Putting Together a Strength Training Program

My strength training program will consist of a 3 day cycle. Mondays will be pulling movements, Wednesdays will be pushing movements, and Fridays will be combination movements. Although I have specified M-W-F, it can be any days of the week as long as I get 3 days in with 1 day off in between for recovery. I like exercises that imitate movements I would normally do, so I usually work with free weights or my own body weight but many of these can be done on machines. For Mondays, I am doing pulling movements (both upper and lower body) and I like to work different plans (vertical and horizontal). Since I work arms with both pushes and pulls I only add one arm exercise to the group for biceps. Here are the exercises I plan to do:

1. Upper body vertical pull: Pull-ups
2. Upper body horizontal pull: Bent Rows
3. Stabilizing upper body pull: Back Extensions
4. Lower body pull: Romanian Dead Lift
5. Lower body pull: Dead Lift
6. Stabilizing lower body pull: Bridge
7. Arm pull: Preacher Curls (I prefer these because of my shoulders)

Because I have different strengths for each of these areas (my lower body is much stronger), I do different sets and/or repetitions. Since I am building for strength and endurance initially and working out weight loss later, I am going to try and do up to 12 repetitions for 3 sets with the goal of making the last set hard to finish (not to failure). This may change from workout to workout but the objective is to make improvement each week. In later posts, I will discuss how to measure improvement from session to session but I use volume (sets x repetitions x weight) so we will use this to monitor progress in future posts.