First post, dang, I should really talk more crap on the forums 
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I don’t think SSOC really forces any other Starting Strength coach to stop offering online coaching. It’s definitely a conflict, but not one that can’t be worked out. In the past lots of coaches offered online coaching on their own. They send you programs to follow, you send them videos of the workouts and they would coach your form and help guide you in making programming modifications if they thought you needed it. Lots of Starting Strength coaches offered that type of service independently. For that matter lots of Instagram fitness personalities offer that kind of thing.
SSOC is a service that allows people who don’t have their hearts set on one certain coach to get paired up with somebody basically at random who they can trust will at a minimum coach their form to the standards of a Starting Strength Coach. In a manner eerily similar to the service Barbell Medicine offers. So far as I have heard nobody has ever said that all SSC’s who want to offer online coaching must do so through SSOC, just like I’m sure nobody is saying Alan Thrall has to shut down his gym to avoid competing with online coaching through BBM.
It remains to be seen whether any SSC’s who aren’t coaching through SSOC will be able to maintain and grow their online coaching businesses independently. I think that any who have developed a significant online presence independent of Rip and the official Starting Strength channels will be alright but the ones who leaned primarily on their association with the Starting Strength brand to bring them business will hurt if they don’t get on the SSOC train.
chuckle Perhaps the SSOC new trainee “questionnaire” should have a question on if they are interested in using RPE (rated 0-5) and paired with a SSC accordingly.
Or to get more to the point:
Whether you had a Dad that loved you and taught you how to be a man or whether you’re looking for a male role model to teach you about the hardships of life by gutting out RPE 10 lifts and not getting much stronger.
Yes. yes it does.
If you pay someone $200/month to get you stronger, I think it’s fair to expect them to use all the data at their disposal to get you stronger as quickly as possible, instead of wasting time trying to inflate your “novice LP” numbers for internet bragging rights and gutting out RPE 10s that aren’t actually increasing your strength to prove to them you’re not a pu**y.
DUP programs are high frequency and high volume; that ain’t very fun, and it’s dreadful for the majority of SSOC’s demographic. Old people don’t wanna pay $200/month to do 6x5 on Monday, 3x6 on Wednesday, and 4x6 on Friday.
Right? For some in the SS community, it does seem to come down to are you man enough to unnecessarily beat yourself up training? I was man enough to try, and I’m man enough to think I could be wrong.
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Drill Seargent took care of that need tyvm.
And now we’ve got a special treat for you folks, it’s the first edition of the monkeysphere tribal comedy hour. Towards the halfway point of the thread it gets even worse than this and devolves into a bunch of name calling so I’m done for now. But there is so much hilarity here. RPE is a fad created to fleece people. Any talk or RPE on SS is trolling. If you can’t set a new 5RM every week it’s your fault. And last but not least, RPE is for leftists. I didn’t realise it was political.
The reason I moved over to this forum is because it is a fresh start, rather than any tribal allegiance (though I would be tempted to move over now because of the way the lines have been drawn over there with Rip repeatedly trying to herd dissenters over here to get them out of his goatee). When and if this forum ever gets as popular it will be probably be time to move on again because any serious discussion of training will be impossible.
I have to agree with you, Mark. I have also seen a lot of training ideas (Fads) come and go, most are designed to fleece the public out of their money. I think the RTS/RPE thing is just the latest fad that will eventually fade away like so many others have.
Oh yeah, this looks as simple as simple could be. http://articles.reactivetrainingsyst…/RPE-chart.png
Let’s imagine how hard this set was. Then let’s imagine how to load the next set or workout. John Lennon would have loved it.
I’ve been lifting on and off since age 15 in 1965 and have tried a bunch of other high falutin’ highly touted stuff.
As such, I doubt I have been an intermediate since my 30’s in 1982 or so.
I’ve done Tudor Bompa periodization micro, meso, and macrocyles. I’ve done Point of Flexion training. I’ve done Nautilus, HIT, and Hardgainer. I’ve done lockouts and partial reps.
God knows, there are nearly a dozen other Shit Hot Tickets too along the way. I suspect if I had stuck to things promulgated by Starr, Hise, and McCallum, I’d have done waaaay better in my lifting sooner.
I view strength training as a lifelong endeavor. After you have tried all the trends for yourself and start seeing them come back around again you might have enough wisdom to figure out what works. And it usually is sets of 5, add a little weight, rinse and repeat
RTS/RPE is nothing more than the latest fad. I’ll stick with the tried and true training methods used by Kazmaier, Kuc, Furnas, Bridges, Pacifico, Coan, Karwoski, etc, etc, etc…
I never dreamed that so many RPE Trolls would show up to continue what Igor started. It’s pretty darn pathetic.
