The best beginner training routine – zero to strong in 40min/week

If you’re a beginner, you can’t start with the end goal stuff. And so to give you a starting point, I want to show you the most effective routine you can start with right now to get stronger, build muscle tissue, gain lifelong mobility about as fast and as safely as possible that you can do in about 40 minutes a week with some simple home equipment and that you can start from literally any strength level as long as you can move your arms around like this, you can start, if you’re a beginner, you’re not currently strength training or at least you’re not currently consistently making progress with your strength every week and you want a body that’s fit, that looks great, that’s healthy and functional, then you’ve got work to do. And if you’ve been avoiding starting because you think it’s too hard and you are too weak or inexperienced to do the sort of stuff you see more advanced people doing, then you’re putting yourself into catch 22.
Because if you are already strong enough to do the movements you’re seeing advanced people do, then you’d already have the body that advanced people have and you wouldn’t need to be training for it. And so we need you to have a process that’s right for your body based on where you are at now, that can actually allow you to start building up your strength so that you can progress eventually towards being advanced and having the muscle and the aesthetics, the strength that advanced people have regardless of where you’re at on the spectrum from beginner to advance. The goal is very simple. Increase your strength because that is what leads your body to build muscle tissue, to stay mobile and healthy as you age and allows you to be lean, look great, have a body that you’re proud of. Now the principle for doing this is exactly the same regardless of whether you are really experienced, super strong, shredded beast or someone who’s completely beginner, has never trained in their life and has zero strength coordination or muscle tissue.
The way that strength training works, and this is the beauty of the human body, the fact that we can actually do things that make it go and change and adapt, so by our consistent actions actually change the form of our body. It’s incredible that we can actually do this. The principle for doing that is basically you’ve got a threshold wherever you are, a threshold level of strength, and if you work there at that threshold, very close to it, when you go away and rest, you cause your body to get a little bit better and build some buffer on top of what your previous threshold was. And you do that enough times. Imagine this is a weekly cycle of training, recovering, coming back, doing some more. Now when you work at your new threshold, then the next time you go away and recover your threshold’s a little bit higher and just by repeating this over and over and over, as our strength increases, so does our muscle and the shape of our body.
The point of this is that effective training, it just has to be training that reaches your threshold, not someone else’s who’s more advanced, not someone who’s weaker than you. Neither of those things are helpful for our purposes. The only thing that’s helpful is training that is exactly at your limit, the limits of your strength, wherever that may be right now, take the bench press for example, where you’re pushing a barbell from your chest up. Imagine trying to do 150 kilos right now. If you have no idea how heavy that is, it’s very heavy. If you try and do that, you’re not going to be able to move the barber. You’re just going to get crushed, get no work done. It’s not going to be effective for you. But as I said, by the same token, anything that’s too easy is also a waste of time.
Imagine a massive bodybuilder who can bench 150 kilos. You don’t see ’em on the gym floor doing pushups to try and build their chest because it’s way too easy for them. There’s no intensity there relative to their strength. And so this gap means that it’s a waste of time. So doing an exercise that’s way beyond your limit, no good doing one that’s way below your limit, also useless. So at this point you might be looking at some strength moves. You see me doing a handstand push up, a front leave and you think, I can’t do that. It’s way too hard. That’s the point. Again, you see my physique, the body I have is reflective of the strength that I’ve built over 10 years of intense training. The key thing you’ve got to understand is that all the same training can be done just at a different absolute level of difficulty.
And here’s the key thing, if you’re a beginner, the key thing I want you to understand is every movement that you can train scales to zero, you can make every movement that we use in our system. We have six strength goals covering six basic movement patterns. Each of those movement patterns, yes, can be scaled up all the way to the end goal, the sort of stuff you see flashed around online, but they can also be scaled all the way down to zero requiring no strength whatsoever to do, which means that it doesn’t matter how beginning you are doesn’t no matter how weak you are, you can find a level that’s suited for your body, find your threshold and train there, and I’m going to show you how you can do that right now so you can go away and start at a level that’s suited for you.
