Find the Perfect Strength Training Program for You in Just 60 Seconds
How often should you train? What exercises should you do? And for how many sets and reps? Take this quiz now to get science-based answers to these questions and more.
Your Training Program
About Your Workouts
Based on your answers, the best workout program for you entails:
Lifting weights times per week.
This is ideal for you because it’s a good “minimum effective dose” for without spending much time in the gym. Click here to learn more.
This is ideal for you because it’s a “sweet spot” of sorts for —effectively balancing intensity, volume, recovery, and time commitment. Click here to learn more.
This is ideal for you because it will help you as fast as possible without leading to injury or burnout. Click here to learn more.
Prioritizing compound exercises that train multiple muscle groups simultaneously, like the squat, bench press, and deadlift.
These exercises stimulate the most muscle growth with each rep, making them ideal for gaining muscle and strength. Click here to learn more.
These exercises burn the most calories and are the most effective at maintaining muscle mass while dieting, making them ideal for losing fat. Click here to learn more.
These exercises strengthen, stretch, and stabilize multiple joints through a full range of motion with each rep and improve your whole-body balance and coordination, making them ideal for improving mobility and reducing pain and dysfunction. Click here to learn more.
These exercises improve your whole-body balance, coordination, strength, and explosiveness, making them ideal for boosting your physical and athletic performance. Click here to learn more.
Training each muscle group with a total of about sets per week.
Since you’ve been lifting weights less than a year, research shows this is enough to maximize muscle and strength gain—doing more isn’t necessary and increases your chances of getting injured or burned out. Click here to learn more.
Since you’ve been lifting weights 1-to-3 years, research shows this is enough to maximize muscle and strength gain—doing more isn’t necessary and increases your chances of getting injured or burned out. Click here to learn more.
Since you’ve been lifting weights for over 4 years, research shows you’ll gain muscle and strength faster by doing more sets per muscle group per week than someone new to weightlifting (~12-to-14 sets instead of ~8-to-10 sets, for instance). Click here to learn more.
Training with weights that are about 75-to-85% of your one-rep max for most exercises.
Research shows that the most effective way to build muscle is to create a lot of tension in your muscle fibers, and the best way to do this is to use moderately heavy weights that allow you to do about ~4-to-10 reps per set. Click here to learn more.
Research shows that using moderately heavy weights that allow you to do about ~4-to-10 reps per set is ideal for losing fat because it burns plenty of calories (up to 500 per workout, depending on how many sets you do) and prevents your body from breaking down muscle tissue for energy (“forcing” it to burn more fat instead), and isn’t as punishing as using heavier weights. Click here to learn more.
Research shows using moderately heavy weights that allow you to do about ~4-to-10 reps per set is ideal for gaining muscle and strength while improving mobility and joint health and minimizing the risk of injury. Click here to learn more.
Research shows using moderately heavy weights that allow you to do about ~4-to-10 reps per set is ideal for improving whole-body strength, balance, and coordination, which improves physical and athletic performance. Click here to learn more.
Ending most hard sets 1-to-3 reps shy of muscular failure.
Taking sets to muscular failure—the point at which you can’t move a weight despite giving your maximum effort—places a lot of strain on the body and invites injury. Research also shows that it’s not any better for gaining muscle and strength than taking sets within a few reps of failure. Thus, most of your sets should end with 1-to-3 good reps still in the tank. Click here to learn more.
Trying to add weight and/or reps to each exercise in every workout.
Resting at least ~2-to-4 minutes between each set of each exercise.
Research shows that resting at least 2 minutes between sets is better for gaining muscle and strength than resting less than this, although there’s little benefit to resting longer than 4 minutes. This might feel like a lot of sitting around in the gym, but it’s essential for getting the most out of your workouts. Click here to learn more.
Taking it easy every 4-to-10 weeks.
This gives your muscles, joints, tendons, and ligaments time to recuperate and ensures you’re refreshed and eager to keep training. You can achieve this by taking a week completely off from weightlifting and intense exercise or by deloading, which involves reducing the volume and/or intensity of your workouts. Click here to learn more.
Your Training Tips
Based on your answers, you'll make the fastest progress toward your goals if you follow these recommendations:
Pay special attention to recovery.
As you age, your muscles recover slower from exercise and your tendons and ligaments become stiffer, both of which can increase your risk of injury. To mitigate these issues, do no more than 6 days of intense exercise each week, don’t take your sets too close to muscular failure too often, and deload or take a week-long break from exercise every 6-to-8 weeks. Click here to learn more.
Eat enough to support muscle growth (but not too much).
Your body’s “muscle building machinery” runs best when energy is abundant, so if you don’t eat enough calories every day, you’ll struggle to get bigger and stronger. Thus, if you want to build muscle effectively, you want to regularly feed your body slightly more energy than it burns (provide it with a “calorie surplus”).
That said, you don’t want to follow the traditional “bulking” advice of eating as much as possible, as most of these excess calories will be converted into body fat, not muscle. If you make this mistake, you’ll have to cut your bulks short to keep your body fat levels in a healthy range and then spend several months losing the excess fat that you gained. Instead, you want to maintain a small-to-moderate calorie surplus that allows for steady muscle gain along with a small amount of body fat that you can lose relatively fast when you start dieting again. If you want to learn exactly how many calories and grams of protein, carbs, and fat you should eat to maximize strength and muscle growth, take the Legion diet quiz now.
Make sure your diet supports your weight loss efforts.
Although weightlifting is an essential part of improving your body composition (the percentage of your body weight that is fat versus muscle), your diet is equally important, especially when it comes to fat loss. Specifically, you must eat fewer calories than you expend over a period of time to cause meaningful weight loss—calories in versus calories out. You also need to consume enough protein to maintain or gain muscle, keep hunger at bay, and recover from your workouts. If you want to learn exactly how many calories and grams of protein, carbs, and fat you should eat to lose fat, build muscle, and get and stay healthy, take the Legion diet quiz now.
Since you’ve been following a proper strength training program for less than a year, you can also expect to build muscle and lose fat at the same time, what’s known as body recomposition. This will last for about 6-to-12 months, after which you’ll likely need to focus on either building muscle (while gaining a small amount of fat) or losing fat (while maintaining muscle). Click here to learn more.
Do some cardio to maximize fat loss.
While you don’t have to do cardio to lose fat, research shows that the best exercise routine for fat loss includes both cardio and strength training. Most forms of cardio burn more calories than weightlifting and are easier on your joints. Thus, once you’re already doing 3-to-5 strength training workouts per week, it’s best to burn additional calories by doing more cardio instead of weightlifting. A good rule of thumb is to do at least 1-to-3 hours of cardio per week to maximize fat loss without interfering with your weightlifting workouts. Click here to learn more.
Consider doing some mobility exercises in addition to your weightlifting workouts.
If you’re new to weightlifting, you may find that a lack of joint mobility is making it difficult for you to do some of the exercises on this program with proper form. Common problems include tight ankles, which can make it hard to keep your chest from tipping forward when you squat; tight hamstrings, which can make it hard to keep a neutral spine when you deadlift; and inflexible shoulders, which can make just about everything more difficult, including bench and overhead pressing and squatting. If you find this to be the case, doing some mobility exercises may help loosen up your joints. Click here to learn more.
Do a mix of weightlifting and cardio to optimize your health.
Research shows that if you want to gain muscle, strength, and endurance, minimize injury risk, lose fat, and maximize your overall health and longevity, doing a mix of weightlifting and cardio is optimal. Specifically, you’ll want to do weightlifting workouts and 1-to-3 hours of cardio per week (with more being better than less). Click here to learn more.
Consider reducing your cardio to 3 hours per week or less.
Since you said your most important fitness goal is to , you’ll likely make faster progress if you keep your total weekly cardio under 3 hours per week. While doing some cardio is a great way to boost fat loss, fitness, and health, most people find that it’s hard to progress in their strength training workouts if they’re doing more than this (most people find 1-to-3 hours is the sweet spot). Click here to learn more.
Try a few exercise variations to reduce your pain.
