- Choose the number of sessions you can for sure commit to.
- Don’t get too Napoleonic
- Spread evenly in the week
- Train all target muscles every session
- Choose Compound exercise for the most efficiency
- Focus on technique
- Choose exercises you have access to
- Alternating Supersets may be used if short on time
- Use 5-10 rep range. This range is heavy enough and enough reps to build strength and gains. No so heavy or so many reps that technique will fall down.
- Use warm-up sets to find the challenging weights to make a baseline for each exercise. Start first week with 1 challenging set of each exercise.
- Update the program each week.
- Add weight (+2.5-5%) next week when you do 10 reps with solid technique.
- Add rep (+1-2 as long as under 10 reps) and/or weight (+2.5-5%) next week when you get between 5 and 9 reps with solid technique.
- Add set (+1) when:
- current numbers of sets never feels exhausting
- you never feel pump in the muscles
- soreness heals WELL AHEAD of your next session
- If accumulated Fatigue is too high, do a deload week.
- After a few month of productive training, a deload, you are ready to build your next program (mesocycle) on top of the last one.
- You can use the same exercises, unless there’s a reason to change it. Ref: When to replace an exercise
- After choosing the exercises you need to restart weights and reps:
- For new exercises: Warming up to challenging weights
- For continued exercises:
- Warm-up to a set of 3-5 reps with your last week’s (before deload) weight
- Try a hard set with that weight and stop when it gets pretty tough.
- If you hit more than 10 reps, increase the load a bit next time.
- If you hit between 5-10 reps, keep the load.
- Restart the number of sets.
- Start with just one set of each exercise.
- If you have a gnarly pump and some serious fatigue, stop and move onto the next exercise.
- If the pump is meh and you barely got tired, do another set right there and reassess.
- Doing more than 2-3 sets per exercise in the first week of a mesocycle is a bad idea for beginners in most cases. Even if you don’t feel super simulated from 3 sets per exercise, move on anyway. You can always increase sets next week. Why? Because you’ll do more damage than good.
- Start with just one set of each exercise.
- Go to step 5 and follow the same progression.
What next
This kind of training can be comfortably followed for 2-3 years or even more and get excellent results.
Throw an additional training day per week if you love the training and recovering super well every few mesocycles.
If you want got to the next level in you training:
Examples
Progression example with multiple sets:
