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Progressive overload is the whole reason any of the programmes on this page work: your body only has a reason to get stronger if you keep asking it to do slightly more than it's used to. That's it — everything else is detail.

More weight is the obvious lever, but it's not the only one. More reps at the same weight, more sets, less rest between sets, or better technique that lets you feel the same muscle work harder all count. On a bad week, just holding your numbers steady while everything else in life is hectic is still a win — it's the months-long trend that matters, not any single session.

Pick a rep range for each main lift and try to add either a rep or a small amount of weight every session or two. When you can't add anything for two or three sessions running, that's your cue to either hold at that weight for a week or drop back slightly and build up again.

A warm-up has one job: get the specific joints and muscles you're about to load ready to actually be loaded. A general pulse-raiser (a few minutes of easy cardio) is a fine start, but it isn't a substitute for warming up the lift itself.

Before your first working set of a compound lift, run a few ramp-up sets from light to heavy — something like 50%, 70% and 85% of your working weight for a handful of reps each. By the time you hit your actual working weight, your nervous system has already rehearsed the movement under load.

It's tempting to cut the warm-up when a session is rushed. Trim the accessory work instead and keep the ramp-up on the main lift intact.

Training breaks muscle down; recovery is what builds it back up, stronger than before. Skip the recovery side and you're just accumulating fatigue on top of fatigue, which shows up as stalled lifts, nagging joint pain, and workouts that feel harder than they should.

Most of the hormonal environment that supports muscle repair happens during deep sleep. Aiming for 7–9 hours a night will do more for your recovery than any supplement on the shelf.

Every programme on this page has rest days built in on purpose — they're not padding. If you're adding extra sessions on top of a programme that's already asking a lot of you, fatigue will catch up with you eventually, usually right before the lift you cared about most.

RPE (Rate of Perceived Exertion) and RIR (Reps in Reserve) are two ways of describing the same thing: how many more reps you could have done at the end of a set. RIR 2 means you stopped with two reps left in the tank; that's roughly RPE 8 on the more common 1–10 scale.

A percentage on paper assumes your 1-rep max is accurate and that you're feeling exactly the same every session — neither is ever quite true. If a wave's "80% for 5" suddenly feels like an RIR 0 grind instead of the RIR 2–3 it should be, that's useful information: your true max has probably moved, or you're carrying fatigue from somewhere else in life.

On accessory work especially, aim to leave 1–3 reps in reserve on most sets, and treat RPE as a sense-check against the numbers on the bar — not a replacement for them.

Rest days get treated as the empty space between workouts, but how you use them affects how ready you are for the next session almost as much as the workout itself does.

A full rest day doesn't have to mean the sofa. Light movement — a walk, an easy bike ride, some mobility work — keeps blood flowing to recovering muscle without adding meaningful fatigue, and tends to leave people feeling better than doing nothing at all. Save true passive rest (actually doing nothing) for when you're genuinely run down, rather than making it the default.

This comes down to how many days you're training and how hard. Someone on a 2- or 3-day full-body programme can often get away with active rest most days; someone running a 6-day split like Push/Pull/Legs needs at least one full rest day built in, and should treat the lighter days on those splits as genuine recovery, not an excuse to add extra volume.

A resting heart rate that's creeping up on waking, motivation to train dropping off, or the same weight suddenly feeling much heavier than it did two weeks ago are all signs you're carrying more fatigue than your rest days are clearing. That's the point to either add a rest day, or bring forward whatever deload week is already built into the programme you're running, rather than pushing through.

None of the above matters much if sleep isn't there — see Recovery Is Not Optional above for why that's the single biggest lever. Think of rest days as topping up what a bad night's sleep can't fix on its own.

The programmes above are ordered by level for a reason — starting in the right place matters more than most people think.

If you're new to structured training, start with SP First Steps, SP Foundations or, if you prefer machines, SP Machine Full Body rather than anything with a wave or split structure. The goal in the first few months is learning the movements and building the habit, not optimising anything.

Linear progression — adding a little weight every session — stops working for most people somewhere between three and twelve months in, depending on how consistent they've been. When you're missing reps on the same lift two or three sessions running despite resting and eating properly, that's usually the sign a beginner programme has done its job, and it's time to move to something with more structure, like SP Push / Pull / Legs or SP Upper / Lower.