If you feel pain while weightlifting, the best remedy is usually rest—stop doing any exercises that irritate the joint that’s hurting until it’s tickety-boo, and then gradually begin training it again. That said, you can sometimes “train around” an injury by replacing the exercises that cause pain or discomfort with ones that don’t. You’ll need to experiment with different exercises to find what feels best for you, but here are some recommendations based on your answers:
Since you feel shoulder pain when weightlifting, consider replacing the barbell bench press, barbell overhead press, dumbbell overhead press, or dip with the reverse-grip bench press, dumbbell bench press, or close-grip bench press.
Since you feel knee pain when weightlifting, consider replacing the barbell back squat, leg press, or leg extension with the front squat, safety bar squat, Bulgarian split squat, or dumbbell lunge.
Since you feel lower-back pain when weightlifting, consider replacing the conventional deadlift or barbell back squat with the sumo deadlift, trap-bar deadlift, front squat, safety bar squat, or Bulgarian split squat.
Since you feel elbow pain when weightlifting, consider replacing the barbell bench press, close-grip bench press, or dip with the cable rope pushdown, cable rope overhead press, EZ-bar skullcrusher, or diamond push-up.
Since you feel hip pain when weightlifting, consider replacing the conventional deadlift, sumo deadlift, barbell back squat, or Bulgarian split squat with the leg press, hack squat or hack squat machine, belt squat, or dumbbell lunge.
Do 1-to-3 hours of cardio per week.
While weightlifting offers many of the same health benefits as cardio, including improved heart health, insulin sensitivity, and more, cardio comes with some health benefits you can’t get from weightlifting. Specifically, cardio burns more calories per unit of time and is better at improving cardiovascular health and insulin sensitivity than weightlifting. You don’t have to do much to see the benefits, though: Just 1-to-3 hours of low-to-moderate intensity cardio of your choice is enough. Click here to learn more.
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Use these 12-week push pull legs workout routines to shatter plateaus and set new PRs (while training just a few hours per week).
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Single-item orders are so blasted expensive to ship that we make very little profit on them. And no profits make the bean counters lose their marbles.
But when you order just one more item, it only costs us a few dollars more to ship both of them to you. Add a third item, and it's just a few more shekels to ship.
And that allows us to make a profit. Which keeps the bean counters happier than a hammer in a nail factory.
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While artificial food dyes and fillers may not be as dangerous as some people claim, studies show they can cause negative effects in some people, including gastrointestinal toxicity and behavioral disorders.
That’s why we use natural coloring derived from fruits and other foods as well as naturally derived ingredients for enhancing shelf life and facilitating the manufacturing process.
Many supplement ingredients lack scientifically validated benefits for healthy humans—we aren’t large rodents, after all—and those that do often use doses too low to be effective.
That’s why we exclusively use ingredients and doses proven effective in peer-reviewed scientific studies on healthy men and women.
While artificial food dyes and fillers may not be as dangerous as some people claim, studies show they can cause negative effects in some people, including gastrointestinal toxicity and behavioral disorders.
That’s why we use natural coloring derived from fruits and other foods as well as naturally derived ingredients for improving texture, enhancing shelf life, and facilitating the manufacturing process.
If you don’t like something of ours, guess what happens next?
No, we don’t request you deliver it to a PO box in the Gobi Desert by carrier pigeon. Nor do we ask you to fill a cursed inkwell with orc’s blood and demon saliva and then use it to complete reams of return forms written in ancient Cyrillic script.
We just . . . wait for it . . . give you every penny of your money back. Holy moo cows. And that means you can say "yes" now and decide later.
Every active ingredient, form, and dose in This product is backed by peer-reviewed scientific research demonstrating clear benefits in healthy humans.
The ingredient, form, and dose in This product is backed by peer-reviewed scientific research demonstrating clear benefits in healthy humans.
Many supplement ingredients lack scientifically validated benefits for healthy humans—we aren’t large rodents, after all—and those that do often use doses too low to be effective.
That’s why we exclusively use ingredients and doses proven effective in peer-reviewed scientific studies on healthy men and women.
The ingredient, form, and dose in our creatine is backed by peer-reviewed scientific research demonstrating clear benefits in healthy humans.
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