Final Thoughts
Progress doesn’t stop when the newbie gains do—but it does require more intention. Knowing where you are in your training journey helps you:
Set realistic expectations
Train smarter, not just harder
Choose a program that meets your current needs
No matter your level, the key is consistency, recovery, and smart progression.
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Jayd (00:00):
When you get to be a more intermediate lifter, your gains are going to slow down. You're not going to be able to make progress as quickly as this, so just keep that in mind. Enjoy the ride, enjoy the prs because it is really cool to see your gains on a week by week basis progressing linearly like this. But I do want you to also keep in mind that eventually it will slow down, and that doesn't mean you're doing anything wrong. That's totally normal. Hey there. Welcome to the Coaching Corner podcast. I'm Jayd Harrison, A-K-A Jaydigains. I've been a personal trainer and health coach for over 10 years, and I've created this podcast to share tips to help you to eat better, get stronger, and take better care of yourself. In today's episode, we're going to be talking about the differences between your progress, the gains you make in the gym, and what your workouts might look like when you're at different stages of your lifting journey.
(00:59)
If you've spent any amount of time in the gym, you'll know that there is such a thing as newbie gains, which is the amount of rapid gains that someone can make in the first six months to two years of their training. After this point, progress seems to stall and slow down a little bit as you get into the more intermediate phase of lifting or exercising. And then we also have the more advanced lifters and exercisers who have been training for a number of years. What you can expect from your body and how you need to train your body to get results is slightly different in these three stages. Now don't get me wrong, any exercise that you do in the gym is good for you and is going to help to improve your overall health. But if you're trying to optimize your gains, this podcast episode will help you to keep in mind the expectations that you need to set for yourself at these different stages of your lifting journey.
(01:59)
Before we get into the episode, make sure to like this video if you're watching on YouTube and subscribe to the channel so you always get the latest videos when they drop. If you are listening to this podcast, make sure that you follow the show so you always get the latest episodes delivered right to your device. Now, if you are looking for a training plan, don't worry, I've got you covered. I am accepting online personal training clients at the moment. Just go to my website, Jaydigains.com and click on coaching. To learn more about the coaching programs that I offer, I can check out nutrition coaching with my Healthy Diet Makeover program or check out my various exercise programs for beginners, intermediate and advanced exercisers. Now without further ado, let's get into the episode now before we talk about how to optimize your training, depending on what stage of your training you're in as a beginner, intermediate, or advanced exerciser, we need to talk about what's called training age.
(03:00)
Training age refers to the amount of time that you have followed a structured and consistent strength training routine. It's not necessarily about how long you have been going to the gym, but more about how long you have been consistently sticking to your routine of going to the gym. So you may have worked out really consistently 10 years ago for a number of years and then took some time off and it's been a while, maybe a couple of years since you've trained. So when you restart as a lifter, even though you have previous experience, your training age is going to be reset from the time that you start. And so how you train your body and the gains that you can expect to make are going to be much more similar to someone who is a beginner or a newbie versus you picking right back up from where you left off.
(03:52)
Now, this is good and bad because if you get newbie gains, then you're going to make a lot of rapid progress, but a lot of people who used to be intermediate or advanced lifters try to return to the gym after a long time away and try to work out at the exact same intensity and the same frequency and volume that they did previously and they can end up getting hurt. This happens all the time. So this is a great way for you to think about your training in terms of how you should pace yourself and also what to expect. So remember, it doesn't matter how long you have been going to the gym, what matters more is how long you have been consistently following a resistance training program, lifting consistently and challenging your muscles consistently. Now, there's three main stages to training age when it comes to resistance training.
(04:44)
First you have the beginners or the newbies. Now these are people who have been lifting consistently or doing resistance training consistently for zero to six months. Okay? Now, when you're a beginner, when you're in this beginner phase or this newbie phase, you can expect to make a lot of progress really quickly. Beginners have a muscle gains potential of one to 1.5% muscle gains per month, and you often can expect to perform personal records or personal best in every training session for a number of weeks or months. As a beginner, your focus should be on learning and mastering the main movement patterns like squats, hip hinging for exercises like deadlifts, as well as horizontal pulling or rows, as well as vertical pulling like pullups or pull downs. You should also focus on mastering proper technique for pushing exercises like the chest press or bench press pushups, and also vertical press movements like overhead press or shoulder press.