And so if it gives you confidence in yourself, my mom who’s in her early sixties untrained for many, many years, brutal bay injuries, has had a knee replaced and their other ankle fused over the last couple of years, she is able to do this. We scaled all the big movements down to a level that suit her and she’s able to literally train and get multiple reps in work until she’s satisfied at the limit of her strength. The movements look nothing like what I’m doing in the shed when I go and train. It doesn’t matter. She’s trained, she’s getting stronger and she’s in the best shape that she’s been in in many years, both in the way that she’s able to walk around and do the things she wants to do. She’s not only holding onto the muscle mass she got, she’s building more because there are no excuses not to be doing this.
You just need to know how to scale things down. So what we’re trying to do, imagine our bench press example again, 150 kilos impossible. What we want to find in terms of scaling everything down to zero for each of your movements, we want to scale things to a point where it’s like you’re doing a bench press, we’ve taken all the weight off and instead of a barbell, we’ve just got a broomstick. So it’s literally zero weight or very close to zero weight, and we’re just doing the movement pattern with no load on it whatsoever. That’s the model we’re trying to accomplish with our movement patterns because if you can find zero, then we can start to slowly add load onto the bar until we find a point of maximal resistance. So I’m going to take you through the six movements that we use in our system and show you how you can scale ’em down to zero and then find your level of strength so you can train all of them stacking stronger.
To give you context for this, what we’re trying to do is imagine this is the strength curve for let’s say a chin up. So this is your ability over that movement pattern from the bottom to the top. You’ll notice that’s towards the middle bottom of a chin up that things get the most. If you’re trying to do one, that’s usually where people have the least amount of strength at the very bottom and the very top things are generally the easiest if you are just doing a chin up body weight, the force required by the movement is constant throughout the range of motion. So maybe it’s like this where at the top you could do a partial range of motion there. You can get it up a little bit from the bottom, but in the middle, the actual difficulty of the chin up is beyond what you could do.
And so you get stuck. We’re going to throw away completely this whole model of fixed resistance anyway, but I just want to outline what that looks like. And so if you are really good at doing chin-ups, then maybe your strength curve would look more like this and you’re able to get a few, you’re not actually working your threshold for much of this, maybe just in the middle portion when you get tired. And then if your strengths down here, then chin ups are useless to you because you can’t even get it wrapped. You can’t even make any progress at all except maybe at the very top. So what we want to do, instead of just trying to do a chin up doing what we can and then failing, see how it’s a very clunky, messy way of approaching strength training because it completely ignores where your specific strength is at right now in terms of your training career and right now in terms of the specific rep that you’re doing and the specific point in the rep that you’re currently at.
So we’re going to throw away this model instead and learn to adapt things to exactly your level of strength at all times. What that first requires. The first job I’m going to show you how to do is to find zero. We’re going to take it all down to requiring no force whatsoever from the working muscles. And then what we can do is bring things back up throughout the rep and find the limit of your strength. So I’ll take you through those one step at a time. So first we’ve got six strength goals that we’re trying to build towards long-term. If you don’t understand the principle behind this, you can go watch some of our other videos to get more of an understanding of the general goals of the system. But we’ve basically got six movement patterns that cover all our body’s needs in terms of strength and development, and we’ve got one strength goal for each of those long-term as our north star guiding us in our training development.
And so for each of those movement patterns, if you want to start training, all you’ve got to do is get the pattern, take it down to zero required difficulty, and then we can scale up. So what does that look like? The first movement is your plange pushup, horizontal pushing where goal is to build up to a straddle plange eventually. Now I talk a lot about the higher end where we are leaning so far forward that our feet come off the ground and we’re in this actual plange position. It’s not a beginner movement, it’s their end goal. I’ve worked for 10 years to try and get a sloppy two second hold on this thing. What we can do if we want to scale it down is basically reduce the lean first so that our shoulders come back or hands go forward, and then we can literally put our feet on the ground so that we’re just in this normal pushup position and work there.
