Build your training week, start to finish
Sample video: in the live course this plays the full walkthrough.
Almost everyone who has stalled is running the same week they ran two years ago, or no week at all: a rough idea of which body part is due, decided in the car park. Both produce the same thing, which is a lot of honest effort with nothing to measure it against.
A training week is not a mood board. It is a small set of decisions you make once, sitting down, with a pen, and then stop making. How many days. Which lifts carry the block. What order. How much. And, the part people skip, the rule that says when the weight goes up. Get those five written and the next twelve weeks mostly run themselves.
What you’ll need
Before you start writing
- Your calendar, not your intentions. Look at the last four weeks and count the days you actually trained. That number is your input, not the one you wish it was.
- Your last month of logs, if you have them. If you do not, that is fine, and it is also the first thing to fix.
- A shortlist of lifts you can do every week for twelve weeks. Available in your gym, comfortable in your body, and easy to load in small steps.
- One sheet of paper. A week that does not fit on one page is a week you will not follow.
- A number for each main lift: the weight you can currently do for a solid set, with a couple of reps left over. Not a maximum. Not a maximum: a weight you could repeat next week.
The steps
- Count the days you will genuinely train. Three real days beat five imaginary ones, every time. If the last month says three, write three. A plan built on the version of you who has an easy week at work is a plan that fails in the first bad week and takes your confidence with it.
- Choose the lifts that carry the block. Two to four movements, no more. These are the ones you will repeat, log, and add weight to for the whole twelve weeks. A squat pattern, a hinge, a horizontal press, a vertical pull is a perfectly good default. Everything else is support, and support is allowed to change.
- Give each main lift a day, and put it first. Whatever leads the session gets your best attention and your freshest effort. If your bench has been stuck for a year and you have been benching after forty minutes of accessories, you have already found something to change.
- Decide the hard sets per lift, per week. Count only the sets that were genuinely difficult. Somewhere between six and twelve hard sets a week for a main lift is a sane starting range for most people. Start at the bottom of the range. You want somewhere to go, and it is much easier to add a set later than to unpick a week you cannot recover from.
- Fill in the support work, and keep it boring. Two or three movements per session that back up the main lift: a second pressing angle, some rowing, some single-leg or arm work. Support work is where variety lives. It does not need to be logged as carefully, and it should never be the reason the main lift suffers.
- Write the progression rule next to each main lift. This is the step everyone skips and it is the one that makes the week a program. In plain words: when I hit the top of the rep range on every set, the weight goes up next time. Write the actual number, for example "3 sets of 5 at 185, then 190." Now you never have to decide in the moment.
- Put the deload in the calendar now. Pick a week, usually the fifth or sixth, and mark it as lighter before you have any evidence that you need it. A deload you plan is a tool. A deload you take because you feel wrecked is just a bad week with a nicer name.
- Write the whole thing on one page and put it where you will see it. Days down the left, lifts and sets across. Photograph it. The point is that on any given morning there is nothing left to decide except whether you are going, and that is the only decision worth spending willpower on.
That is the whole method: honest days, few lifts, best lift first, a starting dose you can grow from, boring support work, a written rule for adding weight, a deload on the calendar, and one page you can see. Everything in Modules 4 and 5 is about running this week well, not replacing it.
The test of a training week is not how good it looks on paper, it is whether you can repeat it. Run the week twice, unchanged, before you judge it. If you cannot finish the sessions in the time you actually have, the week is too big, and the fix is to cut a lift rather than to cut sleep. And resist redesigning it in week three. A mediocre week you run for twelve weeks will teach you far more than a brilliant week you run once.
The mistakes that flatten a training week
1. Building the week you wish you had time for. Five days on paper, three days in practice, and the two that get dropped are always the same two. Now half your plan has never actually run. Write the smaller week. You are allowed to add a day in month two, and adding one feels like progress in a way that missing one never does.
2. Changing the main lifts every week. If the movement changes, the number means nothing, and you have no evidence of anything. Novelty is genuinely enjoyable and it belongs in the support work, where it costs you nothing. The two to four lifts carrying the block stay put.
3. Answering a stall by adding volume. The bar stops moving, so you add sets, so you recover less, so the bar stops moving. Before adding a single set, check the cheaper rungs first: are you resting long enough, are you actually warm on your first working set, when was your last easy week, and are you sleeping like someone who trains. Volume is the last lever, not the first.
Write your week out on one page tonight: days, main lifts, hard sets per lift, support work, and the progression rule next to each main lift. Then mark your deload week in the calendar. Run the week exactly as written twice before you change anything, and at the end of week two write down one sentence: which lift felt like it had somewhere to go, and which one felt stuck. That sentence is what Module 4 is for.