If you’re a beginner who for some reason or other wants to start lifting, the easiest approach is probably just to pick a ready-made training program such as Starting Strength or Stronglifts 5x5 and stick to it. But if you’re anything like me, you’ll be curious about why these programs make sense, and whether they could be optimized for your body, your goals, or your equipment. And you’ll be busy, and not that interested in spending 80 % of your time in the gym just resting.
By using compound exercises to cut down the number of exercises, and clever supersetting to cut down rest time, I think I’ve found an approach with the potential to be at least twice as efficient as “ordinary” programs, with little to no downside. This blog post is my attempt to summarize and explain what countless hours on youtube watching “no bs science fit-tubers” such as Jeff Nippard and Jeremy Ethier have taught me about the basics of resistance training. My biggest takeaways have been understanding why compound movements are great and how to program with supersets to make workouts as time effective as possible, so I’ve emphasized those parts. I’ve also included a complete beginner’s guide to resistance training and my suggested and tested programs. I hope it brings you joy and gains.
Compound exercises 🦵💪
Compound exercises are exercises that train many muscles at the same time. This makes a lot of sense for a beginner, both from an efficiency perspective and for building functional strength. Compound exercises are best achieved with free weights (barbells and dumbbells) since they allow multiple movements and involve many muscles to balance the weights and stabilize the body. An example of a compound exercise is the deadlift, which emphasizes gluteus maximus and hamstrings for the hip bend, but also involves quadriceps for the knee bend, forearms for grip, and calves plus basically every single muscle in your core for balancing and stabilizing. The opposite of compound exercises are isolation exercises, such as the machine leg curl, which focus on eliminating technique, balance, and other muscles, to fatigue the targeted muscle maximally.
(Almost) all compound exercises emphasize one of the following six movements. If you want an effective full-body workout program, just make sure you’re covering all of them.
| Movement | Target | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Knee bend | Thighs | Squat |
| Hip bend | Butt & lower back | Deadlift |
| Horizontal push | Chest & triceps | Bench press |
| Horizontal pull | Upper back & biceps | Bent-over row |
| Vertical push | Shoulders & triceps | Overhead press |
| Vertical pull | Mid back & biceps | Pull-ups |
Your lower back, abs, calves, and forearms are involved in most heavy compound lifts and don’t need to be targeted specifically.
Supersets ⚡️
I like to optimize for time efficiency and I grow restless when waiting between sets. One way to achieve this is supersetting exercises, i.e. performing them back-to-back with minimal rest in between. A study by Paz et al 2017 compared supersetting two antagonistic exercises, bench press and seated rows (one set of bench press followed by one set of seated rows, before resting for two minutes and repeating) to regular scheduling of the same exercises (resting two minutes between each set). The supersetting resulted in increased muscle growth compared to doing exercises with rest (!), while cutting workout time almost in half (!!), so more than 2x the gains per minute in the gym. A similar study has been conducted on exercises targeting the same muscle groups (bench press and incline bench press) showed decreased muscle growth. I haven’t been able to find a study that investigates the effect of “unrelated” exercises (such as squats and biceps curls).
Based on this, supersetting push/pull movements with each other is a no-brainer for me. And since there’s no evidence to the contrary, I superset my leg exercises (knee and hip bend) with unrelated muscle groups (such as calves, shoulders, or arms). As long as I place the leg exercise first in the pairing, it barely hurts the “main exercise”, and the second exercise is “almost free” from a workout duration perspective.
The one major drawback with supersetting is that it requires more planning or equipment, which could make it tricky to do in a crowded public gym (hogging equipment) or a home gym (with limited equipment). I’d still say it’s possible if you get creative or are willing to compromise. Do your overhead presses under a pull-up bar. Take some extra seconds to move the bench after the bench press, and load some extra plates for the barbell rows. Do the second exercise with dumbbells or body weight. To me, it’s worth it.
Mandatory beginner notes 📝
This is where most people who have been to a gym could probably stop reading, but for completeness, I’ll briefly mention some other tidbits that I think are necessary to start working out:
- Resistance training is not like cardio, you need proper rest for your reps to count. One (for complete beginners) to three (for really heavy lifts) minutes seems to be well-established standards.
- You measure your workouts in sets and reps. Three sets of five reps mean that you perform five repetitions of an exercise, then wait two minutes before starting over three times.
- Resistance training is not like cardio. For your reps to count you need your sets to be very heavy. Aim for two reps in reserve (RIR) on most sets, but push yourself all the way to failure (meaning you couldn’t complete another technically correct and safe repetition with a gun to your head) on the last set of an exercise now and then.
- Rule of thumb (even if it’s not 100 % clear if it still holds in recent studies) is to aim for five reps to build maximal strength, and 12 reps to build maximal muscle volume. I currently aim for seven, it’s somewhere in between and I read somewhere that it’s better for beginners (less risk of injury, easier to progress) than five. But don’t sweat it, as a beginner you’ll grow and become stronger whichever you aim for.
