Conjure Strength: A Beginner's Gains Grimoire
An introduction to strength training principles, and two free sample programs.
I’m delighted that you're curious about being strong. I have phenomenal news for you:
You already are.
And not only that, but there is practically no ceiling on how much stronger and more capable you can become with committed training. Ie, a program, aka, a gains grimoire. I’m being a bit cute here with the title, but it was not lost on me, as someone who cultivated a strength practice before her magickal and spiritual practice, that you could look at a strength program as essentially an ongoing magickal working, meant to cultivate a literal different body or skillset. Directed human transformation is pretty magickal.
In that spirit, I created this guide with the goal of aiding the everywitch and wizard in the quest of achieving a stronger, more vital, human avatar.
It’s astonishing how much we can develop these things with some committed attention, desire, belief dismantling and shifting, and inspiration.
What follows is an introduction to strength training principles for overall, full body strength, and muscle growth, as well as two free sample programs (scroll to the bottom for those).
This first part is almost entirely about the basics of manipulating physiology in accordance with tried and true strength training principles. The information herein is entirely within the scope of what I have direct experience and evidence of, and practiced as a strength and fitness coach, and strength athlete. I do not claim that they are the be all end all, and like with everything, it is on you, the operant, to experiment and give attention to what you are doing and the effect it is having on you.
The second part (likely coming March) will be more exploratory and experimental, and deal with the mental and magickal frameworks I have used and explored alongside my physical training (I mean, cuteness aside, if I’m calling this a grimoire, I’m definitely going to talk about how training is complementary to magick and the spiritual/non-physical dimension of life).
Disclaimer before proceeding: This is offered as inspiration; I am not liable for any injury or miraculous, radical mysteries that may befall you in the pursuit of your greatness.
Speaking of Inspiration.
Who is the coolest, most capable, badass, person, character, deity, or fictional hero you can think of?
Who/what pops into your head when you think of the ideal hero?
Conjure them in your mind’s eye.
See them towering, floating, radiating light in front of you.
Got it?
That person inspires you because there is something about them that already exists within you, right now.
We cannot, literally, recognize qualities or ideas that we do not possess some flicker of within us.
To “inspire” means to breathe in. When something inspires us, we naturally, reflexively take into ourselves – it flows within us, like a rainstorm pouring down into a river, flushing it with new power. Like amplifies like.
Strength training is a physical discipline that you can use to connect to and embody your own heroic qualities. You can use it to create a practice of calling forth and amplifying focus, determination, joy, courage, perseverance, toughness, or whatever qualities deeply inspire you.
I raise inspiration and heroes because with training, we are creating a story of who we are physically – how we move, how we exert, how we strive. Stories are always served by inspiration.
Inspiration is always available to those who ask for it.
I view strength training as a discipline that can be a vehicle for self-development, and for augmenting one’s relationship with inspiration, virtue, and the spiritual (non-physical) dimensions of life.
Strength training is arguably the most valuable physical modality you can practice in terms of its overall effect on your life. Strength is the quality that allows all other qualities to express themselves. This is true physically, and metaphysically. Strength is the architecture of self that allows the gilding of beauty, intelligence, and creativity to express themselves.
Physically, strength promotes a host of objective material and subjective personal benefits. It has completely changed my life in every way (and I’m definitely not the only one). Like any art form or sport, it will show us dimensions of ourselves that we were not aware of, it will amplify our strengths and call out our weaknesses, it will invite us to explore new aspects of self that utterly transform our physical and emotional experience of life.
So, what does it do, exactly, and how do you start doing it?
(Skip to the very bottom of this article for the sample programs).
WHY STRENGTH TRAIN?
Strength focused training builds well-being, health, and vitality.
Doing hard things builds confidence. Challenging the body is a fundamental need of our being.
Strength training causes a storm of awesome shit to go down in our physiology and psychology, and you may find that it helps you become aware of physical and mental “blindspots,” that were inhibiting your everyday experience of potential grooviness.
Humans were made to move, and hard movement has its own particular benefits that are pretty exponential.
Increased tissue, bone, and muscle integrity improve our capacity to take on stress, both physical and internal. This also feeds back into our self-esteem and self-image. When the body is consistently prepared to engage with resistance, it functions better at literally everything.
