Training

Plan rules & the reasoning behind them

Leave 1-2 reps in reserve on every working set. Stopping 1-2 reps short of failure drives essentially the same hypertrophy as going to failure, with far less fatigue — which matters when you train 5 days a week.
Hit the top of the rep range on every set → make the exercise harder, don't add reps. Each card tells you how. With 10 kg dumbbells you will run out of load long before you run out of stimulus, so progression here is mechanical: leverage, tempo, range and pauses.
Rest longer than feels necessary. 2-3 min on legs, pull-ups and presses; 60-90 s on isolation work. Short rests cost you reps, and lost reps cost you growth — longer rests produce more hypertrophy and strength, not less.
Light loads still build muscle — as long as the set ends close to failure. That is the whole basis of this program: your 10 kg dumbbells are plenty, provided you take the hard sets seriously.
Two sessions per muscle group per week. Training a muscle twice weekly beats once weekly when total volume is equal, which is why legs land on Monday and Friday rather than in one long session.
Every exercise scales down. Where a card says Scale it down, that version is not a lesser exercise — it is the right one until it isn't. Doing the easier variation properly beats grinding through the hard one badly.
Your first pull-up is a project, not a set. You can't do one yet, so Wednesday doesn't ask you to. The negatives are what build it: getting to the top by any means and fighting the way down trains the same muscles at loads you can't reach any other way. Rows add the volume, scapular pull-ups teach the starting position, and losing bodyweight quietly makes every rep easier — that last one is doing more work than people expect. Expect months, not weeks.
Core is trained like everything else: close to failure, with progression. Three days a week, covering the three jobs it actually has — resisting extension (dead bug, plank), resisting side-bend and rotation (side plank, bicycle), and flexing the spine under load (knee raises, reverse crunch). Endless easy crunches are not training.
Slept badly? Don't cancel — shrink. One rough night doesn't erase your strength, but it does cut the volume you can handle and makes everything feel heavier. Do the first two exercises of the session at full effort and stop there. That protects most of the stimulus at a fraction of the fatigue, and keeps the habit. Cancel only if you're ill or genuinely wrecked.
Never shift the whole week to catch up. A missed session is gone. Pick the week back up on the day it actually is — sliding everything forward just eats your rest days and pushes the problem into next week.
First two weeks: do 3 sets where it says 4. Start below your capacity so you have somewhere to go.
Every 6-8 weeks, take a lighter week: half the sets, same effort per set. Fatigue masks fitness; you often look stronger the week after backing off.
Thursday and Sunday are training too. Growth happens between sessions, not during them. Walk, sleep, eat. If you feel wrecked on Saturday, that session is the one to cut.

Evidence base: Schoenfeld, Ogborn & Krieger, Sports Med 2016 (frequency) and J Sports Sci 2017 (volume dose-response); Schoenfeld et al., J Strength Cond Res 2017 (low vs high load) and 2016 (rest intervals); Morton et al., Br J Sports Med 2018 (protein); Helms et al., IJSNEM 2014 (protein in a deficit).