It's tempting to jump to a more complicated programme the moment progress feels slow, but a stall lasting one or two weeks is normal, not a sign the programme's broken. Give it a fair run before deciding you've outgrown it.

Periodisation is just a plan for how training changes over time, instead of doing the same sets and reps indefinitely. One common style is a wave — four weeks with a different rep and intensity focus each week, then a deload, then repeat.

Because it stops working. The body adapts to a specific type of stress, so training the same rep range at the same relative intensity produces smaller and smaller returns over time. Deliberately shifting between building volume, intensifying load, and peaking for a heavier single gives the body different stimuli to adapt to, and the deload week lets fatigue clear before it becomes a problem rather than after.

Track your top set or estimated 1-rep max at the start of each new wave cycle. Small, steady increases cycle over cycle are the sign the structure is doing its job — a flat or declining trend over two full cycles is usually a sign to check recovery, food, and sleep before changing the programme itself.

A written programme can't know how you slept last night or how stressed this week's been. Autoregulation means using RPE or RIR (see the article above if you haven't already) to adjust the actual weight on the bar around a fixed effort level, rather than a fixed number — SP Autoregulated Strength above is built entirely around this.

Early in a training block, or on lower-RPE prescribed sets, push through mild "I don't feel like it" days — motivation dips are normal and usually aren't a real signal. The plan wins most of the time.

If a prescribed RPE 8 set consistently feels like RPE 9–10 across multiple sessions, or a joint feels off rather than just a muscle feeling tired, that's a genuine signal — drop the weight for that session, or bring the deload forward. Autoregulation only works if you're honest about the difference between "this is hard" and "something's actually off."

Using autoregulation as an excuse to always go lighter. It's a two-way tool — on a day where a prescribed RPE 8 set feels like RPE 6, that's permission to add weight beyond what the plan assumed, not just a ceiling to stay under.

Muscle grows in response to mechanical tension — fibres being made to produce force against a meaningful load, repeatedly, close enough to their limit that the body treats it as a problem worth solving. Almost everything else people argue about online is a way of delivering that tension more or less efficiently. If you understand this one sentence you can evaluate most training advice yourself.

The practical dose of tension is the hard set: a set taken close enough to failure that the last two or three reps genuinely slow down. Sets stopped five reps short mostly build fatigue and confidence, not muscle. The research consensus lands somewhere around ten to twenty hard sets per muscle per week for most people, and the relationship is not linear — going from five sets to ten changes a lot, going from twenty to thirty usually changes very little and costs a great deal of recovery.

Rep range matters less than people think. Anything from about five to thirty reps builds muscle if the set is taken close to failure. Six to twelve is popular because it is the sweet spot for effort versus time: heavy enough that sets are short, light enough that you are not fighting the bar for every rep. Use the heavier end for compounds where the limiting factor is force, and the lighter end for isolation work where you can chase the burn without wrecking a joint.

You also have to eat. Protein around 1.6 grams per kilogram of bodyweight per day is where the benefit flattens out for most people — past that you are simply not getting more for it. See the protein article for the range and a worked example. Beyond protein, building tissue takes energy, so a small surplus makes gaining meaningfully easier. Complete beginners and people returning after a layoff can often gain muscle and lose fat at once; if you have been training seriously for years, you generally cannot, and pretending otherwise wastes months.

If you are new, your job is narrower than the internet suggests. Learn a handful of movements properly, add weight or reps almost every session while that is still possible, and eat enough. Your first six months of progress will be startlingly fast, and most of it is your nervous system learning to recruit what you already have rather than new tissue. That is not a criticism — it is free progress, and the strength is real. Just do not build your expectations around it continuing.

The one beginner mistake worth naming: changing programme every three weeks because progress feels slow. It is not slow. You are comparing week three to week two. Pick something sensible, run it for at least eight to twelve weeks, and judge it on whether the numbers in your log went up.

Once the easy progress stops — usually somewhere in year one or two — the job changes. You can no longer add weight weekly, so you add volume and precision instead. This is the point where tracking earns its keep: without a log you genuinely cannot tell whether you are progressing or maintaining. It is also where exercise selection starts to matter, because you now have enough control to load a muscle properly rather than just move the weight from A to B.