You feel more powerful in your body, both in a literal, felt sense – more buoyant, more energized – and in an emotional, mental sense, from your increased confidence in your work ethic, ability to overcome challenges, and do hard things.
Increased strength also renders us less injury prone.
You know the saying, “The best defense is a good offense”? Building strength is going on the offensive as a way to prevent degradation, injury, and many of the maladies of modern life.
Do you or your friends joke that you’re getting older, and thus your body is just, “falling apart?” That’s weakness, not age. I know 60 year olds who can out-lift and out-move many of my age peers. Training strength and athletic capacity teaches us that many, if not most, of our present conceptions of our limitations are just that, conceptions, ideas. Not fundamental reality or truth.
If you squat over 600 lbs, then you get to joke about your joints being beat up, because you’re at the fringe extreme expression of strength. If you’re desk bound and have never seriously trained for anything, you might not have mysterious, “genetic” chronic pain, you are chronically weak and your body is deteriorating and trying to let you know so you will do something about it.
The modern human has adapted poorly to the constraints of much of daily modern life - sitting in front of screens. We have created an extreme situation for our bodies, and thus we may have to explore extreme balance. By that, I mean the constraint of gym training (If you are able to spend quality time consistently on your feet moving around and doing physical activity, you probably don’t need to spend a ton of time in the gym. However, given how weak the average modern is, I’d still suggest twice weekly strength training).
Personally, getting stronger and more muscular dramatically increased my confidence on many levels, and set me up to take on the more serious matters of life. It helped create a sense of personal sovereignty and agency that I had lacked before.
It also introduced me to power.
Strength training gives us direct, objective experience of our own power, enabling us to recognize, and amplify it exponentially.
There are few feelings like lifting a weight you thought was too heavy for you. It never gets old.
Whether we admit it or not, I assess that most of us crave empowerment. Which is just another way of saying, we seek power.
While some might deny that because of its connotations with villainous “power-seeking” tyrants and moguls, power is simply the ability to direct your energy according to your will, and make shit happen. If we do not wield a certain degree of power, we are helpless. Feeling disempowered sucks.
One of the easiest, most accessible ways to remind yourself and to reinforce that you are powerful already, and that you can become increasingly so, is to strength train. To thrust your will against a force whose only goal is to resist you.
Strength training radically changed my life and entire self conception. It confirmed my hope that deliberate, self directed growth was possible, which was really the first domino in a long line of shifts that have led me to where I am today.
Alright, let’s finally get to brass tacks.
This is primarily to cover the basics, and get you started a-hoisting: discover your untapped potential, build muscle, and get stronger overall.
STRENGTH BASICS
The word “strength” can be used to describe many aspects of the musculoskeletal system’s (your bones, tendons, ligaments, muscles & other connective tissues) adaptation to resistance input (weights, bands, machines, sleds, rocks, cables, odd objects etc).
There are two primary common dimensions of strength training I will address here, which are hypertrophy and overall strength, within the gym context. There is a lot of interplay between the two and for the beginner, they develop simultaneously with appropriate training.
(A note: there are many ways to get strong. There are slightly fewer way to get comically, extremely strong. While I have a bias for the utility of gym and weight based strength training, it is not the only way. The term “training” itself could arguably better apply to other forms of interaction with your own body; using weights in the gym is one way to encourage a particular kind of development; one that I’m personally very fond of).
If you want a physical routine that makes you feel strong and muscular, weight-based gym training is a good way to play.
For all but very high level athletes, increased hypertrophy will lead to increased strength, and vice versa.
What is Hypertrophy?
Muscle development, the increase in strength, size, and structural integrity of the muscle fibers. Growth in size (volume of tissue) will typically occur when there is a calorie (energy) surplus. Absent a surplus, new trainees will often experience some growth, or, a perception of growth as the muscle gets stronger, and body fat potentially diminishes. Hypertrophy training is practical, functional, and can be manipulated for developing specific aesthetics.
What is Strength?
The ability of your body to produce and express force, as well as withstand force. Strength training is aided and complemented by hypertrophy training. Strength training will also create a certain degree of hypertrophy by itself. We can think of hypertrophy as under the umbrella of strength training overall, but the specific quality of force output is strength.
