Programs like Stronglifts

This overview looks at the powerliftingtowin program and starting Strength as alternatives for beginners. Starting Strength might be a good alternative to athletes while the powerliftingtowin program is a good alternative if you are interested in powerlifting.

What is your why

Before we go any further I would like to stop and ask you a couple of questions:

Why do you look for programs like Stronglifts?
Why is Stronglifts not good enough?
Why do you train?
Why are you not happy with the current situation?
What happens if you do nothing?

In fitness, the bottleneck is usually not how you exercise but that you stop exercising altogether. Many beginners go about their research for programs in this way:

What do I want to achieve
How do I achieve it
Why do I want to achieve it

With this approach, you will make a lot of mistakes and train suboptimal. This is how I did it when I started out. The more likely road to success is to about it in this way:

Why do I want to achieve my goal
How do I achieve my goal
What do I want to achieve

If you are not convinced yet look up the TED talk by Simon Sinek. He covers the golden circle of why, how what in a very convincing way. It works for me, maybe give it a try.

The three main motivations in fitness are usually

Looks
Performance
Health

If you are in for the looks you will have a hard time. You are competing with full-time models and actors supported by droves of makeup and digital artists. Good luck if you want to look better than this bunch. If you embark on this road you will be hungry, grumpy and tired. For a good part of the year, you will starve yourself to reach the perfect physique. Diet will be the main driver of your success. Your workouts will support where you want to go but not be the main ingredient. Your choices will not always be healthy or helping performance, but you will look good on a poster.

If you are all about performance you don’t care that much about the gym. You want to break records and win trophies. Fitness is a means to that end. Exercises will be picked according to how much carryover they have to your selected sport. Your diet will fuel your ambition but not be the main driver. Intensity is what propels you forward. Even to the breaking point. You will get injured at least once in your career if you want to make it to the top. Learn how to deal with it. Your choices will not always be healthy or pretty but you will be calm and contempt when you’ve won the trophy.

The last group is mainly interested in health. Your choices stay away from extremes. Therefore you are very unlikely to be stressed or get injured. You can try a lot of different diets and exercise regimes as you don’t care what they do to your performance or looks. You might not make the cover of Vogue or win the Super Bowl. You just watch the madness go by while sipping on your tea.

Stronglifts

Stronglifts is a staple for lifting beginners. Even though it is disliked by many coaches because of its lack of specificity it gained a lot of traction. This is mainly due to its simplicity and effectiveness. You will train three days a week on Stronglifts using the following exercises:

Barbell squat
Barbell bench press
Barbell row
Barbell overhead press
Barbell deadlift

You will squat every session while all other exercises are being rotated. The program starts with an empty bar except for the deadlift and row.

The aim is to complete 5 sets of five repetitions per exercise except for the deadlift. The deadlift is programmed in at 5 repetitions per week. If you succeed you go up in weight. If you fail three times in a row you deload.

The biggest advantages of Stronglifts are its simplicity and effectiveness. You will always know whether you are progressing in the right direction or not. The free app is also a great help to achieve this.

The biggest disadvantages of the program are its lack of specificity and marketing. Especially if you deviate far from the average you Stronglifts will be suboptimal. Very small and light individuals might overtrain on Stronglifts while very large individuals will undertrain. In total Stronglifts is a middle of the road program between muscle and strength gains. Don’t expect exorbitant results in either direction like the website might make you believe.

Starting Strength

Starting Strength is the other popular beginner program with a middle of the road approach. It also utilizes sets of five with linear progression. The main difference is that Starting Strength incorporates the clean as an exercise which Stronglifts does not.

Another main difference is that Starting Strength has a more American approach and therefore has closer ties to football. It is not unlikely that the strength coach of your local team is a fan of Starting Strength.

The biggest advantage of Starting Strength vs Stronglifts is its higher attention to explosiveness. If you want to clean instead of rowing this is the program for you.

The biggest disadvantage is the trainer. While Mark Rippetoe is an excellent strength coach I find his instructions convoluted. Mehdi from Stronglifts is more beginner friendly if you have no strength coach at hand to translate.

Powerlifting to win program

The powerlifting to win program is a beginner program specifically designed for powerlifters.

You will also work on a similar schedule as with Stronglifts. The main difference to Stronglifts is that the powerlifting to win program incorporates autoregulation. Simply put autoregulation means that you keep going when there is more gas in the tank. Stronglifts caps you at 25 repetitions per exercise. This is especially counterproductive when you are stronger than that. Powerliftingtowin takes care of that.

The biggest advantage of this program compared to Stronglifts is that you can progress quickly to higher loads.

The biggest disadvantage of this is that complete beginners have no clue how to autoregulate. This brings the injury risk up of the training is done unsupervised.

What should you do instead of Stronglifts?

If you are not sure yet whether you want to get stronger or bigger your choice most likely is between starting Strength and Stronglifts. Football players might tend towards starting Strength while general strength enthusiasts veer towards Stronglifts. If you have a personal trainer around make use of the money you paid for the gym membership and get a second opinion.

Powerliftingtowin is a good option if you already know your way around a barbell. If you can comfortably control yourself on an AMRAP set this might be for you. If you have to look up AMRAP while reading this don’t do the powerliftingtowin program unsupervised.

If your main interest is Muscle you might want to look at Gironda 8x8 and German Volume Training. I did not include them in the article as they are not programs like Stronglifts. However, sometimes you get into a rabbit hole when you started at “how to get bigger”. The simple answer is a lot of food and reps.