Start lifting — a chain reaction

The scale is one number about a whole body

BMI is mass divided by height squared, and that is genuinely all it is. For a population it tracks health outcomes well enough to be worth calculating. For you, on the day you start lifting, its most useful property is that it is about to become less accurate — because muscle is denser than fat, and gaining the first pushes the number the same way as gaining the second.

Height175 cm

Weight88 kg

BMI28.7

Rule of thumbBMI over 25 is worth a look and over 30 is worth acting on — but it cannot tell muscle from fat, so a strong, heavy person and an unfit, heavy person get the same score.

Open the BMI calculator → Waist-to-height, which BMI misses

What you burn decides whether the training shows

Total daily energy expenditure is your resting metabolism multiplied by how much you move. Lifting itself is a small part of it — a hard hour is a couple of hundred calories, not a thousand. What lifting does is change what your body does with the food, which is why the number matters more as a budget than as a target.

BMR1,780 kcal

×1.55 active

TDEE2,760 kcal

Rule of thumbThree sessions a week moves the activity multiplier one step, not two. Overstating how active you are is the commonest reason a calorie budget quietly fails.

Work out your TDEE →

What actually goes on the bar

This is the step people guess at, and it is the one with real arithmetic behind it. A starting load comes from your bodyweight and your experience: a novice squat sits near one times bodyweight for a single, and the fraction of that single you can hold for ten reps is about three quarters of it. Put those together and an 88 kg beginner squats around 65 kg for sets of ten — which is a bar plus a twenty and a two-and-a-half a side.

Squat 1RM88 kg

For 10 reps~75%

Working65 kg

Rule of thumbRest three to five minutes between heavy sets, sixty to ninety seconds for muscle, thirty to sixty for conditioning. The rest is prescribed by what the set is for, not by how recovered you feel.

Build the session → Why three minutes

And how hard the easy days should be

The conditioning either side of the lifting is where most people go wrong in the same direction: too hard to recover from, too easy to adapt to. Heart-rate zones give it a number. Most of it should be genuinely easy — conversational, zone two — precisely so that the sessions that are meant to be hard can be.

Age 34max ~186

Zone 2112–130

Zone 4149–167

Rule of thumb220 minus your age is the estimate everyone quotes and it is out by about twelve beats either way for a third of people. Use it to start, then correct it from what you actually see.

Find your zones → How much to drink

The scale is one number about a whole body

What you burn decides whether the training shows

What actually goes on the bar

And how hard the easy days should be

Where the chain leaves you