CBLCore · Balance · Longevity
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Core · Balance · Longevity

An opinionated program. Build functional strength slowly.
Love your joints and your body.

Four to six days a week, one working set per exercise. Fifteen minutes for the short version, thirty for the full one. A short daily workout that fits round your life rather than the other way round.

Logging is automatic. You never keep track of anything yourself. Tap how the set felt — that is the entire input. The weights, the streaks, when to go up, when to back off and when a deload is due are all the app’s job.

No setup step. No questionnaire. No numbers to remember between sessions.

Start free How it works
  • 4–6days a week
  • 1set per exercise
  • 15–30minutes a session
  • 8exercises on a busy day
  • 0things to keep track of

Barbell Squat

Last: 68.5 kg × 12, felt easy

A · 2/8

Two easy sessions — try 70 kg.

70 kg × 12

Tap how it felt. The app writes everything else down.

CBL is not a slogan bolted onto a template. Each letter names something the program does on purpose, in every single session, and you can read all three straight off the exercise list.

  1. Core Trained under load every session, and never the first thing dropped when you are short on time. Not crunches — holding your spine still while it is being twisted, arched and pulled sideways.
  2. Balance Balanced coverage, not wobble boards. Every pattern trained, both sides loaded separately, nothing quietly missing.
  3. Longevity Submaximal on purpose, prehab in every session, deloads counted for you. A program you can still be running in five years.

Who this is for

This is an intermediate lifter’s program. It assumes you already know from the inside what a hard set feels like, because judging your own effort is the one skill the whole method depends on. That single fact settles most of the question below.

Who this suits

  • You know what a hard set feels like From the inside — the difference between two reps left and none. That judgement is the one skill the method runs on.
  • You already know the lifts Every exercise has one working set, so there is no room to learn a movement while you train it — the set has to count on the first try. Knowing the power clean is highly recommended: it is prescribed as a hang clean, the easier version to own, but it is still the one lift here that punishes learning on the job. There are quieter substitutions — DB cleans, trap bar jumps, kettlebell swings — and you can switch freely. What you cannot do is skip the explosive lift, because nothing else here trains speed.
  • You can get to a gym most days But cannot spare ninety minutes on any of them.
  • Your gym is quiet at the hour you train The fifteen and thirty minute figures assume you walk straight from one station to the next — a rack, a bench, a bar, a pulldown, a cable stack, a curl machine and a leg press, in order, without queueing. At a quiet hour that holds. At six on a Tuesday it does not, and the same session takes twice as long.
  • Your training keeps getting interrupted Travel, small children, shift work. Missing a day costs you a day here, not the block.
  • You want size, general strength and joints that still work in twenty years And you are tired of restarting a new program every eight weeks.
  • You would rather train than administrate There is nothing to keep track of, because the app keeps it.

Who should use something else

  • You want fast results This optimises for still training in twenty years, and progress is slow on purpose — submaximal sets, small increments, a light week built into every block. If you want a visible change by a date, run something built for that instead.
  • You are brand new to the lifts The loop runs on rating your own effort, and that read is genuinely hard before you have felt a set go all the way. A simpler program with more practice reps per lift will do more, faster, and will tell you plainly when you have stalled.
  • You are peaking for a one-rep max Wrong loads, wrong rep range, no peak, no taper.
  • You can only train two or three days a week Per-pattern frequency collapses to once and the weekly totals stop adding up.
  • Maximum hypertrophy on a handful of lifts is this year’s priority This spreads its volume wide on purpose.
  • You have a live medial elbow problem Not until it has settled. Grip gets loaded every single session.
  • You want training to be light or fun Front squats, eight-rep deadlifts and split squats are none of those things. The sessions are short, and no single set is brutal — but a whole session can very well be. The hard lifts are at the front on purpose and there is no version of this where you skip them.

The two workouts

A, then B, then A again — four to six days a week, continuing from whatever you did last. Reps default to 12, with exceptions marked. A dash means no rep target: naturally loaded movements have their intensity set by leverage and position, so the progression variable is the variation, the lever length or the tempo.

Workout A — Squat, horizontal push/pull, knee and ankle prehab Cut line after #8. The bold rows are prehab — joint work, never taken hard.
# Exercise Reps Notes
1 Front Squat 5 One set of five. Elbows high, chest tall.
2 Barbell Squat 12 Heaviest axial item in the week.
3 Barbell Rows 12
4 Barbell Bench Press or Flat DB Bench Press or Incline DB Bench Press 12 Your choice of variant, switchable any time.
5 BSS (Contralateral Hold) 12/leg DB in opposite hand, tight fist for balance.
6 Alternating Gorilla Rows 12/arm Keep the non-working bell glued to the floor.
7 Alternating Incline DB Bench or Alternating Flat DB Bench 12/arm Incline by default, flat by choice — switchable any time. The incline sits here rather than at #4 because this is the cheaper slot to spend the angle on.
8 Hanging Windshield Wipers — Loaded rotation and anti-lateral-flexion.
Cut line — stopping here is a complete session
9 Push-Ups — To near-failure. The rep count is the progression variable — beat last time.
10 Romanian Deadlift 10 Push the hips back, soft knees, bar close. Stop where the stretch stops, not where the floor is. Straps are fine — the hamstrings are the target, not the grip.
11 Poliquin / Petersen Step-Ups — Knee-friendly terminal-range work. Light or bodyweight.
12 Wall Tibialis Raises — Easy pump. Goes to one leg once both get easy.
13 Triceps Pushdowns 12
14 Single-Leg Leg Press 12/leg Safe quad pump.
15 Lying Back Extension — Face down, lift the chest slowly and lower it slowly.
16 Band Finger Extensions ~30 s Both hands, ~30 s. Counterbalance to daily grip flexion.