(05:53)
You should also focus on developing core strength and stability as well as an overall awareness of your body's positioning in space and awareness and connection to your muscles. Many people in the beginning of their fitness journey or when they're coming back from a long time of not exercising, lose the connection with their muscles. So as a beginner or if you're just returning back to the gym, you need to focus on reconnecting your brain to your body, become aware of what it feels like when you activate or stretch the different major muscles in your body when you're doing squats. You should feel your quadriceps engaging when you're doing hip hinging exercises, you should notice that your hamstrings are stretching at the back of the movement. You need to also maintain an awareness of your shoulder positioning as well as the positioning of your spine. Now, this kind of proprioception takes a while to build.
(06:52)
So as a beginner or as someone returning to the gym, you want to make sure that a good chunk of your training routines include mobility based exercises, core stability and core strength exercises, as well as balancing and stability exercises for the whole body. Now, as a beginner, you can expect to make gains with two to three training sessions per week, and oftentimes I find that beginners make a lot of progress with full body training sessions. This means that you're doing workouts that include exercises for your upper body, lower body and core. And the reasoning for this is that as a beginner or as someone who's returning to the gym and you're maybe not as in shape as you were before, you don't necessarily need to do a ton of different exercises for the same muscle group to make gains. In fact, as a beginner, you can make gains by doing one or two exercises for a muscle group in a training session.
(07:51)
So to avoid over-training any one muscle group, it's a good idea to kind of do everything in one training session. So you might do some upper body exercises followed by a lower body exercise and alternate that, and then finish with some core training or do some core training at the beginning of your workout, some balance work, some mobility work, and then finish off the workout alternating upper body, lower body. As you get more advanced as a beginner, you can begin to bunch your lower body exercises together and do them in C session within a workout and then do your upper body exercises all together within a workout. So these are all good ways that you can structure your training sessions to make sure that you're hitting all of the major muscles of your body and that you're not overdoing it with any one muscle group.
(08:39)
Now, in terms of the progression that you can expect to make, beginners can progress pretty linearly. I find that my beginning clients are able to add on more weight or do more repetitions per set of an exercise every week that we are training for the first month to six months, and sometimes even for the first year of their training. So one week you might be doing 10 pushups, and then the next time you go to practice pushups, you're able to do 12, 13 or 14, and then the next time you go, you're able to do 20. This is a pretty common progression that a lot of beginners experience, but I do want to caution you from having this expectation that it's always going to be this way. You are in newbie gains when you get to be a more intermediate lifter, and when you enter into that intermediate phase of exercising, your gains are going to slow down.
(09:32)
You're not going to be able to make progress as quickly as this. So just keep that in mind. Enjoy the ride, enjoy the prs because it is really cool to see your gains on a week by week basis progressing linearly like this. But I do want you to also keep in mind that eventually it will slow down, and that doesn't mean you're doing anything wrong. That's totally normal In terms of exercise selection, like I said before, it's really important that you're focusing on mastering movement patterns. So practice exercises like hip hinging, squatting, horizontal pressing, horizontal pulling, vertical pressing, vertical polling and rotation. Your goal here is to build a base of strength coordination and good technique as well as that mind muscle connection that's so important for keeping you safe as you make gains for the suggested number of sets and rep ranges. As a beginner, a good rule of thumb is to shoot for doing three sets of every exercise for between eight and 12 repetitions per set, and then you can rest for 30 to 60 seconds between sets before repeating an exercise in terms of how hard you should be training and the amount of weight that you should be using.
(10:48)
You want to use a level of resistance that is the level of a band or the actual weight that you use that allows you to feel the target muscles of that exercise burning by the end of your set. So for example, if you are doing bicep curls and you have three sets of between eight and 12 repetitions, you want to use an amount of weight that has your biceps burning by reps 10, 11, and 12. Now you want to make sure that as your muscles are burning, you're not breaking technique, okay? So we want to practice good technique in every single rep, even as your muscles get tired, so you don't want to use too heavy of a weight to the point where you have to start kind of using momentum to swing the weight up. And at the same time, you don't want to use too little of a weight to where you don't feel any kind of fatigue setting into the muscles at all.
