The plan I actually run

Most training articles show you a plan and quietly skip the part where it has to survive your actual life. So here is my actual life, and then the plan, and then why the plan looks the way it does.

At 28 I benched 175 kilos. No supplements beyond food, nothing else either. I was strong, and I assumed I always would be.

Then my cervical spine failed. Severe compression of the spinal cord at C5–C6. There were stretches where I could not function, and there were moments where I could barely move at all. It ended in surgery, and I now have an implant in my neck.

After that came fifteen years in which I did not lift anything at all.

I am now in my forties. Today I bench 100 kilos for six reps, and 110 for two.

I say this because it is the single most useful thing I can tell a forty-something who is thinking about starting. You will not get back what you had. You will get something else, and the something else is worth more — because the version of you at 28 did not have to unload pallets for eight hours and then still be able to pick up his kids.

Look at any standard programme and you will find the same three lifts at its core: barbell squat, deadlift, barbell bench press.

I do none of them.

• No barbell bench press. The fixed bar path loads my shoulders and neck in a way I will not risk. I press with dumbbells, which let my joints find their own line, or I use a machine.
• No barbell squats. A loaded bar across my upper back is exactly the position I am not willing to put a rebuilt neck into.
• No deadlifts. Same reasoning.

My leg day is machines from start to finish. In my own notes it is not called "legs". It is called spine safety. That is the actual heading I wrote for myself.

Someone will read that and think it is soft. Leg press instead of squats, machines instead of a barbell. Fine. The alternative to a machine leg press is not a heavy squat. The alternative is nothing at all, forever. I know which one builds more muscle.

This is a genuine week, the one I am training right now. Four sessions is a good week for me — some weeks I only get two. Notice that no two sessions happen at the same time of day.

Monday I train at seven in the evening. Tuesday at half ten in the morning. Thursday and Friday at ten. Wednesday not at all.

No fixed training days. No fixed times. The gym slot is whatever gap the rota leaves, and it moves every single week.

Wednesday is the one I want to point at. I could have trained on Wednesday. I chose not to, because I had a morning shift and four sessions in five days would have been too much on top of the physical work. The rest day is part of the plan, not a failure of it.

Days one to three are the heavy ones. Two working sets minimum, four maximum, up to eight reps. Day four is deliberately lighter and higher rep — a pump session, not a strength session.

If you had asked me a year ago, I would have told you I do not warm up. Then I actually described what I do, and realised I was wrong.

Here is what happens on my first exercise:

• A light set, high reps. Nothing heavy. Just moving.
• Add some weight. A few reps only — not to fatigue, just to feel it.
• Add more. A few reps again.
• Two or three of these ramps, and only then the working set.

That is a warm-up. A careful one. I just never called it that because it does not look like the stretching routine you see in videos.

And I do not do it to be virtuous. I do it because without it I physically cannot complete the working set. My body needs time to accept the load. Skip the ramp and the top set simply is not there.

I do not time my rests. I sit down, and I go again when I feel ready. In practice that is a long time — longer than the sixty to ninety seconds you get told to take.

The result: four exercises, two to four working sets each, and the whole thing takes about an hour, every time.

Written down, that looks lazy. Four exercises in an hour? Someone will tell you that is not a real session.

When you arrive at the gym already emptied by your job, the rest between sets is not dead time. It is the only thing standing between you and a session that achieves nothing.

I do not log my lifts. I do not have a spreadsheet. Every session I pick the weight based on how I feel that day and what my body is offering.

The rule for adding weight is simple:

A coach would tell me to track everything, and for a competitive lifter that coach would be right. But I am not preparing for anything. I am not going to be on a stage. I am a man in his forties with a rebuilt neck who wants to still be able to do his job in twenty years.

A logbook I abandon after three weeks is worth less than a rule I actually follow for two years. The best system is the one you are still using when it stops being interesting.

The one number I do know is my bench: 100 for six, 110 for two. I know it because it is the one lift where I quietly still want to get stronger. Old habits from a younger man.

The plan is not the valuable part of this article. Push, pull, legs, and a lighter fourth day is not an original idea and I am not pretending it is.

The valuable part is everything around it:

• Four sessions, and not one of them at the same time of day.
• A rest day taken on purpose, because five days of work plus four sessions was too much.
• Every heavy barbell lift removed, and the plan still works.
• A long warm-up ramp, because a tired body needs one.
• Long rests, because a tired body needs those too.
• No logbook, because I would not keep one.

Every single one of those is a compromise. Every one of them would be marked down by a coach.

And it is precisely those compromises that mean I have trained for two solid years instead of quitting in the third week, like I would have if I had tried to run someone else's programme on someone else's schedule with someone else's spine.