Strength is one of the five components of physical fitness. So it must be important, right? The answer is, yes!
As a result of sedentary lifestyles in today’s society, the human body is underused and under-stimulated. Living in the 21st century, most industries are mechanised and manual labour is hugely reduced. This usually means we have to put in a lot less physical effort when producing goods or doing something like constructing buildings. For example, working at a desk for eight+ hours a day and spending the weekend on the sofa watching TV doesn’t create much movement or stimuli.
The human body is very adaptive. If it isn’t challenged with loadbearing exercises, muscle atrophy will occur and it will become weak, often leading to pain and injuries. This is why strength training is such an important part of maintaining and improving physical fitness. If you compare the way our ancestors lived and the amount of physical activity they did on a daily basis, you will see why today, exercising has become a necessity.
Luckily, due to the growing popularity of professional sports, the power of social media and communities, the amount of exercise-related knowledge that is accessible, and the number of fitness facilities on offer, an increasing number of people are getting involved in some type of physical training.
Strength training is a method that involves lifting weights and using bodyweight exercises. It’s often utilised in sport to build robustness so athletes can perform better and are less likely to sustain an injury. Thanks to the many benefits, strength training is now widely used by the general public too. If the correct exercises are performed with the right form, intensity and volume, strength training will increase total muscle mass, condition the tendons and ligaments, strengthen the bones, improve body mechanics and help with weight control. It can also alleviate stress and boost overall mood.
Set your Goals
Before storming into the gym and lifting random things, have a little think about what you want to achieve from your training. Are you doing it because you had an injury that needs rehabilitation? Are you a fitness enthusiast who wants to improve overall strength? Are you an athlete who is ready to take their performance to the next level? Your goal(s) will determine your, or your coach’s, approach to training.
Training History
You can start strength training regardless of your previous experience. If you’re brand new to this, try to stick to the basics and master those first. Learn how to squat, deadlift, lunge, pull and push properly before starting any of those fancy exercises that you see on Instagram! Use fundamental exercises to build body awareness, efficient movement patterns, condition your connective tissues and improve your mobility. Let’s say that you’ve been lifting weights for some time and feeling good about the loads you’re moving and your forms are excellent, then it can be time to introduce some load manipulation strategies and unilateral exercises.
If you’re brand new to strength training it is crucial that your body is prepared to deal with heavy loads before trying to break any personal records. Starting your programme with a hypertrophy emphasis (meaning lighter weights for 3-4 sets and 8-12 repetitions per set) will condition the muscles and connective tissues as well as firing up your brain. However, always remember that changes need to be systematic as random alterations won’t get you the desired results, instead, they might cause confusion and frustration.
In the case of more skilled lifters, some advanced techniques can be applied to promote progression. Introducing different set structures such as supersets, pre-exhaustion or sets and drops can provide diversity and push the body and mind out of their comfort zones. Utilising isometric and eccentric exercises will increase time under tension, the amount of time the muscles have to work, and will help to strengthen the muscles in specific positions, just like with the scapula when performing active hangs.
Progressive overload
Progressive overload is a resistance training principle where the muscles of the body are continuously challenged by increasing intensity, volume and load. In simple terms, we have to constantly push the envelope to improve performance and force the body to adapt to higher demands.
It’s worth noting that the rate of adaptation in the case of a new lifter is going to be significantly greater, meaning that the person’s force production improves faster, compared to someone who has been training for a decade.
Frequency, Intensity, Volume
When choosing the right frequency, intensity and volume for a strength programme, consider the following factors:
· Age (junior, adult, senior)
· Training history (beginner, advanced, expert)
· Goal(s)
· Injuries (past and existing)
The following table provides some general guidelines regarding frequency, intensity and volume for strength training programming.
If you’re brand new to strength training it is crucial that your body is prepared to deal with heavy loads before trying to break any personal records. Starting your programme with a hypertrophy emphasis (meaning lighter weights for 3-4 sets and 8-12 repetitions per set) will condition the muscles and connective tissues as well as firing up your brain.
Moving forward with your programme, you can increase the intensity and lower the volume, therefore shifting the focus towards increasing force production. Eg. In the case of an expert lifter, the intensity rises quite high while the volume drops. To achieve the best possible adaptation, the exposure of the muscles to 90% effort or higher should be kept short. More than six repetitions could take a too long and ultimately lead to negative results by overly fatiguing the CNS (central nervous system, eg. the brain) while increasing recovery time due to the amount of damage caused in the muscle fibres.
Rest periods play an important role in strength training too. We want to ensure the CNS resets properly and the muscles recover without cooling down too much. Therefore the recommended rest-time between sets is usually 3-5 minutes.
Remember, these numbers are only guidelines. To get the best out of your training make sure that these values are tweaked to your personal needs. If you need any help with that, please get in touch!
Weight lifting vs Bodyweight exercises
Despite the title of this paragraph, it really has to be “weight lifting and bodyweight exercises”. Weight lifting and bodyweight exercises complement each other very well and challenge the body in various ways.
Exercises that work the same muscle groups and seem to be following an identical movement pattern, like a wide grip pull-up and wide grip lat pulldown, trigger the muscles and the nervous system slightly differently. Bodyweight drills are often used to teach correct form, such as starting with bodyweight squats to learn how to position the feet, knees and hips before hitting a heavy barbell back squat.
There are skills like the push-up that not everybody can do right off the bat so in order to build up the required chest, arm and shoulder strength we use exercises like a barbell bench press, where the resistance is adjustable and the load can be progressively increased. Coaches and trainees have to be cautious when delivering or participating in strength workouts. In general, moving heavy objects tends to be riskier than working out with bodyweight exercises, however a lack of attention, disregarding health and safety measures, or inadequate progression can cause injuries in both cases.
Splits
There are a few ways to split workout routines. Popular options are total body workouts, upper-lower body split, push-pull legs split and open-closed kinetic chain splits are just a few examples. Which one you chose depends on what do you want to achieve.
If you’re a fairly balanced out person, I mean from the strength point of view, you should probably do 2-3 strength sessions a week with a full-body approach using predominantly compound exercises. However, there are a few people who experience some strength dissimilarity between the upper and lower body or who might discover differences in relative force production when it comes to pushing and pulling movements. In these cases, the application of a split routine to improve weaker areas makes sense and is often recommended.
Periodisation
Periodisation means training with a structure where the program is split into periods to guarantee progressive overload and overcome general-adaptation syndrome. Professional coaches often use this methodology to maximise performance in the most time-effective way.
With a bit of research, you can learn more about periodization, and implementing it into your programme will accelerate your training and significantly improve your performance.
Here is a brief explanation:
The periods can be grouped as macro, meso and microcycles.
· A macrocycle usually runs for twelve months, but in the case of Olympic competitors, it goes on for four years.
· A mesocycle normally lasts for about one to three months and moves the trainee from low-intensity, high volume training sessions towards high-intensity but low volume workouts.
· A microcycle consists of a single week and contains all the workouts for that week. A microcycle is further broken down into individual training sessions, prescribing the exercises for a given day with instructions on the number of stets and repetitions.
There are a number of periodisation models out there, such as linear, undulating and conjugating, that can be used either exclusively or in combination with others.
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