Workout A in full →

Workout B — Hinge, vertical push/pull, shoulder and hip prehab Cut line after #8. The bold rows are prehab — joint work, never taken hard.
# Exercise Reps Notes
1 / 2 Front Squat 5 One set of five. Elbows high, chest tall. Before the deadlift, after the clean — a clean is graded on bar speed and leg fatigue takes speed first, so on clean days these two swap places. The app does that for you.
2 / 1 Deadlift or Hang Power Clean 8 or 3 × 3 Alternates session to session. Deadlifts run at eight, not twelve — heavier is where a deadlift is worth its fatigue. On clean days this goes first, ahead of the front squat. The hang clean is the default rather than a fixed choice: swap it for the floor clean, DB cleans, trap bar jumps or KB swings whenever you like.
3 Barbell OHP 12 Standing. Squeeze glutes and ribs down — the torso is the limiter.
4 Pull-Ups 12 Strict. Add load at 15+ bodyweight reps; assist under 8.
5 Suitcase Deadlift 12/side Straps optional — grip is a training target, so going without is the default. Keep shoulders square.
6 Alternating DB OHP 12/arm Standing. Non-working arm holds locked out at the top.
7 Alt. Single-Arm Lat Pulldown 12/arm D-handle lat stretch.
8 Ab Wheel Rollout — Anti-extension.
Cut line — stopping here is a complete session
9 DB Lateral Raises 15–20
10 Bicep Curls or Reverse Curls 12 Alternates session to session.
11 One-Legged Hamstring Curl 12/leg
12 Single-Leg Calf Raises — Deep Achilles stretch, minimal footwear.
13 Face Pulls 15–20 High-rep external rotation.
14 Hip Abduction Machine 15–20 Sit tall, pads outside the knees, press out. Slow back — the return is the half that matters.
15 Hip Adduction Machine 15–20 Same seat, pads inside the knees, squeeze together. Let it open slowly — do not let the stack drag you apart.
16 Lying Back Extension — Face down, lift the chest slowly and lower it slowly.
17 Band Finger Extensions ~30 s Both hands, ~30 s. Counterbalance to daily grip flexion.

Workout B in full →

Two lifts that look out of place

Everything else here is a controlled set of twelve stopped short of failure. These two are not, and both are deliberate.

Why front squats open every session

Because otherwise nothing here is ever heavy. Everything else is twelve reps stopped a couple short of failure, which is around two-thirds of a maximum — a fine place to build muscle and a poor place to build strength. Maximal strength is its own quality with its own adaptations: neural drive, connective tissue that stiffens under load, tendons that get thicker rather than just longer. You do not get those from sets of twelve, however many of them you do.

One set of five is the cheapest way to buy it. Five reps sits in the range where the load is high enough to train that, and one set of it costs almost nothing in fatigue or time — a minute, at the front of the session, before anything has worn you down. Run at the same submaximal effort as everything else, it is a near-max load without being a near-max effort, which is exactly the trade a program that wants to run for twenty years should be making.

The front rack is the reason it is the front squat and not the back squat. A bar held on the shoulders in front of you falls the instant your upper back rounds, so the lift cannot be completed with a collapsed posture — the position is enforced by physics rather than by remembering to hold it. On squat days and deadlift days it goes first, so you walk into the heavy lift with the pattern already primed and a spine already stacked.

Clean days are the one exception, and they run the other way round. A clean is graded on how fast the bar moves, and speed is the first thing leg fatigue takes — so there the clean goes first and the front squat follows it. The app makes that swap for you; you never have to remember which kind of day it is.

Why hang power cleans are in a program like this

They look out of place. Everything else here is a controlled set of twelve taken a couple of reps short of failure; the clean is three sets of three moved as fast as you can. That contrast is the reason it is in the program rather than an argument against it.

Strength and power are not the same quality, and they do not decline together. How much force you can produce is one thing; how fast you can produce it is another, and the second falls away considerably earlier and faster than the first. A squat trains the ability to generate a lot of force slowly. Nothing else in these two workouts trains the ability to generate force quickly — and that is the quality behind catching yourself when you trip, getting off the floor, or carrying something awkward up a flight of stairs at sixty. For a program whose whole pitch is still being useful in twenty years, leaving it out would be the strange choice.

It is also remarkably cheap. Three triples at around seventy per cent is a small amount of total work, it is never taken near failure, and it stops on bar speed rather than on grinding — so it recruits the fast motor units that heavy slow lifting reaches only at brutal loads, without the recovery bill. In a program that trains four to six days a week, an exercise that buys a distinct quality for very little fatigue is exactly what you want.

The load is impulsive, which the rest of the program never is. Rapid loading is a different signal to tendon and bone than smooth loading, and slow lifting does not substitute for it. Add the coordination demand — ankles, knees and hips extending together, then catching and stabilising a moving weight — and you get a whole-body motor skill rather than another muscle-group exercise.

