Almost every day, someone asks me some version of the same thing. Could you build me a programme to get stronger? Or, I've heard how important strength training is as you get older, what should I actually be doing? Or, I run a lot and I find it easy to just put on my shoes and do that, but I've got no idea what I'm supposed to be doing for strength on top of that.

Over the years I've built thousands of programs for people, many of them were excellent, and would genuinely work if someone followed them. However, what I've seen is that almost always, giving someone more information doesn't solve the actual problem, and the overwhelm of starting with an entire workout or rehab plan causes the person to stop before they even begin. Or at least very soon afterwards. Human nature is such that if the habit isn't there, and the friction to begin is too great, it doesn't matter how good the programme is or how badly the person wants it.

Now, before I hand anyone a plan, I help them build the habit first, and once that's actually in place, the programme part becomes so much easier.

I've also come to observe that shame shows up in the wellness space far more than anyone would guess. And I have no desire to add to that. I don't want to hand someone a plan and then watch it become another thing that they failed at. There's a sense of shame I've noticed with not being able to stick to the exercise plan, or even to start. I hear about the feeling like everyone else somehow has this figured out and they don't. I'm not interested in adding to that pile of shame for anyone.

So this is my attempt at something different, pulling in everything I've learned, not just about exercise, but about how habits actually form and how people actually change.

I can give you the tool, but I can't be the one who gets you strong. As much as I wish I could sometimes, at some point it has to be your choice to start.

Most people want to start with a full, hard workout, something that feels like it actually counts.

And what I've seen happen so many times is someone goes all in, it's exciting for a few weeks, and then they burn out a bit, injure themselves, feel demotivated, and stop completely, sometimes for months, very often for years.

Across every field that studies habits, it seems evident that starting as small as possible is what actually predicts whether something is still part of your life a year from now. Chasing quick results rarely ever results in long term adherence or improvement.

You've got a choice in front of you. You can go slowly, trusting that starting as small as these simple exercises will build into something real, and give yourself a proper chance to get confident (perhaps even begin to enjoy it?). Or you can look up in two or three years and find you're in the same place, having gone all in, or not at all, a few more times in between.

Small doesn't always feel like enough. But it's almost always the thing that actually works.

People tell me they want to get stronger, and that's a fine place to start. But when I sit with someone long enough, something else usually comes up that sits below that initial reason.

They want to keep up with their kids. They want to still be independent at eighty. They want to travel without worrying about the stairs or the luggage. They want to feel like themselves again. They want to be someone they respect.

So train consistently, try to understand what you're doing and why it works, but also take a bit of time to figure out the real reason you're doing this, the one underneath the one that sounds good on the surface.

You might be surprised how much that shifts your motivation, once you actually know what you're working toward.

I've a bunch of tools in this exercise app that are useful for building any kind of habit. The accountability, the session tracking, the guidance on sleep, the weekly tracking, choosing a time and place ahead of it, deciding what it means to you and what it says about you, none of that is actually specific to exercise.

So if you've already got an exercise routine you're building elsewhere, or a physical therapist has given you a rehab programme you're meant to be doing, or you're trying to build a completely different habit altogether, saving a set amount each month, meditating, whatever it is, you're welcome to use this purely for the tracking and the accountability, and leave my exercises out of it entirely. The principles behind this still apply. Choosing ahead of time when and where you'll do it, telling someone else about it, tracking it honestly, all of that works the same whether the habit is strength training or something else completely.

I built this around exercise because that's what I know best, but the actual mechanism underneath it, the habit-forming part, isn't mine, and it isn't limited to what I've put in here. Use it for whatever you're actually trying to build.

Right now what you're doing is building a habit, and that's really the whole job for a while, so you don't need to be thinking about getting stronger yet. In these first few weeks most of what's actually changing isn't your muscle at all, it's your nervous system learning which muscles to switch on and when, getting a bit better at recruiting them properly, and that's why a squat that felt clumsy in week one starts to feel more familiar by week three, even though nothing about your body looks any different yet.

And somewhere in there, without you specifically training for it, you might start noticing a few other things creeping in too, like a daily task feeling a little easier than it used to, your resting heart rate dropping a bit, perhaps sleeping better than you were a month ago, or getting a blood test back and finding your cholesterol has shifted in the right direction. Those outcomes are not the primary goal right now, but they're often very motivating to notice. For now, continue to focus on building this habit, coming back twice a week, when you said you would, trusting that you're doing the right thing.