Intermediate lifters usually get the most from two things. First, hitting each muscle roughly twice a week rather than annihilating it once — same weekly sets, split across two sessions, generally produces better quality work. Second, learning to manage fatigue: taking a lighter week when performance stalls for two or three sessions running, rather than grinding until something hurts.

Advanced training is mostly an exercise in accepting a worse rate of return. Gains that took weeks now take months, and the honest response is to specialise — push volume on two or three lagging areas for a block while holding everything else steady, then rotate. Trying to grow everything at once, at a level where each muscle needs near-maximal stimulus, is how advanced lifters end up permanently under-recovered and stalled across the board.

The other advanced skill is knowing what is not working. Junk volume — sets performed too far from failure, or on a movement that does not load the target muscle well — costs recovery and returns nothing. Cutting three useless sets is often more productive than adding three more. If a session leaves you wrecked but your log has not moved in two months, the volume is not the answer.

Across all three levels, the thing that predicts progress best is boring: showing up consistently, on a plan you actually follow, with a record of what you lifted. The programmes and the log in this app exist for exactly that. Nothing here is a substitute for coaching or medical advice — if something hurts, or you are training around an injury or a health condition, get a professional to look at it.

A training app has one job: to keep last time in front of you while you train, so today you can do slightly more — a rep, or 2.5kg. That is progressive overload, and a log is how you know it is happening. Everything else is extra, and some exists to keep you opening the app, not getting stronger. Ask the five questions below, be wary of the four things after them, and know where your log lives.

Five questions to ask before you download

1. Can I see last time while I log this time? A tap away is not the same screen.
2. How quickly can I change a set — a missed rep, a heavier bar — between sets, not in a form?
3. Can I get my data out, as a file I can open, without asking anyone?
4. Does it work with no account and no signal? Plenty of weights rooms are in basements.
5. Does it follow a plan, or keep changing it? A programme run for twelve weeks can be compared with itself.

Things that sound helpful and often are not

• Streaks reward showing up, which is fine until the day you should rest — the chain does not know you needed it.
• Badges are the same idea in a different coat: a reward for a milestone the app chose, not one you did.
• Readiness scores are built from what a phone can measure, not how your legs actually feel. The first warm-up set is a readiness check — see the RPE article above.
• A different workout every session feels like progress, but it is question five again: nothing repeats, so nothing can be compared.

None of this is a reason to avoid an app — it is a reason to notice what it is measuring: your attendance, or your lifting.

Where your log lives

UK law gives you the right to ask a company for a copy of your data, but a right you write in for is not a button. Check for an export — a plain file, a CSV, text any spreadsheet opens — before you have anything worth losing.

A NOTEBOOK STILL WORKS. A pad in the gym bag and a spreadsheet at home fail none of the five questions above. An app earns its place by being faster to write in with chalk on your hands, and by doing the arithmetic.

The safety line in this app ends the same way wherever it appears: stop if something hurts rather than aches. That sentence assumes you can tell the two apart, and when you are new to lifting it is not obvious. This is the difference, as plainly as we can put it.

What normal feels like. Muscles you have not trained in a while, or trained in a new way, are often stiff and tender afterwards — usually worst a day or two after the session and gone within the week, which is how NHS physiotherapy guidance describes it too. It is a dull, spread-out ache in the muscle, it eases as you warm up, and it is on both sides if you trained both sides. Being sore is not proof the session was good, and not being sore is not proof it was bad; mostly it means the work was new.

Stop that exercise, and leave it for the day, if you feel

• Sharp or sudden pain, especially in or around a joint, rather than a burn in the muscle.
• Pain in one spot, on one side, that gets worse with each rep instead of easing as you warm up.
• Swelling or redness that was not there before, a pop or a click that comes with pain, or a joint that gives way.
• Numbness, tingling or pins and needles, or pain that runs down an arm or a leg.
• Pain that changes how you move: you are shifting your weight or cutting the range short to get the rep.

