A client tells you they want to put on size. You already have opinions about volume, load, effort and frequency, and you can defend each one on its own. What you have to hand them is a single program: four days a week, whatever their gym happens to own, sessions short enough that they finish the last exercise, and it has to keep working for the next six weeks while they are also trying to lose a few kilos.
Assembling the variables is a different job from arguing about them. This covers how to build a hypertrophy block for a general-population client — exercise selection, rep ranges, where to spend effort, session order, how the block moves week to week, and the nutrition condition that decides what the block can achieve at all.
Build around the constraints before you build around the theory
Four things decide more about the program than any set-and-rep scheme you choose.
How many days they will actually train. Not the number they said on the intake form. If a client has trained three times a week for a year, a five-day program is a three-day program with two days of guilt attached.
How long a session can be. Sixty minutes including warm-up and travel between machines is the realistic figure for most people. That is roughly 18 to 22 working sets, and fewer if the gym is busy at 6pm.
What the gym has. A commercial gym with a full dumbbell rack and cable stations supports almost anything. A hotel gym, a garage, or an apartment building's four machines does not, and the program has to be written for the equipment rather than adapted to it in week two.
Which joints complain. A shoulder that hurts on flat barbell pressing is not a problem to solve inside a hypertrophy block. It is a constraint you select around.
Write those four down before you open the builder. Nearly every block that falls apart in week three fell apart because one of them was assumed rather than asked.
Choose exercises by pattern, then by what the gym owns
Cover the patterns, not the muscles. Muscles get trained as a consequence of patterns being covered, and pattern-first selection stops you writing a program with four chest exercises and nothing for hamstrings.
| Pattern | Weekly slots | Typical options |
|---|---|---|
| Knee-dominant | 2 | Back squat, hack squat, leg press, split squat |
| Hip-dominant | 2 | Romanian deadlift, hip thrust, back extension, seated leg curl |
| Horizontal push | 2 | Dumbbell bench, machine chest press, weighted push-up |
| Vertical push | 1–2 | Seated dumbbell press, machine shoulder press |
| Horizontal pull | 2 | Chest-supported row, cable row, single-arm dumbbell row |
| Vertical pull | 2 | Chin-up, lat pulldown, assisted pull-up |
| Direct arm, delt, calf | 3–5 | Curls, triceps extensions, lateral raises, calf raises |
Within a slot, the options are far more interchangeable than the internet suggests. There is no exercise a client must do, and no movement with a property that makes it irreplaceable. What separates a good choice from a bad one for a particular client is practical:
- Can they perform it well without you watching? A movement that needs correcting every session is a movement you cannot coach through an app.
- Does it hurt? An exercise that aggravates a joint gets trained lightly, then avoided, then silently dropped.
- Can the load progress in small steps? Fixed dumbbells jumping 5kg apart make load progression impossible in a narrow rep range, so either the range widens or you pick something on a cable or a machine.
- Will they keep doing it? A client who likes the exercise trains it harder. That is not a small effect and it is the one most often left out of the decision.
Machines are not a compromise. For a general-population client they are frequently the better choice, because the setup is quicker, the position is fixed, and effort can be pushed without a spotter.
Selection also has to survive the gym being busy, which is where written alternates earn their place. In Fitsly you can attach alternate exercises to a movement in a workout, and the client can swap to one mid-session in the app — so a client who finds the squat rack taken does the alternate you chose rather than the one they invent. Those alternates are part of the training build, not a message you send at 6pm.
The useful rep range is wider than most programs use
Most coaches write 8 to 12 for everything and treat anything outside it as a different goal. The evidence does not support that narrowness. Schoenfeld and colleagues, in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research (2017), pooled 21 studies comparing lighter loads (at or under 60% of one-rep max) against heavier ones and found similar hypertrophy between them when sets were taken to failure — while gains in maximal strength clearly favoured the heavier loads.
The practical reading is not that load does not matter. It is that a wide band of rep ranges will grow muscle provided the sets are taken close enough to failure, and that the rep range is therefore a variable you can spend on other problems:
- Joint tolerance. A client whose knees dislike heavy squats can do sets of 15 to 20 on a leg press and get a stimulus rather than a physio appointment.
- Equipment gaps. If the heaviest dumbbell is 30kg, the answer is higher reps, not a worse exercise.
- Time. Lower reps on the main lift need longer rests. Higher reps on the accessories keep the session inside an hour.
- Technique risk. Reps of five on a hinge for a client you cannot see is a worse bet than reps of ten.
A workable default: 5 to 10 reps on the heaviest compound, 8 to 15 on secondary compounds, and 12 to 20 on isolation work. Every muscle gets some work in the middle band, and no client needs to live at either extreme.
Spend proximity to failure where it is cheap
How close a set gets to failure matters more than which exercise it was performed on. It is also the variable coaches manage least deliberately, because it is the one they cannot see.
The evidence here is narrower than it is often made to sound. Refalo and colleagues, in Sports Medicine (2023), reviewed studies comparing sets taken to momentary failure against sets stopped short and found no clear advantage for going all the way to failure, with the effect appearing to fall away as sets stopped further from it. So sets do need to be hard. They do not need to end with the client stapled to a bench, and the cost of getting there is real.
That cost is not evenly distributed, which is what makes this a programming decision:
| Exercise type | Where to train | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Heaviest compound | 2–3 RIR | Failure here costs days of recovery and degrades technique first |
| Secondary compound | 1–2 RIR | Fatigue cost is moderate, technique holds up longer |
| Machine and cable accessories | 0–1 RIR | Cheap to recover from, safe to fail on, no spotter needed |
| Isolation work | 0–1 RIR | The whole point of the exercise is effort, not load |
Spend the hard efforts on the accessories, where a failed set costs a client nothing but a minute. Keep two or three reps back on the movement their strength is anchored to, because a ground-out squat set contaminates the next two sessions.
For this to be more than a number in a column, the client has to be able to report where they finished. That is a scale decision — RPE or RIR — and for most clients RIR asks the easier question.
Set the weekly volume, then decide how it splits
Volume is the variable with the most research behind it and the most false precision attached to it. For a general-population client, somewhere around 10 to 16 hard sets per week for the muscles they care about is the normal working range, with less for beginners and less again for anyone short on sleep — how much volume clients actually need covers how to find their number rather than pick one.
Two rules keep the total honest. Do not give every muscle the same number: two or three get the priority allocation for the block and everything else gets a maintenance dose. And count what the client completes, not what you wrote.
How the total is divided is the split decision. Four days as upper/lower run twice hits each muscle twice a week and keeps sessions to a sensible length. Four days as a push/pull/legs variant works too, and a three-day full-body week hits everything three times with fewer sets each session. Workout splits explained covers which shape suits which client; for hypertrophy specifically, the split matters mostly because it determines how many sets land in one session for one muscle, and quality falls off after about eight to ten.
Order the session so the important work survives it
The last exercise of a session is the one that gets dropped when the client is running late, and every client is running late eventually. Order accordingly.
Supersets belong at step four, not step two. Pairing a lateral raise with a triceps extension buys back five minutes at no cost. Pairing a squat with a row costs load on both.
A four-week block for a four-day client
The client: 34, eighteen months of consistent training, four days a week, sixty-minute sessions, a commercial gym with dumbbells to 40kg and the usual machines. Priorities for the block are back and delts. Everything else holds.
Upper and lower, each run twice a week.
| Day | Exercises |
|---|---|
| Upper A | Chest-supported row 4×8–10 · Dumbbell bench 3×8–10 · Lat pulldown 3×10–12 · Seated dumbbell press 3×10–12 · Lateral raise 3×15–20 · Cable curl 2×12–15 |
| Lower A | Back squat 3×6–8 · Romanian deadlift 3×8–10 · Leg press 3×12–15 · Seated leg curl 3×12–15 · Calf raise 3×12–15 |
| Upper B | Chin-up or assisted chin-up 4×6–10 · Machine chest press 3×10–12 · Single-arm dumbbell row 3×10–12 · Cable lateral raise 3×15–20 · Triceps pushdown 3×12–15 |
| Lower B | Hip thrust 3×8–10 · Hack squat or leg press 3×10–12 · Split squat 3×10–12 · Back extension 3×12–15 · Calf raise 3×12–15 |
That is roughly 15 to 16 weekly sets for back, 12 for delts counting pressing, and 9 to 12 for everything else — priority muscles high, the rest maintained.
Across four weeks, only two things move: effort on the accessories, and sets on the priority muscles.
| Week | Compounds | Accessories | Priority sets | What you are checking |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 3 RIR, establish loads | 2 RIR | Baseline | Are the prescribed loads plausible for the rep range? |
| 2 | 2–3 RIR | 1–2 RIR | +1 set on rows and lateral raises | Reps rising at the same loads |
| 3 | 2 RIR | 1 RIR | +1 set on rows and lateral raises | Loads moving on at least the main lifts |
| 4 | 2 RIR | 0–1 RIR | Hold | Effort climbing while loads sit flat means the block is done |
| 5 (optional) | 2 RIR | 0–1 RIR | Hold | Only run this week if week 4 still produced reps |
| 6 | Deload — half the sets, same loads | — | — | Reset for the next block |
A five or six week block is not better than a four week one by default. Run the extra weeks when week four is still producing reps, and stop at four when it is not. The next block starts near where this one topped out, not at week one's numbers.
How the block progresses week to week
Inside the block, progression is per exercise and boring. Double progression is the default: fixed rep range, client adds reps at the same load until they hit the top of the range on every set, then adds the smallest available increase and starts again at the bottom.
Write the rule into the prescription so the client runs it without messaging you, and review it per exercise rather than per session — progressive overload for online clients covers reading a stall and telling it apart from a bad week.
The one thing not to do is move everything at once. If load, reps, sets and effort all change in week three and the client falls over in week four, you have no way of knowing which change did it. Sets rise on the priority muscles. Effort rises on the accessories. Load and reps rise wherever the client earns them. Everything else stays exactly where it started.
A client in a deficit is running a maintenance block
This is the part that gets skipped, and it decides what the block can produce.
Building muscle at a meaningful rate needs enough energy to fund it. A client in a calorie deficit can still gain muscle — beginners and clients returning after a layoff regularly do — but for someone eighteen months in and eating below maintenance, the realistic outcome of the block is keeping what they have while they lose fat. That is a good outcome. It is just not the one they think they signed up for if nobody said it out loud.
So do the arithmetic before the programming. Work out roughly where maintenance sits — how to calculate TDEE and macros for clients — and then decide what the block is for:
- In a deficit. Hold volume rather than adding it, keep the loads on the main lifts, and take any trimming from accessories. Judge the block on maintained strength, not on reps added. The size of the deficit changes how much you can ask for, which is a calorie target decision before it is a training one.
- At maintenance. A slow-building block. Progress is real but measured in reps rather than visible change over six weeks.
- In a small surplus. The version of the block that does what the client pictured. Around 0.25 to 0.5% of body weight gained per month is the range worth aiming at for a non-beginner; faster than that is mostly not muscle.
Tell the client which of the three they are on before week one. A client who understands they are on a hold block does not read four flat weeks as your programming failing.