When speaking of highly trained strength athletes (think high level powerlifters or Olympic weightlifters), bigger muscles do not necessarily equate to force greater output. Force output is about skill expression (neurological signaling) via the conduit of tissues strong enough to withstand the amount of force generated. Strength is a quality trained within specific parameters.
For the totally untrained person, building muscle (hypertrophy) does make a difference in strength (force output), so for our purposes, they are basically the same thing; the two qualities will develop somewhat simultaneously. But we can keep this distinction in mind as we mature in our training process.
How Do We Build These Qualities?
Execution of movement under high loads of resistance (the “intensity” of a movement in a strength training program the way I describe it, refers to its weight - more on this shortly).
Strength training is also referred to as “resistance” training. The higher the resistance, the more muscle fibers have to “fire” together to create force.
There are certain rep ranges and movements that are very conducive to producing hypertrophy and strength, respectively.
NOTE: This is far from a strict prescriptive, and there is no special, specific range that “Works” for everything. I am speaking in broad generalities, because there are many factors at play within any given individual’s training context. Athlete A may respond well to 5 sets of 6-8 repetitions and get very strong that way for a while, while another athlete may need to work in higher or lower rep range to get the adequate stimulus required for adaptation to occur.
Hypertrophy Principles
2-5 sets
6-12, 12-25+ repetitions*
Rests 1 - 4 minutes long
Strength Principles
1-6 sets
1-6 repetitions
Rests 1 - 5 minutes long
You’ll notice that there is not a huge difference overall. Again, we are talking about closely overlapping stimuli. These are my preferred set and rep ranges, but these are not rigid rules, and there is infinite room for creativity with supersets, circuits, and so on. For our purposes, I encourage simplicity to start. Learn and get the basics to unequivocally work before you experiment wildly.
*Different muscles may respond to different ranges and intensities. I experienced a lot of arm size growth one training cycle doing a lot of very high rep timed sets of things like cable press downs and lateral dumbbell raises. I was also doing low rep heavy multi-joint/compound movements like deadlifts and rows in the same program. A nice mix of many rep ranges!
Adaptation
Our musculoskeletal system (remember, it’s not just your muscles, it is your bones and connective tissues too!) gets stronger by exposure to, and engagement with, increasing amounts of resistance, that drive it to produce more and more force. The more intense the resistance, the more muscle fibers get “recruited” to engage in force production. When we hit a certain threshold of muscular recruitment, adaptation occurs, and we get stronger.
Now, building strength and building tissue are VERY taxing requests on our bodies from an energetic standpoint. Our bodies are brilliant at energy conservation (one of the reasons habits can be very challenging to change; it takes extra energy to do something new; hence why tiny, “atomic” changes are most successful - less taxing physically and psychologically. Highly recommend James Clear’s book Atomic Habits on that front.)
We do this by increasing difficulty/intensity, over time. There are basically infinite ways to do that, but again, we are going to focus on the essentials. It’s something like increasing the amount of weight/resistance, and the amount of total work.
Adaptation requires stress. Just enough stress that you have energy to spare for your life and are not constantly sore and beat up, but enough stress to “convince” your body to adapt.
Key Takeaway: Intensity has to increase periodically for change to happen.
Frequency
The minimum effective dose for resistance training is actually only once a week. Now, going will be incredibly slow, so I’d recommend committing to at least two sessions a week if you can. Faster gains will trigger the positive feedback loop of the satisfaction of growth and progress, which will be fuel for your quest. Once a week is technically possible, and if that is where you are at, I get it; really commit to that one day.
The trainee can enjoy faster adaptation and results with more frequent training, and there are a variety of training styles that favor 3-4 day a week protocols, and even up to 7 days a week.
Pick your days, and commit to a schedule you know you can handle, whether that be one, or five. Stay flexible, remember you can’t mess up. If one week you want to go an extra day beyond what you committed to, that’s great! And if you miss a day one week, no big deal. Strength training is long game and cumulative, we will never be perfectly consistent, so don’t sweat it.
Key Takeaway: Train as frequently as you can commit to on a long term basis.
Progress
How fast you adapt, build muscle, and get strong has almost as much to do with your life outside of the gym as inside it. I have gone through periods of very subpar sleep and nutrition and still made progress in the gym – the training itself matters a lot.
