Is Practical Programming all you need for life?

[Matt-Panz]

Hello Rip,

Is Practical Programming and Starting Strength the only two books someone needs for the rest of their life, or does someone eventually need a coach?

If so, what would a coach offer that I can't learn myself?

Let me clarify -- If I wanted to become just as good at programming as an SS coach, what can I do? Is there some magic snake-oil-potion they drink to be able to program much better

To become a person who is 100% independent in terms of their training and programming, is more needed than PP & SS?

Thanks,

Matt

[Mark Rippetoe]

No one gets to the level of an SSC without help from humans, with coaching, guidance, and clarification. Neither you nor I are that smart.

[Andy Baker (KSC)]

You get good at programming by spending thousands of hours on the gym floor with lots of different types of people and coaching them through the process of being very weak to very strong. You try and fail with 100s of different approaches until certain patterns start to emerge with certain demographics that can be used to reliably create generic training templates and methodologies like you find in PPST3.

I say this at least once per week in the programming sub-forum. The programs in PPST3 are NOT prescriptive for any one individual. We even say this in the book, yet people still treat them as such. They set them up into spreadsheets and plug their own numbers into those templates and then turn off their brain and try to train on auto-pilot without thinking and adjusting as they go.

Rip can correct me if I'm wrong, but I remember years ago in a conversation we had prior to doing PPST3 that the main reason there weren't a lot of programs in the first two editions was precisely to avoid encouraging people to engage in this behavior.

Each program in PPST3 is just a model of a certain principle. Try and understand the model and don't get lost in the minutia of sets/reps/% etc. That stuff is individualized to a degree and can be quite variable depending on age, gender, goals, etc, etc.

[Mark Rippetoe]

But people -- being people -- will always opt for a prescription rather than understanding the material as a template.

[Scaldrew]

In their and my defence, both books are incredibly exhaustive and valuable resources. Though I'd agree with you when you say that they are insufficient to turn anyone into a coach simply by reading both books front to back, I think we all agree, too, that they remain required reading. Niceties out of the way, it's very hard for novices and inexperienced athletes (redundant, but hey) to manipulate their programme in any way similar to how a coach would, given the huge gap in experience as Coach Baker points out. People—being people—will take the template and run because they have no other way of applying the knowledge to their specific situation that was at the origin of the template to begin with. That is to say, people acknowledge their own lack of experience in contrast to both of you, the authors of Practical Programming, either directly or indirectly and hope for the best.

You probably don't disagree with this, Coach Rip, but I resented your terseness. But only slightly. Only slightly.

[John Watson]

Is Practical Programming and Starting Strength the only two books someone needs for the rest of their life,

No, get Barbell Prescription.
Lots of great info on modifying the training templates using the understood principles of stress/recovery/adaptation.

[Jeff Illingworth]

Programming (and coaching) is like most other learned applied skills (think cooking, carpentry, etc.). There’s an awful lot you can learn about training and programming from a good book like Starting Strength: Basic Barbell Training or Practical Programming. Just like you can learn a lot about cooking from The Professional Chef or Carpentry Complete. You can take what you garner from these and apply it to yourself and as you apply it, you should learn what works well for you and what doesn’t. If you’re actually serious about growing your skill, you start to experiment based off of these observations and you talk to and learn from people with more, better, or different skills than you have. I think a lot of people have difficulty with this as most people don’t know how to be mentored by someone knowledgeable in their field - how to be an apprentice. Often, the only experience people have with learning from others is the sort of rote repetition process they get in school as opposed to someone training you to think and act through the process. If you do all of it right, you apply what you learn and suffer through the mistakes and (probably over-) rejoice in the successes. Gradually, you subject other people to what you’ve learned and experiment on them. Have the courage to know you’re going to fail, be honest about it, and be honest with the people you screw up as you make your mistakes. It’s a lot of work on your part to even get to the point of mediocre at these things.

[Andy Baker (KSC)]

But people -- being people -- will always opt for a prescription rather than understanding the material as a template.

Trust me. I'm aware. Very aware. I'd say ~40% of the questions we get in the programming sub-forum wouldn't be asked if people had read PPST3 instead of just flipping to the specific program examples.

[Andy Baker (KSC)]

If you do all of it right, you apply what you learn and suffer through the mistakes and (probably over-) rejoice in the successes. Gradually, you subject other people to what you’ve learned and experiment on them. Have the courage to know you’re going to fail, be honest about it, and be honest with the people you screw up as you make your mistakes. It’s a lot of work on your part to even get to the point of mediocre at these things.

This is probably the most important part. Failure. The most important lessons come when you crash and burn on a major programming mistake with yourself or with a client. But failure/experience must occur against the back drop of some sort of intellectual understanding of the basic programming concepts or you'll have no idea why you failed, and you'll have no idea how to course correct as you go.

[chaloney]

Each program in PPST3 is just a model of a certain principle. Try and understand the model and don't get lost in the minutia of sets/reps/% etc. That stuff is individualized to a degree and can be quite variable depending on age, gender, goals, etc, etc.

So you're saying I'm a special snowflake and therefore need to make my own special snowflake program based on the ideas in the book?? Rip has been lying to us all these years??

Trust me. I'm aware. Very aware. I'd say ~40% of the questions we get in the programming sub-forum wouldn't be asked if people had read PPST3 instead of just flipping to the specific program examples.

This is completely true. Just last week I had a post all typed up and ready to submit to the programming forum and I thought "well, let me look in the book first, maybe it's already answered...". lol and behold, the EXACT thing I was going to ask "does this make sense?" about was the FIRST example in that section of the book. Glad I looked.