Originally Posted by
mitchless
If you've read Practical Programming, you should have seen the chart towards the back in the "Special Populations" section on training youths. On that chart, you will find that training injuries are very, very rare though more common than powerlifting competition injuries. I was surprised by this in two ways:
1. Given the crazy things done to exploit the limits of the rules of powerlifting (gear, odd positions to limit the range of motion, etc.), I expected more injuries.
2. Given the idiocy I've witnessed in the gym -- usually on the bench press -- I expected more injuries.
Life is not a risk-free endeavor, no matter how much people want it to be. Attempts to mitigate risk require resources (cost) and usually create the opportunity for different risks (moral hazard). All in all, if one trains in accordance with the program as laid out in Starting Strength one will train with minimal risk. I highly doubt that the novice trainee will be strong enough to tear a pec or rupture a bicep tendon doing The Program. However, as training advances beyond the Novice stage and the weights get heavy that all changes. The harder and further any of us pushes our bodies, the closer we are to injury. Someone will no doubt correct me if I'm wrong, but I know of no device that can measure how near one is to his physical limit.
What that means is the inevitably someone will rupture a bicep tendon doing speed deadlifts, or tear a pec on a bench press, or rupture a patellar tendon under a squat. These are things that can happen during normal training -- not a silly tandem barbell curl or rappelling with sketchy ropes like Calum Van Moger. But for most of us, that isn't going to happen either because we're lucky or we just aren't pushing that hard. It is, in my opinion, good to think about these things and humbling to remember. The reward, however, far outweighs the risk.
But that wasn't your original question :-)
The question of imperfections in the Starting Strength method is a far more complicated one, as evidenced by other treads on the forum. It requires the follow up questions of "perfect for what?" and "perfect for whom?" The Starting Strength method is primarily for training novices. Beyond the novice stage, the principals behind the Starting Strength method still apply but things slowly become more complicate; more training variables are manipulated on different schedules to drive a strength adaptation. I don't at what point your training could be considered "beyond" the Starting Strength method; someone else can answer that. But I would observe that the training injuries I'm aware of in the Starting Strength authors took place well after their novice period. I'm pretty sure Andy Baker was training in the womb.
Based on what I know, I don't think any changes to the Starting Strength method will reduce the already small chance of training injury. That's one of the reasons I use it with my father, who has muscular dystrophy. I don't know that he'll ever squat 225 and I don't think he'll ever press 100, but he is moving better and is slowly regaining some of what he lost when he suddenly cut weight in a desperate attempt to avoid type 2 diabetes (it failed).