But rest, nutrition, recreation, and overall well-being matter deeply, and I always see my best results when I’m giving a lot of love to my body outside the gym, too. I’ve seen a lot of people absolutely crush themselves in training but make very slow process, seemingly because they’re overworked, chronically stressed to an extreme degree (and I’ve been that guy too).
Commit to improving your entire quality of life, work in a focused and diligent manner, be kind and appreciative to yourself for your work, and you will make progress.
Key Takeaway: Take care of yourself in all areas as best you can.
Intensity
The weight needs to be hard. And it needs to get harder, frequently. For the beginner on most movements, this will mean increasing intensity through reps, or weight, every week, more or less. Sometimes we dial it up progressively, and then we dial it back down periodically to give our bodies the breaks they need (called a “deload” in strength training).
I’ve seen many a gym goer perform the same movements at the exact same weight, for seemingly months on end. That’s fine, if your goal is simply to do that movement at that weight because it feels good. Your body will get very efficient at, and it will get very easy. You will not get any stronger, and you won’t build more muscle. You will maintain. The demand on your system is diminishing, not increasing, so adaptation will not occur.
As mentioned before, intensity is important, and intensity here refers to how heavy the weight is, and essentially how hard it makes you work. There are different ways of denoting intensity, one is the Rate of Perceived Exertion scale, or RPE training, another is RIR. Both are handy tools.
RPE - Typically a scale of 1-10, 1 being basically laying down and breathing in savasana, 10 being giving yourself a nosebleed because the effort is so immense. You will almost never actually do a 10 (unless you get into strength sports, god help you). RPE is typically used for strength training.
One, very basic, way to scale RPE over the course of a few weeks would be something like this:
Week 1 RPE 6-7
Week 2 RPE 7-8
Week 3 RPE 8-9
Week 4 RPE 5 (“Deload”)
RIR - Reps In Reserve denotes how many more reps you could have done before failure (not being able to move the weight through the movement’s range of motion). RIR is a good tool for Hypertrophy training to measure progress and intensity.
There are many ways to experiment with intensity, but for now, the takeaway is you want to get close to failure but not actually fail, hence Reps in Reserve.
Muscular failure can promote adaptation, but it creates higher overall stress on the body and your subsequent sets , so it can cause diminishing returns and cut into your overall efforts if over utilized. If you go to failure on your first set, you may diminish likelihood that the effort of your next two sets will be high enough to contribute to adaptation. 3 sets at 2 RIR amount to more overall adaptation than one set to failure if you’re an intermediate trainee. I say “MAY,” because this is very hypothetical, and different people respond differently. It takes training for years and trying different approaches to determine the best strategy. Different muscle groups may also respond better to one than another.
These systems will become handier as you get a sense of what your current actual strength threshold is. The first few months, you should be able to increase weight frequently on many movements, because the adaptations are mostly neurological. As your brain gets more efficient/practiced at the movements, it will be able to recruit more muscle and actually tax tissue. Your gains may be somewhat linear for many months as your overall body system gets acclimated to training.
There are many many articles on RPE and RIR floating around out there if you want to learn more about how to use these rubrics.
Key Takeaway: Keep weights increasing overtime, keep intensity high, but use failure sparingly. Use whatever system makes the most sense to you/is easy to use/you can use consistently.
Deloading and Fatigue Accumulation
As mentioned, it can be wise to schedule a “deload” week every 4-6 weeks.
The reason for the deload is to address the cumulative fatigue that we garner over multiple weeks of training. Training heavy taxes your Central Nervous System (CNS), and it’s supposed to, but in order to keep from burning out or stopping progress all together, we must go through periods of rest and an overall decrease in intensity.
We are cyclical animals, and we do not progress linearly long term. Like the rhythms of the seasons, we also operate on mini biological circuits that dictate our energy and our ability to push hard.
Key Takeaway: Work WITH your body’s natural rhythms, not against them, whenever possible.
THE BASICS
You need weights, you need a routine, you need a basic program. Allow me a tangent. A “program” is actually an old timey reference to a show’s “program,” the order of events in a theatrical production (according to Jamie Lewis, who knows more about strength culture history than probably 99.99999% of all human beings, so I’m not going to argue).
We are not talking about computer programs. You are not a computer. You are a deeply emotional, constantly changing, hot blooded, spirit-fueled animal demigod. We are not creatures of linear inputs and outputs.
