5×5 strength program
Two workouts, alternated three days a week. Squat every session, add weight every session. The purest expression of linear progression ever written down.
The program
Alternate workouts A and B on three non-consecutive days: week one is A/B/A, week two is B/A/B. Same warm-up ramp every session, then five working sets of five at one weight (deadlift excepted — one heavy set of five).
Workout A
| Exercise | Sets × reps | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Back squat | 5 × 5 | +5 lb every session |
| Bench press | 5 × 5 | +5 lb every session |
| Barbell row | 5 × 5 | +5 lb every session |
Workout B
| Exercise | Sets × reps | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Back squat | 5 × 5 | +5 lb every session |
| Overhead press | 5 × 5 | +2.5–5 lb every session |
| Deadlift | 1 × 5 | +10 lb early, then +5 |
The rules
- Start light — empty bar is honorable — and let the additions do the work. The program's power is the compounding, not the starting weight.
- Rest 90 seconds between easy sets, 3–5 minutes once they're hard. Rushing rest is the most common self-inflicted stall.
- Miss reps at a weight twice in a row? Repeat it a third time. Miss again: deload that lift 10% and climb back. The rebuilt ascent passes your old wall almost every time.
- Warm-ups matter more as weights climb — use the warm-up calculator for the ramp and the plate calculator to load it without arithmetic.
- Curious what your 5×5 weights say about your max? A hard set of five converts cleanly in the 1RM calculator.
Frequently asked questions
Why five sets of five?
Five reps is heavy enough to drive strength and light enough to practice with quality, and five sets gives enough total volume to grow on. It's the intersection where a beginner can push weight aggressively without form collapsing — which is why some version of 5×5 has been the default strength prescription since the 1960s.
Squatting three times a week sounds like a lot. Is it?
For a beginner, no — it's the engine of the whole program. At this stage you recover between sessions, and the frequency is what makes the squat progress so fast: every session is both practice and stimulus. It stops being sustainable precisely when linear progression stops working, which is the program's natural end anyway.
Why only one set of five on deadlift?
Because heavy deadlifts are uniquely expensive to recover from, and the rest of the program — squats three times a week, rows — already trains the same musculature. One heavy, well-executed top set progresses the lift for months. More is possible; more is not needed.
When should I stop running 5×5?
When the deload-and-rebuild cycle stops producing new PRs — typically 3–6 months in, squat often somewhere between 1.25 and 1.5× bodyweight. That's not failure; linear progression simply has a natural end. From there, intermediate programming with weekly (rather than per-session) progression, or a split like PPL, is the next chapter.
More free programs
Beginner 3-day full body
Three full-body days built on the big five patterns — the simplest effective way to spend your first six months of lifting.
Push Pull Legs (PPL)
The six-day split that took over bodybuilding for a reason: every muscle twice a week, organized by movement, endlessly customizable.
A program is a plan. A coach is a feedback loop.
AirFit Coach builds a program like this one around your equipment and schedule, lets you log sets on iOS, Android or the web, and proposes the next progression each week — you approve it before anything changes. It will build the day around it too: a daily protocol for sleep, mornings and mobility. Want a person running it? Trainers on AirFit deliver the same thing with a human on the other end.
Coach reading this? Build programs like this in AirFit and deliver them to clients in AirFit on iOS, Android and the web.