Thirty years of swimming, walking or the bike, and your scan came back thinning anyway. 63% of competitive road cyclists have thinning bones. Only 19% of runners do.

Yes. I would rather have you than someone who has been lifting badly for ten years and has to be talked out of it first.

The first four weeks contain almost no weight. Eight sessions, four movements, and the loads are light enough that most women spend the first two or three sessions on an empty barbell or a pair of twenty pound dumbbells. That is not me being delicate with you. It is that the technique has to become automatic before the load gets interesting, and the only way technique becomes automatic is dull repetition. Phase 1 is repetitive on purpose. I say so inside the sessions too, because when people see the same four movements over and over they assume they bought a thin program.

What you actually learn in those four weeks is short to list. How to hinge at the hip without your back rounding. How to squat to the depth your hips have today instead of the one you had at thirty. How to press something overhead without your ribs flaring open. How to row.

Nobody is watching you, which is the good news and also the problem. So the last session of Phase 1 is a self check: you film your four movements for your own eyes, judge each one against a short checklist, and record your four answers in the app. The films stay on your phone and nobody else ever sees them. Phase 2 stays shut until all four answers are recorded. That gate is not a motivational trick. It is the substitute for a coach standing beside you.

The trial this program is built on recruited postmenopausal women who were not already lifting weights, and had them lifting heavy inside a couple of months (Watson, Weeks, Weis, Harding, Horan and Beck, 2018). Every one of them had a supervisor within arm's reach for every set. You have a phone and a checklist. That is why my ramp is slower than theirs was.

I have not found the ceiling yet. The women in the LIFTMOR trial averaged around sixty five years of age and still gained bone density in the lower back and at the top of the thigh bone over eight months (Watson et al., 2018).

If you are somewhere between fifty and seventy and you can get up off the floor without pushing on a chair, your age is not the limiting factor. Your loading history is. Those are two different problems and this program is aimed at the second one.

The floor question is question eight in the screening. It is not decoration. Answer it honestly and the program adjusts.

Sometimes yes and sometimes no, which is why there is a screening system rather than a guess made from a sales page.

Start with the evidence. The LIFTMOR trial did not only include women with osteopenia. It included women who already had osteoporosis, and they lifted at high intensity twice a week for eight months (Watson et al., 2018). A second look at that trial found the training broke no bones in the spine, and the forward curve of the upper back got better rather than worse. That is a genuinely surprising result and it is the reason this program exists at all.

Now the part the trial does not give me. Every one of those women was supervised, in a university setting, by people who had screened them first and who could stop a set mid rep. I am not in the room. So I have to do the screening in advance and be stricter than they were, because strictness is the only tool I have left.

This is the list that makes the answer no, and you meet it before you pay: it is the question above the card field on the checkout page.

• A T-score of -3.0 or below.
• A broken bone in your spine, ever, even if your T-score looks fine.
• Any fracture at all in the last two years.
• Spinal stenosis or spondylolisthesis.
• A T-score between -2.5 and -2.9 together with a curve in your spine, forwards or sideways.

Any of those and the checkout does not open. You get a page explaining why in plain language, the Doctor Briefing to take to a specialist, and a free guide to finding a physical therapist who works with bone, all of it free because nothing was charged. Your answers are saved with your order, so the app never asks them again. If an answer was wrong, or something changes, redo the screening inside the app: an answer on that list locks the training and the page tells you where to write. One line is enough, you never have to explain yourself, and a refund on that ground is not one anybody here argues with.

A T-score between -2.5 and -2.9 on its own does not lock you out. It puts you on the extended ramp, which turns Phase 1 into six weeks and twelve sessions instead of four and eight, and holds the impact work back until the second week of Phase 2.

One more thing that matters more than the T-score. The movements that break thin spines are bending forward and twisting with weight in your hands, not standing up with it. That is why loaded forward bending, loaded twisting and the standing toe touch are permanently banned here, why they exist in the app as records you can look at with the word never next to them, and why a link to that page sits at the bottom of every single session.

This is the question I care most about, so I am going to take longer over it than the others. Please read the whole thing.

