Walking + Strength Foundations

The training does not create the deficit; what you eat does. There is no calorie target, no macro split and no supplement advice in this programme, because a training plan is the wrong place for them.

For that side of it, see a registered dietitian or your GP — particularly if you take regular medication, have been told to watch your blood sugar, or have a history of disordered eating.

One case is worth naming rather than leaving to that conversation: if you take insulin or a sulfonylurea for diabetes, training while eating less can drop your blood sugar further and faster than either does on its own.

Speak to your GP or diabetes team before you start, keep something fast-acting to hand while you train, and treat shakiness, sweating, confusion or sudden hunger as a reason to stop the session and check rather than to push through it.

Strength is what this programme protects, so strength is the gauge. Log the top set of the squat, the split squat, the press and the row.

The signal to act is a load you handled a fortnight ago that you cannot handle today, twice in a row on the same lift or on two different lifts in the same week.

That is not a motivation problem and training harder does not fix it: take the next week at two thirds of the sets with the same loads, keep the walks, and eat more.

If it is still going backwards the week after, stop cutting food further and talk to a registered dietitian or your GP.

If your sleep or your sessions fall off, or your appetite drops away, that is the programme telling you it is under-fed — any one of those on its own is enough to act on, and they do not have to arrive together.

Periods becoming lighter, irregular or stopping counts too. If you are on medication that suppresses appetite, use sleep and your sessions as the signal instead, because appetite will not tell you.

Eat more, do not train more. The two days a week you are not training are part of the plan rather than a gap in it.

Count the hard days rather than the sessions: two of these five are hard ones, the two lifting days, and everything else in the week is a walk at a pace you can talk through.

Four hard days a week is the ceiling for most people and three is the number to hold to while you are new, so if you want to add something, add walking — a third hard session a week is what makes the two that matter worse.

Before you start, please read this part. Training is among the safest and most useful things most people can do, and there is a short list of exceptions worth checking yourself against first.

If you have a heart or lung condition, chest pain or pressure at rest or on effort, dizziness or blackouts, blood pressure or diabetes that is not currently controlled, low bone density or osteoporosis, a joint or back problem that is flaring, or you are pregnant or within a year of giving birth, speak to your GP or a physiotherapist before starting and follow their instruction over anything written here.

Stop the session and get medical advice for chest pain or tightness, breathlessness out of proportion to the effort, dizziness, or a sudden sharp pain in a joint.

Stop it as well for pain, numbness, pins and needles or weakness that travels down an arm or a leg, and get that seen before you load the pattern again.

If you have not trained for a while, spend the first fortnight at the bottom of every rep and load range, including with no dumbbell at all. Nothing here is medical advice.