(11:43)
So you want to find what I call your Goldilocks weight, which is the amount of weight that allows your muscles to feel that burn as they get tired by rep 12. Keep in mind that as a beginner, that weight is likely going to change pretty quickly over time. From one week you might need to hold the five pound dumbbells and feel tired, and then maybe two or three weeks later you need to go up to the eights or the tens or the twelves. This is really normal, so keep that in mind that you're not always going to be using the same weights, especially as a beginner, as you get strong really quickly. For this reason, I do think it's a good idea to record your workouts because this will allow you to know what weight you should be using each time you go to repeat and exercise.
(12:29)
I actually create fitness journals for this very recent that many of my clients and my followers on Twitch use, and you can find these on Amazon. I'll include a link for these in the show notes and in the video description below. But what these journals allow you to do is record what you do in every workout, including the exercise that you do, how many sets you do, what resistance level you use, and how many reps you do, and then you can also take notes on the workout itself. So that's a really good tool because next time I go to repeat this workout, I can look back in my journal and I can say, oh, okay, so I did eight reps with 135 pounds on the bar. When I go to do this, I need to put 135 pounds in the bar, see how it feels.
(13:16)
I did eight and my rep range is eight to 12, so I'm going to keep that weight the same, and I'm going to try to get more reps out. By the time that I reach a point where a weight is easy for me and I'm no longer feeling tired or I'm feeling the burn happening by reps 10, 11, and 12, that's when I know it's time to add more weight. So that's what we call the principle of progressive overload, which is going to be really important for you as a beginner to keep an eye on. So record your workouts, write them down so that you always know what weight you need to do and how many reps you did previously when you did that exercise. So when it's time to progress, and it's also kind of nice to look back on your notebook when you have done a couple of weeks of resistance training and you can see that progress over time like, wow, I was only doing this amount of weight for this number of reps and it was really hard a couple of weeks ago, but now look where I am.
(14:11)
I've added so much weight, I've added so many reps, so that can help with motivation as well. Now at some point, if you have been lifting consistently for anywhere between six months to two or three years, you're likely going to hit that intermediate phase and transition into being an intermediate lifter. Now, as an intermediate lifter, your gains are going to be much slower than what they were when you were a beginner. Instead of expecting one to 1.5% of an increase in your muscle mass every week, you can expect more likely something between 0.5 and 1% increase in muscle mass per month, and you have to work a little bit harder, a little bit more frequently, and with a really good plan in order to keep progressing as an intermediate lifter. So whereas a beginner can get away with making gains off of two to three times per week doing full body training, intermediate lifters more often than not have to increase the frequency of their training sessions to between four and even six times per week.
(15:17)
They also tend to need to do more sets on each muscle group in order to stimulate muscle growth. Then they had to do when they were a beginner. So where a beginner can kind of get away with doing a three by eight to 12 on squats and they'll grow their leg muscles from that, and intermediate exerciser is going to have to probably split out their workouts to do multiple exercises that hit the same muscle group for two to three, sometimes even more sets per exercise. So typically intermediate exercisers will split out their workouts into a four day split, alternating between upper body and lower body. Another really common split for intermediate exercisers would be something like push pull legs, and in each workout they're focusing on the same handful of muscles and targeting them with a variety of exercises. So for example, an upper body day that you might see me do if you join me while I'm live on my Twitch channel, that's Twitch tv slash jd gains, is I will start with my core stabilizing exercises and my balance training exercises for my warmup, and then I will start to do resistance training exercises that hit my chest, my shoulders, and my triceps.
(16:34)
So I might do a bench press, a couple of sets of bench press. I might do four sets of eight to 12, and then I might follow that up with some flies in order to hit my pecs and my anterior delts a little bit harder. And then I might follow this up by doing some tricep pull downs with a resistance band or a cable machine to get a little bit more fatigue and work in on my triceps, or I might focus on my back muscles and my biceps. And for this, I might do something like starting with some pull-ups or pull downs to activate my lats, and then I might do some rows which hit similar muscles but from a different movement, and I might follow this with some bicep curls. So as you can see in each of these examples of an upper body day, I'm focusing on the same muscle groups that are in the upper part of the body, the chest or pecs, the deltoids shoulders, the lats in the back, et cetera.
(17:32)
And I'm doing multiple exercises for as many as 10 to sometimes 20 sets per week depending on what your body needs in order to stimulate muscle growth and strength gains. Now in terms of progression, keep in mind that your gains might be a little bit slower here than they were when you were a beginner, but you should still see progress, linear progress over time. Over time, you should still be able to do more repetitions on the same exercise in each set with that with the weight that you're using. And over time, you should eventually be able to do that exercise with more weight. You're still going to be aiming for fatiguing the muscles by the end of each set and making sure that they're burning or feeling tired by the last three or four reps. And again, it's really important that you're writing down your workouts and recording what you're doing.