If it’s too heavy still, we can bring a knee or foot closer. And basically the principle here is we just want to take all the weight off our hands and put them on our feet. We can move our feet to support ourself through this movement. If we have our feet under us, then all the load is off our hands and we should now just be able to guide ourselves through a zero weight pushup. So when you try this, go and do it. Take all the way over your hands and you should be able to reach full range. You should be able to get your hands touching your body and then all the way out to locked elbows without any load on it whatsoever. And now once you’ve done that, that you can scale to zero. If we now flip this and look at the front lever row, which is our horizontal pull, again, the goal as a front lever, not beginner advanced.
So to scale down, we can reduce how far we’re pushing our hands away from us to make the row easier. And then if it’s still too hard, again, we can walk our feet in more towards the midline. So we start to take weight off our hands and put them on our feet. And if we keep walking back again, we can get to the point where there’s effectively zero weight on our hands and we’re just going through the motions. We’re just basically standing there guiding ourselves through a row. And again, you should be able to get full range of motion, get your elbows past your body, and then again, all the way back out to locked elbows. And now you’re doing both your horizontal push and horizontal pull things that you can scale up all the way to elite levels now at zero. And so even if you are complete beginner and super tired at the end of your set struggling to even move, you’ll still be able to get your reps in and complete them full range of motion, doing as much training as you decide you want to do for the day with me so far.
So that is horizontal pushing and pulling. And so you’ll see that they’re just converses of each other, but you basically are getting to the point where all the weight is off your hands. And so yes, you’re moving your body relative to the rings, but it’s your feet helping you to do that rather than your hands actually pushing and pulling. It’s very similar concept with the vertical movements. And so with a handstand pushup, ultimately yes, we’re building two freestanding handstand pushup. Again, extremely difficult. You don’t start there. It takes years. So what we do, the general principle here is that we’re taking weight off our hands again and onto our feet. It’s like the horizontal but a bit more simple. So we can move our feet from the air onto a wall. If that’s too hard, we can put ’em on a platform. If that’s too hard, we can bring them all the way down to the ground so that now we’re in this sort of parks position.
And again, just like with the pushup, our weight is fully on our feet. We’re literally just standing there guiding ourselves through the range of motion. We can come down to a knee if we need to at the bottom, whatever we need to do to basically just use our feet to take the whole load so that our hands are yes, going through the full range of motion from completely flexed overhead like this shoulders touching our ears to the point where our hands touch our shoulders. We’re in this deep position. We do that with zero load and guide ourselves through. So again, super tired, doesn’t matter. We can still train full range of motion and the one arm chin up is essentially the same. It’s just even easier. What we do with this one is just put our hand on the other ring, put our feet on the ground, and we can just literally stand there and squat through the range of motion again, from full overhead, fully flexed shoulder to our wrist, touching our chest, getting full range without any weight on that hand.
That arm doesn’t even need to be doing any work. We can just be guiding ourselves through it with our feet. So that’s your vertical pushing and pulling. And what I want you to do after this is go and get your ring set up and have a go at each of these. And you should be able to guide yourself through an entire full range motion rep top to bottom without needing any strength. You should be able to do it and feel like you haven’t even worked a single muscle of the working muscles. That’s the point because then we can figure out how to make it harder very, very easily. And then your squat, even if you load this thing up, I put the little chairs under his arm. Even if you load the squat up with 60 kilos of weight, you should still be able to make this close to zero effort by using your other leg.