- The way you adjust the difficulty is by picking the weights that allow you to do your target number of reps.
- There’s this really important concept called progressive overloading. For every week spent in the gym, you should be able to a) lift heavier weights, b) do more reps, or c) do more sets. Challenge your muscles by trying to increase these variables (in this order). If you find yourself unable to do this (this is referred to as plateauing), your muscles won’t grow and you won’t be stronger. Eat more protein, change exercise, or google “deloading”.
- Starting weights aren’t super important since your first month with free weights and compound movements is mostly about learning safe technique.
- For warmup, I tend to do a few reps with just the bar, a few reps with about half the goal weight, and then just go for it, with very little rest. I only do this for the first exercise of the workout. But some cardio is probably a good idea as well, and just “dry-running” movements with body weight before you do them is helpful from both a warmup and a technique standpoint.
- Weekly volume (number of sets per muscle) seems to be a game of diminishing returns. Any work is a lot better than no work, but aiming for 10-20 sets per muscle seems to be an optimum supported by studies.
- Track your workouts! I’m enjoying the free version of hevy, but your notes app works as well. This helps progressive overloading.
My suggested-and-tested beginner program
Workout A:
| # | Exercise | Movement |
|---|---|---|
| 1a | Squat | Knee bend |
| 1b | Wildcard / Rest | |
| 2a | Bench Press | Horizontal Push |
| 2b | Barebell Row | Horizontal Pull |
Workout B:
| # | Exercise | Movement |
|---|---|---|
| 1a | Deadlift | Hip bend |
| 1b | Wildcard / Rest | |
| 2a | Shoulder Press | Vertical Push |
| 2b | Pull-up | Vertical Pull |
Comments:
- Covers all the basic compound movements, and therefore your full body.
- Perfect for supersetting to save time.
- Starts with the heaviest movement (the one activating the most kg:s of muscles, and probably where you’ll be lifting the most kg:s of weight), and only involves one leg movement per workout so you can go all in.
- My suggestion for wildcard exercises to superset with the leg movements would be upright rows (since side delts get less activation than front and back delts in the other exercises) and dips (since triceps aren’t that involved in the shoulder press, and dips provide a greater range of motion that bench press).
- Program it however you like, I did A - B - rest - repeat.
- You could probably get away with as little as two sets per exercise, I did three but up to five would probably make sense (track your weekly number of sets per muscle group).
My suggested-and-tested intermediate program
Workout A: Upper
| # | Exercise | Movement | Reps |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1a | Bench Press | Horizontal Push | 3x7 |
| 1b | Barebell Row | Horizontal Pull | 3x7 |
| 2a | Shoulder Press | Vertical Push | 3x7 |
| 2b | Ring Pull-up | Vertical Pull | 3x7 |
| 3b | Upright rows | Downward Vertical Pull | 3x12 |
| 3a | Ring dips | Downward Vertical Push | 3x7 |
Workout B1: Lower + arms, emphasis on knee bend
| # | Exercise | Movement | Reps |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1a | Squat | Knee bend | 3x7 |
| 1b | Cable triceps pushdowns | Push | 3x12 |
| 2a | Romanian deadlifts | Hip bend | 3x7 |
| 2b | Biceps curl | Pull | 3x12 |
| 3a | Hip thrusts | Hip bend | 3x7 |
| 3b | Calf raises | 3x12 |
Workout B2: Lower + arms, emphasis on hip bend
| # | Exercise | Movement | Reps |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1a | Deadlift | Hip bend | 3x7 |
| 1b | Cable triceps extension | Push | 3x12 |
| 2a | Bulgarian split squats | Knee bend | 3x7 |
| 2b | Hammer curl | Pull | 3x12 |
| 3a | Hip thrusts | Hip bend | 3x7 |
| 3b | Calf raises | 3x12 |
Comments:
- Upper/lower split allowed me to progress faster, as muscles got more rest between workouts. Biceps and triceps recover pretty fast, so doing low rep work on one day and completing with higher rep work the following day worked great for me.
- Perfect for supersetting to save time.
- Most exercises for the upper body are the same as in the beginner program.
- Doing squats and deadlifts in the same workout didn’t work for me, one or the other was suffering, so I decided to create two different lower workouts to alternate between. B1 emphasizes the squat, and has a less taxing hip bend variation. B2 emphasizes the deadlift, and has a less taxing knee bend variation.
- And while we’re talking variations, I decided to change up the biceps and triceps exercises between B1 and B2, because why not. If you don’t want extra arm work, feel free to substitute them with something else (or even just rest, squats and deadlifts are heavy!).
- Some smaller muscles (arms, calves, and shoulders) were bumped up to 12 reps.
- Program something like A - B1 - rest - A - B2 - rest, but feel free to add more rest as needed.
- You could probably exclude the last two exercises per workout and just do more sets of the first four.