Training glossary

By the Coresa Training coaching team·Last reviewed 11 September 2026

Coaching has a vocabulary, and pretending otherwise just moves the confusion into the session. This page defines every term you might hear on our floor or read in this library, in a sentence or two each. Where a term deserves a fuller explanation, its name links to a dedicated page.

Nothing here requires memorizing. Coaches translate as they go; this glossary exists for the members who like to know why a word was chosen, and for anyone reading the library who hits a term mid-sentence.

The terms

Adherence

The unglamorous variable that decides results: whether you keep showing up. Every format argument bows to it.

Aerobic base

The foundation of easy-effort fitness that hard intervals are built on top of. Built slowly, mostly in zone 2.

AMRAP

As many reps (or rounds) as possible in a set time. Useful for testing; risky as a default, because form decays with the clock.

Anabolic resistance

The way older muscle responds less to the same training and protein signal — real, modest, and beatable with a louder signal.

Autoregulation

Autoregulation is adjusting the day's load or volume to how you actually are — sleep, stress, soreness, bar speed — instead of to the number the sheet predicted. The plan still sets the target effort; the body sets the weight that meets it.

Bilateral

Both limbs working together — the barbell lifts. Where the biggest loads live.

Bracing

Creating pressure and stiffness through the trunk before load arrives — breathe in, tighten as if about to be nudged, keep breathing.

Bracing

Bracing is creating stiffness through the whole trunk before a lift by drawing a breath into the belly and sides and then tightening the midsection around it. It protects the spine and lets force pass from the legs to the bar without leaking.

Coach-to-client ratio

Coach-to-client ratio is the number of people one coach is responsible for in a session, written coach first: 1:1, 1:2 to 1:5, 1:8, 1:20 and beyond. It sets what coaching can physically happen in an hour, before programming or talent come into it.

Compound movement

A multi-joint lift — squats, rows, presses — that trains several muscles at once. The backbone of every session here.

Concentric

The lifting phase of a movement, where muscle shortens — standing up out of a squat, pressing the bar away.

Concurrent training

Training strength and endurance in the same program — which is most people's reality, and works fine at normal volumes.

Cool-down

The few minutes of easing off at the end of a session. Modest physiology, excellent transition.

Deload

A deliberately easy week that lets accumulated fatigue drain so the previous weeks' work can show up as fitness.

Density

Work done per unit of time. Circuits raise it; rest lowers it; neither is virtuous by itself.

Detraining

The gradual loss of adaptations when training stops. Slower than feared: strength holds for weeks, not days.

Detraining

Detraining is the loss of training adaptations when training stops or falls below the dose that holds them. It runs on a staggered timeline: conditioning fades first, within a couple of weeks; strength holds for several weeks; the skill of the movements holds longest of all.

DOMS

Delayed onset muscle soreness: the ache that peaks a day or two after unaccustomed work. Covered fully in the answers library.

Double progression

Double progression is a loading rule with two dials. You work inside a rep range, say 8 to 12; you add reps until every set reaches the top of the range; then you add load and drop back to the bottom. Reps move first, weight second.

Eccentric

The lowering phase of a movement, where muscle lengthens under load. Where soreness comes from, and where descent strength is built.

Effective reps

Effective reps is the idea that the last few reps before failure, the ones where the bar slows and the largest muscle fibres are forced to work, deliver most of a set's growth stimulus. It is a useful model for choosing loads and rep ranges, not a law of physiology.

EMOM

Every minute on the minute: start a fixed piece of work each minute and rest with whatever remains.

EPOC

The afterburn effect — extra energy spent after hard exercise while the body puts itself back in order. Real, and smaller than advertised.

Finisher

A short, hard block at the end of a session — conditioning or high-rep work that empties what is left.

Frequency

How often you train a movement, a muscle, or at all. Two a week builds; three to four is the sweet spot for most.

GPP

General physical preparedness: the broad base of strength, engine and movement quality that every specific goal is built on.

Heart-rate recovery

How fast your pulse falls after effort. Fitness shows up here before it shows up anywhere else.

