Given that the trainee lacks basic athleticism, I’d have them spend at least 6 months playing some sort of sport before they even worried about getting stronger. Something like football, rugby, track/field events, pretty much anything with running, jumping, explosiveness, coordination, balance, etc. I find that, generally, lifters who start out with no athletic foundation spend way too much of their beginning training time sorting out all of these issues (along with having to chase away the mobility boogieman with half hour long warm-ups), and it’s much better to just address this at the start.
After gaining some basic body awareness and attributes from the above, I’d have them train nothing but bodyweight exercises (push ups, dips, chin ups, lunges, sit-ups, etc) and sled pulling for about another 3 months. Dave Tate wrote that no trainee should touch a bench press until they can do 100 push ups (it was the final “Iron Evolution” article published here), and I honestly think it’s incredible advice.
Again, the benefit I see here is that, by building up some strength, endurance and GPP BEFORE a trainee starts lifting, the odds of them getting stuck at a 65lb overhead press greatly diminishes. They’ll already start off with some strength, and in turn their beginning months would be more heavily vectored toward learning the skill of the lifts.
After this part, it’s honestly not too difficult. It’s getting a beginner to do the above which is pretty much impossible. Could do an abbreviated program like Pavel’s 3-5, something like WS4SB, one of the millions of 5/3/1 variations, pretty much whatever keeps them motivated and getting stronger. I personally lived off abbreviated training until I had a 300+ bench, 400+ squat and 500+ deadlift, but I did spend about 1 year doing abbreviated training and 6-9 months following WS4SB over a period of about 3-4 years, so I still had some periods of time where I did higher reps and more specialized work.
I imagine that what I would do that would be unique compared to others is getting the lifter into a 13mm belt as soon as I could and having them do all of their pulling double overhand with straps, while working their grip outside of deadlifts. Additionally, I would rarely have the trainee deadlift from the floor, and instead have them perform block/mat pulls for the majority of their deadlift training to be able to overload the back while minimizing risk for lower back injury. Additionally, when they were learning how to squat, I’d start them with the safety squat bar first so that we can bypass the whole “low bar vs. high bar” nonsense and just get them used to learning the motor pattern of the squat while developing insane upperback strength.