Stop the session altogether for these, because they are not training problems. Chest pain or pressure, feeling dizzy or faint, breathlessness that stops you talking, or a heartbeat that is racing or irregular. The NHS says to call 999 for chest pain that comes on suddenly and does not go away, spreads to your arms, neck, jaw, back or stomach, or comes with sweating, feeling sick, dizziness or breathlessness. For anything else that worries you and cannot wait, NHS 111 will tell you where to go.

After you stop. A pain that has not settled within a few days, or that comes back every time you do the same lift, needs a GP or a physiotherapist to look at it. A website cannot, and we are not going to guess. In many parts of the UK you can refer yourself to NHS physiotherapy without seeing a GP first.

Train around it, not through it. A sore knee does not have to mean no training, but it does mean not doing the thing that hurts it. On the Log, Swap for today puts a different lift from the same group in its place for that session without changing your programme; use it, and leave the lift that hurts until it has been looked at. Pushing through pain to keep a run going is exactly the trade this app is built not to ask for: there is no training streak here to protect.

None of this is medical advice, and it cannot account for an injury you already have or a condition you live with. If you are training around either, get it looked at before you load it.

Every line in the programmes here is written the same way: the lift, a dash, then what to do. Once you can read one line you can read all of them, and on the Log the What does this mean? link under each line explains it where you meet it. This is the whole key in one place.

How to read a line

A range, like 3–5 or 30–45s, is room to move, not a target to hit the top of. Stay inside it with good form. When you reach the top of the range on every set, that is the sign to add a little weight next time — the progressive overload article above explains why.

Rest between sets. The American College of Sports Medicine's position stand on resistance training suggests around two to three minutes between sets of the big lifts that move several joints — squats, presses, deadlifts, rows — and about one to two minutes for smaller single-joint lifts like curls and raises. Treat that as a starting point, not a rule: heavier sets need longer, and a set started before you have your breath back is a set done badly. The rest timer on the Log counts up, not down, so it shows how long it has been and sets you no target.

Why the order matters. Each day puts its biggest lift first, while you are fresh, and the smaller ones after it; the same position stand recommends big lifts before small ones and lifts that move several joints before lifts that move one. Keep that order if you can. If the rack or machine you need is taken, Swap for today on the Log puts a lift from the same group in its place for that session, so you do not have to reshuffle the whole day.

Supersets save time: two lifts for different muscles back to back, then one rest. They suit smaller lifts like curls and pushdowns, where one muscle rests while the other works. They do not suit two heavy lifts, which is why the programmes here only pair small ones.

People new to a gym are often told that machines are for beginners and barbells are for people who are serious. The evidence does not back the snobbery. A 2023 review that pooled thirteen studies, covering just over a thousand adults, found no difference in muscle growth between training with free weights and training on machines. What it did find is that strength is specific: people got strongest on the kind of equipment they had trained with.

What each one is good for

• Machines move along a fixed path, so the balancing is done for you and all your effort goes into the push or the pull. They are quick to set up and easy to load in small steps, which is why SP First Steps is built on them: you learn to work hard before you have to learn technique under a bar as well.
• Dumbbells make each side work on its own, so a stronger side cannot carry a weaker one, and they let your hands and elbows find their own path. They take more balance, and the jumps between one pair and the next can be large.
• A barbell is where the heaviest loads live. The squat, bench press, deadlift and overhead press in SP Foundations are barbell lifts because a bar lets you keep adding weight in small steps for a long time. It also asks the most of your technique, which is why the demo and cues in the exercise library are worth a look before your first heavy set.

Most good programmes use all three, and most of ours do. What matters more than the tool is effort — sets taken close to the point where the reps slow down — and doing it for months. Building Muscle: What Actually Drives It, above, explains why.

When to bring a barbell in. When the machine version of a movement feels familiar and you can control the weight all the way down, the barbell version is a reasonable next step. Start with the bar on its own, or the lightest load that lets you practise the movement. There is no deadline for it; Choosing Your First Programme, above, says how to tell when SP First Steps has done its job and SP Foundations, the barbell programme, is next.

Equipment is also a way round a problem. If one version of a movement is uncomfortable, another often is not — a dumbbell press where a barbell press bothers a shoulder, or a machine where a free weight does. Swap for today on the Log makes that change for a session. If it hurts rather than aches, though, read Aches, Pain, And When To Stop, above, first.

