I know you said you don’t want to put in the effort to justify this program, but I’m curious what your evidence is that it works close to as well as Starting Strength. SS was optimized empirically over the course of years and large numbers of people, so just porting over the theory from SS seems unlikely to be enough to get good results. Note I’m not claiming that’s what you’re doing, just explaining why I’m initially skeptical. I currently am in a position where many newbies ask me for workout recommendations, so I would love to be able to recommend something easier than SS, as long as it actually works.
Note that I think SS (with Power Cleans substituted out) is not actually very difficult, provided you have someone competent around to critique your form. The main disadvantage I see is that many gyms don’t have a squat rack, so it’s harder to find a good place to do the necessary lifts.
this is based more strongly on a popular Beyond Brawn routine than SS. The rep scheme is SS. The major change is incline bench instead of switching back and forth between flat bench and overhead press. EEG scans of muscle activation is some evidence this is fine (works pecs, anterior delt, and triceps about equally). the reason for the SS rep scheme instead of the original BB one is that the success of SS shows that newbies can handle a bit more volume than he (Stuart) thought.
I’m open to arguing about it, I just wasn’t going to do the work of providing lots of arguments before anyone asked.
I know you said you don’t want to put in the effort to justify this program, but I’m curious what your evidence is that it works close to as well as Starting Strength. SS was optimized empirically over the course of years and large numbers of people, so just porting over the theory from SS seems unlikely to be enough to get good results. Note I’m not claiming that’s what you’re doing, just explaining why I’m initially skeptical. I currently am in a position where many newbies ask me for workout recommendations, so I would love to be able to recommend something easier than SS, as long as it actually works.
Note that I think SS (with Power Cleans substituted out) is not actually very difficult, provided you have someone competent around to critique your form. The main disadvantage I see is that many gyms don’t have a squat rack, so it’s harder to find a good place to do the necessary lifts.
this is based more strongly on a popular Beyond Brawn routine than SS. The rep scheme is SS. The major change is incline bench instead of switching back and forth between flat bench and overhead press. EEG scans of muscle activation is some evidence this is fine (works pecs, anterior delt, and triceps about equally). the reason for the SS rep scheme instead of the original BB one is that the success of SS shows that newbies can handle a bit more volume than he (Stuart) thought.
I’m open to arguing about it, I just wasn’t going to do the work of providing lots of arguments before anyone asked.