There is a particular kind of training programme that circulates well. It has variety. It has a name. It promises that this specific arrangement of exercises is the thing that has been missing. It is extremely good at being shared and extremely bad at making people stronger.
The programmes that actually work share a quality that makes them almost unshareable: they repeat. The same lifts, the same patterns, week after week, with the load creeping up by increments small enough to be unsatisfying. Nobody screenshots that.
The mechanism is not mysterious. Strength is a skill expressed under load, and skills consolidate through repetition. Every time you swap an exercise, you reset part of the learning curve. Do that often enough and you spend your entire training life on the steep, inefficient part of every curve and never reach the part where the strength actually accrues.
This has a practical consequence for how you should think about your first two years. The goal is not to find the optimal programme. The goal is to find an adequate programme you will still be running in eighteen months. Adequacy sustained beats optimality abandoned, and it is not close.
The corollary is that variety has a place — it just is not where people put it. Vary the accessory work, the conditioning, the way you warm up. Keep the main lifts fixed. That gives you enough novelty to stay engaged and enough repetition to actually adapt.
If your programme is boring and your numbers are moving, the programme is working. Resist the urge to fix it.
Written by
Dami Adeyemi
Part of the CHISSELED coaching and studio team. Everything published here is written by people who train, program or build the products they are writing about.