DL programming for novice

[Outstanding]

Someone mentioned here and Rip said on a recent podcast that more sets with fewer reps might be a good idea. Does this apply to deadlifts? I think I'm close to maxing out on what I can do with five reps. But my "work set" is just one set. I do warm ups of 1x5x45; 1x3x65; 1x3x95; 1x2x115; 1x2x135. Then my work set is 1x5x 150-ish. I'm up to 156 I think, but my last two workouts, adding one pound each time were brutal.
I'm thinking I might be doing too much warmup, or should I split up my work sets to 2x3 instead of 1x5?
I'm 59, female and have been adding weight weekly since February.
Thanks.

[Charlie Davies]

How many times per week do you deadlift? How's your recovery? How's your form?

In general stalling means you are either doing too much work to recover from, or too little volume to drive improvement. Or in a newbie, bad form.

The value of a coach is that they can tell the difference, where inexperienced lifters have a lot of trouble judging this sort of thing.
I'm not a coach, I struggle with this stuff, and make a lot of mistakes in my own programming.

So your decision tree here, is:
1) make sure your form is good (video & form check if you haven't already)
2) guess whether you are recovering vs. accumulating stress from deadlift session to deadlift session

If form is good, and you under-recovered -- improve recovery.
This would mean more sleep, more food (protein particularly), maybe less-frequent deadlifts or alternating deadlifts with a less-stressful variant on deadlift sessions.

If form is good, and recovery is good -- add volume.
For example, a backoff set of lighter deadlifts after your main deadlift, or deadlifting 2x week (one heavy, one light) instead of 1x.

Maybe the 2nd set would be a modified deadlift at lighter weight -- 1" deficit or a 1 second pause 1" off the floor, or romanian deadlifts, etc.
These variants all make the lighter deadlift still hard on the muscles w/o being as stressful for the spine as max-weight.

As an example, I deadlift one heavy set of 3, 5, or 8 (on a 3-week cycle) once per week, and deadlift one lighter set of 5 on another day that week.
The light deadlifts are either wide-grip or paused, I'm experimenting.
I *feel* like this is working, but haven't set any new PRs yet, will stick with this for 6 weeks or so to give it a fair chance before trying something different.

Probably I should hire a coach, but I'm a cheapskate. Beware that if you follow my advice, this is a case of the blind leading the blind :-) I *have* read a bunch of books about programming...

[BrooklynJerry]

Sure sounds like solid advice.

[SteveL]

CWD has good advice. One other thing to consider if you are truly maxed out for your size is to start in with Haltings and rack pulls. I finally had to do that and it's working well. I spend four weeks alternating with them and then attempt a new PR with a set of five deadlifts. I've been doing that for a little over three months and it's going well. However I think I'd start with what cwd stated first.