Progressive overload
Gradually increasing the demands on your muscles over time — more weight, reps or sets — so they keep adapting. It is the single most important driver of strength and muscle gains.
TDEE (Total Daily Energy Expenditure)
The total number of calories you burn in a day, including exercise, digestion and everyday movement. It's the number you eat around to gain, lose or maintain weight.
BMR (Basal Metabolic Rate)
The calories your body burns at complete rest just to keep you alive — heartbeat, breathing, organ function. It's the biggest single component of your daily calorie burn.
One-rep max (1RM)
The heaviest weight you can lift for a single clean repetition of an exercise. It's used to set training loads (e.g. working at 75% of your 1RM) and to measure strength progress.
Hypertrophy
The growth of muscle size. It's typically trained with moderate loads for about 6-15 reps per set, taking most sets close to failure, with enough total volume across the week.
Hip hinge
A movement pattern that bends primarily at the hips while keeping the spine neutral (not rounding the lower back). It's the foundation of deadlifts, Romanian deadlifts and kettlebell swings.
Compound exercise
An exercise that works multiple muscle groups across multiple joints at once — squats, bench press, deadlifts, rows, pull-ups. Compounds give the most training return for your time.
Isolation exercise
An exercise that targets a single muscle across one joint — biceps curls, leg extensions, lateral raises. Used to bring up specific muscles after the big compounds.
RPE (Rate of Perceived Exertion)
A 1-10 scale of how hard a set felt. RPE 10 is all-out failure; RPE 8 means you stopped with about two good reps left in the tank. It's a simple way to auto-regulate intensity.
RIR (Reps in Reserve)
How many more reps you could have completed before hitting failure. Training with 1-3 RIR on most sets balances effective stimulus with recovery.
Deload
A planned lighter week — reduced weight, volume or both — that lets accumulated fatigue clear so you come back stronger. Commonly run every 4-8 weeks of hard training.
Macros (macronutrients)
Protein, carbohydrates and fat — the three nutrients that provide calories. Protein has 4 calories per gram, carbs 4, and fat 9. Tracking macros gives you more control than calories alone.
Protein
The macronutrient that repairs and builds muscle. Most people training for muscle aim for roughly 0.7-1 gram of protein per pound of bodyweight per day, spread across meals.
Caloric surplus
Eating more calories than you burn. A modest surplus is required to build muscle and gain weight, and it drives a slow, steady increase on the scale over weeks.
Caloric deficit
Eating fewer calories than you burn. A deficit is required to lose fat; a moderate one (paired with protein and training) preserves muscle while you lean out.
Bulking
A phase of eating in a calorie surplus, paired with progressive resistance training, to prioritize building muscle. Best kept a modest surplus to limit fat gain.
Cutting
A phase of eating in a calorie deficit while training and keeping protein high, to lose fat while holding onto as much muscle as possible.
Training volume
The total amount of work you do — usually counted as hard sets per muscle per week, or sets x reps x load. Within reason, more volume drives more muscle growth, up to your recovery limit.
Rep (repetition)
One complete movement of an exercise from start to finish — for example, lowering into a squat and standing back up is one rep.
Set
A group of consecutive reps performed without resting. You then rest and repeat for the prescribed number of sets.
Training to failure
Performing a set until you physically cannot complete another rep with good form. Effective in small doses but very fatiguing, so most sets are best stopped a rep or two short.
Push / Pull / Legs (PPL)
A popular training split that groups exercises by movement: a push day (chest, shoulders, triceps), a pull day (back, biceps) and a leg day. Scales well from 3 to 6 days a week.
Upper / Lower split
A routine that alternates upper-body days and lower-body days, usually 4 days a week. A simple, effective structure for intermediates.
Full-body workout
A session that trains the whole body in one workout. Ideal for beginners and for 3-day-a-week routines because each muscle gets trained frequently.
DOMS (Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness)
The muscle soreness that peaks 24-72 hours after a new or especially hard workout. It signals novelty, not progress — you can grow with little soreness, and being sore isn't required.
Mind-muscle connection
Consciously focusing on contracting the target muscle during a lift. It can improve how well that muscle is worked, especially on isolation exercises.
Range of motion
How far a joint travels during an exercise. Training through a full, controlled range of motion generally builds more muscle and mobility than cutting reps short.
Body fat percentage
The share of your total body weight that is fat. It's a better measure of body composition than weight alone, and every method (calipers, scales, formulas) is an estimate.
Lean body mass
Your total weight minus fat mass — muscle, bone, organs and water. Preserving lean mass is the goal of a good fat-loss phase.
Life-Load
FORMA's adaptive workout-readiness score. It turns your sleep, stress and daily schedule into a 0-100 readiness number and reshapes today's workout — a full session, a lightened one, or active recovery — reshuffling the training week so no work is lost.