Something I hear from almost everyone starting out is this idea that if they're not sore the next day, the session didn't really count. It's not actually true though. Soreness the day after a workout tends to show up more when a movement is still new to you, and it usually settles down the more familiar that movement becomes, even while you keep making real progress underneath it, so you can absolutely build real strength without much soreness at all once your body's caught up with what you're asking it to do. You may feel it again down the line when you introduce a new exercise, or just a new way of making it harder, that still happens to me, but it's not essential for muscle growth.

So if you walk out of a session feeling completely fine the next day, that doesn't mean it didn't work, and you don't need to push harder just to earn some soreness as proof. If you are sore sometimes, it's not a warning sign, just don't use it as the measure of whether things are working. The thing that actually matters is whether you showed up and did what you set out to do that day.

One of the questions I get asked constantly is what's actually going on with all the cracking, popping, and creaking that appear once people start moving more, especially in the knees.

Almost all of that noise is just gas bubbles forming and releasing in the fluid around your joint, or tendons and ligaments sliding across bone as they move, especially once you've been still for a while and then get going again. This has actually been measured in large population studies of people's knees, and almost every single person's made some kind of noise, healthy joints included. It's not a sign of anything wearing out, and it's not linked to needing a joint replacement down the line either.

The idea that a joint is out of place and the crack is it popping back in is a myth too. What actually seems to help is staying consistent with movement, the noise often settles down as your joints warm up and the fluid around them does its job, which is a big part of why a decent warm up matters.

The only time this is worth paying closer attention to is if the noise comes with pain, swelling, or the joint suddenly feeling unstable, or if it follows an actual injury, a twist, a wrench, something with a clear cause. Noise on its own, without any of that, isn't something to be afraid of.

I say this because I've seen people start avoiding exercises entirely because of a noisy knee or shoulder, when in fact the noise itself is not the problem. Avoiding movement because you're worried about a normal, harmless sound is often worse for you than the sound itself could ever be.

Some days you're going to turn up tired, or something's a bit sore, or life has just been a lot and you've got nothing left in the tank. Here's how I suggest you handle those days. Do less. If your knee's a bit sore, go shallower on the squat, or swap it out for something that feels fine. If you're exhausted, reduce the number of rounds you do, or just move through the exercises slower than usual without chasing your normal effort. What you don't do is skip the whole thing because some part of you has decided it only counts if it's a strong session.

A short session on a tired Thursday, one where nothing felt particularly good, or just one where you moved slower and did fewer rounds, still counts. No one is grading you on how it felt while you were doing it. But building the habit and commitment to yourself by just showing up again really matters. So on the hard days, just do what you can, tick it, and let that be enough.

You may be interested to know some of what's actually happening inside your body while you're doing this, because there's a long list of things strength training affects, and it's not just muscle.

Your HDL cholesterol, the good kind, tends to increase. Blood sugar gets managed better, because muscle is where a lot of your blood sugar actually gets stored and used, so more muscle means your body handles it more efficiently. Blood pressure tends to improve. Bone strength improves too, which matters more the older you get. Resting heart rate tends to drop. Sleep quality improves. Mood and anxiety levels tend to improve. Your risk of falling, and your risk of what happens if you do fall, both go down, because you've got the strength and the balance to catch yourself.

I think of exercise as medicine because it's one of the few things that treats such a wide range of things at once, and it doesn't come with the side effects most medicine does. So if you're ever curious what else is happening while you're training, beyond just getting stronger, this is some of it. You might even notice some of these shifting for yourself as you go.

Think about the things you actually want to keep doing. Travelling and getting your own bag into the overhead locker. Walking up the stairs at home, or up the stairs at someone else's house when there's no lift. Grocery shopping without needing help carrying it in. Getting yourself up off the floor if you fall or if you're just playing down there with a kid. Picking up a grandchild, or a dog, or whatever it is in your life that needs picking up.

