No gimmicks, no transformations, no hype. Just barbell work, honest assessments, and programs that survive contact with a real training week — written for the intermediate and advanced lifter who would rather train than read another forum thread.
Service Document 001 § Delivered free
Written for intermediate lifters stuck somewhere between 225 and 315 on the bench. One upper day, one lower day, one accessory day. Enter your email and the PDF is yours — no upsell sequence, no onboarding drip, just the program and a short note from me explaining the intent of each week.
— A. Baker
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This Week's Pick
A twelve-week block designed to add real weight to your total without turning you into a competitive powerlifter. The commercial-gym intermediate's program — structured, honest, and accounts for the fact that you also have a job.
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The best program is the one you can recover from, execute with intent, and still be running four weeks from now. Anything else is a mood board.Andy Baker, Practical Programming for Strength Training
i.
Community programming
A shared programming stream, a private forum, and monthly office hours. The right tier for the disciplined self-coached lifter who wants to stop guessing what comes next.
Recommended for: program shoppers who keep coming back
$27per month · cancel any time Join the club →ii.
Custom programming · async
A program built around your training history, schedule, equipment, and the lift you care about most. Written by me, revised monthly, delivered via shared document.
Recommended for: serious lifters with specific goals and a clock
$900per quarter · $1,600 / 6 mo · $2,400 / yr Start the intake →iii.
One hour on the phone
A one-time, sixty-minute phone call scheduled after purchase. You bring the question — a stalled lift, a return from injury, a training philosophy argument. I bring twenty years of context.
Recommended for: readers of the books with one hard question
$150one-time · scheduled after purchase Book the hour →
On the author
Andy Baker has coached IPF-level powerlifters, commercial-gym intermediates, and everyone in between. He is the co-author of Practical Programming for Strength Training (with Mark Rippetoe) and The Barbell Prescription: Strength Training for Life After 40 (with Jonathon Sullivan). He writes, he programs, and he still coaches from the floor — not from a studio.
His reader is someone who owns a squat rack, knows what RPE means, has read Starting Strength, and would rather train than scroll. Everything on this site is written for that lifter.
Practical Programming for Strength Training
The Barbell Prescription
Every lifter with thin calves wants to know whether they are wasting their time in the rack at the end of leg day. The honest answer has a little to do with genetics and a lot to do with the way most lifters train them — which is to say, badly, at the end of every session, when they are too tired to apply intent.
Read the essay →The westside template is still a useful tool. But the number of intermediate lifters grinding themselves into the platform on ME day — because the program says ME day — is worth a paragraph. Max effort is not a mood; it's a readiness decision, and some weeks the correct decision is not to.
Read the essay →Most trainees who try conjugate do fine on the upper days and quietly butcher the lower days. The fix isn't more variation — it's understanding which lower-body variations actually transfer to the competition squat and deadlift, and which are just novel ways to get tired.
Read the essay →