Programming is the most commoditised thing in fitness. The best-known free programs have been run by hundreds of thousands of people over years, and that is a level of real-world testing no paid program can match. What follows is what each is actually for.
If you are new to lifting
r/Fitness Basic Beginner Routine. Free, in the wiki, three days a week, full body. Unfashionable and effective, and it comes with an explanation of why it is built the way it is, which most programs skip.
StrongLifts 5×5. Five compound lifts, add weight every session, three days a week. Simple to the point of being boring, which is exactly right for a first six months. The volume becomes brutal toward the end, which is the signal to move on rather than a flaw.
Starting Strength. The same idea with fewer lifts and a stronger opinion. Works. The book’s certainty about it working indefinitely does not survive contact with most people, as covered in the best strength training books.
If you have no equipment
r/bodyweightfitness Recommended Routine. The best free bodyweight program that exists, with proper progressions for each movement so there is somewhere to go when a push-up stops being hard. It is genuinely well constructed and it costs nothing.
Once you are past the beginner stage
GZCLP. A structured progression framework rather than a fixed routine, built around tiers of intensity. More flexible than the beginner programs and considerably less likely to stall.
5/3/1. Jim Wendler’s framework, widely documented for free even though the books are paid. Conservative, sustainable, and built around slow progression, which is the correct answer for most intermediates and the least satisfying one.
PHUL and PHAT. Power and hypertrophy hybrids for people who want both strength and size, at four to five days a week.
For running
Couch to 5K is the most successful free training program ever written, and the reason is that it starts genuinely easy. Our week-by-week version, including the weeks people actually quit in, is at Couch to 5K.
Beyond that, most structured running plans derive from Daniels’ VDOT tables, which means a free plan built on the same tables is not meaningfully worse than a paid one.
The thing that matters more than the plan
Which program you pick is a small variable. How many weeks in a row you run it is an enormous one. People switch programs at the first plateau, which is generally the point at which the program has started working rather than stopped.
The genuinely useful decision is how to split the week so each muscle gets trained at a sensible frequency and has time to recover, which is a recovery question rather than a program question. That is push pull legs vs upper lower and how many sets per muscle per week.
Our own free programs
We publish a set of structured programs with the analysis behind them, built on the same 173-exercise catalog the app uses, at the training collections. Free to read, no email required, and each one shows the per-muscle weekly volume it actually produces rather than just listing exercises.
Where to discuss these once you are running one: the best fitness subreddits.