Again, we’re just taking the weight off the working leg and putting it on the supporting limbs. So we take our weight off, put it onto our other leg and our hands, and you should be able to get to the point where the working leg is not even pushing on the ground, it’s just limp and it’s your assisting leg and your assisting arms that actually take the whole load. And then finally, the last movement with the Nordic curl. It’s very similar thing. What we can do is two things. Firstly, we can pi, so we can bend our hips, and so we can reduce the lever length just by breaking at the hips and shortening our body. And then from there we can put our hands on the ground and literally hold ourselves up, give ourselves as much support as we need. And then again, you should be able to feel your feet, your ankles, completely let go, not need to be doing any work, and you just guide yourself through with your arms, which means again, we found zero hamstrings aren’t doing any work, and now we can scale it from there.
So your first point of call is to go and test all of those things. Just get one full range of motion rep without any load whatsoever on the working muscles, because from here we can then titrate up. And it’s very easy to find the point of failure where you can actually work at your maximum level of strength and make progress as fast as possible in 40 minutes a week or less. So let’s just review where we’re at. We’ll go back to our chin up example, our strength across the range of motion, our maximum possible strength might look like this. We’ve now figured out how to scale that one arm chin up down to zero throughout the full range of motion from top to bottom by taking all the weight off that working arm. Now, what we want to do throughout the movement is basically scale up until we hit the point where we’re failing and we’re doing everything we can, but staying in the same place.
The force required by the movement is equal to our maximum potential force output from that working arm. That is our goal throughout our strength training. And so we’re going to learn to do that. And then if we just break the rep down into a bunch of mini reps, we can do that throughout the movement. And so doing this is actually pretty simple, and to give you a nice clear image in your head of what this should look or feel like. Imagine, let’s go back to the example of that bench press where you’re holding the broomstick. Just say you’re halfway through a rep holding it there. It’s effortless, right? The difficulty requires practically zero. So you’re holding that bench press above your chest very happily. Now imagine a 200 kilo person comes over and starts to slowly sit on the bar in the middle of the broomstick above your head.
Imagine they perch over you and they slowly start to ease themselves onto the broomstick, putting their body weight bit by bit onto the broomstick that you are holding. Okay? So slowly you’ve got 200 kilos being loaded onto the bar and this person’s rear end is above your face slowly getting heavier and heavier and heavier and heavier. You’re going to do everything you can to hold that bar up, right? Hold it away from you. Yeah, obviously because you don’t want this person getting any closer. But there’s going to be a point we said before, you can’t bench press 150 kilos and this is a 200 kilo person trying to sit on you. There’s going to be a point where no matter how hard you push, that bar is going to start to ease down before to lower towards your face, and there’s going to be nothing you can do about it.
That moment is what we are trying to find at every single point in our reps. We’re trying to constantly pull that ring down towards us in the one arm chin up, but we’re going to load enough body weight on us that it’s literally being prid away out of our grasp. And now we’re at the point of being forced to fail and lower despite trying to pull up. That’s basically where all of our training is going to sit. And so if you know what variable to manipulate, you don’t have a person sitting on your bar. But each of these movements is difficult for a specific reason because of the leverage, because of how we load it. And so if you know what variable you are trying to manipulate in order to bridge the gap between here and the strength goal, end goal level of strength we’re aiming for, which might be up here, if you know what variable sits between these two levels, then you can adjust it just until you find that point of failure.
Okay? So with all of these, I’ve run through them quickly, but it’s basically just reversing what you did to make it really easy. And so if you’ve scaled to zero and you know what the goal is, you should be able to figure out how to bridge the gap between the two. But to give you our variables that we use in our system with the plange pushup, you’re literally just increasing the distance, horizontal distance between your shoulders and your hands. And so you lean forward in front of where your hands are. Eventually your feet are going to be able to come up off the ground and eventually with more strength. Again, this is a multi-year process of building the strength necessary, but with more strength, you get to the point where you can do a straddle plan or a plange. And so all you’re trying to do is lean forward enough that you find that point of failure where it’s impossible to move, and now you found your limit.
