Build the muscle you actually asked for

Why sets a week, and not a programme

Almost everything that decides whether a muscle grows is captured by one number: how many hard sets it does in a week. Not the split, not the order, not whether you called it push-pull-legs. The research clusters around growth rising with weekly sets and flattening somewhere past twenty for most people, and around two sessions a week beating one for the same total. That is why this tool gives you a set count and then arranges it, rather than handing you somebody else's routine and hoping your week fits it.

A hard set means a set that finishes within a couple of reps of the point where another one was not happening. Sets that stop well short of that do very little, which is why a session can feel long and busy and still not have done much. Three sets taken close to failure will beat six taken comfortably, every time.

Where the starting weights come from, and why they are a range

Each exercise carries a fraction of bodyweight: a novice back squat for a set of five sits near three-quarters of bodyweight on the bar, a dumbbell lateral raise near six per cent of it in each hand. Those fractions are moved by how long you have been training and by the average upper-body difference between the sexes, and then given a bracket of about a fifth either way — because they are population averages and you are a person.

The honest position is that the bracket exists to be corrected. If the first set gave you fifteen reps when you were aiming for eight, the number was wrong and now you know by how much; step five works out the adjustment. A tool that printed one confident figure would be pretending to know something about your body that it cannot.

Regions: real, and smaller than the internet says

A muscle is not one thing. Incline pressing does grow the upper chest more than flat pressing does. A seated calf raise reaches the soleus, which a standing raise barely touches, because bending the knee takes the gastrocnemius out of it. Hinging and curling grow different parts of the hamstring. All of that is measured, and it is why this tool lets you point at a region.

What it is not is a way to choose a shape. The difference between emphasising a region and ignoring it is a few per cent of growth over months, and where a muscle attaches — which is what actually decides how it looks — does not move. Nor can any exercise take fat off the area around the muscle it works; that has been tested repeatedly and it does not happen.

Training with no equipment at all

The awkward part of bodyweight training is not that it cannot build muscle — it can, as long as the sets get close to failure — but that there is no small plate to add. The progression has to come from leverage instead: moving your feet up, your hands down, or one limb out of the movement. That step is much bigger than a plate, so reps drop sharply when you take it, and that drop is the sign it worked rather than a sign you have gone backwards.

Two muscles are genuinely hard to train this way. Hamstrings need something to anchor your feet before a Nordic curl is possible, and the back needs something to hang from or pull against — a bar, or the edge of a sturdy table. Everything else has a usable ladder, and this tool shows the whole of it so you can see where you are on it.

Common questions