A question that often comes up when Alwyn Cosgrove and I release a new book in the New Rules of Lifting series: “Will it work for advanced lifters?”

I have short answers and long answers, but I don’t always have persuasive answers. So I asked my friend Bryan Krahn, an editor at T-nation, to ask me some tough questions about Supercharged. You tell me if I close the deal.

Who’s this book for? What problem does it solve?

I think it’s for any lifter — any age, either gender, any stage of development — who either doesn’t have a program at all, or understands that his current program has stopped working, knows he needs to do something different, but doesn’t know what.

My philosophy is, if you’re putting in the time and effort, you probably deserve better results than what you’re getting.

That’s the problem Alwyn solves. His business depends on providing programs that give people better results than they can get from his competition.

How does an advanced lifter benefit from this book?

What is advanced? Is it years of training? Is it hours per week in the gym? Is it a level of achievement?

Speaking as someone who’s worked out in gyms almost continuously since 1980, I’d say that a lot of people are doing advanced workouts. But I rarely see advanced lifters.

To me, an advanced lifter is a guy or a woman with advanced form, advanced strength, and an advanced approach to training.

Those three things are going to look different from one lifter to the next.

Explain.

We all know some basics. If you can’t squat without your heels coming off the floor, or your form breaks down on the second rep of a set of five, you aren’t even an intermediate, much less advanced. Adding more weight to the bar before you fix your form is just going to mess you up, and probably sooner than later.

Advanced strength, to me, means you’re close to maxed out on both form and load. If you bench press on the Smith machine with your feet up on the bench, it doesn’t matter if you’re doing My big point is, what looks simple on paper becomes as complex and sophisticated as you want to make it. I use different exercise-selection strategies for each movement pattern. I also vary the exercises I use in core and metabolic training based on what I’m doing in the rest of the workout.

That’s why Alwyn can use this same basic workout template for complete novices at Results Fitness, or with some of the world’s most famous and best-paid athletes at the Nike complex in Oregon. One template, infinite applications!