And now it’s all about adjusting that to be able to train through your reps for the row, the front levers. Similarly, you’re just going to push the rings away towards your hips until you find the point where it’s too difficult. And so the easy way to find this is get to the top of the row and then rather than lowering, push the rings away until you start to get forced down. And in fact, this is the best way to find failure for all of these is rather than trying to on the way up, get to the top and then use the difficulty variable as a way of forcing yourself down. So with the pushups, try and hold yourself at the top of a pushup elbow, slightly bent, lean, so far forward until you start to feel it force you down. Same with the rows. Push your rings away towards your hips, towards your feet until you start to be, your elbows are pried open and you force down.
It’s exactly the same with all of these. With the pushup. You just load weight onto your hands, getting your hips up, pushing weight off your feet, onto your hands until you start to get forced down to the bottom of the movement, the chin up. I’ve already explained, you just take the help away until you’re forced down exactly the same with the squats. So you can bend a little bit with your knee, lots of weight on your back, and then just keep lowering until suddenly you need to grab yourself some support from the chairs, or you put your other leg on the ground in order to stop the fall, and now you know you’re failing. And Nordic it super easy as well. You just again, lean into the movement and take your arms away and try and straighten out. Eventually, you’re going to pretty quickly find the point where you fall flat.
And then it’s just a matter of scaling back again and parking, putting hands on the ground, helping yourself to not fall. And as I said, the easiest way I think to find this point of failure out is just by testing it. I realised at some point in my training that I could literally just test, keep trying to do a harder version than I’m currently capable of. Keep trying to do the full thing. And when I find myself falling, I know, okay, cool, well, I found my limit. I’m now actively failing. So this part isn’t hard, and we can talk a lot more about what it feels like to train at umax and the sort of intensity you want to go for and how much training you want to do. But the important point I want to make in this video is about making it easy enough to start.
And so if you take one thing away from this, I want you to go and try each those movements, get a full range of motion wrap with no effort, no intensity, and then from there you can start to scale things up in terms of the routine. All of this is much more important than the specific details of how you actually train, but I’m going to give you the full routine as promised anyway. And it’s this six movement patterns that we’ve just been through once a week each. You’re going to rock up to your training area, and you’re going to have one go, one continuous set of doing this, going through full range of motion reps, start to finish making it as heavy as you can, but making it doable. And you’re just going to do that until you’ve had enough. So one set per each of your movements once a week each, you can split them up over the week however you want.
But what you should be hypothetically aiming for is one to three minutes per set for each of six movements over the week. So yes, this is like max 20 minutes of training time a week. This is all I do. This is all any of my students do. But you don’t need more time than this. When we say 40 minutes a week, we’re talking about rest time as well. So I’m effectively doubling the most conservative estimate of how long this is going to take. You get full range of motion once you find the point of failure where you’re falling despite your best efforts, you know, found your max, and that is what effective training feels like. And if you can just train there for a couple of minutes a week for each of these six movement patterns, and as I said, do it across the full range of motion, then you are now officially doing the most effective strength training possible for getting stronger, building muscle tissue, gaining lifelong mobility, and allowing yourself to have that lean, great looking physique that you want.
So there’s a lot of information. There’s is quite a practical deep dive. Let me know what you think, if this is useful for you. And if you like this and you’re interested in applying this yourself, you want more of a deep dive into what it looks like to actually get started with all this stuff. Make as much progress as possible. Then I’ve made a new free training on the whole system and how it works. So if you want to learn more, go watch that links in the description. Otherwise, lemme know your thoughts and questions and comments below. Happy training.

This video outlines an effective routine for beginner strength training that can be done in about 40 minutes per week with simple home equipment. [00:35] The key principles are:

• This efficient approach can help beginners build strength, muscle, and mobility as safely and quickly as possible. [00:35]
• Start at a level that matches your current strength, scaling movements down to zero difficulty if needed. [03:57]
• Focus on six key movement patterns (horizontal push/pull, vertical push/pull, squat, knee flexion) and progressively increase the difficulty of each until you reach failure. [07:57]
• Train at the limit of your strength, with one intense set per movement pattern per week. [19:23]