Counterpoint: there's plenty of coaches out there that teach/reinforce bad form.
> And if you are a beginner, any attempt to do these exercises will invariably contain so many mistakes that they are not worth doing any more.
I totally disagree. StrongLifts (and the Starting Strength book it derives from) starts you with the empty bar. Unless you have a serious medical condition, putting 20kg on your back / chest is unlikely to result in serious bodily harm or damage to musculature. As you slowly and steadily increase the weight on the bar, you discover places where your form needs improvement. At least, that's how it worked for me (I only made it to ~100kg squats though).
Of course it's great if you can find a good coach. But I think an app like StrongLifts is a viable+reasonable substitute for a coach.
It's not that a beginner cannot put 20kg on their back or chest. It's that a beginner does not know how to safely put that 20kg on their back or chest. Especially the chest.
Also some exercises like the deadlift can't be done with an empty bar. Stronglifts would ask you to start with 95lbs which is too much.
To me your comment is toxic and reeks of a sense of superiority and elitism from your own experience. You labelled everyone who can't put 20kg to be someone having a serious medical condition. That's both untrue and disrespectful.
> As you slowly and steadily increase the weight on the bar, you discover places where your form needs improvement.
Please no. The beginner does not discover places where the form needs improvement. The beginner simply fails to lift after increasing the weight. The beginner injures themselves when they thought they could lift but they did not.
The StrongLifts program starting with an empty bar is not right. They should've started with a PVC pipe with the same dimensions as a bar to practice form.
My advice: find a coach and ask him/her to supervise you if you can afford it. If you can't, still find a coach for your first month doing these exercises and then switch to the app.
> Please no. The beginner does not discover places where the form needs improvement. The beginner simply fails to lift after increasing the weight. The beginner injures themselves when they thought they could lift but they did not.
This assertion is contradicted by the hundreds of thousands of people (myself included) who have progressed beyond the beginner stage after starting out with the 20kg bar and without ever requiring the intervention of a human coach.
That said, I would have benefited from one. I had to completely deload and relearn my squat form because I was consistently leaning forward and de-emphasizing my posterior chain (now it's my best lift).
Speaking from experience, it's really pretty difficult to cause yourself an acute injury (i.e., worse than a nasty bruise) with 20kg if your form even resembles the squat, bench, or deadlift.
Granted, 20kg can be a big starting weight for overhead press, and if you're a petite woman you may initially need an alternative to the Olympic barbell even for the others.
Also, deadlifts are kind of tricky: a bare bar on the floor is a deficit deadlift. But a couple of blocks can solve this issue.
Wow, weight lifting is seriously ‘gate-kept’. GP needs to chill, he’s being elitist, and forgetting PTs are super expensive. I followed Stronglifts to 110kg, and just started again after 4 years. It’s fun. It’s easy. You focus on few, simple exercises, so form is easy to do well if you try.
> And if you are a beginner, any attempt to do these exercises will invariably contain so many mistakes that they are not worth doing any more.
I totally disagree. StrongLifts (and the Starting Strength book it derives from) starts you with the empty bar. Unless you have a serious medical condition, putting 20kg on your back / chest is unlikely to result in serious bodily harm or damage to musculature. As you slowly and steadily increase the weight on the bar, you discover places where your form needs improvement. At least, that's how it worked for me (I only made it to ~100kg squats though).
Of course it's great if you can find a good coach. But I think an app like StrongLifts is a viable+reasonable substitute for a coach.