Your program is your show, baby. It’s simply a way to organize your own razzle dazzle in a way that helps you pay attention and learn to understand what is working, and why. They are guidelines.
A program, a system, a spell, is as much art as science, and while there are principles that are pretty universal, think of them as a foundation to build your wonderland on, not iron bars restricting you.
Don’t need to stress the details too much. You just need to learn how to work hard, if you don’t already. Let’s boil down everything discussed for far into your actionable principles:
-Work all major muscle groups (your entire body).
-Load heavy
-Increase intensity over time
-Decrease intensity periodically and recover
-Repeat
That’s it. It must be work. As discussed, it needs to be hard. If you curl 8 lbs every week, your body will not continue to get stronger (8 lbs is so light it isn’t doing anything, for the vast majority of people).
Let’s break it down further.
-Divide work into smaller muscle groups
-Train each muscle group at least once, ideally twice a week
-Change set and rep ranges to help increase load over time
Exercise Selection
How do we know specifically what movements to select for our program?
There are many variations to choose from and play with.
Generally, you can start with:
- Movements that use the most muscle: multi-joint (“compound”) full body movements like the squat, deadlift, shoulder press, chest press, row, pulldown, high pull, clean, and carry.
-Ease of access: if your gym is mostly barbells and dumbbells, don’t select cable based exercises you have to invent some way to set up. Use what you have the most consistent access to.
-Movements you can load progressively on a stable surface (barbells, dumbbells, cables, machines).
I’ll walk you through the common fundamentals, why they are selected, and how to put them together.
Types of Movements:
Upper Body, Lower Body, Full Body*, & Locomotive
(*Full body movements are often put in the lower body category, like deadlifts, even though deadlifts definitely increase arm strength).
Upper and Lower can be further specified.
Upper Push/Front/Anterior
Movements that “push” away from you. Chest press, overhead/shoulder press, push ups, dips.
Upper Pull/Back/Posterior
Movements that “pull” toward you. Rows, pull ups, pull downs.
Lower Push/Front/Anterior
Movements that dominantly involve the quadriceps (quads, main thigh muscle on the front of your body). The quadriceps “Push” the floor away when you stand up from a squat.
Lower Pull/Back/Posterior
Movements that involve the hamstrings, lower back, and glutes. You could say these muscles “pull” when they contract in a deadlift or hamstring curl.
Not all movements can actually really be qualified as a push or pull, that’s a simplistic organizational paradigm, but one that can be helpful.
For Upper, we can start with one push, one pull, for each primary direction, horizontal, or vertical.
Push (Horizontal): Dumbbell Chest Press
Pull (Vertical): Lat Pulldown
Push (Vertical): Seated Dumbbell Shoulder Press
Pull (Horizontal): Single Arm Dumbbell Row
For Lower, we can feature two multi-joint quad-focused movements, two multi-joint hamstring and/or glute focused movements.
Lower Front/Anterior: Squat, Legpress Machine
Lower Back/Posterior (Glute, Hamstrings, calves): Deadlift, Hamstring Curl, Reverse Lunge
We can further divide our work by training unilaterally, as well, as you may notice in some of the movements listed above. Training unilaterally (one limb/side), has many benefits. We tend to have a dominant side that we will favor in movements that use both limbs simultaneously, our dominant side may produce more of the force and recruit more muscle on that side.
Unilateral work ensures that our non-dominant side is still receiving enough training stimulus to continue to get stronger and get it close to the dominant side’s output.
Most dumbbell and barbell Hypertrophy and Strength work is stationary and bilateral (standing in one place, both limbs moving simultaneously).
However, there is one more area of training that is of huge benefit for Hypertrophy and Strength, and that is:
Loaded Movement/Locomotion: moving from A to B with weight.
Farmers walks, suitcase walks, front rack carries, bear hug carries, overhead carries, sled pushes, drags. These are trickier to pull off in a commercial gym, but I’ll give the simplest examples:
Walk: Pick up the weights, walk across a space with good clearance. I like 50 feet, and increasing weights. Simplest are the Farmer’s Carry, a weight in each hand, held against the body, or a Suitcase Carry, which is just one weight in one hand (assymetrical loading, which challenges your trunk/abdominal muscles).
March: Pick up the weights, march in place. Good for when you don’t have room or clearance (busy gyms).
