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Strength Programming: How to Write and Adjust Your Training Plan

Your squat is going up, your bench isn’t, and your program still says to add weight next week. So what do you change?

Or perhaps the program is working, but you can only train three days instead of four now. Do you skip a day, squeeze everything into the other sessions, or find a different program?

These are the questions that you will come across once you’ve been lifting for a while. You know how to train. The hard part is deciding what to train, how much to do, and when something needs to change.

What is strength programming once you’re past beginner gains?

A good program sets out your exercises, sets, reps, working weights and training days. Strength programming is the process of choosing that structure, then reviewing and adjusting it so you’re making progress towards the things you actually care about.

When you’re new to lifting, repeating a few movements and adding a little weight regularly can work very well. Eventually, though, you won’t be able to keep increasing the weight every week. That doesn’t mean you’re doing something wrong, or that you need the most complicated program you can find.

You need a way to answer more useful questions. Is your current training helping you improve? Is the work getting too easy, too demanding or just no longer producing the stimulus you need? And if you change something, how will you know whether it helped?

A good templated program can be an excellent starting point. It can’t know in advance exactly how you’ll respond to every week of training and it won’t work the same for everyone.

Before changing your program, what are you trying to improve?

This sounds obvious until you look at how many different things you could mean by ‘getting stronger’.

If you’re preparing to test a heavy squat, you need some practice doing heavy squats. But you might also benefit from building your quads, improving your strength in a difficult position or sticking point, or developing the capacity to handle more training. Adding another heavy squat day won’t necessarily be the best way to do all three.

You don’t need to organise everything around the competition squat, bench and deadlift unless that’s what you’re actually training for. You should choose the lifts and attributes you care about and construct your program around those.

Every exercise in your program should have a job. It might be there to practise a specific lift, build muscle, strengthen a specific position or let you accumulate useful work without too much fatigue.

For example, you might use low-bar squats because it’s the lift you want to test, and leg presses or split squats for additional leg work. Or maybe you don’t care about your exact numbers on a specific squat variation, but are instead developing lower body pushing strength for another sport or activity. Then you have more freedom to choose a squat variation that translates better to your sport, or one you tolerate or respond to better.

The important part is choosing the destination before arguing about the perfect route.

What if the weight written in your program is too heavy today?

Say your plan calls for a top set of five at 110 kg, but your warm-ups feel heavier than usual.

Do you attempt 110 kg anyway because that’s what’s written down? Or do you choose a weight that lets you complete five good reps at about the intended difficulty?

This is where having some sort of built-in autoregulation becomes useful.

RIR, or reps in reserve, describes the number of extra reps you think you could have done at the end of a set. If you did a set of 5 reps and think you could have done 2 more but would have failed the 8th rep, then you had 2 RIR. In strength training, this is commonly written as RPE (rating of perceived exertion), where RPE = 10 − RIR. So RPE 8 is 2 RIR, and so on. It lets us estimate how hard the set was or how hard it was supposed to be.

Maybe the 110 kg was supposed to be a hard set with 1 RIR (RPE 9), but today 105 kg already feels like RPE 9. Rather than continuing to 110 kg and turning it into a max-effort set or even failing it, you can stop at 105 kg because that actually meets the intensity the program intended for today. Or maybe you do the 110 kg and it flies. It only felt like RPE 7. Well, then we haven’t reached the intended intensity today, and we could try 112.5 kg or more to reach RPE 9.

Your programmed weight was the best estimate available when the session was written. It isn’t a contract. You can adjust it if you have a good reason to think you’ll get more useful training from a different load.

That doesn’t mean changing the whole plan because of one bad warm-up. It means getting the intended work done, recording what happened and checking whether the same problem keeps appearing. If you’re repeatedly having to reduce the weights, then maybe it is time to re-examine the program itself.

Do you need more volume, heavier work or another training day?

This is where people can get stuck reading conflicting advice online. Someone tells you to add more sets. Someone else says you’re doing too much. Someone says to bench once per week, another person recommends benching four times a week, and they all seem to be making progress and know what they’re talking about.

Any of those could be the right advice, but you can’t figure that out until you assess what your current program is doing.

Volume: should you add more sets?