(18:26)
That way you can make sure that you're giving yourself the right challenge and progressing yourself when it's time. In terms of your reps and sets as an intermediate exerciser, you should be performing a mixture of higher volume training like you did when you were a beginner of sets between eight and 12 or repetitions or maybe even more repetitions up to 20 for some exercises. And you should also be focusing on starting to increase the intensity of your lifts with heavier weights and fewer reps. Now, you can progress the amount of weight that you're using linearly, or you can do what's called a daily undulating periodization where on one day of the week you're focusing on heavier lifts with fewer reps per set, and then on another day of the week or in that same training cycle, then you're lifting for volume doing the same exercises, but you're focusing on a different adaptation.
(19:20)
Heavier lifts are in general going to train more of your coordination and your central nervous system and train your body how to activate all of your muscles that need to work at the same time, whereas volume training is better towards trying to develop hypertrophy or building the muscle. Both are very important, both are important for you to train and include during this phase of your training. Your goal as an intermediate exerciser should be to continue to refine your mastery of these movements and make sure that as you are lifting more reps and more weight that you're doing so with good technique, you also should be focused on balancing out any kind of muscular imbalances that you have, and you should be focusing on addressing your weak points with mobility exercises and isolation exercises. As an intermediate lifter, you might benefit by block periodization in your training.
(20:21)
This means that you spend a number of weeks focusing on one adaptation at a time in order to really focus on getting that adaptation in your muscles. So for example, if you're following block periodization for power lifting, this means that you would have a period of between three to six weeks, maybe even longer in what we call an accumulation phase, where you would have a block of workouts that are focused on volume training, building muscle building your endurance and your work capacity. After between three and six or more weeks, then you might enter into what's called an intensification block where you're lifting heavier weights, but you're also still including the same kind of hypertrophy exercises as accessories that you might have done in the accumulation block. And then in your peaking block, you're getting ready to test maxes and lift really heavy weights for really small numbers of reps per set, like one, two or three reps per set, and you really shouldn't be doing those heavy lifts for small numbers of reps at the beginning of your intermediate phase of training.
(21:34)
This is something that you should be progressing towards and working towards gradually over the course of weeks or months. If you're following the OPT model, the optimal performance training model that the National Academy of Sports Medicine promotes, then you might go through different blocks focusing on stability and endurance, followed by strength and endurance, followed by muscular development, which is more like a hypertrophy block or an accumulation block, and then this is followed by a strength block where you would be doing those heavier lifts followed by power. These are both good examples of how you might periodize your training, which I do think is a good idea if you are in that intermediate or advanced phase of training to see gains and to make actual changes to your muscles, remember at this stage as an intermediate or advanced exerciser, your muscles are going to just need more of whatever it is that you're trying to get from them.
(22:37)
So if you're trying to develop hypertrophy, you're going to need to do more hypertrophy, high volume sets, and if you're trying to get stronger and develop your coordination, you're going to need to do more strength or high intensity lifts or coordination exercises. Now, as we all know, there's only so many hours in the day and only so many days of the week, so you can't necessarily spend as much time as you might need to develop all of the aspects of your muscular fitness and move them forward unless you are training like five hours a day like a professional athlete. And even professional athletes periodize their training, right? So periodizing your training where you focus either a day focused on hypertrophy or you put focus on hypertrophy for a couple of weeks, followed by stability and power, right, or endurance periodizing and focusing allows you to spend the time that you need in order to get your muscles to adapt in that way that they need without you necessarily overtraining yourself and overdoing it in the gym.
(23:45)
Now as an advanced lifter, once you get to the point where you have been consistently lifting and exercising for three or more years, it gets a lot harder to make gains. It's a lot harder as an advanced lifter to build muscle. You can expect to build between 0.25 and 0.5% muscle mass per month or maybe even less strength gains. Adding weight to your personal record is hard fought and very incremental. So the name of the game when you're in Advanced Lifter is patience and fall in love with the journey because you're not going to be seeing PRS all the time like you did when you were a fresh whipper snapper, and as an advanced lifter, you do often need more stimulus in order to get whatever adaptation it is that you're trying to get from your muscles. So you can often find advanced lifters in the gym five to six times per week, but their workouts will be highly fine tuned and specialized towards whatever adaptation they're working on that day.
