I get asked about my routine more than anything else, and the honest answer disappoints people. There is nothing clever in it. It is the same handful of lifts, done properly, for years, around a job that already takes a lot out of me.
Here is the actual thing, not the version that sounds impressive.
The split I run
Five days when work allows, four when it does not, and I never train five if it means the fifth one is rubbish. Push, pull, legs, upper, and then one day that is whatever has been neglected, which is almost always legs again or the bits of the back nobody trains.
I train in the evening on work days. Everyone tells you mornings are better. Mornings are better for people who sit down all day. If I have been on my feet since seven, going straight in at six in the evening while I am still warm works better than dragging myself in at half five in the morning and lifting like a man made of wood.
Sessions are between fifty and seventy minutes. Anything past that and I am just socialising, and I did not come to socialise. Not usually, anyway.
The lifts that built most of it
Incline press, weighted dips, rows of some kind every single week, and squats or a variation. That is genuinely the core of it, and if you took everything else away I would look about the same.
The rest is accessories and I treat them like accessories. Lateral raises, curls, rear delts, calves. They matter for how it all sits together, but they are not what built anything, and men who spend their whole session on them stay exactly the same size for years and cannot work out why.
I go heavy but I do not go stupid. Two hard sets that are genuinely hard beat five sets you could have talked through. And I have never once been injured chasing a number that mattered to me and not to anybody else, because I stopped chasing those numbers when I realised the job needs my back more than the internet does.
How I eat around a physical job
High protein, not complicated, and more food than people expect. When you are on the tools all day the calories are already going somewhere before you get to the gym. Undereat and you do not get lean, you just get tired and small and your afternoons fall apart.
Four meals. Something proper before five in the morning, something in the van at lunch, something after training, and something in the evening. I do not weigh anything. I have done it before, for long enough to know roughly what things look like, and now I just look.
Alcohol is the only thing I actually watch, and only because of what it does to the next day rather than what it does on the night.
The boring bits that actually work
Sleep. It is the whole thing and nobody wants to hear it. Seven and a half hours and I am fine. Six for a week and everything gets harder, the sessions go backwards, and I get short with people.
Consistency over intensity. I have never had a magic eight weeks. I have had four years of turning up when it was raining and I could not be bothered, and that is what the difference actually is.
Progress that is boring is still progress. Half a kilo, one more rep, a set that felt easier than last week. If you need every session to feel like an event you will quit by March.
What I get out of it
Partly the obvious. I am not going to be modest about it, I like how I look and I have worked for it. But mostly it is that the work does not break me. I can do a full day, train, and get up and do it again, and at some point that stopped being about vanity and started being about staying in the game.
What I would tell you if you were starting
Pick four lifts and get properly strong on them before you worry about anything else. Learn what a hard set feels like, because most people have never had one. Eat more than you think. Sleep like it is part of the programme, because it is.
And stop changing the plan. Everyone I know who looks the way they want to look has been doing roughly the same thing for years. Everyone I know who is still asking about splits has been asking for years.
It is not clever and it is not quick, and that is exactly why most people never get there.
And there is the other part, which is that the gym is the one place in my day where I am completely in charge of what happens next. I know what that does to me. I have a fairly good idea what it does to some of you watching from the other end of the room, too.