Programming
Writing your own programme
At some point following someone else’s template stops fitting your schedule, your weak points and your recovery. Writing your own is more straightforward than it looks.
Templates are excellent for beginners and early intermediates. Eventually they stop fitting — you have four days rather than three, a shoulder that dislikes one movement, a weak point nobody else has, and a life that does not match the template's assumptions.
Writing your own is a sequence of decisions, in order.
1. Define the goal, specifically
Not "get stronger and bigger". Something you could measure in six months: a specific total, a body weight, a particular lift, or maintaining strength while losing fat.
If you have several goals, rank them. A programme cannot maximise everything simultaneously and the ranking determines every subsequent trade-off.
2. Establish the constraints
How many days can you realistically train, on the worst week of the next three months? How long per session? What equipment is available? What injuries or restrictions do you have?
Be honest here. A programme built for the good weeks fails in the ordinary ones.
3. Choose the structure
Days available determines this more than anything.
Three days: full body. Four days: upper/lower. Five or six: push/pull/legs, or upper/lower with an extra session, or a specialisation split.
Aim for each muscle group being trained roughly twice a week.
4. Choose the main lifts
Two or three per session, and they should be the movements most relevant to the goal — the competition lifts for a powerlifter, big compound movements for general strength and size.
Keep these stable across the whole block. These are what you progress and what you measure.
5. Set volume and intensity
Start at the lower end. Something like ten hard sets per muscle group per week is a sensible starting point, with room to add.
Distribute across the sessions. Choose rep ranges: heavier work in the three-to-six range for the main lifts if strength is the priority, six to twelve if size is, and accessories anywhere from eight to twenty.
Specify proximity to failure. "Three sets of five at two reps in reserve" is a complete instruction; "three sets of five" is not.
6. Add accessories with a reason
Two to four per session, each with an articulable purpose: a weak point, volume for a muscle, balancing a pattern, or something you enjoy.
If you cannot state the reason in a sentence, it does not go in.
7. Plan the progression
Decide in advance how the block will progress. A common and workable scheme: add a set per muscle group each week for three or four weeks, holding load roughly constant, then deload with volume halved.
Or: hold sets constant and add reps within a range, increasing load when the top of the range is reached across all sets.
Either works. What matters is that it is decided in advance rather than improvised weekly.
8. Plan the deload
Schedule one every fourth to sixth week, and treat it as a real part of the plan rather than an admission of failure. Volume roughly halved, intensity maintained or slightly reduced.
9. Write it down and run it
The whole block, in advance, in a document you will actually open. Then run it for the full six to twelve weeks without changing it.
This is the part people fail. A programme changed in week three produces no information about whether it worked.
10. Evaluate, then adjust one thing
At the end of the block, look at the log. Did the main lifts progress? Did you recover adequately? Did you actually complete the sessions?
Then change one variable for the next block. More volume if you progressed and recovered well. Less if you did not recover. A different accessory if a weak point persists.
Changing one thing at a time is the only way to learn anything about your own response.
The common mistakes
Too much volume at the start, leaving nowhere to progress and generating fatigue immediately.
Too many exercises, so sessions run long and nothing gets progressed properly.
No planned deload, so the block ends in a stall or an injury.
Copying an elite lifter's programme, which is designed for their circumstances, their recovery, their weak points and, frequently, their pharmacology.
Changing it mid-block because a session went badly.
A programme that is boring, conservative and completed will outperform an ambitious one that is abandoned in week four. That is the whole lesson, and it applies at every level.