Bar speed is a better sensor than feel, not a worse one. A slow, ugly clean can feel easy, so the effort rating everything else runs on genuinely does not apply here. What replaces it is more objective, not less: if set three is visibly slower than set one, that was the last set. A two-by-three day is a correct outcome rather than a failure, and the app records it as one.

The hang version is the one prescribed. Starting from the hang drops the pull off the floor, which is the part that is hardest to learn, easiest to do badly without a coach, and the part that adds lower-back loading to a week already carrying plenty of it. Almost all of the speed stimulus survives the cut, and it is quiet enough that most gyms never notice.

Which explosive lift is yours to pick; whether you do one is not. Four alternatives are built in, and you can switch between them whenever you like — each keeps its own weights, and all of them count as the same day, so the alternation never desyncs.

  • Power clean from the floor — the full lift, if you have the technique and a gym that will have it.
  • DB power cleans or a single-arm snatch — near-silent, and most of the stimulus. Good where a barbell is the problem.
  • Trap bar jumps — no catch to learn at all. Jump height is the sensor instead of bar speed.
  • KB swings — the simplest and the lightest, in sets of ten rather than three.

What there is no option for is deleting the slot and deadlifting every B session instead. That would not be a substitution — it would take a physical quality out of the program and put nothing in its place.

Core — trained under load in every session, never optional

Most of the trunk work here is not labelled as trunk work. It is built into lifts you would file under something else entirely, because an offset load has to be paid for somewhere and that somewhere is your midsection.

Both alternating dumbbell lifts hold the non-working arm locked out at the top, so one side presses while your obliques stop you folding toward the other. The Bulgarian split squat carries its bell in the opposite hand for the same reason. The suitcase deadlift is a heavy weight in one hand and nothing in the other — it exists to be resisted sideways.

Overhead pressing is done standing, so the torso is the limiter rather than the shoulder. Deadlifts are reset before every rep, so you brace eight times instead of once. None of those is a core exercise on paper. All of them are.

On top of that, the last slot above the cut line in both workouts is dedicated trunk work — hanging windshield wipers in Workout A, the ab wheel rollout in Workout B — placed early enough that it survives a rushed day. On the days you only have fifteen minutes and walk out at the cut line, you have still trained your core. That is exactly why it sits there rather than at the end.

And it is trained as three distinct jobs rather than one vague one. The trunk’s real work is resisting movement in three different planes, so three different exercises do it.

  • Anti-rotation

    Hanging windshield wipers · Workout A #8

    You hang from the bar and control the swing of your own legs across the midline — loaded rotation and anti-lateral-flexion at once.

    Knees tucked → bent → ½ straight → straight → straight with a three-second eccentric → straight with ankle weights.

  • Anti-extension

    Ab wheel rollout · Workout B #8

    The job is refusing to let the lower back arch as the wheel travels away from you.

    Knees short → knees full → knees deficit → standing eccentric only → standing full.

  • Anti-lateral-flexion

    Suitcase deadlift · Workout B #5

    Twelve reps a side. One bell, shoulders square, obliques stopping you folding sideways — a loaded carry pattern trained as a lift.

    Straps optional: grip is a training target here rather than something to work around.

All three are trained under load, which is what separates this from adding a plank at the end. None of them is a rep count you chase — they progress on leverage, and the leverage is logged exactly the way a weight is. Moving from a bent-knee wiper to a half-straight one is a real step forward in precisely the way 100 kg to 105 kg is, and the app records the rung and works out when the next one is due.

Add it up and the trunk is under load through most of the session rather than for one exercise of it. That is the difference between a program that trains a midsection and one that bolts a plank onto the end.

Balance — balanced coverage, not balance training

Balance here means balanced coverage — not proprioception drills, not wobble boards, not standing on one leg on a foam pad. The word is ambiguous, so: this is the sense that is meant. Push and pull get equal weight, horizontal and vertical get equal weight, both legs get loaded separately, and nothing is quietly dropped because it was not fun.

The two places this was overclaiming are now closed rather than argued away: the hamstrings get loaded in a hinge at long muscle length, not only in knee flexion, and the frontal plane is trained in both directions — one set on the hip abduction machine and one on the adduction machine, in every Workout B. Everything else in the program is sagittal, and the adductors were the one muscle group getting nothing at all. What it still does not mean is that nothing is thin — chest is, and it says so.

Read either column downwards. Workout A covers the squat, both horizontal patterns and single-leg work. Workout B covers the hinge, both vertical patterns and a loaded carry. Alternate them four to six days a week and every pattern lands in front of you two to three times in seven days.

One row in that table needs a caveat. The hinge alternates. Slot 2 in Workout B is a deadlift one session and a power clean the next, so at six days a week you hinge three times but you only load the hinge heavily about one and a half times — clean day is three triples at roughly 70%, which trains the pattern fast rather than hard.

That is deliberate: eight-rep deadlifts three times a week on top of three squat sessions is more axial load than the rest of the program is willing to spend. It does mean the posterior chain gets less than the pattern table implies, which is why the set counts below put it at about seven rather than nine.

Everything above the cut line, by pattern Read down either column: the pattern changes on every row.
# Workout A Workout B
1 Front squat — one set of five Front squat — one set of five
2 Squat Hinge — deadlift or power clean
3 Horizontal push Vertical push
4 Horizontal pull Vertical pull
5 Single-leg, anti-rotation Loaded carry, anti-lateral-flexion
6 Incline push Vertical push
7 Horizontal pull Vertical pull
8 Loaded core, anti-extension Loaded core, anti-extension

Both sides, separately loaded

Bilateral lifts let a strong side carry a weak one for years without either of you noticing. So nine items in the program are unilateral and heavy — not finishers, not burnouts, but working sets with a bell or a stack behind them.

