The Beginner’s Guide to Creating an Effective Strength Training Program

The key to effective strength training is having a plan. If you take away one thing from this article, please let it be that having a plan is crucial to your fitness success. Not only is it a way to promote accountability and consistency but it is the only way to know if you are on track to meeting your fitness goals.

What is Strength Training?

Strength Training is the use of resistance to muscular contraction to build strength, anaerobic endurance, and size of skeletal muscles.1 Different types of resistance training may include using free weights (e.g., kettlebells, dumbbells), using resistance bands, working with weight machines, or even just using your own body weight (e.g., push-ups, crunches).

When you perform these resistance workouts, you are putting stress on your body. And after enduring that stress, your body become stronger (que the Kelly Clarkson song– ‘What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Stronger’).

The Principle of Progressive Overload

No matter how you design your strength training program, one principle should remain supreme in your training: progressive overload, which essentially means making your workouts harder each time. The Principle of Progression states that increases in time, weight or intensity should be minimal, meaning they are kept within 10% or less each week to allow for a gradual adaptation while minimizing risk of injury.2 Strength training with progressive overload will ultimately lead to increases in strength and hypertrophy (increasing the size of your muscles).

How Do I Design My Program?

Make your program simple and logical.

Simple – When it comes to your strength training program, more is not always better. In fact, sticking to a few basic exercises will get you a lot further when it comes to achieving your goals. This is because the basics have been the tried-and-true foundation for major fitness progress. For programs that will take approximately an hour to complete, I would suggest choosing less than 10 total exercises (including warm-ups).

Logical – No matter how you typically exercise, you probably feel a lot better during workouts where you begin gradually or with a few stretches. Therefore, it would make sense to start with a warmup to activate your muscles.

You probably feel fatigued towards the end of your workouts and more energized in the beginning. Therefore, it would make sense to choose your hardest exercise after your warmup.

 Which Exercises Do I Choose?

A majority of exercises you choose should be from compound movements (e.g., squats), or movements that use multiple muscle groups versus isolation movements (e.g., bicep curls) that only work one muscle. This is not to say that isolation exercises do not have a place in programming. Isolation exercises can help to fix muscle imbalances, target specific muscles while resting others, and can become pivotal when you have an injury.

My general guidance – and of course there can be arguments for more or less exercises in either category – is to choose 3-5 compound movements and 1-2 isolation movements.

Compound Movement List*

Isolation Movement List*

*Of course, there are other exercises outside of these lists. This is for example purposes.

Whether you are programming full body days or if you are splitting your program between upper and lower body days, balance is key. For example, let’s say you are programming a lower body day. You wouldn’t want to create muscle imbalances by only selecting squat type movements. You’d want to offset the work you are doing on your quads and glutes by performing exercises on your hamstrings as well.

How Many Sets and Reps Do I Perform of Each Exercise?

Foundations for muscle growth consist of around 3-6 sets of 6 to 12 repetitions per exercise with short rest intervals (60 s) and moderate intensity of effort.3  Although what I just described is the hypertrophy rep range, this can be applied to goals of strength and endurance as well, give or take a few reps. Exercises programmed for strength are generally lower in reps as the expectation is that the weight can be increased. Exercises programmed for endurance are generally higher in reps with the expectation that you are increasing stamina.

How Often Should I Train?

You should train as many days as you can stay consistent from week to week. It does not help if you train 6 or 7 days your first week and 0 the next.

If you are new to strength training, I would advise starting out with 2-3x a week and gradually increasing to an extra day when you are more comfortable with the movement patterns.

How Often Should I Change My Workout Plan?

Especially if you’re a beginner, it may take your body about a few weeks to learn each movement pattern. It is only after multiple training sessions your body will increase its ability to efficiently build muscle in what is known as adaption. If you are constantly changing the exercises in your workout routine, your body will never be able to properly adapt to the stress put on it and therefore, will not be able to adequately build muscle. Therefore, it is recommended to keep your workout plan consistent for 4-6 weeks.