Gym Path

You've got the habits down. Now we add training on top of them.

You picked the gym path. Everything you built in Phase 1, daily weigh-ins, calorie tracking, your steps, is still a part of your routine and always comes first. Training gets added on top of it, not instead of it.

I don't hand you a generic program. Your training gets built around your weaknesses, your strengths, and what you actually want to prioritize, along with your schedule and how much time you have to give it. Two clients in the same phase can end up with different programs, because the program is built around you.

This applies whether you're bulking or cutting. If you're cutting, training is there to preserve the muscle you already have while your calories are down. If you're bulking, training is what drives the muscle you're trying to build. The goal shifts, but how your program gets built doesn't.

This page walks you through how training is structured and what's coming next before you touch a single exercise.

We're programming progressively overloading resistance training. Here's why that specifically.

What you're doing in the gym is resistance training, built to progressively overload over time. That means the demand on your muscles keeps increasing, more weight, more reps, or better control of the same weight, session over session.

That specific approach is what makes lifting worth your time in this program. If you're cutting, it preserves the muscle you already have while your calories are down. If you're bulking and your calories are high enough to support it, it's what builds new muscle. Either way, the muscle you keep or build is what the rest of this phase is protecting.

Three splits, one real question: how many days can you actually commit?

A split is how your training week gets divided up, which muscle groups get trained on which days. There are three common ways to organize a training week.

The split that's right for you comes down to one thing: how many days a week you can actually commit to training, not how many you'd like to.

These three aren't the only options. If none of them fit your life the way they are, we can customize from there. The split is a starting point, not a box you're stuck in.

The number on the bar is the whole point.

Progress in the gym comes from progressive overload: doing a little more over time than you did before, more weight, more reps, or better control of the same weight. You can't tell if that's happening without a record of what you actually lifted last time.

Every session gets logged, either in the MacroFactor app or in a workout spreadsheet I share with you. That log is what tells us whether the program is working, not how you feel walking out of the gym.

Three things come before your first workout: the words, the muscles, the movements.

Before you start lifting, three short pages get you ready:

Technical Definitions covers the terms you'll see everywhere from here on: reps, sets, tempo, RPE, the words that show up in every program.

Muscle Anatomy shows you what's actually moving. Knowing which muscle a lift targets makes the difference between going through the motions and feeling the work.

Technique pages break down each movement pattern, push, pull, legs, one at a time. Form first, weight second.

Start with the words, then the muscles, then the moves.

Technical Definitions is next. It's short, and it makes everything after it easier to follow.