Starting Strength

My gym is pretty small and you're supposed to do deadlifts in a rather tight power cage.

do them there then.
put padding mats at the sides and do it.

the bar needs to travel vertically close to your body anyway, it doesnt need much horizontal space.

don't really see the point of PCs for non-athletes

helps posterior chain (DL , Squat).
Pendlay rows don't. Hell even chinups are better to that extent.

They shouldn't (see ).

SS with rows isn't SS, and SL is a marketing gimmick dreamt up by someone who never touched a weight in his life.

SS is different because it accounts for the body's decreasing ability to adapt to stress - you add more weight in the first couple of weeks, then taper off, then start only adding weight on monday and friday (for the squat at least) then you get to the point where you only do one topset every workout with backoff sets, or you drop from 3 sets of 5 to 3 sets of 3, until you quite simply CAN'T make linear progress from workout to workout.

SL and other knockoff programs simply don't take account of the novice's ability to adapt quickly to relatively little stress. The extra two sets in SL, for instance, are junk volume, and the advice to start with the bar and add 5lbs to every lift right away is absolute fucking garbage that'll mean you artificially limit your progress and also learn how to do the lifts wrong (unless you start out very weak, squatting a set of 5 with the empty bar is a completely different stress to squatting a set of 5 that's actually heavy for you.) Mehdi has even backpedalled over time to try and make SL more like SS because people started complaining that they were stalling stupidly early.

They're the best way to train rate of force development + calling muscle into contraction for max effort, which is great as an accessory to deadlifts for a novice. Obviously if you're not particularly athletic and you can never get your PC above like 33% of your deadlift as you finish the novice phase, that's the time to consider dropping them. It's also okay not to do them if you're older/have chronic injuries that prevent them being done well. In that case, you simply alternate deadlifts with chins.

Can you comment on Reg Parks 5x5 which Arnold done? Is it also a rip off?

Think of it as a beta version. You'll certainly get stronger using it, but with SS you'll get stronger faster and with less fucking around.

Think about it:

When Park did '5x5' he was actually doing 3 work sets across, worked up to in two jumps at about 50% and about 70%.

So it's effectively 3x5 as well.

The calf raises and wrist work are more or less pointless for a novice as you don't need the extra volume to stimulate growth as deadlifts and squats are already giving them more than enough stress. Might as well drop 'em.

And you don't really need rows. Cleans are better for athletic development and generally less tedious.

As for front squats, they're a bit pointless for a novice - especially since squatting correctly is quite difficult to learn and they'll interfere with that learning process. They're an assistance exercise for the clean and jerk used to strengthen the recovery from a clean. Best to leave them till you start doing the olympic lifts in earnest.

Curls are great and everyone does them, but you don't need them if you're also doing weighted chinups, which have the added advantage of working your back in a way that none of the other main lifts do.

As for dips: depending on your starting bodyweight, you may or may not be able to do them correctly, and especially for weaker novices or those with pre-existing shoulder problems, they can cause more problems than they solve.

And then we're back to SS.

I'd say Park's novice program is overall fine, and you will make progress on it, in the same way that you'll make progress on SL, because as a novice you'll make progress doing ANYTHING.

The thing is, if you do SS and you eat right, you'll have a fairly decent set of lifts after 4 months (e.g. press in the mid 100s, power clean in the high 100s to low 200s, bench in the low-mid 200s, squat in the low-mid 300s, and deadlift in the low 400s.) I don't know of any other program that consistently shows those kind of results.

why is is that i can't add weight at every workout anymore?
squat 100kilo
bench 67
ohp 50
dead 125
power clean 57

I can only add like weekly, the smallest plates are 1.25 kilo so its 2.5kilo which is the smallest i can add.

I been doing it for 4-5 months Is this a recovery issue or am i just genetically weak?

The only reason I can think of is bad form and or not eating well enough, check both.