I’ve been lifting via the 5/3/1 program since December 2011. In the last year, I’ve completed 8 months of lifting.
Consistent, not so much, but I was stalling enough in the last couple of months that I decided to recalculate my maxes last week.
When I started last December, I was still doing shoulder rehab (at home) thrice weekly. My shoulder hurt every day. Even trying to do an assisted pull-up would cause days’ worth of escalation of shoulder pain.
It’s hard to make a true assessment of my upper-body strength at the time, because so much is driven by the ability to strongly and painlessly rotate ones shoulders: pushups, pull-ups, rows, lifting objects higher than the waist, and raising anything overhead. Even crunches were painful–the curling motion is the exact opposite of the good posture I have to maintain to prevent the bone spur from grinding various things in my shoulder.