Heart-rate zones

Effort bands tied to training purposes, from recovery-easy to near-maximal. Explained fully in the answers library.

High-touch coaching

High-touch coaching is a coaching model in which one named coach knows your history, watches your working sets and adjusts your program between sessions. It is the opposite of a floor pass: the product is attention, not access to a room.

Hypertrophy

Muscle growth. Driven by hard sets near your limit, enough weekly volume, and a reason to keep adapting.

Intensity

In strength talk: how heavy relative to your max. In conditioning talk: how hard relative to your ceiling. Context decides.

Interval

A repeated cycle of hard work and planned recovery. The recovery is part of the training, not a pause from it.

Isolation movement

A single-joint lift — curls, raises — used to support the compounds, not replace them.

Isometric

Producing force without moving: planks, holds, a pause at the bottom of a squat.

Junk volume

Junk volume is training work that adds fatigue without adding a training stimulus: sets stopped so far from failure that the body has no reason to adapt, or sets piled on after fatigue has already ruined their quality. It counts on the sheet and not in the tissue.

Lactate threshold

The effort line beyond which the burn accumulates faster than your body clears it. Tempo work lives just beneath it.

Linear progression

Linear progression is adding a small, fixed amount of load every session or every week while the sets and reps stay the same. It is the beginner's engine: it runs for roughly the first year of consistent training, then stalls, and a slower rule replaces it.

Load management

Load management is the practice of controlling the total stress placed on your body across training, sport and daily life so that it rises gradually rather than in jumps. The aim is not less load; it is a rate of increase your tissues can keep up with.

Maintenance dose

The surprisingly small amount of training that holds fitness through a busy season — far less than building it took.

Maintenance training

Maintenance training is training written to hold the strength and fitness you have built rather than add to it. It needs far less volume than building did: the load stays heavy, the sets and sessions shrink. It works when it is chosen and fails when it happens by accident.

Minimum effective dose

The minimum effective dose is the smallest amount of training that still produces the adaptation you want. For strength it is a few hard sets per movement pattern per week. Coaches start there because it leaves room to add, and because everything above it is paid for in recovery.

Mobility

Range of motion you can control with your own muscles. Different from flexibility, which is passive range.

Movement pattern

One of the basic shapes human movement reduces to: squat, hinge, push, pull, carry. The exercise library is organized by them.

Movement pattern

A movement pattern is one of the basic categories of human movement that coaches use to organize training: squat, hinge, push, pull, carry, and trunk work. Programs are written by pattern rather than by muscle because the body produces force in coordinated chains, not in isolated parts.

NEAT

Non-exercise activity thermogenesis: all the movement that is not a workout. Often a bigger daily burn than the workout.

Neutral spine

A back held near its natural curves rather than deeply rounded or arched. A range, not a razor's edge.

Novice gains

Novice gains are the rapid strength increases of the first months of training, driven mostly by the nervous system learning to recruit and coordinate muscle you already have rather than by new muscle. They let a beginner add load almost weekly, they run out within a year or so, and they come around once.

One-rep max (1RM)

The heaviest single rep you could perform. Estimated from lighter sets here, almost never tested directly.

Overreaching

Short-term overshoot of training beyond recovery — fixed by an easy week, and sometimes used deliberately.

Overtraining

The deep, months-long hole past chronic overreaching. Rare in recreational training, and worth respecting anyway.

PAR-Q+

The PAR-Q+ (Physical Activity Readiness Questionnaire for Everyone) is Canada's pre-participation screening form: seven yes-or-no questions about your heart, blood pressure, chest pain, dizziness, chronic conditions, medications and joints. Seven answers of no clear you to become more active; a yes routes you to follow-up questions and sometimes to your physician.

Periodization

Planning training in phases so hard work and recovery arrive on purpose instead of by accident.

Power

Force times speed. The quality that fades first with age, and the reason jumps and throws stay in programs for adults.

Progression

The harder version a movement grows into once the current one finishes strong.

Progressive overload

Gradually asking your body for slightly more than it is adapted to. The engine under every program that works — the full page lives in the answers library.

