This is an interesting take, not that you asked my opinion. It's strange to me that you'd recommend against starting strength to a beginner. I love isolated lifts as well, don't get me wrong - they're essential, especially if you're targeting specific weak links effecting form and functionality.
Basically no professional who isn't already indoctrinated into the SS ecosystem recommends starting strength to anyone anymore - even if you want to focus on compound movements, it's just not a well put together program. Elite high school programs moved on, people training adults moved on, etc. It's just not good:
Very low volume per muscle for most muscles. It's just not anywhere near enough to grow at an efficient rate, and if we're talking about day to day functionality, you do not need to be lifting close to your 1RM max for CNS adaptations. Muscle growth + CNS adaptations is how you increase strength, and even powerlifters and olympic weightlifters have long since changed to having hypertrophy blocks in their periodization.
Huge frequency imbalance. You hammer squats, squats, squats, and more squats. Triceps is all incidental work. What bicep work? This plays into the volume - and volume near failure is king for muscle growth.
Fixed linear progression, no autoregulation. We know now that linear progression, reset on stall is just not the best way to progress in either strength or hypertrophy. RPE/RIR is king for everyone these days for a reason, as is progressive overload on multiple axis. Increase reps, increase weight, more rarely increase sets. Fixed rep ranges are just outright bad for both strength and hypertrophy. Even powerlifters who compete on 1RM spend a significant portion of their time in different rep ranges.
Stops well short of failure. Strength and muscle grow best when you work close to failure. It's not just a matter of "training hard" - your muscle receives most of the growth stimulus and your get most of your CNS adaptation when in that 0-3 RIR range.
And this is before you get into things you are likely to run into when being involved in SS that aren't program specific, but are Ripp specific - like his absurd hatred for trap bars for deadlifts. If we're talking functional strength, trap bar deadlifts are about as "functional" as it gets - who carries in their groceries with a barbell deadlift grip? When you carry heavy boxes, do you pick them up with an inward facing grip on opposite sides, or put both your hands under it on one side? Most people doing everyday things can save themselves tearing the shit out of their shins and get as much or more out of a trap bar deadlift.
Starting Strength and Ripp himself were gigantic boons to the world decades ago when all orts of people were afraid of picking up a barbell. Now, they're both stuck on a decades old understanding of how we build muscle and strength.
I do understand what you're getting at, and respect your take. While I agree aesthetics are important, I don't think the benefits of isolated movements for the sake of vanity outweigh the benefit of functional compound lifts for a newbie. Football players need to jump, hinge, push and pull - so do the average Joe's. Hypertrophy and isolated lifts are not mutually exclusive.
Acting like it's just aesthetics is an inaccurate representation of the position.
More hypertrophy, more muscle mass, better metabolic health. I'm not going to play up the whole "muscle burns more calories than fat" bit because the BMR difference is not huge unless you have literally years of training, but muscle mass is huge in preventing insulin resistance and diabetes.
Basically every muscle
I also never said don't do compound movements - I said a program that has more isolation movements in it than starting strength is going to be beneficial. I explicitly stated that bench, squat, and deadlift should be in every program, even!
One of the biggest benefits of compound movements is that you can only increase the weight to the max of your weakest muscle participating in that set, at the same time you have other options to hit hypertrophy for stronger muscles. If done properly, leaving ego behind, this prevents injury - I've seen too many folks focus on their pretty muscle groups ignoring others and ultimately injuring themselves because supportive muscle groups aren't being developed in unison with the larger pretty muscle groups. It's up there with folks who bodybuild and spend zero time to train mobility or fibers.
This is one of those things that gets repeated all of the time yet there is actually zero real evidence out there that this is a thing. You'd see more injuries from people doing bodybuilding style lifting than others, and you just don't. Body-builders have plenty of compound lifts they perform that also have muscles that are strengthened by additional isolation work they do
- they all have leg extensions and leg curls in their rotation, and despite having "overdeveloped" their quads and hamstrings, they don't go rip their body in half when they squat or deadlift. Meta-analysis frequently show basically entirely similar injury rates between the two (Or, actually, higher for free weights - but because people drop the weights on themselves, lol)
Background The effectiveness of strength training with free-weight vs. machine equipment is heavily debated. Thus, the purpose of this meta-analysis was to summarize the data on the effect of free-weight versus machine-based strength training on maximal strength, jump height and hypertrophy...
bmcsportsscimedrehabil.biomedcentral.com
Like, your fundamental argument just isn't logical on all of this - compound lifts limit your injury risk because doing that lift is limited by the weakest muscle (This actually varies from untrue to gross oversimplification - the actual cap on any lift is joint torque in the toughest region of the lift for you. There's also A LOT of momentum in compound lifts), yet people doing the equivalent of compound lift in day-to-day life aren't limited by the weakest muscle and instead just injure themselves.
And we should look at what the most common type of lifting related injury is, in everyday life or otherwise, and what sort of training prevents it.
Myotendinous junction injuries are the most common - where the muscle and tendon meet. How do we strengthen this? Slow heavy reps with eccentric emphasis. You know what sort of movement is the exact opposite of this? The power clean.
If you're just starting out, compound movements keep it simple and are the foundation to good form. Start adding in unecessary complexities right away and it gets overwhelming, even with a step by step program on an app. Going from zero gym time to 1.5- 2 hours a day trying to complete all your sets can feel defeating.
Who said anything about 1.5 to 2 hours a day? I have a very overkill program that takes 20 to 24ish sets per workout across 7-8 different exercises each day and I still am in and out in roughly an hour. Most people will make great progression with far less.
Compound movements directly relate to everyday functionality - power cleans, because I want to be able to pick my 100lb kid up from the floor to my chest without struggling or decimating my posterior chain or hip flexors. Overhead presses, because I need the ability to put a heavy tote back up on the garage shelf without hurting myself. Training full range of motion and power with concentric and eccentric movement under load within a functional movement is the foundation to your body aging well. You can have a real pretty muscles, but they're worthless if they can't perform when you need them to.
I can guarantee you bodybuilders can pick up their 100lb kid from the floor to their chest without issue despite never doing a power clean. You sit here and talk about needing eccentric movement under load and are advocating for an exercise that has literally no eccentric.
There are specific issues with overhead presses that make them extremely injury prone. Many people cannot do them at heavy loads safely/without pain/etc. because of their anatomy. I sometimes have them in my rotation, particularly with dumbbells going to a very deep stretch, but I would never recommend a barbell OHP to anyone.
That being said if you're a newbie with ambition, or have a good starting foundation and want more I'd recommend Marcus Fillys Functional Bodybuilding. Its functional movements, meets isolated pump, meets explosiveness and mobility. I really appreciate what he's done here - more training for complete health over just aesthetics though.
Just my 2 pennies.
I'm impressed you managed to entirely misconstrue a post that is explicit about still keeping compound movements in but adding on additional isolation exercises that reach the aesthetic goals into somehow being just about aesthetics. My argument is SS is an outdated program with poor ideas underpinning it and that basically every program should have additional isolation exercises built in, particularly since it will increase overall muscle mass (health benefit) and physiques (aesthetic benefit). A significant portion of the post that you didn't even touch on also dealt entirely with training adaptations regardless of the lift involved.
