New Here? Start With This.

Welcome aboard.

RussHowePTI.com is a pretty big website.

I started building it in 2011, so there are years of workout programmes, nutrition plans, exercise demonstrations, articles, and various other bits of fitness nerdery hiding inside.

You do not need to use all of it.

In fact, if you’ve just joined, I’d rather you ignore about 90% of it for now.

One of the easiest mistakes to make with a large fitness website is spending so much time looking through everything that you never actually start anything.

So this guide has one job:

Get you up and running as quickly as possible.

Give me five minutes and I’ll show you where everything important lives, what you should use first, and what you can safely forget about until you need it.

Your first five minutes

Let’s make this ridiculously simple.

There are three main things you need to think about right now:

What are you going to do in the gym?
How are you going to approach your nutrition?
Where do you find everything again tomorrow?

The site gives you a few different ways to answer those questions.

If you just want me to tell you what to do in the gym today:

Go to Daily Trainer.

If you’d rather follow a complete training plan:

Go to Workout Programs.

If you want help organising your diet:

Go to Nutrition Plans.

And whenever you find something you know you’ll want again, save it to Favourites.

That’s the members area in a nutshell — everything else is there when you need it.

The members area: your home base

Think of the members area as the front desk of the website.

You can jump from there into all of the main content, without needing to remember where anything lives.

You’ll also see important updates whenever I’ve added something new or made changes to the site itself.

My advice is to bookmark your members area page.

Not because you need to visit every section each time you log in, but because if you ever find yourself thinking:

“Where the fuck was that again?”

This is where you come back to.

Daily Trainer: “Just tell me what to do”

If choosing a programme sounds like more thinking than you currently have the patience for, start here instead.

Daily Trainer is the simplest way to use RussHowePTI.com.

Open it.

See what today’s workout is.

Do it.

Come back for the next one.

That’s basically the system.

You don’t need to design your own training split, worry about which muscles you’ve trained recently or spend twenty minutes wandering around the gym trying to decide what exercise comes next.

I’ve already done that bit for you.

Inside each workout you’ll see the exercises, sets, reps, and rest periods I want you to use. Tap an exercise and you’ll also be able to open the demonstration so you can see how it’s performed.

If you’re relatively new to structured training — or simply enjoy having somebody else make the decisions — this is probably the easiest place to begin.

Workout Programs: “Follow a structured plan”

Perhaps you’d rather know what you’ll be doing for the next several weeks.

That’s what Workout Programs are for.

Instead of giving you one workout at a time, these are complete structured programmes built around a particular goal or style of training.

You’ll find programmes aimed at things like building muscle, losing fat, improving strength, and generally making yourself considerably more difficult to kill.

Some are straightforward.

Some are deliberately horrible.

I’m looking at you, Up The Mountain.

The important thing is that you only need one.

Don’t fall into the trap of finding six programmes you like and trying to combine all of them into some horrifying 14-day training split.

Choose the one which best fits your current goal, schedule and experience.

Then follow it.

There’s plenty of time to try the others later.

Nutrition Plans: “Okay, what am I eating?”

Training is only half of the equation.

If your goal involves losing fat, building muscle or improving your body composition, your nutrition needs to support what you’re doing in the gym.

That’s where Nutrition Plans comes in.

I’ve never been interested in forcing everybody onto the same miserable diet of chicken, rice and regret.

Different people prefer eating in different ways, so you’ll find several approaches inside the site.

The important thing is that your training programme and nutrition plan don’t need to be a matched set.

You might love one particular Workout Program and prefer the structure of a completely different Nutrition Plan.

That’s fine.

Choose the combination which suits you and, most importantly, which you can actually stick to.

And don’t make nutrition more complicated than it needs to be.

Calories matter.

Protein matters.

Food quality matters.

Consistency matters.

Whether you ate your carbohydrates at 6:03pm or 6:47pm probably doesn’t.

What if I don’t know an exercise?

Don’t guess.

I’ve spent years building exercise demonstrations into the site for exactly this reason.

Where an exercise requires explanation, you’ll be able to see how it’s performed rather than trying to reverse-engineer it from the name and hoping you’ve invented the correct movement.

The demonstrations use real training footage rather than perfectly lit fitness-model nonsense where somebody performs three immaculate repetitions with a weight their grandmother could lift.

Underneath the video you’ll also find coaching information and alternatives, which can be useful if:

your gym doesn’t have the required equipment;
a particular movement doesn’t suit you;
or you simply want another exercise which trains the same area.

So if you come across something unfamiliar:

Check the demonstration first.

Much better than performing three questionable sets and discovering afterwards that you’ve accidentally trained an entirely different body part.

Favourites: Build your own shortcut menu

As you use the site, you’re going to find things you keep returning to.

A programme you want to run next.

A workout you particularly enjoyed.

An article which answered something you’d been struggling with.

Save them to Favourites.

Think of this as your own little personalised corner of RussHowePTI.com.

The whole membership might be huge.

Your version of it doesn’t need to be.

Over time, Favourites lets you build a shortlist of the things which are most useful to you instead of repeatedly searching through the entire site.

And then there’s the blog…

There are a lot of articles on this website.

Please don’t decide you need to read all of them before you’re sufficiently educated to perform your first workout.

You’ll be here until 2034.

The blog exists for when you want to understand something in more detail.

Why does a particular training method work for you?

How much protein do you actually need?

Should you squat on a BOSU ball?

Why does Jason Statham appear completely unwilling to age like a normal human being?

That’s what the articles are for.

Use them when you have a question, want to learn something, or fancy disappearing down a fitness-science rabbit hole with me.

But they are supporting material.

You don’t need to earn a degree in RussHowePTI.com before you’re allowed to pick up a dumbbell.

So… where should you start?

If you’ve reached this point and you’re still staring at the website wondering what to click, use this:

Want me to choose today’s workout?
→ Daily Trainer

Want a complete training plan?
→ Workout Programs

Need to sort out your diet?
→ Nutrition Plans

Found something you’ll want again?
→ Favourites

That’s it.

Seriously.

Don’t spend your first week exploring every corner of the website.

Pick something and start.

The rest of the site isn’t going anywhere.

You’re good to go

When I started RussHowePTI.com back in 2011, the goal was pretty simple.

I wanted to take everything I’d learned from coaching people in the gym and turn it into something anybody could follow.

The site has become considerably bigger since then, but the basic idea hasn’t changed.

You don’t need to know everything about training.

You don’t need a perfect diet.

And you certainly don’t need to use every programme I’ve ever written.

You just need a sensible plan and enough consistency to give it a chance to work.

So choose where you’re starting.

Get your first workout done.

And whenever you need the next thing, it’ll be here waiting for you.

Welcome to RussHowePTI.com.

Now go train.