The four weeks at a glance
Train on days that are not back to back — Monday, Wednesday and Friday, for example — so there is a rest day between sessions. Two sessions a week are enough to make progress; three are better if you recover from them. Each session trains the whole body in about 45 minutes.
Effort goes up slowly. The table shows how many sets to do and how far from failure to stop, in reps in reserve: how many more reps you could still do when you end the set.
| Week | Sessions | Sets per exercise | Reps in reserve |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2 | 2 | 4–5 |
| 2 | 2–3 | 2–3 | 3–4 |
| 3 | 3 | 3 | 2–3 |
| 4 | 3 | 3 | 2–3 |
What a session looks like
Start with 5–10 minutes of easy cardio and one or two light sets of the first exercise. Then do five or six exercises for the whole body: a squat or leg press; a Romanian deadlift or hip thrust; a chest press; a lat pulldown or row; a shoulder press; and one core exercise. Do 8–12 reps per set and rest 60–90 seconds (see rest between sets).
Machines are a good place to start: the path of the movement is set for you, so you can focus on effort. Ready-made sessions in this format are on the beginner workouts page — rotate your first gym workout, workout B and workout C through the week.
Picking your starting weights
In the first session, pick a weight you could lift about 15 times and do 10. That leaves 4–5 reps in reserve: light enough to focus on technique, heavy enough to learn something. Write it down.
From then on, use double progression: keep the weight until you reach the top of the rep range on every set with 2 or more reps in reserve, then add the smallest step — the next plate on a machine, the next pair of dumbbells. Most beginners can do this every week or two for months (see progressive overload). Do not train to failure in the first month: while the technique is new, it adds little.
What to track
For every exercise: weight, reps and sets — and, for the last set, how many reps you had left. That is enough to know what to lift next time. Muscle soreness for a day or two after the first sessions is normal and becomes rarer within a few weeks; pain in a joint is a reason to drop that exercise and pick another, not to push through.
At the end of the month, compare your first and last sessions: on most exercises the weights should be clearly higher. seto logs a set in a couple of taps and shows what you did last time, and it can build these full-body sessions from the equipment your gym has.