You Don't Need to Know Much to Start Strength Training. Just This.

There's a version of strength training that lives on the internet that involves intricate periodisation, a five-day training split, a detailed spreadsheet and approximately seventeen different supplements.

That version is not for you. Well, not yet, anyway. And honestly, probably not ever, because most of it is overkill.

Here's what you actually need to know.

Your body is very good at adapting. Use that.

The single most important concept in strength training is progressive overload. It sounds technical. It isn't.

Your body adapts to the demands you put on it. That's a good thing in life, but in the gym it means that if you keep doing the exact same workout with the exact same weights for the exact same number of reps, your body will eventually stop finding it particularly challenging. And when it stops finding it challenging, it stops changing.

Progressive overload just means giving your body a slightly bigger challenge over time.

That might look like doing one more rep than last week. Lifting slightly heavier. Resting for a bit less time between sets. Moving more slowly and deliberately through the exercise to increase the demand on your muscles.

You don't need to do all of these at once. You don't need to add weight every single week. You just need to be moving forward, slowly and consistently, rather than staying exactly the same.

Track your sessions. Even just jotting down what you lifted and how many reps in your phone notes. You'll be amazed what you notice after a month.

The workout you'll actually do is better than the perfect one

I've been coaching women for a while now and I can tell you with complete confidence that the "optimal" programme that never gets done is less useful than the decent programme that gets done three times a week.

Life is busy. Most of the women I work with are managing a job, a family, maybe ageing parents, and somewhere at the bottom of the list, themselves. A training plan that only works when everything else is perfect isn't a training plan. It's a fantasy.

So before you write off a session because you haven't got the full hour, or the right gym, or the right energy: what can you do with what you've actually got today? Sometimes that's 20 minutes with a pair of dumbbells in your living room. That counts. That absolutely counts.

The basics are called basics because they work

You don't need a huge exercise library. You need a small number of movements that cover the main patterns: a hinge (like a deadlift), a squat, a push, a pull, and a carry. Get good at those. Get stronger at those. That's genuinely most of it.

When I start working with someone new, we spend real time on these fundamentals. Not because they're easy, but because doing them well is the difference between getting stronger and getting injured. And because once you've got them, everything else becomes available to you.

A few things that help more than you'd expect:

Think about pushing the floor away in a deadlift, rather than pulling the bar up. The power comes from your legs. The bar just comes with it.

This is one of my favourite cues to use in group sessions, because there is something extremely fun about getting a room full of women to all push the floor away simultaneously and genuinely entertaining the idea that together we might bring it down. (The Craft fans will understand. Everyone else: watch The Craft.)

Think of your arms as straps in a deadlift or a row. They're connecting you to the weight. The work is happening in your back and your legs. This sounds simple. It changes things.

These are the kinds of cues that shift something. Not because they're clever, but because they give you the right mental picture at the right moment.

You don't need to know everything before you start.

This one's important. I see women spend months researching before they ever pick up a weight. Watching videos, reading programmes, trying to feel ready. And I get it, it can feel like a world with its own language and rules. But the truth is, you learn most of it by doing it.

Start simpler than you think you need to. Get a bit of guidance on the fundamentals. Turn up consistently. And then keep going.

The women I work with who make the biggest changes aren't necessarily the ones who arrived knowing the most. They're the ones who showed up week after week and kept building on what they knew.

That's it. That's the whole thing.