How to get strong:
In the context of physical training, Strength is the ability to generate or apply force to an object or the ability to resist a force that is being applied to you.
Why should you bother?
It makes everything else easier, gives you greater physiological reserve and a massive self esteem and mental health boost. Strength is inversely correlated with all cause mortality meaning the stronger you are and the larger your muscle mass, the less likely you are to die from anything.
If you want to be able to pick up your great-grand kids when you’re 100, you’d better get strong now, because you’re going to lose a percentage every year once you get old, even if you continue to train. So start with what you want to be able to do in that distant future and work out how strong you need to be now. (The answer is almost certainly way stronger than you are!)
There is a famous quote from Mark Rippetoe (veteran strength coach and all around strength guru) “ Strong people are harder to kill than weak people and more useful in general”, all true.
I remember talking to a client about him helping a neighbour move a grand piano into their house. He said he was holding one side of the piano and the rest of the street were on the other! – who was more useful?
What is strength?
Strength is the result of repeatedly adapting to a manageable amount of overload.
Remove the stress, no strength is developed.
Overdo the amount of stress or experience too many overloads with insufficient recovery and you’ll get fatigued, negatively adapted and injured.
There is a range of volume + intensity that causes the desired adaptation. This starts with the minimal effective dose (a term nicked from the pharmaceutical industry for the lowest drug dosage that caused a desired effect) at one end, with the maximum recoverable volume at the other.
The key to getting stronger is to repeatedly deliver the appropriate amount of stress (overload) followed by the correct amount of recovery. It is that simple.
Coach Brian
Principles:
There are principles of training at play, and you need to apply them to be successful: You can ignore them, but they won’t ignore you. Generally anyone struggling with results will be misapplying one or more of these:
- Specificity: Adaptations are specific to the training, tissues, loads, speeds, etc. applied. This means you get more out of what you put in. Getting strong won’t turn you into a great marathon runner, training for a marathon won’t get you strong. Both need specific training or you’ll end up pretty awful at both.
- Overload: Adaptation occurs when you force your body to work harder than its current limits. Overload can be applied to several aspects of training such as frequency, intensity, duration, type etc. Failing to build in consistent overload is the most common reason I see for lack of progress.
- Progression: The load, frequency, volume etc. should increase gradually over time to improve performance (see overload above). It should be noted that each overload, recovery and supercompensation (improvement) cycle is a small step forward. This is why really impressive strength takes consistency over a long time.
- Recovery: Training should allow sufficient rest and recovery to avoid overtraining and injury. Technology, smart watches etc can help here.
- Variety: Some amount of variety should be introduced to prevent boredom and plateaus. This needs to be balanced against the need for consistency and repeatability of the training. Too much variety is bad for progress. You’re better off with too little variety than too much. Note how we will build variety in by changing the rep ranges and percentages each week.
- Regression: Stop training and remove the overload stress and you will regress to the baseline strength your current lifestyle demands of you. There is no training Switzerland, you’re either getting stronger or getting weaker.
“You do not need to do many different exercises to get strong – you need to get strong on a very few important exercises, movements that train the whole body as a system, not as a collection of separate body parts…. the body best adapts as a whole organism to stress applied to the whole organism. The more stress that can be applied to as much of the body at one time as possible, the more effective and productive the adaptation will be.”
Coach Mark Rippetoe, Starting Strength: Basic Barbell Training
How do I start?
What you need to do depends on your experience level:
Novices (probably 99.5% of people reading this):
This means anyone who can achieve a linear increase in strength. Or to put that into English, if you are able to keep on adding a weight to your lifts each time you do them, you’re still a novice. Enjoy your newbie gains, you’ll never make such fast progress and it’ll be a fond memory soon enough.
As a novice, you need a program that is aimed at novices. Yes, you could use a program aimed at intermediate or advanced lifters, but they will be adding weight every week or every month respectively and tend to have more variety than is desirable for a novice, because they need it. A novice can add a small amount of weight two or three times a week. You may progress on a program too advanced for you, just not as fast as if you’re on the right program.
Novices should follow Rippetoe’s advice and use a few exercises that can be progressed for a long, long time. Think DL, Squat, Bench, BOR, Pull up, Chin up, Yates row, Shoulder press. Focus on the basic skills and master them. Follow our strength programming and train strength twice a week (you could train strength more frequently, but there is an opportunity cost. You also want a huge aerobic capacity, need healthy mobile joints etc.). As long as you are able to just repeat and add weight. We would only do 3 sets of 5 reps of the main effort lifts. This may sound easy, but it gets scary heavy pretty quickly. You soon realise the limiting factor is courage rather than physical. Don’t be surprised when 3 x 5 takes you 45 minutes.
As the amount you can add to the bar each time dwindles, start adding in the accessory and assistance lifts in. Increase the volume, play with the percentages. You’ll still make progress, just not as fast as your noob phase. Sad times 🙁
Intermediates, follow the programming. Do all the accessory and assistance and power sets. Work at improving the quality of your sleep, nutrition and recovery. Allow for bad days where you’re tired and nothing works. Keep coming back.
As you progress from Intermediate to Advanced, consider following a program like Jim Wendler’s 531 program, you can probably stay on that making steady monthly progress for years and will only need to switch onto something else if the gains train stops. There are a whole bunch of bolt on programs that go with 531. We like ‘Boring but big’, but there are plenty of others to play with.
Am I intermediate or advanced? One of my former coaches trained at a power lifting gym where they were limited to the beginner class until they could DL and back squat 200Kg!
Community & Accountability:
People give up because they get bored or scared or both. Honestly the mental is far harder than the physical. This is why training with people who hold you accountable to turn up relentlessly and train even when the very prospect of getting under the bar makes you want to puke is the biggest change you can make. Find your community or create it.
Nutrition:
Back your training with appropriate nutrition. Get enough protein in each day or you’ll be leaving gains on the table.
This is a whole post/ book/ blog/ in its own right, so I won’t labour it here.
Recovery:
Again, a whole post/ book/ blog in its own right
Got questions? Get in touch brian at fitspring.co.uk