Strength training 101: build your first program from scratch

You don't need the perfect program to make progress. You need a decent program you'll stick to for months. This guide covers the basics: how many workouts, which exercises, how many sets, how to warm up, how long to rest, and how to adapt it all to your goal.

What is a strength training program?

A program is simply a repeatable plan: fixed workouts, with fixed exercises, repeated every week. That repetition isn't boredom, it's what makes progress measurable: if you do the same bench press every week, you can compare, add a rep, then add a kilo. This is the fundamental principle of strength training, progressive overload: doing slightly better than last time, week after week.

The corollary: write everything down. Without a record of your last session, you can't beat it.

In Musku: your workouts live in the app, and every set you check off is saved. Next session, your last weights and reps are pre-filled: you see exactly what to beat.

How many workouts per week do you need?

The honest answer: as many as you can sustain all year. Three workouts you actually do beat five workouts you abandon in March.

• 2 workouts: enough to progress when you're starting out.
• 3 to 4 workouts: the sweet spot for most lifters.
• 5 or more: useful once you're advanced and your volume no longer fits in 4 sessions.

A useful benchmark: each muscle grows best when trained about twice a week. Your split should make that possible.

In Musku: set your target frequency in your profile, and the dashboard tracks your week's goal. String successful weeks together and your streak shows up: consistency becomes a game you don't want to break.

Which split? Full body, upper/lower or PPL

A split is a way of distributing muscle groups across your week. The logic: group muscles that work together, so they warm each other up within the session and recover together between sessions.

• Full body: every major group in each session. One leg exercise (quads, hamstrings, glutes), one pushing movement (chest, shoulders, triceps), one pulling movement (back, biceps), plus some abs or calves. Ideal at 2 or 3 workouts per week: every muscle gets stimulated often, and a missed session leaves no group behind.
• Upper / lower: the body is cut in half. The upper session covers chest, back, shoulders, biceps and triceps; the lower session covers quads, hamstrings, glutes, calves and abs. Perfect at 4 workouts: each half comes around twice a week, with enough room to work every group properly.
• Push / Pull / Legs: grouped by function. Push: chest, shoulders, triceps, the muscles behind every press. Pull: lats, traps, rear delts, biceps, the muscles behind pull-ups and rows. Legs: quads, hamstrings, glutes, calves. Makes sense at 5 or 6 workouts per week: below that, each group only gets trained once a week, which is suboptimal.

The classic beginner trap: copying an advanced lifter's PPL while only training 3 times a week. At that frequency, your chest or your back only works once a week. Pick the split that matches your real schedule, not the one you fantasize about.

In Musku: ready-made programs cover each split, with muscle groups visible on every exercise. Tweak them freely or build your own workouts from scratch, and the iOS widget starts today's workout right from your home screen.

Which exercises should you pick?

Build each workout around compound movements, the ones that involve several joints and a lot of muscle: squat, deadlift, bench press, overhead press, pull-ups, rows, dips. They give you the best return on effort.

Then add isolation work (curls, triceps extensions, lateral raises, calves) for the muscles the big lifts don't fully cover.

• 4 to 6 exercises per workout, no more: beyond that, quality collapses.
• Big lifts first, while you're fresh. Isolation at the end.
• Keep the same exercises for several weeks: you can't progress on a movement you swap every week.

In Musku: the catalog covers the classic movements with illustrations and targeted muscles, and you can create custom exercises for your favorite machines. The muscle distribution screen shows your volume per group: imbalances become obvious before they become a problem.

How many sets per muscle per week?

The consensus benchmark: 10 to 20 effective sets per muscle per week. As a beginner, aim for the low end: 10 to 12 sets are plenty to progress.

In practice that means 3 to 4 sets per exercise. An effective set is one taken close to failure: by the end, you have 1 to 3 reps left in the tank, not 10. Six lazy sets are worth less than three serious ones.

In Musku: each set is checked off in one tap, with the "previous" column right there to beat. When a set tops your best weight, best volume or estimated 1RM, the app detects it live and lets you know: records never go unnoticed.

How to warm up: warm-up sets

Two layers. First, a short general warm-up: 5 minutes to raise your temperature and wake up your joints. Then the important part: specific warm-up sets on your first heavy exercise, ramping up toward your working weight.

• Empty bar or light weight, 10 to 12 reps
• Around 50% of your working weight, 8 reps
• Around 70%, 4 to 5 reps
• Around 85%, 2 reps, then your working sets

These sets don't count toward your volume and shouldn't tire you out: they prepare the movement.

In Musku: mark them as type W by tapping the set badge. They're excluded from your records and stats, and the app remembers your ramp-up to suggest it again next session.

How long should you rest between sets?

Rest isn't wasted time: it's what makes the next set good. Cutting rest short lowers your weights and reps, and with them the stimulus.

• Heavy compound lifts (squat, deadlift, presses): 2 to 3 minutes, up to 5 for pure strength work.
• Medium exercises: 1:30 to 2 minutes.
• Isolation: 1 minute to 1:30.

Use a timer rather than your gut, your gut always cheats in the same direction.

In Musku: every exercise has its own rest time, and the timer starts by itself when you check off a set. It counts down on your lock screen as a Live Activity, adjustable in 15-second steps, and on your wrist if you have an Apple Watch.

Cutting, hypertrophy, strength: what your goal changes

Strength: heavy weights, 3 to 6 reps per set, long rests of 3 to 5 minutes, moderate volume. Progress is measured on the bar.

Hypertrophy (building muscle): the classic 6 to 15 rep zone, close to failure, resting 1:30 to 3 minutes. Research shows muscle can be built anywhere from 5 to 30 reps if sets are hard, but 6-15 remains the most practical zone.

Muscular endurance: 15 to 25 reps, short rests of 30 seconds to 1 minute.

What about cutting? This is the most common misconception. A cut is not a set-and-rep scheme: it's a nutrition matter (a calorie deficit). In the gym, your goal during a cut is to keep your strength and your weights, precisely to tell your body to hold onto muscle while your diet burns the fat. Switching to long, light sets "to get lean" is counterproductive. Same logic for bulking: the calorie surplus changes, not the structure of your workouts.

In Musku: your goal is part of your profile and feeds the AI analysis of your workouts. Estimated 1RM charts track your strength, volume tracks your hypertrophy, and body measurement tracking (weight, body fat, waist, synced with Apple Health) tells you whether your cut or your bulk is heading the right way.

Where to start, concretely

• Pick your realistic frequency, and the matching split (2-3 workouts: full body; 4: upper/lower).
• 4 to 6 exercises per workout, compounds first.
• 3 working sets per exercise, 1 to 3 reps from failure.
• Ramp up your warm-up, actually rest between sets.
• Write everything down, and compete with your last session: one more rep or one more kilo.

That's all you need to progress for your first two years. Download Musku on the App Store: the programs are ready, your weights are pre-filled, your records are tracked. All that's left is lifting the bar.