Every programme in this app is written as if the week goes to plan. It will not, every week, and the people who get strong are not the ones who never miss. They are the ones who come back the next day without making a drama of it. This is what to do when the week falls apart.

• Missed a session: do the next one. You do not need to make it up, double up or start the week again. The Log picks up the rotation where you left it, so next time it offers the day after the last one you did, whatever the calendar says.
• Short on time: do the first lift of the day properly and trim the rest. The first lift is the one the day is built around, and the smaller lifts after it are where the time can come from. Twenty-five minutes on the main lift is worth far more than a skipped hour.
• Tired, or a hard week: keep the lifts, take a set off each, and stop a rep or two further from failure than usual. A lighter session done does more for next week than a heavy one ground out.
• Ill: rest, and especially with a temperature — NHS physiotherapy guidance says to stop exercising if you have a fever. When you are better, come back lighter.

Coming back after time off. Start lighter than where you left off: a few sessions at a weight that feels easy, then build back up. Strength tends to hold for a while after you stop, and to come back faster than it took to build the first time, so the gap is usually smaller than it feels. The mistake is picking up at your old numbers on the first day and spending the next fortnight sore and discouraged.

Why there is no training streak here. A streak turns a missed session into a loss, and the easiest way to protect one is to train when you should be resting. This app counts the sessions you finished this month and nothing else; there is no chain to break. Missing a Tuesday costs you a Tuesday.

If life is going to stay busy for a while, change the plan rather than failing it. For two days a week, SP First Steps suits someone new and SP Two-Day Full Body suits someone who already knows the lifts; SP Upper / Lower is four days. The Find my programme questions on the programmes screen will point you at one.

Our app sets your training no target and no streak, and puts no score on it. It is also free, and it asks for no account. None of that is a gap waiting to be filled: each one was left out on purpose. This is the reasoning, so you can judge it for yourself.

What it does instead

• Free. Everything in this app is free, and nothing you use now will ever be moved behind a payment. The shop is what pays for it.
• No account. There is nothing to sign up to and no password to forget, and logging works without a signal.
• The log lives on your phone. Nothing you log is sent to us. The catch is that a lost phone takes the log with it, so the Backup screen makes a copy you keep, as text or as a CSV any spreadsheet opens.
• Last time, in front of you. While you log, each exercise shows what you did last time and your best, because that is what you need to choose today's weight.

Why no streak. A streak turns a missed session into a loss. The easiest way to protect one is to train on a day you should rest, or through a pain you should stop for, and both cost more than the session is worth. The Log counts the sessions you finished this month and nothing more: the count starts again each month, and there is no chain to break. The article When Life Gets In The Way says what to do when a week falls apart.

Why no score on your training. A single number for your readiness, or for your day, can only be built from what a phone can measure, and that is not how your legs feel under a bar. A number that rises and falls invites you to chase the number instead of the lifting. The first warm-up sets of a session are a better readiness check, and the article Training By Feel: RPE and RIR explains how to read them.

Why no target in the gym. The programme is the plan and the log is the record, and between them they already say what to try today: the programme's sets and reps, and a little more than last time if last time went well. A target on top of that would be one more number to fail. The rest timer counts up rather than down for the same reason: it shows how long it has been and leaves the decision to you.

Why no target in the Food tab. For someone vulnerable to an eating disorder, a calorie figure to stay under can feed restriction. We cannot see how anyone uses the food log, because we never receive it, so the design has to be safe for everyone by default. The food log has no calorie target and no way to type one. Protein is the number it leads with, because the reason to look at protein is to eat enough of it. Energy figures appear only where you open them, the log keeps 14 days and no more, and the Hide energy figures switch on the What this app keeps page takes them away altogether.

If counting any of this starts to feel compulsive, stop using the numbers. In the UK, Beat runs free helplines and online support at beateatingdisorders.org.uk, and a GP is a reasonable first conversation.

The shop follows the same rule. The bag states the delivery price and the free-delivery threshold, and there is no bar to fill and no countdown.

What it costs. Leaving these out has a price, and it is fair to name it. There is no copy of your log in a cloud, no reminder to come back, and nothing that celebrates a good week for you. If a number to hit is what keeps you training, keep one, on paper or in your head. The app will not set it for you.