Volume is the amount of work you’re doing. Counting working sets is a practical starting point, but the type of exercise, weight and effort all affect how demanding those sets are.

Five hard sets of deadlifts are not the same training stress as five sets of curls. Five sets of five squats at RPE 9 are also very different from the same volume at RPE 7. As you get stronger and the weights increase, the amount of volume that you need or can tolerate can also change.

Imagine that your squat is improving but your bench has barely moved across two blocks. You’re consistently completing your bench work, your technique is repeatable and you seem to recover well. More productive bench or pressing volume might be worth trying.

Now imagine your bench RPE is rising every week, your last sets look progressively worse and you’re arriving at the next session still fatigued. Adding more work may just make the problem worse.

More volume is one lever we can pull, but it’s not the only one, or necessarily the right one. First work out whether there’s a reasonable case for needing more stimulus, or whether something else should be tried first.

Intensity: do you need to lift heavier?

In strength training, intensity can mean the load relative to your one-rep maximum (%1RM), or how close you take a set to failure (RPE/RIR). Those things are related but not identical.

If you can bench 100 kg for one rep, a single rep at 70 kg is probably fairly easy. Ten reps with that same weight may be very challenging.

If most of your training is in higher rep ranges, but you want to improve your ability to perform a heavy single, some practice with heavier loads will help. If you’ve spent months doing heavy singles with very little other work, building muscle with more volume at moderate intensities might be worth considering.

You don’t need every set to be as heavy as possible. You need the mix of training to make sense for the goal. Often this looks like a few targeted heavy sets for a peak stimulus, and adequate volume at a heavy enough load for practice and development.

Frequency: should you train a lift more often?

Frequency is how often you train a movement. Training bench twice rather than once a week doesn’t automatically mean you’ve increased the total work. Frequency is related to volume, but it’s a separate variable. It can be easier to do two sessions with four sets each than one session with eight sets, but you don’t necessarily have to increase your volume to experiment with higher frequencies.

Spreading your existing sets over two sessions might let you perform them better, especially if the later sets of one long session are suffering. And a “less fatiguing” lift like bench press may respond better to higher frequencies than something like deadlifts.

There’s nothing magical about three or four sessions a week. If you can train well and recover on the schedule you have, don’t add days just because someone else’s spreadsheet has more. For example, I’ve had athletes make better progress deadlifting once every two weeks, but that doesn’t mean it should be the default for everyone.

Exercise selection: do you need a different variation?

If you want to get stronger at a particular squat, you need enough practice with that squat. That’s specificity: training should resemble the performance you’re trying to improve.

But repeatedly testing the same heavy lift isn’t the only (or often best) way to build the strength in it. Paused squats might help you practise a position, while leg presses or another squat variation can let you accumulate more volume without hitting any fatigue issues.

There’s also room for preference. If two exercises serve much the same purpose and you enjoy one a lot more, that’s a perfectly good reason to choose it. You’ll probably put better work into something you want to do.

The question isn’t “what is the best accessory exercise?” It’s “what do I need this exercise to contribute to the program? And what exercise do I think will serve that purpose best?”

Does progressive overload mean adding weight every week?

No. Progressive overload means that as you adapt and become more capable, your training eventually needs to provide a greater stimulus to keep driving adaptation.

You can’t force that adaptation by putting another 2.5 kg on the bar when you aren’t ready for it.

Sometimes adding weight is appropriate. Other times you might add a rep, build up the number of productive sets, or repeat the same work while it becomes more manageable. Sometimes, if you’re not sure, you can try extra weight or an extra rep, see how the RPEs feel, and either continue or pull back based on that. It’s not always clear until you try it, but you shouldn’t be repeatedly hammering for progress that just isn’t there yet.

Say you’re doing a bench variation for three sets of four to six. You might gradually build from four reps per set towards six, then increase the weight and start again at four. That’s a progression you can follow without needing a new one-rep max every Monday and is especially useful if you are working with machines or weights where the next smallest weight increase is still too big.

For a main lift, you might use a heavier top set at a target RPE and some back-off sets to accumulate additional work. That gives you practice with heavier loads while allowing the day’s performance to influence the weight. Over time, you might find the top set progresses but the back-off sets hold steady, and then the top set stalls for a bit while the back-off sets start increasing.

