Twelve weeks from nothing, starting with an empty bar

Week one, you squat an empty bar. Twenty kilos, five reps, five sets, two minutes between each. It takes about eleven minutes and you'll walk out convinced you've wasted a trip.

Do it anyway. The empty bar is the last time the movement will be light enough for you to actually think about what your knees and hips are doing. Squander that and you'll spend month three unpicking a habit you built in month one.

Everything below fits in 45 minutes, three times a week. If you only get two, the whole thing still works, it just takes longer. That's the trade you're making, and it's a fine one.

The two sessions

There are two workouts. You alternate them. Monday, Wednesday, Friday is easy to remember, but any three non-consecutive days will do.

Session A

• Back squat, 3 sets of 5
• Bench press, 3 sets of 5
• Barbell row, 3 sets of 8

Session B

• Back squat, 3 sets of 5
• Overhead press, 3 sets of 5
• Deadlift, 1 set of 5

Week one runs A, B, A. Week two runs B, A, B. Keep going like that for twelve weeks.

Yes, you squat every session. Yes, that sounds like a lot. At the weights a beginner uses, it isn't. You'll be squatting 40kg in week three, and 40kg doesn't need three days to recover from. It needs a night's sleep and something to eat.

One set of deadlifts looks absurdly light on paper. It won't in week seven. The deadlift punishes frequency harder than anything else on the list, and grinding through three sets of five is the fastest route to a back that complains all weekend.

Warming up without burning the clock

Don't do twenty minutes on a bike. Warm up with the bar itself.

For squats: empty bar for five, then add roughly a third of your working weight for five, then two-thirds for three, then two singles near the top. That's it. By week six that's four warm-up sets, each under a minute, and you're at your real weight inside six or seven minutes.

Bench and press get two warm-up sets. Deadlifts get two. Rows get one.

How the weight goes up

This is the entire engine of the programme, so get it right.

Every single session, you add weight to every lift. Not when you feel ready. Every session.

• Squat and deadlift: +5kg per session for the first two weeks, then +2.5kg
• Bench and row: +2.5kg per session
• Overhead press: +1.25kg per session

You'll need the small plates. Most gyms have 1.25kg discs hiding under the rack. If yours doesn't, a pair costs about a tenner online and they're the best value in the whole sport.

Write every number down. Paper notebook in the gym bag, or a note on your phone. You will not remember what you pressed nine days ago, and guessing wrecks the progression.

Weeks one to three

Light, boring, and the part most men skip.

The job in these three weeks is to learn where the bar sits, how deep you go, and how to brace. Film one set a week from the side, at hip height, and watch it in the car park. You're looking for the hips and shoulders rising at the same rate on the squat, and a bar path over mid-foot on the deadlift.

If you've got the money, three sessions with a coach who competes in powerlifting or weightlifting is worth more than any amount of reading. Sixty to ninety pounds an hour in most cities. Book them for week one, week three and week eight.

Expect soreness. Expect your legs to feel strange going down stairs on day two of week one. That fades by week three and doesn't come back unless you take a fortnight off.

Weeks four to eight

This is where it gets good and where it gets hard, in that order.

Around week five the bar stops being light. Squats start taking four or five minutes of recovery between sets rather than two. The session that took 38 minutes now takes 50. Budget for it.

Around week six you'll have your first genuinely unpleasant session. The weight will feel wrong from the first warm-up set, the third set will be a grind, and you'll drive home wondering whether you're doing something wrong.

You're not. That's just what week six is.

Lengthen your rests before you drop the weight. Three minutes, four if you need it. Rushing sets to save eight minutes is how a good progression dies early.

Weeks nine to twelve, and your first stall

Somewhere in here you'll miss reps. Probably on the overhead press first, because it's the lift with the least room to grow. You'll get four instead of five on the last set.

Rules for that:

• Miss once: repeat the same weight next session.
• Miss twice in a row: repeat it again.
• Miss three times: drop that lift by 10 per cent and build back up, adding weight each session as before.

That reset isn't failure. It's the programme working. You'll come back through the same weight a fortnight later and it'll move easily.

By week twelve, a man who started at an empty bar and didn't miss much has usually got a squat somewhere in the region of his own bodyweight for five reps, a deadlift a good deal heavier than that, and a press that still feels insulting. Individual numbers vary enormously with height, age, weight and history. Don't measure yourself against a stranger's spreadsheet.

When the week falls apart

It will. A child gets a temperature on Tuesday night. A job goes sideways. You're in a hotel in Birmingham on Thursday.

Missing one session costs you nothing. Pick up where you left off, same weights, no penalty.

Missing a full week costs you about two sessions of progress. Come back 5 per cent lighter on everything and you'll be past your old numbers inside a fortnight.

Missing three weeks means you restart the last block. Annoying, not fatal.

What actually kills the twelve weeks isn't a missed session. It's deciding that a disrupted week means the whole thing is ruined, and then not going back. The man who trains 28 times in twelve weeks beats the man who trains perfectly for five weeks and then stops.

Food, sleep, and the stuff nobody wants to hear

You need to eat more than you currently do, and most of the increase should be protein. A palm-sized portion at every meal is the rough working standard. If you're getting up at 5:45 to train before the house wakes, you need to be in bed before eleven. Everything about week six is worse on six hours.

If you've got a history of back or shoulder trouble, high blood pressure, or anything you're on medication for, talk to your GP before you start loading a bar. That's not a formality. It's the one thing on this page you can't work around by being stubborn.

Kit

Flat shoes. Not running trainers, which have a squashy heel that moves under load. Canvas plimsolls do the job for about thirty pounds.

Skip the belt until week eight at the earliest. Skip the gloves entirely.

That's the lot. No sleeves, no straps, no pre-workout.

Week thirteen, you'll open the notebook and see 20kg written in the top corner of page one. You'll have forgotten it was ever that light.