Consider Olympic swimmers first. Female Olympic swimmers have been measured with bone density in their legs no better than women the same age who do no sport at all (Bellver et al.). One study put swimmers 9.8% lower in the bones of the legs than people who did no exercise, with the endurance specialists 14.8% lower. Twenty hours a week in the water. Some of the fittest women on the planet. Worse legs than a woman who sits at a desk.

The cyclists tell the same story and they tell it louder. Two thirds of one professional road cycling team had bone density well below the normal range (Medelli et al.). Ten of nineteen elite Norwegian endurance cyclists had low bone density, and one of them had frank osteoporosis (Andersen et al.). Road cyclists show osteopenia at around 63% against 19% in runners, and the usual explanation is that cyclists carry roughly half the loading history.

So why. Not fitness, clearly. Not effort, obviously not. Here is the reason.

Bone is rebuilt continuously in response to mechanical load, and it only adds material when the strain going through it crosses a threshold. Below that threshold it quietly sheds material it has no evidence it needs. Harold Frost described this in 1987 and it is still the model everyone works from. Your skeleton is not broken. It is thrifty. It will not pay to maintain structure that nothing is asking for.

Which means the last thirty years of your exercise, all of it, sent almost no signal. Walking is a load your skeleton has handled since you were one year old and it stopped being news a very long time ago. Yoga holds you slowly against your own body weight, which is the same weight you carry to the kitchen. Swimming takes gravity away on purpose. Cycling is seated, smooth, and your feet never strike anything. Four disciplined activities. Four near zero osteogenic signals.

And then menopause arrived and the number on your scan was bad, and you concluded that menopause did it. It did not. Menopause removed the buffer that had been hiding thirty years of it.

So the answer is not more exercise. It is a different signal.

Read that line again, because it is the whole product. More walking will not fix this. Longer swims will not fix this. Adding a fourth yoga class will not fix this. The thing that is missing is not volume, it is intensity of load, and no amount of the first substitutes for the second.

Australian researchers tested precisely this on women who already had bone loss. The LIFTMOR trial had postmenopausal women with osteopenia and osteoporosis lift heavy and do some jumping work, five sets of five reps at more than 85% of the heaviest they could lift once, twice a week, thirty minutes a session, supervised, for eight months. It measured real gains in bone density in the lower back and at the top of the thigh bone, where it goes into the hip (Watson, Weeks, Weis, Harding, Horan and Beck; Journal of Bone and Mineral Research, 2018).

What you are buying is that protocol, rebuilt to run without a supervisor standing next to you. That rebuild is not cosmetic. It is a four week technique ramp before any real load, effort based targets instead of percentages of a maximum you have never tested, form gates that hold the next phase shut, and a screening system that will refuse to sell some women this program. The trial was supervised. We are not. Everything unusual about how this program is shaped comes out of that one sentence.

Where I will hedge, since I would rather you hear it from me. I do not know how much of the swimmer and cyclist finding is the missing load and how much is low body weight and poor energy availability in elite sport. My honest read is that it is both, with load doing most of the work. The threshold logic holds either way, and it holds for you regardless, because you are not an elite athlete and you are not underfed. You are a woman who was told to do cardio and be careful with her back, and who did exactly that.

Keep the walking. Keep the yoga. I am not asking you to give up one thing you enjoy. Walking is good for your heart, your head, your sleep and your hips staying mobile. It is simply not good for your bone density, and it never was, and nobody told you.

You did not fail at this. You were given the wrong instructions and you followed them faithfully, which is somehow worse, because the discipline was real the whole time.

The drug and the load are doing two different jobs, and only one of them is being done right now.

Bisphosphonates such as alendronate work mainly by slowing down the cells that remove bone, so what you have is held on to for longer. That is a real and useful thing. It is also a defensive thing. Mechanical load is the signal that tells the body to add material in the first place, and nothing in a tablet supplies that signal (Frost, 1987). Slowing the loss and prompting the gain are not the same job, and one does not stand in for the other.

Your medication status does not change anything about your program. In the screening there is a question about it, and the answer never affects your tier. It is captured so the app can talk to you correctly in a few places, and for nothing else. A woman on alendronate with a T-score of -2.0 and a woman on nothing with a T-score of -2.0 get the identical twelve weeks.