None of that happens by accident, and it doesn't happen just because you want it to either. It happens because you've got the muscle and the strength to actually do it, and the only way to build that is to ask your body to do things that are a bit harder than what it's already comfortable with, over and over, consistently. So when a session feels small or unglamorous, it's worth remembering that this is what it's actually in service of, not how you look, but whether you can still do the things that make up an actual life.

If you've tried this before and it didn't stick, that's not a character flaw. I find people are quick to judge themselves, attributing the inability to make it stick as a lack of discipline or ability to follow through. I've been working with people for long enough to know that in every single case, the starting point was just too big.

This programme is built around practising what it actually looks like to carve out two sessions a week in your life, not around holding on to a perfect streak, and untidy as that sounds, showing up again after a gap is actually the whole point of this, not a failure of it. The story you tell yourself about the gap matters a lot more than the gap itself does, so if the story is usually something like I always quit, I'm bad at this, I'll probably fail again, that story is worth questioning, because it's very likely just not true, and every time you come back you're proving it wrong a little more.

In twenty years of doing this work, if you asked me what actually predicts whether someone keeps going, my honest answer wouldn't be discipline, or motivation, or even how much they wanted it. It would be whether they were doing it with someone else and if they had committed a time and place to do the exercise.

The “someone else” might be a partner, a friend, your kid, someone from work, or even just a group chat where people check in and say they've done their session for the week, it doesn't need to be complicated or formal. What it does is give you a reason to show up on the days you'd otherwise talk yourself out of it, because it's not only about you anymore, and there's something in knowing someone else is expecting to hear from you that gets people through the exact days that would have otherwise been skipped. So if there's anyone in your life who might want to do this alongside you, even loosely, even just checking in now and then, it's worth asking them.

Recently my mom, who's now in month three of this habit tracker herself, walked in the front door with grocery bags in both hands, a lot of them, and I went to help her carry them in like I normally would. She said no, no, this is my farmer's carry, you've shown me this counts.

A few things stood out to me about that. One is that exercise had made that task easier for her, she could actually manage all those bags in one trip without it wrecking her. But the other thing, and I think this one matters just as much, is that the task itself was the exercise. She didn't need to separate them out in her head. Carrying groceries in from the car is a farmer's carry, whether you're doing it in a gym with kettlebells or doing it in your own driveway with actual groceries.

You don't always need a formal workout to be building strength. Picking something up off the floor, carrying the shopping, hauling a suitcase up a flight of stairs, these things count too, especially once you know to notice them. Training helps you do the daily tasks. But sometimes the daily tasks are the training, and you don't need to draw a hard line between the two.

Your body doesn't actually know where you are. It doesn't know if you're holding a ten kilogram dumbbell or two shopping bags that happen to weigh the same. It doesn't know if you're on a step machine at the gym or climbing the stairs to your front door with your hands full. It doesn't know if you're squatting in front of a loaded barbell or just getting up off the toilet for the tenth time that day.

All your body registers is the demand you've placed on it, the load, the range of motion, how many times you've asked it to repeat something. It has no idea about the setting, the equipment, or whether you called it exercise or not.

I think this matters because it takes the pressure off needing a proper gym, a full hour, or the right kit before something counts. It also means you can keep building strength well outside the boundaries of an organised workout, using the actual demands of your day, if you know to look for them.

I want to introduce you to something I call exercise snacks. We tend to group all our exercises into one structured session because it's easier to plan and track, but that structure isn't a requirement for your body to adapt.

You could just as easily do a set of squats in the morning while the kettle boils, a few push-ups against the kitchen counter before lunch, and some lunges tomorrow while you're waiting for the washing machine to finish. Broken up like that, spread across the day or across days, it still counts, and your body still responds to it.

If a full session feels like too much on a particular day, or you simply can't find twenty uninterrupted minutes, this is worth remembering. Your body doesn't know or care whether the work came in one block or in scattered pieces. It only knows what you asked of it.

There's a lot of noise at the moment around longevity, doing everything perfectly according to the latest research, in the hope of adding years to your life. I want to be honest about where I stand on this, because I think it's worth thinking through.

If longevity becomes the primary goal, chasing it properly can come at a real cost, financially, socially, and mentally. I've seen people get to a point where they can't socialise because they need to be in bed by a certain time, where their diet has narrowed so much that eating with other people becomes difficult, where most of their mental space is taken up managing all of it. It starts to feel like a shame, optimising a body that has less and less life left to actually live in.