  • BSS with a contralateral hold — 12/leg
  • Suitcase deadlift — 12/side
  • Single-leg leg press — 12/leg
  • Alternating incline DB bench — 12/arm
  • Alternating gorilla rows — 12/arm
  • Alternating DB overhead press — 12/arm
  • Alternating single-arm lat pulldown — 12/arm
  • One-legged hamstring curl — 12/leg
  • Single-leg calf raises — one leg at a time, off a step

Left and right cannot hide behind each other when each one has to produce twelve reps on its own. The side that is behind shows up in the log as a different weight, and it gets its own progression from there.

One set per exercise, counted conservatively

"One set" sounds thin until you count the way volume is actually recommended — per muscle, per week, rather than per exercise. Here is the six-day arithmetic, counted against our own interest wherever there was a choice.

Hard sets per muscle per week, at six days Frequency is what buys the volume: each pattern comes round two to three times in seven days.
Muscle Where the sets come from Sets a week
Back Barbell rows, alternating gorilla rows, pull-ups, single-arm lat pulldown ~12
Glutes Back squat, BSS, single-leg leg press, plus the deadlift about 1.5× a week ~10
Triceps Pushdowns 3×, plus 15 pressing sets counted at half ~10
Quads Back squat, BSS, single-leg leg press ~9
Shoulders Standing barbell OHP, alternating DB OHP, lateral raises ~9
Chest Main press (barbell, flat DB or incline DB), alternating incline DB bench, push-ups ~9
Hamstrings & posterior chain Romanian deadlift, one-legged curl, plus the deadlift about 1.5× a week ~7
Biceps Curls about 1.5× a week, plus 12 pulling sets counted at half ~7
Calves Single-leg calf raises ~3

Those are inside the range usually recommended for growth rather than above it — the back and the pressing muscles comfortably, the legs solidly, biceps and calves at the lower end and honestly so. A unilateral lift counts as one set, not two — twelve reps per leg on the BSS is one set for the quads, the same way it would be if you did both legs at once.

The sets accumulate across the week instead of being crammed into one brutal session, which is why none of it wrecks the next day. At four days a week the totals drop by roughly a third, which is worth looking at directly.

Why a session fits in fifteen to thirty minutes

The ordering has a second consequence, and it is the one you feel. After the opening pair, no two consecutive exercises train the same muscle group. The tissue you have just used is recovering while you do the next thing — you are rowing while your chest recovers, then pressing again while your back recovers. So there is almost no rest to take: you rest when you want to rather than when a timer says so, and nothing has to be hurried to keep the session short.

The opening pair is the deliberate exception. Five front squats immediately before the back squat, or immediately after the clean, is meant to be consecutive: it primes the pattern and sets an upright spine for the heavier lift that follows. It is one set of five, so it costs you a minute at most.

It does mean your back squat runs on legs that have already worked, so the number on the bar lands lower than it otherwise would. That number is not the goal. A body that works is — and legs that just did five hard front squats and then twelve back squats have done more than legs that only did the twelve.

There is one other place the rule bends, and it is worth naming rather than leaving to be found. In Workout B the pull-ups sit directly before the suitcase deadlift. Those train different things — a vertical pull and anti-lateral-flexion — so the rule holds as written, but they both ask a lot of your hands, and grip is the one tissue in this program with no scheduled rest at all. If your hand opens before your obliques do, the answer is straps rather than a reshuffle.

That is where the two numbers come from. Fifteen minutes buys everything above the cut line, which the plan calls a complete session in its own right. Thirty buys the arms, calves, hamstring work and prehab on the end. Six long sessions is three hours a week; four short ones is one hour. Either way it is less gym time than a conventional four-day split of hour-plus sessions.

Longevity — built to be repeated for years, not weeks

The whole design is submaximal on purpose. One working set per exercise, stopped a rep or two short of failure, is not a compromise with laziness — it is the dose a movement can absorb when it is coming back round in two or three days. Nothing here is ever taken to the floor, because tomorrow is a training day too.

  1. One set, stopped short of failure

    The target is a hard set that still had a couple of reps in it.

    That is not a watered-down version of training to failure — it is the dose a movement can absorb when it comes round again in two or three days. A set taken to the floor on Monday is still being paid for on Wednesday, and Wednesday is another session.

  2. Prehab in every session, numbered like everything else

    Ankles, knees, hips, shoulders, spine and hands, every session, at an effort that costs you almost nothing.

    Workout A carries Poliquin / Petersen step-ups, wall tibialis raises, a lying back extension and band finger extensions. Workout B carries face pulls, one set each on the hip abduction and hip adduction machines, the same back extension and the same finger extensions.

    The knee and ankle work is ordered ahead of the leg press on purpose, so a session that runs out of road loses the quad pump rather than the joint work.

  3. Range of motion, trained under load

    There is no separate mobility block, because the lifts do it.

    Squats are taken deep, so the hips, knees and ankles keep the range instead of slowly surrendering it. The alternating overhead press parks one arm locked out overhead while the other works — a long loaded hold in the position most desks quietly take away. Gorilla rows start from the floor, so every rep begins at full stretch under a hinge.