Two things I will not pretend to know. I have never seen a trial that took women already on a bisphosphonate, randomised half of them into a LIFTMOR style program, and measured what the combination does over a year. Somebody should run it. And I cannot tell you the effects simply add up, because that is not how biology usually behaves.

My read is that the drug protects the floor and the load raises the ceiling, and that you want both. That is a judgement, not a finding.

Tell your prescriber you are starting to lift weights, getting heavier over time. Take the Doctor Briefing with you. If they restrict your loading, that is on the question above the card field on the checkout page, and answering it honestly closes the checkout before you have paid anything. There is no refund to ask for, because there is no charge.

You are standing at the point in this whole story that bothers me most, so I will be direct.

Bisphosphonates are commonly stopped after about five years, because the added benefit flattens out while the rare side effects keep accumulating. That decision is usually correct. What nobody hands you along with it is the second half of the plan, because for most women there is no second half. The medication held a line for five years, the medication is withdrawn, and the thing that put you in the clinic in the first place has not been addressed at all.

How quickly bone turnover picks back up after stopping varies a great deal from woman to woman, and I cannot predict yours. Nobody can from where I am sitting. What I can tell you is what does not change: load is still the only input that asks bone to add material, and load has no five year limit and no holiday.

So the five year mark is either the moment your care stops, or the moment it changes shape. That is genuinely up to you now, and it is a bit unfair that it is.

There is a question in the screening about medication status with an option for having finished a course. Tick it. The app will speak to you slightly differently in a few places because of it, and the Rescan Primer will frame your next scan differently too. It changes nothing about your training. It changes what I say to you.

One caution. Coming off a drug is not a reason to train harder or faster than the plan says. If anything it is a reason to be rigid about the ramp, because the four weeks of Phase 1 cost you almost nothing and buy you a spine that knows what it is doing before the weight gets real.

Yes, and owning nothing is the most common starting point rather than the awkward one.

Start with what is in the house. The first four weeks are eight sessions of learning four shapes at a weight you could carry up a flight of stairs, and a rucksack loaded with books or bottled water does that job honestly. Weigh it on your bathroom scale, put the number in the app, and the progression works exactly as it does for everyone else.

Order one pair of adjustable dumbbells while you do that. Roughly a hundred and fifty to three hundred dollars for the pair, they fit under a bed, and they are the whole shopping list. Secondhand is completely fine. Cast iron does not wear out.

What I will not tell you is that you can do this forever with nothing. Your own body weight is the load your skeleton adapted to decades ago, which is the entire argument this program is built on. Anybody selling you a bodyweight routine for your bones is selling you the problem. The rucksack gets you started, not finished.

Once you have the weights: the dumbbell path is written out in full, all twenty four sessions, all nine movements, with its own starting loads and its own increments. It is not a stripped down version of the barbell program with a note apologising for itself. You pick your path at signup and you can switch later without losing your history.

Some of it is genuinely better with dumbbells. The overhead press lets each shoulder find its own groove instead of being locked to a bar. The row is easier to keep square. The split squat and the suitcase carry are dumbbell movements anyway, on every path.

Now the honest bit, because this is where most programs go quiet.

Around week eight, on the hinge, your hips are going to out-pull your grip. Two heavy dumbbells become a hand problem long before they become a hip problem, and when that happens your bone stops getting the signal that your legs are perfectly capable of delivering. It is the single real limitation of the path and it arrives on a fairly predictable schedule.

When you hit it, you have options in roughly this order of cost:

• Lifting straps. About fifteen dollars. Fixes the grip issue on the hinge immediately and buys you months.
• Move the hinge to one dumbbell held vertically between your legs, so all the load sits in two hands on one handle rather than split across two.
• Adjustable dumbbells that go to fifty or sixty pounds per hand.
• A barbell and a few plates, which is the honest end point if you intend to keep training past this year.

I do not sell any of that. There is no affiliate link anywhere on this site and there never will be. Which is precisely why you can believe me when I say the dumbbells are genuinely enough for the first block and genuinely limiting by the second.

