  The physical pole and running masses of squarks and gluinos have recently
been related at two-loop order in a mass-independent renormalization scheme. I
propose a general method for improvement of such formulas, and argue that
better accuracy results. The improved version gives an imaginary part of the
pole mass that agrees exactly with the direct calculation of the physical width
at next-to-leading order. I also find the leading three-loop contributions to
the gluino pole mass in the case that squarks are heavier, using effective
field theory and renormalization group methods. The efficacy of these
improvements for the gluino and squarks is illustrated with numerical examples.
Some necessary three-loop results for gauge coupling and fermion mass beta
functions and pole masses in theories with more than one type of fermion
representation, which are not directly accessible from the published
literature, are presented in an Appendix.