    Single-arm pulldowns are done with a D-handle for the lat stretch, single-leg calf raises off a step for the Achilles, and the split squat puts the trailing hip through real extension. Range you own under load is range you keep — and unlike stretching at the end, none of it is the first thing dropped when you are short on time.

  4. Posture, enforced by the lifts rather than remembered

    Three lifts load the position a desk quietly takes away. None of them is a posture exercise on paper.

    The front squat opens every session with the bar racked in front of you, where it falls the moment the upper back rounds — you cannot complete the rep with a collapsed posture, so the position is enforced by physics rather than by remembering to hold it.

    The deadlift is reset before every rep, so you set a stacked, braced spine eight separate times instead of once. The alternating overhead press is done standing with the non-working arm locked out overhead, which is a long loaded hold in exactly the position that closes down over years of sitting.

  5. The lying back extension

    The counterweight to all the anti-extension work — and the one item deliberately never taken hard.

    Both sessions spend real effort resisting extension — wipers in A, the ab wheel in B — on top of a day spent sitting in flexion. Nothing took the spine the other way under control, so a lying back extension sits in both: face down, lift the chest slowly, lower it slowly.

    Like the rest of the prehab it is run light. Slow and controlled is the whole prescription — a spinal extension taken near failure four to six days a week, on top of squats and deadlifts, would be the one place this program contradicted itself.

  6. Two sessions up, three sessions down

    The steps are not the same size either: up is the smallest notch your gym can make, down is a full 10%.

    Two easy sessions in a row and the load goes up; it takes three sessions with nothing left in the tank before it comes back down. Going up is the smallest step your equipment can actually make — the next notch on the rack, one more rep — because being slightly under target costs you one session and there is no hurry.

    Coming down is a long way back, and is meant to be. Three hard sessions in a row is not a load that is 2% too heavy; it is a body asking for a real rest, and a token reduction just extends the problem. A hard set is the top of the range rather than a mistake. Living there is the mistake.

  7. Deloads you do not have to remember

    A light week at about 80%, counted in sessions rather than weeks — so a travel week never burns deload credit.

    Prehab stays in, and the cut line comes off the table. The cadence is thirty sessions, and every other window in the program is counted in workouts rather than days for the same reason: a week away from the gym should not quietly expire the evidence.

    Fatigue signals outrank the calendar. Two aborted sets inside a ten-workout window, or three different lifts backing off at once, calls one early.

  8. Do cardio as well — this program is not it

    You arrive here already holding about a third of the usual weekly target. The other ninety minutes is on you.

    Cardiorespiratory fitness is one of the strongest predictors of how long people live and how well they live it — at least as strong as strength, plausibly stronger — so a program built around still working in twenty years owes you a straight answer. The answer has two halves.

    First, this is not nothing. Twelve-rep sets with almost no rest between them, four to six days a week, hold your heart rate up for a real share of every session. Call it an hour a week of genuine cardiovascular work, which is more than most lifting programs deliver and is a large part of why a session feels harder than one working set per exercise sounds.

    Second, an hour is not the target. The usual number is about 150 minutes a week of something that raises your heart rate, with a little of it hard — so the gap left to fill is nearer ninety minutes than the full amount. That is two or three easy sessions: run, cycle, row, swim, walk uphill, play something.

    Do not count this program as all of it, and do not count it as none of it either. The short sessions leave room on purpose, and doing both on the same day is fine — after the lifting, or several hours apart. Nothing in the app tracks any of it, and none of the rules here know it happened.

  9. Tripwires the program builds in

    Grip is loaded every session with no scheduled rest, so elbows are the named risk — and the app is the one watching.

    You are asked how your wrists and elbows feel before the first set and again at the end — two taps. Sore in three of any ten workouts calls a light week on its own.

    Two notes about the same elbow inside ten workouts fires the protocol for that side: lateral gets loaded wrist extensions in and reverse curls out; medial gets load taken off the gripping work and controlled loading of the tendon itself added, as wrist curls or a forearm roller, until it settles.

    Squats are named as the likeliest recovery bottleneck. You do not have to watch for any of it — the app counts the notes, the ten-workout windows and the cut-line frequency, and tells you.

Every one of those rules is a comparison between this session and the last: two easy sessions, three hard ones, warmup weights creeping, two elbow notes inside ten workouts, cuts piling up. Across two dozen exercises and four to six sessions a week, none of it is visible from memory — which is exactly why the app keeps all of it and you keep none of it. You tap how the set felt. That is your entire share of the work.

You never keep track of anything

Logging is automatic. One tap says how the set felt; everything else — the weights, the streaks, the deload clock, the tripwires — is the app’s job, and it is the only job the app has. There is no grid to maintain and no spreadsheet to keep up with.

  • Nothing to remember

    Which workout is next, what you lifted last time, what the warmups were, whether that mark makes two easy sessions or three hard ones. None of it lives in your head or in a spreadsheet. You walk in and the day is already laid out.

  • No setup step, ever

    You are never asked to describe your gym, and you are never asked your bodyweight. The app learns how big a step is on each lift from the weights you actually log — dumbbells running 20, 22, 24 is a step of 2; a leg press jumping 20 is a step of 20. Before there is any history it guesses from the size of the load, and you correct it once by typing what you really used.

  • The arithmetic, all of it

    Streaks on every exercise, when to add load and when to pull it back, whether the reps should move instead of the weight, how often you have stopped a session early lately, when a deload is due, whether the same elbow has been mentioned twice. That is the whole job the app has.