Do not wait until you have the perfect setup. Start with what is in the house.

Two sessions a week, around thirty five to forty minutes each. The shortest in Phase 1 is under thirty and the longest in Phase 2 runs closer to fifty, and most of the difference is you standing still between heavy sets. That rest is not padding and I will not let you shorten it.

Somebody told you that bending over is how you hurt your back. Bending over with a rounded spine under load is how you hurt your back. Those are two different sentences and the difference is the entire hinge chapter.

The movements that damage a fragile spine are bending forward and twisting with weight in your hands. So three things are banned here permanently, on every path, for every member, at every tier: loaded forward bending, loaded twisting and the standing toe touch. They live in the app as their own records so you can look at each one and read why. A link to that page sits in the footer of every session you will ever open.

The one rule I will not bend on:

• If something goes sharp, you put the weight down mid set. Not at the end of the set. Mid set. There is not a single rep in these twelve weeks worth finishing.

There is also a stop conditions banner at the top of every session page. It collapses after you have acknowledged it once, because I trust you to have read it, but it never goes away entirely.

On the evidence. The companion analysis of LIFTMOR found that the heavy training broke no bones in the spine, and that the forward curve of the upper back got better over the eight months (Watson et al., 2018). That result is most of why this program exists. Those women were supervised and you will not be, which is why your first four weeks go almost entirely on making sure your back does not round rather than on making anything heavy.

Some of you should not start at all, and you find that out before you pay. A broken bone in your spine at any point in your life, spinal stenosis, spondylolisthesis, or any break in the last two years, and the checkout closes rather than opens.

What your back will actually feel like. Everybody who trains gets sore. Sore across both hamstrings and your backside two days after a hinge session is ordinary and it mostly stops happening by week three. A dull ache low down that is gone by the next morning is fine. A sharp line in one spot, a pinch, a sting, or anything electrical running down one leg is not soreness. That is a stop, and then a message to a physio, not a message to me.

No, and you will notice arthritis is not one of the eight screening questions. That is deliberate. It is too common and too variable to route on. If a doctor has restricted your loading because of it, that is question seven and it is handled there.

Knees first. You set the depth, not me. Nowhere in this program does it say how far down you have to go, and there is no depth standard to fail. Squat to a box or a chair set at a height your knees are content with, and let that height come down over the weeks if it wants to. It usually does. If the split squat is the movement that hurts, swap it for the hip thrust, which loads the same hip and asks nothing of the knee joint.

Loading an arthritic joint through a range it tolerates is generally well handled and often reduces pain over a matter of weeks, whereas avoiding load tends to make the joint worse over time. My working rule is simple. Pain above about three out of ten during a set means stop the set. Joint pain that is still worse twenty four hours later means the last session was too much and you go back a step.

Hands are the more common limiter, honestly. Grip fails before hips do for most women over sixty, and arthritic hands fail sooner. Straps solve it for about fifteen dollars and I would rather you use them from week one than lose the hinge entirely. The suitcase carry is the one place I do not want you to strap up, because grip is the point of that movement, so shorten the carry instead and keep the load in your fingers.

If your hands are bad on a given day, train the day anyway and drop the hinge load by ten percent. A lighter session logged beats a perfect session skipped, and the app will not scold you for the number.

Then you do not do it, and I refund you.

That is the question above the card field on the checkout page. Answer it yes and the checkout closes before you have paid anything. You get a page that explains the position respectfully, the Doctor Briefing to take back with you, and help finding a physio who actually specialises in bone. All of it free, because you were never charged. If your doctor clears you later, everything is still here at the same price. I am one step removed from you and your doctor is not.

Before you ask them, though, take the Doctor Briefing with you. It is two printable pages, it is free and public on this site, and you do not need to buy anything to read it.

Here is why that matters. Most of the no answers I hear about are answers to a question that sounded like "should I lift weights with osteoporosis," which lands in a busy ten minute appointment as a question about maximum deadlifts in a commercial gym. The briefing states what the protocol actually is, which trial it comes from, what the loads and rep ranges are, and which conditions rule a woman out. Given that, some answers change.

