Stop Following Random Workouts. Do This Instead.

0:00 Most workout programs are built around muscle groups. Chest day, arm day, glute day. I did that sort of training for years until I got to the point where I resented the gym because I was spending so much time there trying to do the most optimal plan and not really seeing much return for my efforts. Now, my programs are built completely differently. They're built around the seven movement patterns. Squat, lunge, hinge, push, pull, carry, and rotate. And it's the single biggest reason I went from training six days a week with nothing to show for it to training four days a week and being the strongest, fittest, and most athletic I have ever been. I've been training for 11 years and a qualified personal trainer for the last five and in this video I'm going to give you the exact five steps that I use to build my programs around the seven movement patterns. By the end of this video, whether you train at home with just dumbbells or in a fully kitted gym, you're going to have a fully built training program that you can take with you into your next session. Just quickly before we get into it, if you have no idea what I'm talking about when I say the seven movement patterns, I actually made a video on that a couple of weeks ago and it's the entire philosophy of what we're going to be talking about today, so I would recommend watching that first. It is pinned in the description. But, if you've already watched it or you just want to get straight into building your program, let's start with step one, which is deciding how many days a week you're going to train. And I want you to be really honest with yourself here. It's not about what you think you should be doing, it's about what you think you can actually be consistent with. Anywhere between two and four days a week is enough. I personally train four days a week, but I work from home, I don't have any kids, and fitness is my entire job.

1:29 If you've got a full-time role, kids, a long commute, or literally any other responsibilities that mean you can only train two to three times a week, that is completely fine. Where most people go wrong at this stage in the process is by trying to go all in and committing to training pretty much every day of the week. I would genuinely rather that you commit two sessions per week that you can actually tick off consistently for a year than saying you're going to do five, doing it for a couple of weeks, and then ending up burning out and stopping because you were just way too overwhelmed. Not only would I rather that, but you'll also get better results that way. So, pick a training frequency that is realistic to you and your life.

2:03 Now, no matter what training frequency you're doing, you're going to do full body sessions so that you can distribute the movement patterns across the week and push yourself really hard in every exercise. If you do three or four sessions per week, you'll just have more flexibility to hit the movement patterns that you want to prioritize more frequently. But, with every frequency, you're going to do full body sessions and hit every movement pattern at least once. I touched on this in my last video, but the reason full body training is so good is because you're never absolutely hammering just one muscle.

2:30 Not only does that mean you can go heavier and push harder within each session, but it also means that if you aren't able to have a rest day between sessions, you should be absolutely fine. I saw that question a lot in the comments in my last video, so just to clarify, as long as every session is full body, no single muscle is going to be getting hammered so much that it needs the full 24 hours to recover. I sometimes train 2 days in a row, other times I have a rest between. Just make sure that you're listening body. If you're really achy, take a rest day. If you're not, you don't need to. Now, once you know how many days you're training, you spread the seven patterns across those days. The simplest rule to follow is that every session should hit your lower body, your upper body, and your core. How I distribute this is making sure that every session has a squat or lunge, a hinge, a push, a pull, and a rotate or a carry. Here's roughly how I'd lay that out for every frequency.

3:17 For a 2-day program, day one is squat, horizontal pull, hinge, vertical push, anti-rotation, and carry. Day two is hinge, horizontal push, lunge, horizontal pull, rotation, and carry at the end. For 3 days, day one is squat, vertical pull, hinge, horizontal push, rotation, and a carry. Day two is hinge, vertical push, lunge, horizontal pull, anti-rotation, and rotation. Day three is lunge, horizontal pull, hinge, vertical pull, rotation, and a carry.

3:48 And for 4 days per week, here's what my structure actually looks like. Day one is squat, vertical pull, hinge, vertical push, anti-rotation, and carry. Day two is hinge, horizontal push, lunge, horizontal pull, rotation, and anti-rotation. Day three is lunge, horizontal pull, hinge, horizontal push, rotation, and carry. Day four is vertical push, hinge, vertical pull, squat, and a carry. You'll notice that the patterns aren't evenly distributed across my week, and that's on purpose. I do more pulling than pushing because I sit at a desk all day, and pulling really helps with your posture. And I do more hinging than squatting or lunging because glute growth is a goal of mine.

