✦Fitness · 13 recordsStart strength training

Beginners make progress on almost any programme, so the plan is deliberately plain: a few compound movements, three times a week, adding a little each session. What it actually protects is technique early and consistency later, which is where this fails.

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Goal

Still training three times a week in four months Month 4

Consistency and technique. The weight follows both.

Learn the movements Week 6

Cheap to learn now, expensive to unlearn later.

  • Pick the programme and stop reading about programmesDo firstDay 3
  • Book two or three sessions with a coachWeek 2
  • Film one set of each lift and watch it backWeek 6

Add weight slowly Month 4

The smallest increment, only when the last session was clean.

  • Record the starting weightsDay 7
  • Review the numbers at six weeksWeek 6
  • Review again at four months and change one thingMonth 4

Routines

  • Strength sessionweekly
  • Sleep seven hoursdaily
Skills
  • Strength trainingBeginner → Intermediate

    Log the sessions here. Technique and consistency are the things improving early on, and neither shows up on the bar.

✦ It comes with a note

Boring on purpose

Beginners make progress on almost any sensible programme, so the programme is not the interesting variable. Turning up and not getting hurt are.\n\nAdd the smallest increment available, and only after a clean session. Adding faster feels like progress for about six weeks and then stops, usually with something tweaked.

✦ Questions

Start strength training, answered.

Three, on non-consecutive days, which is what this plan assumes. More days is not better early on — recovery is when the adaptation happens, and a fourth session mostly adds a reason to miss one.
By the smallest increment available, whenever the last session was completed with good technique. Adding faster feels like progress for about six weeks and then stops abruptly, usually with something tweaked.
Not necessarily, but a few sessions early are unusually good value. Technique errors on loaded movements are both easy to build in and expensive to unlearn, and a coach catches in ten minutes what a video will not.
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