Some do not. Sometimes the no is a real no, based on something in your file that I cannot see from here. I am not going to teach you how to argue with your doctor and I would think less of a program that did.

Strength moves in weeks. Bone moves in scans. Those two sentences are the honest summary of the whole timeline and I would rather lead with them than with a promise.

The strength part is quick and it is measurable. Most women add about ten pounds to the hinge across the first block, then move faster than that in Phase 2 once the technique stops costing them attention. The app shows you the total weight you moved today against your first session of the same type, in pounds, on the screen at the end. Seeing 2,340 next to 1,150 does something that a paragraph of encouragement cannot.

The moment women actually write to me about tends to land somewhere between session six and session nine, and it is almost never the number on the bar. It is carrying the shopping in one trip. Getting off the floor without planning the route first. Standing up from a low sofa without the arm.

Bone is slower and there is no dashboard for it. Nothing you feel in week five is bone. That is what the next question is about, and I would read it before you buy rather than after.

I do not know, and anybody who tells you they do is selling you something worse than this.

What I can give you is a realistic frame. The Rescan Primer that comes with the program does exactly that.

Twelve weeks will not show up on a scan. Do not book one for week thirteen. You will pay a hundred and fifty to three hundred dollars to be told nothing, and then you will conclude the training failed when what actually happened is that you measured too early. LIFTMOR ran for eight months before it measured change, and even that is a short study by bone standards (Watson et al., 2018).

Then there is the machine itself. A DEXA scanner is not exact, and in the lower back a change smaller than about three percent often cannot be told apart from the machine's own wobble. Use the same clinic and the same machine as last time if you possibly can. A different machine can hand you a different number for a spine that did not change at all.

And the result that most women do not count and should. Untreated bone loss after menopause typically runs somewhere around one to two percent a year. A number that is flat across two years is not nothing happening. It is several percent that did not leave.

What I cannot promise you is your particular scan. The trial reported group averages, and inside any group average there are individuals who did much better and individuals who did nothing at all. I have no way to tell you in advance which one you will be, and the honest version of this product says that out loud on the sales page rather than in a footnote afterwards.

There is a page in the app about what to do if the number does not move. It was written before you bought, not after you were disappointed. The app also asks for your rescan date and starts a specific eight week preparation sequence sixty days before it, because turning up to that appointment having trained for a year and having no idea what to ask for is a waste of the year.

No, and the program is deliberately shaped so that you never do. Nothing in the twelve weeks puts a loaded bar over your throat or behind your neck. The press goes overhead from the front where you can step out from under it, the hinge you simply set back down, and if you are squatting in a rack you set the safety pins at the bottom of your depth so the worst possible outcome is that you sit down and the bar lands on steel.

A partner does help with turning up on a wet Tuesday. That is adherence, not safety, and they are different problems.

For technique, your phone beats a partner anyway. A partner watches once from a bad angle and says it looked fine. The video does not.

No and no. No monthly charge, no auto renewal, nothing to swallow, and no equipment I earn a cent on. Every purchase here is one payment for something you keep.

sixteen dollars and ninety-nine cents, once, for the following.

• Twenty four sessions across twelve weeks, written out one at a time. Two a week. Not a template you fill in yourself.
• All three equipment paths written in full: gym barbell, home barbell, and dumbbell only. You pick one at signup and you can change it later.
• The screening, the safety routing and the phase gates, which are the parts that took the longest to build and which nobody puts on a sales page.
• The app. Every set gets a suggested weight and a plain sentence explaining why it picked that number. Logging a set is one tap if the prefill is right. Strength charts per movement on the home screen. A twenty four cell grid that fills in as you go, with no confetti and no badges on it.
• The Doctor Briefing, two printable pages with the citations on them, written to be handed across a desk rather than read by you.
• Never Do These, which is the three banned movements and why.
• The Rescan Primer and Reading Your Own Progress, which between them are the two documents that stop you misreading your own results in either direction.