4:27 Bias your week to whatever your priority is, but just make sure that you're not skipping anything out completely. And to address another question I've seen in the comments, yes, it is absolutely fine to hinge two days in a row because the variations are different. So, one day you might be doing a barbell conventional deadlift, and the next day you might be doing a single-leg RDL with a kettlebell. It's the same movement pattern, but a completely different stimulus, so you will recover absolutely fine. By the way, if you want to guide that maps all of this out, every pattern, loads of exercise examples, plus a programming template that you can just plug everything into, it's completely free and linked in the description. Grab it before the next step because it will actually be really useful to have whilst we map out your program. Step three is exercise selection, and this is the step that gives my training style a unique twist to the classic gym bro training. Every session I do is built around two compound movements followed by accessory work. And most fitness programs that you see online will use those two same words, compounds and accessories. But my version of accessory movements isn't quite the same as theirs, and the distinction is the entire reason that I now not only look athletic, but I'm also injury-free, the strongest I've ever been, and actually enjoying the gym. Let me break it down. Compounds are the big lifts, the ones that load multiple muscles at once that you can go really heavy on. They build the most strength and the most muscle in the least amount of time. Barbell squats, barbell dead lifts, bench press, pull-ups, overhead press, the classics. In my sessions, my first two exercises are always compounds, one for my upper body and one for my lower body. These are the ones you're going to push really hard on.

6:00 Lift as heavy as you can and track your progress as carefully as possible. The compounds do 80% of the work in your training. Now, here's where my method differs from most. Most programs treat accessories as small isolation exercises to bring up lagging muscles. A cable face pull for your rear delts, a bicep curl for your arms, a machine hamstring curl for your hamstrings. The accessory in each program is just a way to pump up a specific muscle. And that's not how I program. To me, an accessory isn't just an isolated movement. It's a more isolated athletic movement that still falls within the seven movement patterns and challenges my body in a functional way. So, in my training, a pulling accessory isn't a rear delt fly or a cable face pull. It's a bird dog row where I'm training my back and my core and my balance and my anti-rotation all at the same time. Or it's a single arm lat pull-down where one side of my body has to stabilize whilst the other side work. A hinge accessory isn't just a hamstring curl on a machine. It's a single leg RDL where I'm hinging and balancing and training my glutes unilaterally. Or it's a Swiss ball hamstring curl where my core and glutes have to fire to keep my hips stable as my hamstrings do the work. This is the difference between training your body as a load of separate muscle groups and training your body as a one single entity that moves together. However, if you are someone who absolutely loves a bicep curl or a cable kickback, that is completely fine. I just personally find these athletic movements to be so much more rewarding to train because it genuinely feels like I'm developing skills and teaching my body to withstand whatever is thrown at it alongside developing my physique in the way that I want to. If you want to do more athletic style movements, but you also you to keep your bicep curls, that is absolutely fine. You can combine the two styles. I just recommend that you order your sessions by compounds, athletic exercises, and then aesthetic exercises if you want them. Now, when you're picking exercises, ask yourself these three questions. What equipment do I have? What is my experience level? And what can I progressively load over time?

8:00 The hardest pattern to do at home is probably the vertical pull. If you don't have a pull-up bar, you've got two options. One, you could either get a doorway pull-up bar from Amazon, they're about 20 pounds and worth every penny in my opinion. Or two, you can get a long resistance band, anchor that over a door, and use that to do lap pull-downs. Like I said, the free guide I mentioned has loads of exercise examples for every movement pattern, for dumbbell only and full gym setups. So, grab it from the description if you haven't already. Step four is the actual prescription, your sets, your reps, and your rest. And this is where I see people making the biggest programming mistakes. Most women either massively under-train or massively over-train when they're creating their own programs. Either you're doing three sets of 12 with a weight that you could really be doing 20 reps with, or you're doing six different exercises for the same muscle group, absolutely hammering your muscle, leaving no room for rest.

8:49 But, we're not doing that anymore, okay? So, here's what we're going to do instead. For your big compound movements, the first two exercises of every session, aim for three to four sets of six to 10 reps. I always do four sets, the first being a warm-up set where I do a lighter weight and more reps. And then the other three being my working sets where I'm doing fewer reps, but really pushing myself with the weight. For accessory movements, anything beyond your two compounds, go a bit lighter and bump the reps up. Three sets of eight to 12 reps is a really good range here. For carries, aim for two to three sets of 30 to 60 seconds.

