Training

The boring secret

For two years I chased complexity — new splits, exotic lifts, another supplement with a mascot. None of it moved the needle. What finally worked was almost insultingly boring: six exercises, one progression rule, and the discipline to not renovate the plan every time it stopped being exciting.

Pick your six

You need a push, a pull, a squat, a hinge, and two things you’ll actually show up for. Mine: bench, weighted pull-up, high-bar squat, Romanian deadlift, overhead press, row. Pick yours once. Changing exercises is not progress — it’s procrastination with chalk on it.

Accessories are seasoning, not dinner. I’ll rotate curls, lateral raises, and whatever my shoulders are complaining about that month. The six main lifts don’t move. Three years running the same bench progression, my numbers went from a sad 60kg to 130kg for a double — not because bench is magic, but because I never once swapped it out for incline smith machine press because Instagram told me to.

The only progression rule

Add reps or add weight, roughly every session, in small enough jumps that it never feels heroic. That’s it. That’s the whole system. I keep a note on my phone — not an app, a literal Notes app entry — with every top set I’ve hit for eighteen months. When squat says “5x5 @ 100kg,” next week I try “5x5 @ 102.5kg” or “6,5,5,5,5 @ 100kg.” One of those two things happens basically every week, and the weeks it doesn’t, I know exactly why: I slept four hours, or I was fighting a cold, or I just had a bad day and that’s allowed too.

Linear progression stops working eventually — for me it was somewhere around month eight on squat, month fourteen on bench. When it stops, you don’t panic and rebuild the program. You add a back-off set, you switch from weekly jumps to fortnightly ones, you deload. The rule doesn’t change. The patience required to apply it does.

Effort, measured honestly

“Training hard” is a phrase people use to avoid admitting they’re not. Here’s the test I actually use: on your last set, could you have done two more reps with the same bar speed? If yes, you weren’t close. If you don’t know, you weren’t paying attention. I count reps in reserve (RIR) out loud in my head on every top set — “that’s a 2,” “that’s a 1” — and I write the number next to the weight in my log. Some weeks the log says 3, 3, 2 across my top sets and I already know the numbers next week won’t move, because I didn’t ask enough of the ones this week.

The uncomfortable part: most people’s “failure” is my “RIR 3.” Actual failure — bar speed dying, form falling apart, spotter stepping in — is rarer and scarier than the gym-bro version of the word suggests. You don’t need it every set. You need it sometimes, on purpose, so you remember what real effort costs. For more on evidence-based training principles:

Mistakes that cost me a year

I spent my first serious year doing three things wrong, and any one of them alone would have been forgivable. Together they cost me roughly twelve months of visible progress.

First: program-hopping. I’d run a plan for three weeks, see slower results than the fitness influencer promised, and switch. Three weeks is not enough time to know if anything works — you’re still learning the movement pattern, not testing the stimulus.

Second: undereating on purpose because I was scared of “getting fat” before I’d built anything worth defining. I stayed around maintenance for a year trying to recomp with maybe four years of training age. Recomp works if you’re a beginner or you’re coming back from a long layoff. I was neither, and I paid for it in stalled lifts and a physique that looked the same in every mirror photo across the entire stretch.

Third, and the expensive one: I never wrote anything down. Without a log, every session is a guess dressed up as intuition. “That felt heavier than last time” is not data. The day I started writing down weights, reps, and RIR was the day my numbers started moving again, and it wasn’t a coincidence — it was the difference between training and just exercising.