Three sessions a week · 30 minutes · all machines and dumbbells
So you can tap it like an app instead of hunting for the link every time.
This note disappears once you have logged your first workout.
No stretching before you lift. Stretching goes afterwards — it's on the Stretch tab.
Stay on the same weight until every set reaches the top of its rep range with good form and your knees feeling fine. Then go up one pin, or to the next dumbbell.
The reps will drop back down when you add weight. That's exactly right. Climb again.
Rest about a minute between sets. Long enough to get your breath back, short enough to be out in thirty minutes.
Three days a week minimum — after each gym session, plus a couple of off days. Daily is better.
This stretching will not stop you aching after a workout, and it will not stop you getting injured. The research on both is clear and it says no.
What it does do is buy back movement that decades of sitting took away — and that part is worth real money. Being unable to flex your ankle properly is one of the better predictors of falling over, and a stiff rounded upper back raises that risk too.
So: stretch to move better, not to feel less sore. The thing that actually cuts your injury risk — to under a third — is the lifting.
This page is for one person: a 65-year-old woman who has never trained before, using a normal commercial gym, on her own, three short sessions a week. The Today tab tells you which workout to do and when. The A, B and C tabs hold the three workouts. You do one, rest a day, do the next, rest a day, do the third, and start again. That is the whole schedule.
Everything you type in the log — the weight, the reps — is saved on this phone only. Nothing is sent anywhere. The page uses those numbers to remember what you did last time and to tell you when it is safe to lift a little more.
Most of the program is written for someone who already lifts. If a term is new, this is what it actually means:
You do not need to understand any of this to start. Open the Today tab, do the warm-up, do the workout it names, and fill in the numbers as you go. The rest of this tab is here to explain the “why” whenever you get curious — or worried.
Some discomfort while you're loading the knee is expected, and it is not damage. Here's how to tell the difference between normal and too much.
Strengthening your thighs reduces knee pain more than paracetamol does, and about as well as anti-inflammatories. It usually starts helping within 2 to 4 weeks — long before anything looks different.
Week 1: just measure. No target. Find out what your normal week looks like on your Fitbit.
Then add 1,000 steps a day every two weeks until you're at 7,000–7,500 a day. Then stay there.
Don't chase 10,000. In a study of nearly 17,000 older women, the benefit flattened out at about 7,500 steps. Past that, more steps didn't buy more.
And don't worry about walking fast. How quickly you walk made no difference once total steps were counted. It's the amount that matters.
2 × 10 minutes on the treadmill with the incline up, twice a week. Add 2 minutes every two weeks until you reach 20.
Always after you lift, never before. Cardio first leaves your legs tired and measurably blunts the strength you build. Doing it second costs the walking nothing.
Go at a pace where you could talk but not sing. Incline walking instead of running: same benefit to your heart, far less on your knees.
30 to 40 grams at each meal, across 3 or 4 meals. Not one big hit at dinner.
This is the bit most people get wrong. A 30-year-old builds muscle off 20 grams in a sitting. Past 65, your muscle has gone a bit deaf to the signal and needs 30 to 40 grams to hear it. Same food, different arithmetic.
About the scale: lifting on its own barely moves it. What changes is what you're made of — less fat around the middle, more muscle, same number on the scale for a while. Losing actual weight needs eating a bit less on top of this.
Week 3 is when people quit, because nothing looks different yet. Here's what's actually happening, so you know it's working before you can see it.
| When | What's happening |
|---|---|
| Weeks 1–4 | You get 15–30% stronger — almost entirely your nervous system learning to use the muscle you already have. The muscle isn't bigger yet. This is normal and it is progress. Sore knees often start easing here too. |
| Weeks 6–9 | Actual muscle growth becomes measurable for the first time. |
| Week 12 | Thigh muscle up roughly 4–9%. |
| 3–6 months | Half a kilo to over a kilo of muscle. Standing up from a chair five times gets 1.5–2 seconds faster. You walk measurably quicker. |
Because changing it would make it worse. Beginners who rotate exercises build less muscle than beginners who repeat the same ones — you spend every session re-learning instead of getting stronger. Six weeks of the same six movements is how they stop being something you have to think about.
The weight changes every week. The exercises don't. That's the whole design.
Not because of the 30-minute limit. In a review of 151 trials in over 6,000 people aged 60-plus, the lower volume programs came out best for building leg muscle — and they improved everyday movement about 90% more than the high-volume ones. Two sets is the better dose here, not a compromise.
This is how the page works out which week and block you're in. If you take a week off, push this date forward by a week.
Everything is saved on this phone only — no account, nothing sent anywhere. Once you have opened it once, the whole program works with no signal — handy in a gym basement. Only the videos need a connection.
Not medical advice. Built 2026-10-31. Every claim on this page traces to published research — the citations live alongside the program file in the repo.