Pray enlighten us Glasshoppah. If 9 is the Shit Hot Magic Number that the New Incarnation of the Iron Gods hath decreed are the keys to progress, then why construct a table that starts at 5.5 and increments it’s way up from there to 6, 6.5, 7, 7.5, 8, and finally, 8.5? What do those other waypoints along the Sacred Metrics Way contribute? Are they the marks of The Beast?
If you failed a 5rm then you didn’t do something right leading up to the event of 5rm
You are not discussing, you and your Leftist Land pals are trolling.
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I believe you guys are referring to a certain group of stunted adolescents who never grew up. There is nothing tough or manly about being a dip-shit.
Being an adult (man or woman) means having the brains and guts to take responsibility for yourself and your actions. The only real freedom we have is to take responsibility for ourselves. Otherwise you are just a victim or a slave.
That’s how I see it anyway.
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Also I don’t understand the people who look at RPE and say it is too complicated. I mean, to do percentage based programs you have to multiply. To do an RPE based program you may have to multiply twice. I know, it is way too hard! You would think with the mental toughness built up from grinding out all those high intensity reps, an extra math step wouldn’t be daunting.
A DUP program doesn’t have to be high volume. Most reps are at 70% or 80% of 1RM, so the volume isn’t that difficult. You also don’t need as much rest between sets. People often report that this style feels better and is much easier to recover from than the programming favored by grind it out advocates.
For example, squat 1@7, 3x5, 3x4 @70 on Monday, 1@8, 3x1@85% on Wednesday and 4x3@80% on Friday.
The one that really got me was a guy who “always left a rep in the tank” when he trained, yet the ideas of assigning that set a number (@9) or even of doing any sets with more than a rep in a tank were too complex/fancy/unnecessary.
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I actually found it so similar to loading, frequency and volume to my current percentage based program I decided rating warm up sets superfluous. Thus I invented my own version which only modifies my work set intensity based on my last warm up set. Only rating one set really saves on time and confusion.
Gotta strike while the autoregulation irons hot I reckon.
As soon as I can invent a catchy acronym, I’ll be hiring a web designer and taking food out of the mouths of those bullish RPE promoters Tuchscherer, Baraki and Feigenbaum…
Oh yeah and this thought while I was training tonight…
Since the mantle seems to be be shifting.
Is there a starting strength with no Rip?
I don’t think so. I can’t think of anyone funny and charismatic enough to replace him…
Maybe that YouTube guy Alan Thrall…oh wait NVM!
So I listened to this on a drive this morning…wow. Austin, thanks so much for recommending it! I’m setting a reminder on my phone to re-listen to it once a month for the next quarter - it’s that important.
Highly, highly recommend others listen to it if you haven’t already.
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That podcast was a gem, just listened to it. Would recommend it to others also. I mean I initially though the concept was kind of obvious - but was not expecting the depth of the issue to be so extensive.
I’m not endorsing everything you said here or that anyone has said in this thread, but I can sympathize with some of it. I too have been a little put off recently by SS and have been more convinced by what BBM is saying in this particular disagreement and in general just by the sorts of things they discuss. It all seems like it’s happened very quickly, though.
Personally, I’m not going to go out of my way to talk down Starting Strength, Rip, or SSOC/Barbell Logic podcast. Whatever their faults, that organization has made a huge positive difference in my life and I will still recommend it whole-heartedly to the untrained/poorly trained. Rip’s message, delivered the way he has delivered it (I really hope this whole episode doesn’t make him say “F it” and go full-bore a-hole in all aspects), was exactly the sort of thing I needed to hear to ACTUALLY start really training and change my body and life. I think it’s a unique message/delivery combination that is still needed and uniquely capable of convincing a lot of people to get strong.
That said, I’m a big fan of what BBM delivers as well, and Jordan and Austin have something special going. It’s still early yet, though.
In the end, I think it will all be a positive development. Will it drive Rip over the edge? Hope not. Will it humble Reynolds and Hambrick a bit? Hope so. I don’t want to hear anymore about ILP.
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Sometimes our desire to “win” the argument over shadows our ability to discuss new ideas and find truths together through the refinement of debate.
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I agree Badfish that whatever the faults of the SS crew, they have been a force for positive change in our lives. I would definitely recommend the SS techniques and have done so often, but when an option like BBM or anyone else comes along that presents the best parts of the SS material, but without the same downsides, I’ll more likely recommend that as a source of information.
I think this is almost an Innovator’s Dilemma type of problem for SS. I think it is very hard for them to walk away from the unhelpful YNDTP culture, the bullying on their forums which starts with Rip at the top, the political crap, etc. They’ve been a success in spite of that stuff, because the program and techniques work. Taking it to the next level probably requires dumping that stuff and I just don’t think that Rip or any of the rest of them are interested in that (which is their free choice of course).
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