How to actually start

The most common way to fail at starting is to over-design the beginning. People spend three weeks researching split routines and never train. The correct first program is one you could describe in a sentence.

Week one

Two or three sessions. Each session covers the whole body. Each session has one movement from each of these patterns:

Pattern	Examples
Squat	Goblet squat, leg press, bodyweight squat
Hinge	Romanian deadlift, hip thrust, back extension
Push	Push-up, dumbbell bench press, overhead press
Pull	Row, lat pulldown, assisted pull-up
Carry or core	Farmer’s carry, plank, dead bug

Two or three sets of each. Eight to twelve repetitions. Stop each set with two or three repetitions still in the tank — you should be certain you could have done more.

That is the whole program. It is not a simplified version of a real program; for the first several months it is the real program.

Why so few decisions

Everything that makes training complicated — periodisation, specialisation, advanced intensity techniques — exists to squeeze progress out of bodies that have stopped responding to the simple thing. Yours has not started responding yet. You will improve on almost any stimulus, which means the only variables that matter are whether you turn up and whether you gradually do more.

Spending your attention on program design now is spending it on the wrong problem. Spend it on the two things that actually determine your first six months: consistency, and adding a little each week.

What to deliberately ignore for now

• Supplements. All of them, including the ones that work. The effect sizes are small and they are small relative to nothing, which is what you are currently doing.
• Training to failure. It adds fatigue faster than it adds results, and it makes technique worse at exactly the point you are learning it.
• Anyone’s opinion about the best split. Splits matter when your training volume gets high enough to need dividing. Yours will not for a while.
• Your one-rep maximum. There is no reason to find out.

The one thing that is not optional

Write down what you did. Every set, every weight, every repetition.

This sounds like bookkeeping and it is actually the mechanism. Training works by doing measurably more over time, and you cannot do measurably more than something you did not measure. The difference between people who progress for years and people who plateau in month four is very often just this.

Next in the series: what “doing more” precisely means, and how fast to add.