My wife's lifting program

I was talking with my wife the other day about her lifting program that I designed for her. No, I'm not certified in any way as a personal trainer, but I know some things, and I know the issues she has with her body. Also, for whatever reason she didn't make any real progress with her previous personal trainer so what did we have to lose?

The program that I designed is highly influenced by New Rules of Lifting, New Rules of Lifting for Women (both by Schuler, Cosgrove (plus Forsythe on the second)), and Eric Cressey. As such, every day there is some kind of multi-joint, complex lift involving heavy weights. The adaptations I have made for her involve her bad knees (seriously in need of second surgeries on both joints) and her weak hand strength. To address the first we (at least for now) don't include lunges or deep squats but we do include Romanian deadlifts and limited depth squats. To address the second we include farmer's walks almost every day as well as other lifts that involve her holding suspended weights.

Nancy (that would be my lovely wife) was commenting both about how much she enjoys all of the back and core work, and about how different all of this is than what she has done before and what she has observed other ladies doing in the gym. She said that she hasn't ever done anything like the volume or weight we are doing in working her midsection — seated cable rows, wide-grip cable pulldowns, bent-over rows, push-ups (incline, for now), Pallof presses, planks, woodchops, reverse woodchops, and more.

In addition, she is doing these in different configurations, 3x15, 4x8, and 5x5. She had never done more than two sets of any exercise before and, further, had always done nearly a dozen different exercises in any one session. She's doing 5-7 exercises each session but doing them multiple times. She's also never done anything other than sets of 10-12 before. I'm trying to build strength, not muscle, so we're trying to get her body used to lifting heavier weights. This is going to take time, but she's in no rush. We'll just take the progress slow and steady like the turtle.

As to the second point about how she's doing stuff different than other ladies, just the other day we watched a lady do (I bet you can guess) triceps extensions, curls, and cable-pushdowns with little tiny weights. And this was while Nancy was supersetting wide-grip lat pulldowns and barbell bent-over rows. She pointed out how it just made sense to work the big muscles in her body and not the tiny auxiliary muscles if she wants to see any real change. Makes sense to me.