If you’re completing the same work at a lower RPE, or with more consistent or challenging technique, that’s also useful evidence of progress. Squatting the same weight progressively deeper over time is progress.

You don’t need a weight PR every session for a program to be working.

When should you change exercises or start a new training block?

If training feels stale, it’s tempting to replace everything and download a new program. But changing your main exercises every week makes it difficult to learn much from the results.

A training block is a series of weeks with a broadly consistent structure. It gives you a chance to practise the lifts and see how you respond.

You don’t need to throw out a block just because you’ve reached week four or six. If it’s producing the improvements you wanted, it may only need a small adjustment, or you can extend it for a few more weeks as it is.

There are situations in which you might change the way your blocks look. Maybe the training isn’t producing the intended result across a meaningful period. Maybe an exercise causes more fatigue than useful work, you’re preparing for a competition, or your priorities have changed.

Sometimes becoming less specific is productive. A period focused more on hypertrophy, variations or other lifts, almost like an off-season, can develop qualities you’ve been neglecting. Sometimes these can be training side quests, like trying another sport or pursuing different but related goals. They let you work towards different PRs and return to your main lifts with more to build on.

This is the practical idea behind periodisation: organising training into phases with different priorities. You don’t need to predict your training a year in advance to use it, but for most people, doing the exact same training month after month, year after year, is not the best path to success.

A worked example: your four-day program no longer fits

Let’s say you’ve been making progress on a four-day plan, but work and another commitment now leave you with three training days. You could look for an entirely different program, but first ask what the existing one is doing for you.

Suppose the main goals are to improve your squat, bench and deadlift. You currently have two squat exposures, three bench exposures, one deadlift exposure and some additional leg, back and arm work.

You might reorganise those priorities into:

You decided to drop one bench session in favour of adding a chest press because you can get through that faster and still have time for other accessories, meaning that you don’t lose as much volume overall. You would still need to decide how much work belongs in each session and which accessories are worth retaining.

But the main goal, the important lifts and the reasons those exercises are there haven’t changed. You’ve reorganised the training around your week rather than abandoning what was working and made educated compromises to minimise any potential losses from this new schedule.

Then review the results. Are the Friday accessories suffering because you’ve crammed too much into that session? Is the bench still moving? You can use those answers to adjust the next block.

That’s good strength programming in practice.

How do you know whether the changes are working?

You don’t need to track everything, but you should record enough to avoid making the same guesses month after month.

Start with your weights, sets, reps and RPE or RIR for the important lifts. Videos can help you compare technique, and a few notes about sleep, nutrition, bodyweight or an unusually difficult week can provide useful context.

Then review the training at different times:

An estimated 1RM (e1RM) can help you follow maximal-strength trends without testing a true max every week. But it isn’t a perfect measurement. Different rep ranges, technique and fatigue can all affect the estimate, but it’s easier than comparing those raw metrics directly.

A good approach to training reviews is to treat each block as a small experiment. You try something based on your current knowledge, record the outcome and gradually learn what seems to work for you. Across several blocks, you might notice that a certain variation, amount of work or rep range often coincides with better results.

One good block isn’t proof that you’ve discovered the perfect program, but it is additional evidence. This approach is more useful than changing five things at once for all your lifts and having no idea what helped.

Where does coaching fit into strength programming?

Hopefully you now have a better understanding of how to approach your program, knowing that no one has some perfect routine that they just haven’t shared with you yet. Understanding why you’re doing the training in your program is part of becoming a better lifter, and helps you make better decisions during training and when you are planning your training.

The difficult part often comes when there are several reasonable options or seemingly none at all. Do you add bench volume, change the intensity, increase the frequency or give the current block more time? And if your schedule changes, what can you remove without sacrificing too much progress?

That’s where individual coaching can help. I build your program around your goals and circumstances, review your training and lift videos, and use the results to decide what needs adjusting. It might be your first time tackling a certain issue or circumstance, but chances are I’ve worked through the same process with many others before.

If you want to spend more time training and getting stronger, and less time stressing about rebuilding the program because you’re not seeing the results you want, then check out the coaching options.

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