The app is bookkeeping, not the method — the program came first and still works in a notebook. Here is how to run the whole thing with a pen →

What it does badly

Every program is a set of trades, and a page that only lists advantages is not telling you about a program — it is selling you one. Several of these are raised by the plan against itself, which is a point in its favour and does not make them go away.

Judging your own effort is a skill, and everything runs on it.

Rate consistently wrong and every rule downstream inherits the bias — with no second set to catch it.

The whole feedback loop rests on one judgement: how close was that set to failure? People are measurably worse at it the further they are from failure, the higher the reps, and on lower-body lifts — and a set of twelve squats stopped two reps short is all three at once.

Someone with a couple of hard years behind them reads it well enough for the rules to work, which is exactly who this is written for. Someone who has never met a genuine limit is guessing, and the machinery runs happily on a guess: rate too easy and you chase weights that grind, rate too hard and you sit for months on a load that stopped doing anything. Two sessions up and three sessions down filters out noise; it does nothing about a consistent bias.

One working set makes that worse rather than better. With two or three sets you get a second opinion inside the same session — the follow-up set tells you the first was misjudged, and you fix the weight before you leave the building. Here there is no second set to check against, so the only correction arrives two sessions later through a streak counter. That is the price of getting a full session logged in a dozen taps, and it is paid every time.

The front squat has the sharpest version of this, and it is the lift with the highest frequency in the program — six sessions a week, opening every one. What ends a front squat is usually not the legs. It is the rack position: thoracic extension giving way, elbows dropping, wrists complaining.

So a HARD on this lift is ambiguous in a way a HARD on the leg press is not, and if you tap it three times running the app will take 10% off a weight your legs never objected to. Read the set before you rate it. If the bar was falling forward, that is a position problem and the fix is mobility and cueing, not less weight.

The alternating lifts have a specific version of this problem. Holding the other dumbbell locked out overhead through twelve reps on the working side means each set runs about double the time under load with a long isometric on top — which is a real core stimulus and the reason those lifts are in Workout B. But on the alternating overhead press in particular, what actually ends the set is often the hold and the general gassing rather than the working shoulder. The mark you tap is honest about the set. It is not necessarily reporting on the muscle the load is meant to be driving.

Nothing here forces you upward. If you sit still, that is yours to fix.

There is no upward probe. Land in the zone forever and no rule will ever object.

Every rule in this program answers a set that fell outside the zone. A set that lands inside it is evidence the load is right, so it moves nothing — which means there is no version of this where the app decides on its own that you have been comfortable for too long and pushes. That is a deliberate refusal, not an oversight. An increase nobody’s set argued for is a guess dressed up as a rule, and it would arrive on precisely the day you were least able to absorb it.

So the failure mode is real: rate a touch conservatively, land in the zone every time, and you can hold one weight for months while the app reports that everything is working.

There are two ways in. The common one is the rating — a set you call a 7 that was really an 8, repeated. The rare one is that RPE 7–8 has genuinely stopped being enough stimulus to drive adaptation, which for anyone short of a properly advanced lifter should not happen; below that level, submaximal sets at this frequency keep producing, and a stall is far more likely to be your calibration than your ceiling. But it is possible, and it is the one thing the machinery cannot see.

What the app does about it is say so. Six sessions at the same weight and the same reps, with nothing else misbehaving, and it tells you the number and stops there — no proposal, no nudge, no arrow. Regulating this is your job. You are the sensor, and if you have been sitting still longer than you meant to, take the next notch up and let the set report back.

Grip is loaded every session with no scheduled rest.

The likeliest place for this program to hurt you, and the reason it asks about your elbows twice a session.

Pull-ups, gorilla rows, hanging wipers, the suitcase deadlift, every dumbbell in both workouts. Grip gets no scheduled rest anywhere in the week, and it is the one tissue that two exercises in a row can end up competing for. This is the likeliest place for the program to hurt you.

Note which elbow the standing prehab actually defends. Band finger extensions every session and reverse curls in the arm rotation are both extensor work, which answers the lateral side. The risk named above is the medial side, and that comes from flexor-pronator load: gripping, hanging, pulling. So the two sides get different treatment, and the medial one is reactive rather than standing.

If you report the same elbow twice inside ten workouts, CBL offers both halves of what actually helps — take the chaotic gripping load down (straps on the suitcase deadlift, gorilla rows down a step, the wipers regressed a rung) and put controlled loading of the tendon itself in, as slow wrist curls or a forearm roller added to your prehab until it settles. Loading is the treatment for a tendon that is already complaining, which is not the same claim as "more grip work is good for you" — which is exactly why it is not in the default program.

And because none of that shows up in a mark, the app asks directly. Two taps a session, one before the first set and one at the end: are your wrists and elbows fine, niggling or sore? RPE describes a muscle. Connective tissue never produces a hard set — it produces a lift you quietly stop doing, which is invisible to every other rule here.

Report sore in three of any ten workouts and a light week gets called on that evidence alone, ahead of the abort rule, because this is the problem in the program most likely to become chronic and the one a deload actually treats rather than defers.

Workout B has the sharpest version of it, and it is the one place the no-two-in-a-row rule genuinely breaks: pull-ups at #4 are immediately followed by the suitcase deadlift at #5, which is two hard grip demands back to back. That order is kept on purpose rather than shuffled, because moving the carry away from the pull-ups would put it next to a press or a pulldown and cost the alternation somewhere else, and because the answer is cheaper than the reshuffle.