(24:47)
Block periodization is incredibly important for advanced lifters because it allows them to give their muscles the amount of stimulus that they need in order to advance their strength gains and their hypertrophy. For this reason, you might find an advanced training program that has a wide variety of sets and rep ranges. Advanced lifters are also going to more often use more advanced exercise techniques like pause reps or tempo work in order to make the gains that they need to make. Now, we do like to think about training age in this kind of linear progression of beginner, intermediate, and advanced, but when you are in that advanced stage of having lifted consistently for three plus years, you are at this stage keenly aware of the fact that progress is not linear and it comes in spurts. So you're likely going to experience long periods where you are not seeing any gains, whether you're taking your measurements, checking your body weight, measuring your body fat percentage or your muscle mass, or if you're testing your strength or your endurance regularly with AMRAP sets or max tests, there are going to be long periods where you're not going to see those gains.
(26:02)
And that's why I say it's important to fall in love with the process of training. When you're an intermediate and advanced exerciser, you got to love this shit, or at least you have to get to the point where you see it as just part of your day, something that you just do and you don't think about it too much because if you think about it too much or if you don't love it, then you might start overthinking. And it's this middle slash advanced kind of stage where most people give up and they drop off, and you have to have the grit and the discipline to continue to show up. Most of the time in order to maintain your progress, it's not worth it to completely go off the rails and stop lifting for a year in order to come back and become a beginner lifter again, because in that time, you will have lost a lot of muscle.
(26:57)
And if you're not exercising for a year, that's not really great for your heart health either. So it's worth it to invest in cultivating this mindset that going to the gym, exercising is just something that you do, and sometimes you're going to be excited about it. Sometimes you're going to be in love with it, other times you're not. But it's just like any other relationship in your life. Sometimes you're going to have to really just have grit and continue to show up because of discipline, and then the love will come. But those are two things that I see make or break. Whether someone sticks around and gets to the advanced stage and holds onto the gains that they've made for the long haul, it's those people who are either able to just like, I'm not thinking about it. This is just something I do. It's just something that's part of my day and they stay consistent.
(27:51)
Or the people who are like, I love training, I love working out, and they're able to be consistently motivated to show up at the gym. That is the difference for a lot of people. And also, you don't have to love it. Like I said, you can just have the discipline to show up and do it because you love the results or because it keeps you healthy or because you want to age better. That's totally okay if you don't actually enjoy working out. You don't have to work out for two or three hours, but a little bit goes a long way, especially in the beginning, in the intermediate stages. And if you need to kind of pause and be an intermediate lifter and you're not making a whole lot of gains, but you're not willing to put in the extra time or the planning and precision effort that it takes to get into that advanced stage and to make progress at that advanced stage, that's okay as well. If you just want to do this as a hobby, as a lifestyle thing, just to maintain the health of your body, that is legitimate, and that's okay. But if you want to optimize your training to continue to get stronger to make more muscle, then this is the way that I would encourage you to think about your training age and so that you can plan your workouts and plan to periodize your training according to what your body needs.
(29:16)
So that's it for today's episode. Thank you so much for watching or listening. If you're watching this episode on YouTube, make sure that you like the video if you found it helpful, and make sure to subscribe to my channel so you always get the latest episodes and other videos that I drop throughout the week. If you're listening to this episode, make sure to follow the channel so you get the latest episodes whenever they drop delivered right to your device. And keep in mind that you can join me while I'm live on my Twitch channel. I go live on Tuesdays and other days throughout the week. As I have time, just go to Twitch tv slash Jaydigains and give me a follow or subscribe if you want to support the channel. Also, if you're interested in working with me or following one of my training programs, go to my website Jaydigains.com. That's J-A-Y-D-I-G-A-I-N s.com. I am taking on online personal training clients at the moment, and I also have a training app that you can subscribe to and follow one of the programs that I've created for beginners and intermediate and advanced exercisers. You can find information for that on my website. Thank you again, I hope that you found this helpful. I'll see you in the next episode. In the meantime, make sure that you're eating your veggies and eat your protein, drink your water, prioritize your self-care because you're worth it, and I'll see you soon.
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