The Bill Starr 5×5 is a three-day-a-week barbell program built on weekly linear progression. You train Monday, Wednesday and Friday, the days run heavy, light and medium in that order, and each session is squats plus one press plus one pull. Every 5×5 is a ramp, not five sets across, so only the last set is a genuinely hard set.
The progression is the whole program. You work up to your current five-rep maxes over three or four weeks, hit them, then keep adding the same small increment every week and set a personal record each Monday until you stall.
There’s no percentage chart and no deload schedule. You go up until you can’t, then you reset a few weeks back and climb again.
This suits an intermediate lifter who has run out of road on a beginner program that adds weight every session. It’s a poor fit if you want variety, if you can only train twice a week, or if you need to peak for a meet on a fixed date. The version on this page is the linear one, and the spreadsheet below does the weekly maths for you.
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Bill Starr 5×5 Spreadsheet
Enter your current maxes and the rep count you hit them at, set your weekly increase and your smallest available plate jump, and the sheet fills in all ten weeks. The % to Reset column controls how far below your maxes you start, and it’s normally set so you meet your old numbers again around week 4.
Spreadsheet built from Madcow’s original write-up and the archived lift.net article.
Bill Starr 5x5 Linear Progression | LiftVault.com
What Is the Bill Starr 5×5?
Bill Starr was the strength coach who wrote The Strongest Shall Survive in 1976, and the 5×5 he built for football players is the ancestor of most barbell programs people run today. Three full-body days a week, the same handful of compound lifts every session, and a heavy/light/medium rotation so you’re not trying to set records three times a week.
The 5×5 itself is a ramp. You climb across five sets to one top set of five, so the first four sets are warm-up and practice and the fifth is the one that counts. That’s what keeps the workload low enough to come back and do it again 48 hours later.
The weekly schedule
- Monday (heavy): squat, bench press, and barbell row or power clean, each ramped 5×5 to a top set
- Wednesday (light): squat at roughly the Monday weight minus a set, incline or military press, and deadlift or high pulls
- Friday (medium): the Monday lifts again, ramped slightly heavier, with a top set of 3 and then a back-off set of 8
- Assistance is deliberately thin: hyperextensions and sit-ups midweek, dips and arms on Friday
Friday’s triple is where the new weight gets tested, and Monday’s 5×5 the following week is set from it. That’s the engine of the whole thing.
The part I’d hold you to is the Wednesday session. It looks like a throwaway and people skip it or turn it into a second heavy day, and both of those are how you stall this program early. Leave it light.
Bill Starr 5×5 vs Madcow 5×5
These two names get used interchangeably and they aren’t quite the same thing. Bill Starr wrote the original. Madcow, a well-known poster on the old strength forums, wrote the intermediate adaptation that almost everybody actually runs, and his own page describes it as one of the many flavours of Starr’s 5×5, built for the intermediate lifter.
The sheet on this page is Madcow’s linear version. Practically speaking, that means weekly progression rather than session-to-session, and a ramp to one top set rather than five sets at the same weight. If you specifically want Madcow’s write-up and layout, we have a Madcow 5×5 spreadsheet too.
Bill Starr 5×5 vs StrongLifts 5×5
The StrongLifts 5×5 program is the beginner descendant of this one, and the difference matters when you’re choosing between them. StrongLifts is five sets across at the same weight, three lifts a session, and you add weight every single workout. Starr is a ramp to one top set and you add weight once a week.
Start on StrongLifts if you’re new. Adding 5 lb three times a week is faster than adding it once, and you should take the faster progress while your body will still give it to you. Come here when that stops working, which for most people is somewhere in the first six to nine months.
How to Set Your Starting Weights
Put your best recent set into the sheet along with how many reps it was, and it converts that to a five-rep max for you. If you have a true 5RM, use that. If you only know a single, that works too, but the estimate gets rougher the further from five reps you go.
Then leave the reset percentage alone unless you have a reason. The default puts you three or four weeks below your current maxes, which feels far too light for the first fortnight and is exactly the point. Starting under your maxes is what buys you a long run of record weeks instead of stalling in three.
Weekly increases of 5 lb on presses and 10 lb on squats and deadlifts are the normal settings. Go smaller before you go bigger.
What to Do When You Stall
You will stall. The program is built on the assumption that you eventually will, so it isn’t a sign you did anything wrong.
- Missed reps on one lift, once: keep that lift at the same weight next week rather than adding to it
- One lift stuck for weeks: reset that lift alone by a few weeks’ worth of increases and work back up. Don’t restart the whole program
- Most lifts stuck for weeks: reset everything a few weeks back and climb again, and consider changing something (rep ranges, assistance, how much you’re eating) before the next run
Rest is the other thing people get wrong here. Two to five minutes between work sets, closer to five after a hard top set. Rushing the compounds is a good way to manufacture a stall that isn’t real.
Frequently Asked Questions
It works for beginners but it isn’t the fastest option. A true novice adding weight every session on a program like StrongLifts will progress about three times faster while that still works. The Bill Starr 5×5 is built for the intermediate lifter who has already stalled on session-to-session progression.
Bill Starr wrote the original program in the 1970s. Madcow wrote the intermediate linear adaptation that most people actually run, and his own page calls it one of the many flavours of Starr’s 5×5. The spreadsheet on this page is Madcow’s linear version, which progresses weekly and ramps to one top set of five.
No. The 5×5 is a ramp, so you climb across the five sets and only the last one is a hard set. Five sets across at one weight is StrongLifts, not Starr, and it’s a much larger workload at the same top weight.
Until you stall on most lifts, which is usually somewhere between two and four months from a sensible starting point. Then you reset a few weeks lower and run it again. The spreadsheet covers ten weeks per run, which is about one full cycle for most lifters.