The answer is straps, and using them is a normal adjustment rather than a failure. The suitcase deadlift runs strapless by default because grip is a training target there, but the moment your hand opens before your obliques are done, that set has stopped being anti-lateral-flexion work. CBL watches for exactly that and offers the straps itself.

Four days a week is about a third less of everything.

Every weekly set count on this page is a six-day number.

Train four days and every pattern comes round twice instead of three times. That puts the back nearer eight sets a week, quads, shoulders and chest nearer six, hamstrings nearer five, and direct biceps work at one set a week.

That is enough for an intermediate to keep progressing and comfortably enough to hold what you have — but if maximum size is your priority this year, it is light, and the fix is more days rather than more sets. Below four days a week this is the wrong program: per-pattern frequency collapses to once, and one set per exercise once a week does not add up to anything.

Chest is thinner than the table makes it look.

Nine sets a week — but three of them sit below the cut line, so a habitual cutter banks six.

Nine is a fine number until you notice where the sets sit. Three of them are the push-ups, and the push-ups are below the cut line — so anyone who cuts habitually is training chest six times a week on six sets. The cut line is designed to delete the least important work first, and on the chest specifically that argument is weakest.

The angle used to be the other half of this, and it is no longer. A default Workout A presses flat at #4, incline at #7 and flat again on the push-ups at #9, so the upper chest is not contingent on how you happen to have set the main press. You can still undo it — #7 offers a flat alternating bench, and #4 offers an incline — but you have to go and do that. There is no decline anywhere, and there is not going to be.

The fix has its own price, and it is in the rating rather than the stimulus. At 30–45° the bell you are holding locked out sits closer to overhead, so the isometric is harder and what ends the set is more often the hold than the working pec. That is the alternating lifts’ existing weakness, slightly worse. The trade was still the right one: #4 is the heaviest and most loadable press in the program, and buying the angle there would have cost real load on it.

The volume is a considered trade rather than an oversight. The program is built around eight items above a cut line, and every addition has to displace something or push the session past the time it promises. Quads and shoulders lose a third of their sets to the cut line too — but what they lose is a leg press and a lateral raise, and what the chest loses is a compound. That is the muscle the cut line costs most.

Spinal loading adds up whether or not any single set felt hard.

Something is loading your spine on every single training day. If your lower back is what limits you, watch the total rather than any one set.

Twelve-rep squats three times a week are the most systemically taxing thing here, and twelve is the rep count where breathing and trunk fatigue usually end the set before the legs do. The plan names squats as its likeliest recovery bottleneck itself.

Deadlifts are run at eight rather than twelve precisely so they are not a second version of that problem, but eight means a heavier bar sitting on top of three squat sessions a week. Resetting the bar before every rep is a genuine mitigation — eight first reps rather than one rep and seven worse ones.

Add it up honestly and the spine is under something four to six days a week: a front squat every session, twelve-rep back squats three times, deadlifts on top of that, a Romanian deadlift in Workout A, and a lying back extension in both workouts.

The back extension is the one item on that list that is deliberately never taken hard — slow up, slow down, and that is the whole prescription. Spinal extension near failure four to six days a week on top of everything else would be the one place this program contradicted its own thesis, so it does not.

Even so, if your lower back is the thing that limits you, the total is what to watch. It is not any single set here; it is that something is loading the spine on every single training day.

It builds size and general strength, not a one-rep max — and it never changes shape.

Wrong program for a meet in twelve weeks, and there is no periodisation to look forward to.

Twelve reps stopped short of failure is around two-thirds of a maximum: a fine place to build muscle and a poor place to build a competition total. There is no heavy specific practice, no low-rep work outside the cleans, and no peak.

And apart from deloads, nothing about it varies — same exercises, same rep target, indefinitely. That is a feature if you like showing up and doing the thing, and a genuine limitation if you need novelty to stay interested.

Short sessions still mean more trips to the gym.

Fifteen to thirty minutes is time under the bar, not time away from home — and it assumes a gym minutes away.

It is not the commute, the changing room, or the negotiation with your household about being out again. Four to six trips a week is four to six trips, however short each one is.

The saving is uneven, too: one working set on a machine really does take one set’s worth of time, while one working set on a heavy squat still needs three or four warmup sets in front of it.

Four marks, and what each one starts

A mark is one tap, and it is the only thing you have to judge all session. You say how the set felt; the app works out what that means, what to do about it, and when.

The mark control Up and down are deliberately asymmetric — two sessions to go up, three to come down.
Mark What it means What it triggers
EASY You had more than a couple of reps left. Under-dosed — below the range, not the bottom of it. Two in a row → add load
IN ZONE A working set that stopped a rep or two short of failure. Nothing to report. —
HARD The last rep was the last one you had. The top of the range, not an error. Three in a row → drop ~10%
STOP You racked it mid-set — the set did not finish. Usually the session gets cut short too. Two of these in ten workouts → pull the block back

A hard set is allowed. Every set being a hard set is not.

— the plan, on why a single hard session is fine and three in a row is not.

Questions

How long does a session actually take?

About fifteen minutes for everything above the cut line, and about thirty for the whole thing, warmups included. Those are the author’s own measured times running this program, so expect to be slower while you are learning the lifts or sharing a squat rack.