9:20 Heavy enough that your grip is failing towards the end of your set, and that your core is having to work really hard to stabilize your spine. For anti-rotation work, like Pallof presses or bird dogs, three sets of eight to 12 reps per side. For rotation work, like cable wood chops, three sets of 10 to 15 reps. Now, for your rest periods, rest 2 to 3 minutes between your heavy compound sets and 60 to 90 seconds between accessory sets. I know that feels like a long time, but your nervous system needs to fully recover between sets so that you can push yourself really, really hard throughout your session. If you're rushing your rest, you will be using lighter weights than you could be and you'll be leaving results on the table, which I don't want for you. But that also doesn't mean fall into a TikTok hole in the middle of your gym session.

10:01 Make sure you're timing your rest and sticking to the guidelines that I've given you. But arguably the most important thing in all of this and the thing most people are missing is that you need to be training close to failure. Not necessarily at failure, but you need to be within one to two reps of failure for every single set. If you're stopping at 12 reps because that's what the program that you've written says, but you could have gone to 18, you're not pushing yourself hard enough and you're not giving your body a reason to grow. Now obviously, you also want to maintain really good form throughout your sets. So just try and find that line between really pushing yourself, getting really close to failure, but also keeping your form really, really solid. And step five is an absolute non-negotiable. It is progressive overload. If you take nothing else from this video, please take this. Without progressively overloading, none of this matters. You can pick the perfect seven patterns. You can pick the perfect sets and reps. You can train four days a week consistently for a year. If you are not progressively overloading, you will not see results. Progressive overload just means making your training measurably harder every single week. There are loads of different ways to do it. Adding weights, if last week you squatted 50 kilos, this week aim for 52 and a half.

11:09 Adding reps, if last week you did three sets of eight, this week go for three sets of nine. Adding sets, if last week you did three sets, this week do four. Improving your form or range of motion, if last week your squat was a bit shallow, this week hitting full depth with the same weight would be progressive overload because you've made the movement harder. Reducing your rest periods is also a way of progressively overloading because again, you're making things harder by having less recovery time. It doesn't matter how you progressively overload, the key is that something has to be measurably harder every single week. And to do this, you need to be tracking your sessions. I personally use my training app, but you could use the notes app on your phone, a physical notebook, the Google Sheets app, literally anything. Just write down the exercises that you're doing, the sets, the reps, the weights you lifted, the rest you took, and every week try and beat one element of that, even if it's by one single rep. Without this, you are just exercising, not training, and you will not see any significant results, no matter how good your program is. Right, let's put all five steps together with an actual session. Let's say you've decided to train three days a week, you train at home with dumbbells and a resistance band. Your first session might look something like this.

12:23 Compound one is a goblet squat from the squat pattern, four sets of eight, two minutes rest between sets. Compound two is a bent-over dumbbell row from the horizontal pull pattern, four sets of eight, and again, two minutes rest between sets. Accessory one is a single-leg RDL from the hinge pattern, three sets of 10 per side with 60 seconds rest between sets. Accessory two is a half-kneeling shoulder press from the vertical push pattern, three sets of 12 per side with 60 seconds rest. For your core, you choose Paloff press, which is from the anti-rotation movement pattern, three sets of 10 per side with 60 seconds rest. That's the entire session. You've got five exercises, you'll be done in 45 to 50 minutes, and it hits five of the seven movement patterns. You'd hit the other two movement patterns, lunge and carry, across your other two sessions that week. Track everything and try and progressively overload every single exercise in one way or another every week. Repeat that program for three months, and I promise you you will look more athletic by the end of the 12 weeks than you would after a year of bouncing around random workouts from TikTok. So, those are the five steps to building your very own athletic training program from scratch. Pick your frequency, distribute the seven patterns across your week, choose compound and athletic accessory exercises within each pattern that you can progress over time, set your sets, reps, and rest based on the movement, and train close to failure on every set, progressively overloading week to week, every week. Quick reminder that the free guide has loads of exercise examples within each pattern, compounds, and athletic accessories for home, dumbbell only, and fully equipped gyms. Plus, a programming template that you can just slot everything into. It's linked in the description. And if you haven't watched the seven movement patterns video yet, it's linked right here, and it's the entire philosophy behind everything that I've spoken about today. I'll see you in the next one.