The honest answer is less than you would like, more often than you would think, and for far longer than feels dramatic. That is the whole method. Everything below is detail.
The short version
- Lower body lifts such as squats and deadlifts: 2.5kg a week while it is still going up easily.
- Upper body lifts such as presses and rows: 1.25kg a week, using the small plates.
- When it stops going up weekly: the same increments, every two or three weeks instead.
That is it. If you can hold that for a year without missing much, you will be a genuinely strong person by the end of it, and the arithmetic makes the point better than any argument. Two and a half kilos a week on a squat is a hundred and thirty kilos a year. Nobody adds a hundred and thirty kilos to their squat in a year, which tells you something important: the plan will break before the year is out, and the skill is in how you handle the breaking.
Why small jumps beat big ones
A big jump feels like progress and behaves like a gamble. Your technique has to absorb the change all at once, your joints get the whole increase in one session, and if the lift fails you have no information about where the edge actually was.
Small jumps keep every repetition looking like the last one. That matters most on the lifts you learned recently, where the movement is still settling. It is the same argument made in learning to squat: the pattern you practise under load is the one you keep.
Why upper body moves slower
Because the muscles doing the work are smaller, so the same 2.5kg is a much larger percentage of the lift. Ten kilos added to a forty kilo press is a twenty five percent increase. Ten kilos added to a hundred kilo squat is ten percent. Same plate, very different demand.
This is why we keep a set of 0.5kg and 1.25kg plates on the rack, and why they are the most useful plates in the building. Members who discover them tend to keep progressing for months after members who only use the big ones have stalled.
When to stop adding
Stop adding weight when any of these happens:
- The last repetition of your last set looks noticeably worse than the first.
- You miss a repetition you should have made, twice in a fortnight, on the same lift.
- You start dreading a particular lift on the way to the gym.
The third one is not soft, it is data. Dread almost always turns up a week or two before a stall shows in the numbers.
The week you miss a rep
Nothing has gone wrong. Missing is information, and the sensible response is boring: repeat the same weight next session. Most of the time you make it, and you carry on.
Miss the same weight three sessions in a row and it is time to back off. Take ten percent off, build back up over three or four weeks in your usual increments, and you will usually go straight past where you stuck. This is not a setback and it is not starting again. It is how every long training career is actually shaped, in small waves rather than one line.
Deloads, without the drama
Roughly every eight to twelve weeks, take a week where everything is about twenty percent lighter and finishes easily. You will feel like you are wasting a week. You are not. People who take these on purpose spend far fewer weeks taking them by force, usually with an injury attached.
If you have been sleeping badly, a lighter week is often the entire fix. Sleep and recovery covers why that is, and it is worth reading before you conclude your programme is wrong.
A worked example
Say you squat 60kg for three sets of five today, and it is comfortable.
- Weeks one to six: add 2.5kg a week. You are at 75kg and it is getting honest.
- Weeks seven to twelve: add 2.5kg every other week. You are at 82.5kg.
- Week thirteen: everything twenty percent lighter, all easy.
- Weeks fourteen to twenty four: 2.5kg every two or three weeks, with one missed session repeated. You finish around 95kg.
That is thirty five kilos in six months from a starting point most beginners pass in their first eight weeks, and it is a realistic year rather than an advertised one. If it looks slow on paper, remember that you are describing a person who can now squat their bodyweight for repetitions and could not six months ago.
The part nobody wants to hear
Progress does not stop, but it does change shape. In year one it is weekly, in year two it is monthly, and after that it becomes a thing you notice looking back over a season rather than session to session. That is not a failure of the programme. It is what getting strong looks like once you are actually strong.
The people who last are the ones who stopped needing the number to move every week, and started enjoying the training itself. That usually happens somewhere in the second year, and it is worth waiting for.