The reason it is that quick is the exercise order: after the opening front squat, no two consecutive exercises train the same thing, so the muscle you just used recovers while you do the next item. You rest by feel rather than by clock.

The one exception is power clean day, where the three sets of three want two minutes between them on purpose — four minutes of standing still across the session, which still lands it inside the same half hour.

Why the order lets you skip the rest timer →

Is one set really enough?

For an intermediate, yes — as long as you count it per muscle across a week rather than per exercise.

At six days a week the back gets about twelve hard sets from rows, gorilla rows, pull-ups and single-arm pulldowns; glutes about ten; quads, shoulders and chest about nine each; hamstrings and posterior chain about seven; calves three. Arms are the interesting case: three direct triceps sets and about one and a half direct biceps sets, because the curl slot alternates. Counting the indirect work at the conventional half a set puts triceps near ten and biceps near seven — inside the range usually recommended for growth rather than above it, with biceps at the bottom of it.

Frequency is what buys the rest. Every pattern comes round two to three times in seven days, so the sets accumulate across the week instead of being crammed into one brutal session. Train four days instead of six and those totals drop by roughly a third — still enough to progress steadily, genuinely light if maximum size is the priority this year.

The weekly set count, muscle by muscle →

Do I have to keep track of anything?

No. Logging is automatic. You tap how the set felt, and the app owns every piece of bookkeeping after that.

What you lifted last time, whether that makes two easy sessions or three hard ones, what to try today, whether the reps should move instead of the weight, how often you have stopped early lately, when a deload is due. There is no grid to maintain, no spreadsheet, and no numbers to remember between sessions.

Why the log is the mechanism →

Do I have to train six days a week?

No. Four, five and six all work. The A/B alternation is driven by what you did last rather than by a calendar, so a shorter week shifts the sequence along instead of breaking it — nothing is owed and nothing needs making up.

Be clear about the trade: at four days a week every pattern gets trained twice rather than three times, which is about a third less weekly volume. Below four days this is the wrong program.

What if I miss a day?

Nothing breaks. Every rule compares one session of a workout to the previous session of the same workout, never to a date, so the sequence picks up where it left off.

Deloads are counted in sessions rather than weeks, so a travel week does not burn deload credit. After a long enough gap the app treats old streaks as stale, and after a longer one it recalibrates the load rather than pretending week-old evidence is current.

Do I need to set my gym up in the app first?

No — there is no setup step at all, and you are never asked your bodyweight.

The app works out how big a step is on each lift from the weights you actually log: if your dumbbells run 20, 22, 24 it sees a step of 2; if the leg press jumps 20 it sees 20. Before there is any history it guesses from the size of the load, and you correct it once by typing the weight you really used.

The honest cost is that the first suggestion on a brand-new lift can be a weight your gym cannot make. You overwrite it, and it learns.

Why there is no setup step →

What if my gym’s weights jump too far?

Reps and load are treated as one ladder. The written target is 12, but reps are allowed to float in a band — 8 to 16 by default — to absorb coarse equipment.

A leg press stepping 20 kg has no weight that gives you twelve honest reps once twelve at the lower plate has gone easy. So you add reps where you are, then take the jump at fewer reps and climb back toward 12. Where the equipment is fine-grained, like a loaded barbell, nothing ever deviates from 12.

The rep and load ladder →

Do I need a full gym?

Close to one, yes, and this is the program’s least flexible requirement. A barbell, dumbbells, a pull-up bar and an ab wheel are the base, plus five machines: a hamstring curl — which has no free-weight substitute worth the name — a lat pulldown, a cable stack for pushdowns and face pulls, and the hip abduction and adduction machines that carry the only frontal-plane work in the program. You also want a resistance band for the finger extensions, which costs almost nothing. A leg press for the single-leg work is the one you can most easily live without.

Cleans are prescribed as hang power cleans, which are quiet enough that most gyms never notice, and there is a documented ladder of substitutions below that: dumbbell cleans or single-arm snatch, trap bar jumps, kettlebell swings. The full lift from the floor is there for anyone who wants it, and trap bar jumps have no catch to learn at all. You pick which one; you do not get to skip it, because nothing else in either workout trains speed.

Can I use pounds?

Yes. Kilograms or pounds is a setting, and the arithmetic follows it. Loads are stored canonically in kilograms underneath, so switching units — or logging a session in a second gym on the other side of the world — leaves your history and your charts intact.

What does it cost?

Free for a month, then $20 a year, and there is no card to start.

Your training log stays readable and exportable whether or not you ever pay — a lapsed subscription stops new sessions going in, it does not lock the door on what is already there.

Do I need the app to run this?

No. The program came first and works fine in a notebook: two grids, four marks, two footer rows. The app exists because the bookkeeping is relentless rather than hard, and relentless is the part that quietly stops happening.

Run the whole thing with a pen →

What happens to my data?

It is yours, and it is local first. Every set you log is written to your device immediately and syncs to your own private account. Nothing is shared, sold, or used to rank you against strangers, and you can export the whole log whenever you like.

Start logging today.

No setup, no questionnaire, nothing to keep track of. Log your first session and let the day report back — fifteen to thirty minutes in the gym, one tap per set in the app, and it works with the signal off.

Start your free month See Workout A

Free for a month, then $20 a year. No card to start. Your training log stays readable and exportable whether or not you ever pay — a lapsed subscription stops new sessions going in, it does not lock the door on what is already there.