Here's an analogy I like to use. I could spend all my time and money making sure my home has no cracks, no mould, not a speck of dust, every cushion exactly where it should be, every light bulb working. But if I did that, I probably wouldn't have the time or the money left to have friends over for dinner, to go away with people I love, to do anything that actually builds a meaningful life inside that house.

I've had to come to terms with the fact that my body, like that house, won't be perfect and won't last forever. What I want instead is for it to be strong enough to keep me safe, to keep the elements out, to house an actual life inside it.

To be clear, I don't think it's wrong for someone to choose differently. If optimising for longevity genuinely aligns with someone's values, that's their choice to make, and it's not my place to talk them out of it. I'm not trying to convince anyone to want what I want. I'm just telling you what I'm building toward, in case it resonates with you too.

Your strength session is really just the architect. It walks through the site and identifies where work needs to happen, this muscle, that movement pattern. But the actual building, the repair and the adaptation, happens afterwards, while you're resting and while you're asleep. Protein gives your body the raw materials for that rebuild. Sleep is largely when the building crew actually shows up and does the work.

So if you're training consistently but not sleeping enough, or not eating enough protein, you're sending the signal without giving your body what it needs to respond to it. You don't need to overhaul your diet or your sleep to see the benefit, just take them seriously as part of the process, not as optional extras around the edges of it.

Start with what you've got. Most of these exercises work with just your bodyweight to begin with, and household items like water bottles or a backpack with some books in it can stand in for weights once you're ready to add resistance. Don't let missing equipment be the reason you don't start.

You don't need to push through it or drop the whole session because of it. Every exercise sits within a pattern, push, pull, hinge, one side at a time, squat, or core, and on my YouTube channel you'll find other options within that same pattern to swap it out for. Find one that suits your body and carry on.

Light enough that your form stays solid, heavy enough that the last couple of reps genuinely feel hard. If you're unsure, start lighter than you think you need to. You can always add more next time, it's much harder to undo a session that was too heavy.

A few minutes of easy movement, marching on the spot, arm circles, a few bodyweight squats, is enough to get things moving before you start. It doesn't need to be its own production.

Please check with your doctor or physio before starting, or before continuing, if any of that applies to you. This programme is built for generally healthy adults starting out, and it's not a substitute for guidance specific to your own situation.

Most sessions in this programme take around 10-20 minutes. Some days it'll be quicker, some days slower, that's fine.

Both are useful information. If it's too easy, add a bit more weight or a couple more reps next time. If it's too hard, drop the weight, do fewer reps, or swap in an easier version of the movement. It should feel challenging by the end of a set, not miserable the whole way through.

It's not required, but a few minutes of gentle stretching, or just moving slowly through the ranges you worked, can feel good and won't hurt anything. Do it if you enjoy it, skip it if you don't.

Yes, strength training and running work well together, and your running will likely benefit from it. Just keep an eye on your overall fatigue, if a week is heavy on the running side, it's fine to make a strength session a bit lighter that week.

Nothing happens except that you pick back up where you left off. There's no penalty or lost progress that can't be rebuilt. Also, no need to explain yourself. Just come back to it.

Yes, twice a week is the minimum this is built around, not a ceiling. Once the habit feels solid, add a third session if you want to.

Genuinely, yes. Once a week beats zero every time, and it can still be what keeps the habit alive while life is full. Add a second session when you're able to.

When the exercises feel familiar rather than effortful to remember, and two sessions a week has become something you just do rather than something you have to talk yourself into. There's no set timeline, it's different for everyone.

It's still there, waiting for you. You might want to ease back in a bit gently, but nothing is lost by taking a break and coming back.

Here's how, depending on what you're using:

Yes, your progress is tied to your account, not the device, so as long as you sign in with the same email on your new phone, everything will be there.

First, try closing and fully reopening the app, sometimes it just needs a moment to sync. If it's still locked after that, WhatsApp me and I'll sort it out. There's a link to my number at the bottom of the main page, once you've closed this one.

You'll find my WhatsApp and Instagram links at the bottom of the main page, once you've closed this one. Tap either one and it'll open a chat directly. If you'd rather email, I'm at massage@socialwellness.co.za, and I'll get back to you as soon as I can.