Five pillars, one plan

Training & movement

Training hard is the easy part. The question is what you train, how hard, how often and why exactly that way. That's where the difference lies between progress and lifting the same weight for three years. It starts with the movement itself. How an exercise is performed determines which muscles do the work and which joints take the load. Two people doing the same squat load their hip and knee completely differently, depending on leg length, ankle mobility and how they control the movement. At REZA, we therefore look first at how you move, before adding any weight. Technique isn't an introduction to the training. It is the training.

Then comes progression. Muscles and tendons get stronger by receiving a stimulus that's slightly heavier than what they're used to, then getting time to adapt. Keep the stimulus the same, and adaptation stops. Increase it too fast, and you run into overload. Progressive overload is the skill of keeping that difference exactly right, which can mean more weight, but just as easily more reps, an extra set, better execution or less rest. How much training you need is a question with an answer that differs per person. Research on training volume paints a clear picture: more weekly sets deliver more muscle growth on average, but that relationship flattens out, and there's a point where extra work mostly costs extra recovery. Where that point sits for you depends on your training years, age, sleep, stress and how much else you do in a day. For most people with a demanding job, the optimum sits lower than they think, and the gain lies in better sessions rather than more of them. Intensity works the same way. Training to the point where a rep is no longer possible isn't necessary for strength or muscle growth, and the literature is fairly consistent on that. What is necessary is getting close to that point: a set left with four reps in reserve does demonstrably less than one left with one or two. Pushing everything to the limit every week costs more recovery than it delivers.

All of that gets translated into a programme with direction. What you do in week twelve follows from what happened in week one, not from a template that happened to be available.

Nutrition

Most nutrition advice online isn't wrong. It just isn't yours. "Eat healthy" and "drink more water" say nothing about how much you need, when, and what to do in a week with three business dinners.

Nutrition coaching at REZA starts with two numbers: how much energy you take in relative to what you burn, and how much protein you eat. Together, those determine most of what happens to your body composition. If you want to lose weight while keeping muscle mass, you need a deficit large enough to do something and small enough not to undermine your training. Research shows that a large energy deficit measurably slows the build-up of muscle mass, while strength gains often hold up better. That's a reason to choose a deficit deliberately rather than as large as possible. Protein is the second lever. The literature is unusually consistent here: for people doing strength training, extra protein delivers a small but real gain in strength and fat-free mass, with a point beyond which more adds almost nothing. That point sits higher than the average person reaches and lower than the fitness industry suggests. For people over fifty there's extra reason to pay closer attention, since muscle building becomes less responsive to the same amount with age. After that comes the quality of what you eat, which is more than a health question. Foods high in fibre, water and volume keep you fuller on the same amount of energy. Get that right and you need less willpower, and willpower is the first thing to run out. What doesn't happen: no forbidden foods, no meal plans down to the gram, no advice that only works in a week without birthdays. What does happen is that we work out what you actually eat, where the room is, and which two or three adjustments deliver the most for the least effort.

Boundary: REZA provides nutrition coaching within sport and health. In the case of a medical condition, a nutrition-related diagnosis, or medication that requires adjustments, REZA refers you to a dietitian or doctor. That's not a formality but a boundary we hold.

Behavior and habits

Almost no one drops out because the programme was wrong. People drop out in week seven, after a busy stretch, when two missed sessions turn into a missed month. That's what this part focuses on. Motivation is the least useful lever here. Motivation shifts with sleep, work pressure and the weather, and anyone who makes their training depend on it ends up training exactly on the days that were easy anyway. What does hold up are commitments so small and so fixed that they stop requiring a decision. Research on habit formation shows behaviour sticks better when it's tied to a fixed moment or an existing routine than when it depends on an intention.

Beyond that, it's about consistency rather than perfection. Someone who hits 80 percent of their sessions over two years gets further than someone who does everything perfectly for three months and then stops. In practice that means a plan with a minimum version for busy weeks, worked out in advance instead of improvised the moment things go wrong. It's also about how you handle load. A stretch where things feel heavier is normal and part of the process, but telling healthy fatigue apart from a signal to scale back is something most people don't do well on their own. That's exactly where an outsider tracking your data makes the difference.

Boundary: this is coaching aimed at behaviour, habits and consistency. It is not psychological treatment and doesn't replace it. Where a concern calls for that, REZA refers you on.

Performance

Performance here doesn't mean showing up at a starting line. It's about what your body can do on an ordinary day: taking the stairs without thinking about it, lifting a suitcase into an overhead locker, getting through a long workday without the evening being a write-off.

Strength is the most useful yardstick here, and not just because it's measurable. Population research shows a consistent link between muscle-strengthening activity and a lower risk of serious conditions, and between grip strength and general health outcomes in older adults. That's observational data, so caution around cause and effect is warranted. But the direction is stable enough to take strength seriously as something that reaches further than the gym.

What gets measured depends on your goal. Usually that's a combination of capacity in the key exercises, body composition and a few functional tests. Those numbers aren't the point in themselves. They're the means to establish whether the approach is working, because that's the only question that matters in week eight.

Source: Momma et al. 2022: muscle-strengthening activity and risk of serious conditions; Lee 2020: grip strength and disease-specific mortality in older adults

Recovery

Training is the stimulus. Adaptation happens afterwards. Get that reversed and you reach the point where more training delivers less. Sleep is the heaviest-weighing part of this, and also the most underestimated. Research on acute sleep deprivation shows a measurable drop in physical performance, and among people who train intensively, worse sleep tracks with periods of excessive load. For someone sleeping short four nights a week and wondering why progress has stalled, that's often a more relevant lever than the training programme itself.

The balance between load and recovery is also actively managed. A good programme includes lighter weeks, and they aren't built in because something went wrong. They're built in because adaptation takes time and constantly pushing harder eventually stalls.

What you notice from this in practice: the number of sessions is matched to what you can handle, not to what's theoretically possible. And during a stretch of heavy workload, poor sleep or illness, the programme scales down instead of you dropping it altogether.

Source: Craven et al. 2022: acute sleep deprivation and physical performance