At checkout there is one unchecked box for the Form Vault at fourteen dollars and forty-nine cents. That is a deeper reference card for each of the nine movements: setup, the cues in order, three common faults each with a correct and incorrect picture, a self filming protocol telling you exactly where to put the phone for each lift, and a troubleshooting index that goes from what you feel to what is probably causing it. It is genuinely optional. The form guidance you need to train safely is already in the program.

For scale. One session with a physio who knows bone runs a hundred and fifty to two hundred and fifty dollars, and you would need a dozen of them to cover this ground. The scan that gave you the bad news in the first place cost you somewhere between a hundred and fifty and three hundred.

Do Phase 1. Eight sessions over four weeks. If you don't feel measurably stronger at the end of it, tell me and I'll refund every cent, and you keep everything including the Form Vault.

I tied it to finishing Phase 1 on purpose. A thirty day no questions refund rewards the woman who buys, does nothing, and asks for her money back on day twenty nine. That woman is not the problem, she is just the outcome of a badly built promise. Eight sessions is four weeks of your life and it is the smallest amount of work that makes the question answerable.

If the screening put you on the extended ramp, your Phase 1 is twelve sessions over six weeks, and the same promise covers it with the same generosity.

If the screening routes you to red, I am not selling you a barbell, and it happens before your card is touched. The questions are on the checkout page above the card field, so a woman it refuses is refused while her money is still hers. If it was your spine, you are pointed at The Upright Protocol, which is written for exactly those answers. If it closed training altogether, there is nothing here you can safely do, and you were never charged for finding that out.

Some women bought before those questions moved to the checkout, and were closed inside their accounts instead. Nothing about their promise has changed. The Upright Protocol goes on the account at no charge, the two cost the same, and if you would rather have the money it comes back in full. I will ask one thing, what went wrong, in case it is something I can fix, and your answer never changes the money. I would rather refuse a sale than take money from a woman who should be seeing a specialist.

What this is not is a thirty day trial. If you get part way in and something is genuinely in the way, tell me what it is. Half the time it is a swap or a weight, and I would rather fix that than take your money for nothing. If I cannot fix it, the money comes back. If you simply have not started, the promise above is the one I am making, and it is waiting for you at session eight.

Session twenty four is an assessment. You record your numbers on the hinge, the squat, the press and the row, and those become the baseline everything afterwards is compared against. That session exists whether you ever buy another thing from me or not.

Then you have three real options and I will describe all of them fairly.

Repeat the twelve weeks with your new starting loads. It costs nothing, the sessions stay in your account with no expiry, and it works, because adding weight over time works whether or not the sessions are new. It is the least interesting option and it is not the wrong one.

Or take The Next 12 Weeks at seventeen dollars. That is block two, weeks thirteen to twenty four, the load block, in the same app with the same rules. It comes with Rescan Ready, the Deload Doctrine, and a quarterly self assessment that compares your four benchmarks against your own history rather than against a table of other women.

Or take The Full Year, which is offered once on the page right after you buy, and later inside the app at the difference. It is weeks thirteen to fifty two.

Read that offer carefully, because it is buying ahead of writing and it says so on its face. Weeks thirteen to twenty four are in the app today. Weeks twenty five to fifty two are not written yet. They arrive one block at a time, ahead of you, as you reach them, against a date I work to. If I am late you get the difference back without asking, and you keep everything that has landed.

If buying ahead of writing is not for you, take The Next 12 Weeks or repeat what you have. Both are real answers and neither costs you anything you have already paid for.

Now the part that matters more than any of that. Bone responds to loading over months and years rather than weeks, and even the LIFTMOR trial ran for eight months before it measured anything (Watson et al., 2018). Twelve weeks makes you strong enough and skilled enough to train properly. It is the ramp, not the destination, and that is worth knowing while you are deciding rather than in March.

Whatever you choose, keep loading something. That is the only instruction that never changes.

There is nothing to download, and that trips people up, so here it is plainly. Your programme is a website. It lives at latticehealth.online/app and it opens in the browser you already use, on any phone or computer.

To get back in, go to that address and put in the email you bought with. A sign-in link comes to your inbox. No password, ever.