Weighted carries/locomotion increases the strength of smaller muscles in our trunk, hips, and legs that stabilize the body. The word “functional” is thrown around so much in fitness that it’s basically lost meaning, but carrying stuff is the most functional human skill there is. Carry your kid, carry your pet, carry your groceries, carry a grown ass adult in an emergency.
Carry heavy, get very strong.
Warming Up and Rests
Warm Ups:
To warm up, use “ramp up” sets. This means using decreasing reps, increasing weight to prime your system for your work sets. Still rest about 45-90 seconds between ramp ups. For beginners, this won’t be very many sets, or it will be a lot of sets while you figure out what weight is actually challenging for you. You will figure it out!
The more ramp sets you use, the fewer reps they should have.
You won't need as many ramp ups for similar movements performed after each other, IE, overhead press after bench.
Rests:
When lifting heavy, consider resting a minimum of 2 minutes between work sets. Your body needs time in between heavy sets to replenish something called ATP, which is the energy resource for muscular contraction. It takes 3 minutes to restore properly after it's depleted. This article goes into the details. We can train under depletion (1 minute rest high volume sets can be great, but I would save those for more advanced intermediate lifters), but while we’re learning, it’s generally better to rest enough that you can really nail the specifics of your movement every time. Lifting is a motor skill, and it benefits us to practice doing that skill as well as we can, most of the time, that way our technique doesn’t break down when the weights get heavy.
What do you do while resting? Breathe. Walk around. Listen to music. Get into the practice of centering and conserving yourself during your rest, then going absolutely ferociously intense on your movement in focus, attention, and output.
Super-sets:
People love super-sets (two different exercises back to back). Honestly, so do I. They can save a little time, and deliver the puuump. What’s not to like?
For time efficiency, consider biasing different body part super-sets, for example, deadlifts and push ups, or squats and rows (upper and lower). A single joint arm movement plus an abdominal focused movement is another classic combo (biceps curls and weighted sit ups or planks).
Experiment.
SAMPLE STRENGTH & HYPERTROPHY PROGRAMS
Let’s go!
We keep in mind that many of our muscle groups, given their large size and how they intersect around the body, play complementary roles in a given movement.
For example: A squat primarily works the quads, glutes, trunk, and calves, but still uses the back, lower back, and hamstrings. The latter muscles are contributing, they are just not doing the bulk of the work. So to train legs twice a week, you can do squats, split squats and leg-press on one day, and deadlifts, reverse lunges and hamstring curls on another. Different movement (loading) patterns, different degrees of the same or close proximity muscles engaged.
The below are samples I encourage you to use at your discretion (this is not a prescriptive, this is not a custom program, and I am not responsible for anything that happens to you in your exploration of its principles); they are meant to be very basic templates. The prescribed rep ranges and intensity levels could definitely change based on your current ability, outside activities, injury history, and many other factors.
There are many ways to program, and if you try this for 8-12 weeks and like your progress, you can continue to use it, but try changing up a few of the exercises, or add in a lot of tempo (Slowed down) reps.
These programs was written as minimum effective dose, meaning you could easily add more sets for higher/faster return if you have the time.
There are lots of ways to increase intensity without necessarily changing the movements. It is good to periodically cycle movements out, for example, switching from single arm dumbbell row to seated cable row. Same angle, same muscles, slightly different stimulus. A new stimulus will help adaptation continue to occur.
That said, I kept them as simple as possible so they should be accessible to most people with full use of all of their appendages.
For the Carries, substitute Marches in place when your environment precludes safe carries.
Go Forth and Hoist!
There you have it. I tried to include as many relevant topics as possible to help you create a thorough understanding of the principles of strength training, so you can begin to experiment on your own, regardless of what program or system you use.
But don’t take my word for it, this is a tiny sliver of what is possible; I simply kept it to the classic, and tested foundations that I am utterly confident in, and I hope, gave you some understanding of why and how these principles work.
Don’t hesitate to reach out to me if you have questions that aren’t answered here, or if you’re interested in doing a fitness program consult or a Tarot session to assess your physical and life queries. I love helping people get stronger, and I am with you on the path.
May the gods bless you with stamina, inspiration, and vitality on your quest to call forth your power.
Thanks for being here!
Cara
ᛞ
This is such a good article! Kick-ass info all around.