Ramp set

A lighter set on the way up to working weight, rehearsing the movement while waking the tissue.

Ramping sets

Ramping sets are the warm-up sets that climb toward the day's working weight in a few planned jumps, with reps falling as the load rises. They rehearse the movement, wake up the nervous system and tell the coach what the top weight should be today.

Range of motion

Range of motion is how far a joint travels during an exercise, from the start position to the deepest point and back. Coaches usually want the fullest range you can control under load, and treat shorter ranges as a deliberate tool rather than a shortcut.

Regression

The easier version of a movement — a rung down the ladder, not an insult.

Regression and a progression

A regression is an easier version of a movement on the same ladder, and a progression is the harder version one rung up. Coaches use the ladder to place each person on the rung where the rep is honest, which is how eight people do the same exercise at eight levels.

Relative strength

Strength per kilogram of you. What hills, chin-ups and mountain sports actually care about.

Reps in reserve (RIR)

How many more reps you could have done when the set ended. 'Two in reserve' is the most common prescription on this floor.

Resting heart rate

Your pulse at complete rest — one of the cheapest fitness tests there is, trending down as your engine grows.

RPE

Rate of perceived exertion: a 1–10 scale for how hard a set felt. Coaches use it to set loads without testing maxes.

Sarcopenia

Sarcopenia is the age-related loss of muscle mass, strength and physical function. It accelerates when muscle is not loaded and it responds to resistance training at every age, which is why it is treated as a training problem as much as a medical one.

Scaling

Adjusting a movement's load, range, tempo or variation to the person doing it. In a coached room, everyone is scaled.

Stability

The ability to keep a joint or the trunk where you put it while forces argue otherwise.

Steady state

Continuous cardio at one sustainable effort, from strolls to tempo runs, depending on the zone.

Superset

Two exercises performed back to back before resting, usually pairing movements that do not compete.

Tempo

Prescribed speeds for each phase of a rep, written like 3-1-1-0: three seconds down, one pause, one up, no pause.

Time under tension

How long a muscle works during a set. Matters less than effort, but tempo work uses it deliberately.

Top set and back-off sets

A top set is the single heaviest set of the day on a lift, done at the prescribed effort, and back-off sets are the lighter sets that follow it to supply volume. The structure gives an intermediate lifter one heavy exposure and enough practice without the fatigue of several near-maximal sets.

Training age

How long you have trained consistently — a better predictor of what you need than your birthday.

Training block

A run of weeks in which the same movements repeat so their loads can climb, before the program changes shape.

Training intensity

Training intensity has two meanings that are easy to confuse: to a strength coach it is the load on the bar as a share of your best lift, while in everyday use it means how hard the work felt. A set can be high in one and low in the other.

Training program

A training program is a sequence of sessions written to build on each other over weeks, with a rule for when the demand goes up and a plan for when it comes down. A workout is one session; a program is the reason this session looks the way it does.

Training volume

Training volume is the amount of work you do, most usefully counted as the number of hard sets per movement pattern or muscle group each week. It is the dose; effort and load decide whether each set in the count actually counts.

Unilateral

One-limb-at-a-time work — split squats, single-arm rows. Where imbalances show and get fixed.

Unilateral training

Unilateral training is loading one limb at a time (split squats, single-arm rows, suitcase carries) instead of both together. It exposes the side-to-side differences two-limb lifts hide, spares the spine because the loads are smaller, and transfers to sports that happen one leg at a time.

VO2 max

The most oxygen your body can use per minute — the ceiling of your engine, and one of the better-studied predictors of healthy aging.

Volume

The total amount of hard work, usually counted as challenging sets per muscle or pattern per week.

Work capacity

How much training you can do and recover from. Raising it is often the first, invisible phase of getting fitter.

Work-to-rest ratio

The shape of an interval, like 1:2 — thirty seconds on, sixty off. Shorter rests make the same work harder.

Working set

A set done at the prescribed effort, as opposed to the warm-up ramp that leads to it.

Zone 2

Conversational-effort cardio — the pace you could hold while speaking in full sentences. The base most engines are missing.

Common questions