To make it feel like an app, you can add it to your home screen. The steps are on your Account page, under "Getting back in quickly". On an iPhone it starts with the share button, the square with an arrow coming out of the top, at the bottom of the screen. After that it opens with one tap like everything else on your phone.

If the sign-in email does not arrive in a few minutes, check spam first. Then check the receipt from your purchase and use the exact address it was sent to. The account always lives on the address you bought with.

Your programme is attached to the exact email address you paid with. Nine times out of ten, this is the whole problem: you are signing in with a different address than the one on your receipt.

Open the receipt from your purchase and read which address it went to. Then sign in at latticehealth.online/app with that address, letter for letter.

If that is already what you did and it still says no account, tell the chat the address on your receipt and whether you paid by card or through PayPal. It checks the payment itself and repairs the account on the spot, and it keeps re-checking on its own afterwards. You do not need to send screenshots or prove anything.

Nothing you paid for goes anywhere while this gets sorted. The purchase is on record with the card company or PayPal either way.

Honestly: it depends which movement, and the answer is different for each one. So here is what the program actually asks of a wrist, movement by movement, and you can take it to whoever knows your wrists.

There are four main lifts. The hinge and the row both ask you to hold a heavy thing in your hands. That is a grip problem, and grip problems have a cheap fix: lifting straps, about fifteen dollars, which take the weight off your fingers and put it on the strap. I would rather you use them from week one than lose the hinge. The suitcase carry is the one place straps defeat the purpose, because grip is the whole point of it, so that one gets shortened instead.

The squat is easier than it sounds. On the dumbbell path you hold one weight against your chest with your elbows underneath it, so your wrists are stacked and not bent. On the barbell path the bar rests on your upper back and your hands are only steadying it.

The overhead press is the one to ask about. Pressing overhead loads the wrist and the forearm directly, and the setup asks for wrists stacked over the elbows rather than bent back. Straps do not help with that, because the load is going through the joint rather than the fingers. There is no swap written for it and I am not going to invent one for you here.

Two things worth knowing before you decide. The press is the lift I am least confident changes bone at the hip or the spine, and I say so on its own page: my read is that it earns its place through the upper body and posture rather than through the scan sites. So it is not the heart of the program. And a nerve or a tendon under pressure is not the same kind of problem as a stiff joint, which is why this is a question for a doctor or a hand therapist rather than for me.

Take the Doctor Briefing with you. It is free, it is on the site, and it lays out exactly what the twelve weeks load and how heavy it gets, which is the thing a clinician needs in order to give you a real answer instead of a cautious one.

If the answer comes back no, tell us within the guarantee window and you get your money back. You are not stuck with it while you find out.

Per hand, when the movement uses two dumbbells. If a session says 20 lb on the overhead press, the hip hinge, the row or the split squat, that is a 20 lb dumbbell in each hand, so 40 lb in total. Your session screen now says "per hand" next to the number on those movements, so you never have to guess.

When the movement uses one dumbbell, the number is the whole of it. The goblet squat is one dumbbell held at your chest. The suitcase carry and the suitcase hold are one dumbbell in one hand. The hip thrust is one dumbbell across your hips. On those, 20 lb means one 20 lb dumbbell.

On a barbell, the number is the bar and the plates together.

Log what was in your hands, the same way. Put the per-hand number in on a two-dumbbell movement, and the app works out your next weight from that. If you logged the total by mistake, open the session from your history, tap Change on the set, and put the per-hand number in. Nothing else needs fixing.

Yes. Nothing you buy expires. The programme sits in your account until you open it, and a session you have not started does not count down. Buying in September and starting in November is fine, and the price you paid is the price you paid.

Two things are worth knowing before you go quiet for a while.

The rest gap between sessions runs from your last logged set, not from the day you bought. So if you stop for three weeks, the next session is waiting when you come back, and nothing sends you backwards. You pick up at the session that was next.

The guarantee is linked to finishing Phase 1 and it has a time limit from the day you buy, which is printed on the refund page. If your plan is to buy now and start months later, that limit can run out before you have done eight sessions. If that is you, say so in one line to support when you buy, on the same email thread, so the date you told us about is on record. That thread is what the guarantee is read from if you ever need it.