STRENGTH TRAINING 101
One of the main reasons people seek out gyms or training facilities is to increase their overall strength. It is widely understood that individuals of all ages who increase their strength through exercise experience less chronic pain, improve their mobility, and just generally feel better. A strong body is a healthy body that will last a long time if cared for and maintained correctly. The issue most have is they need a place to begin, and it can be hard to find. The responsibility of personal trainers is to guide and foster a person’s body and understanding of how to increase their overall strength in a measured and healthy manner. Strength, like anything else, can be built in a multitude of ways, but here are a few simple ways it can be accomplished.
Bodyweight Training
We do not normally think of our bodies as something difficult to move because we walk around, walk up stairs, and do all sorts of regular activities with it each day. However, movement of our own body takes effort and causes metabolic stress. Therefore, a simple way to build strength initially is to use our body as a resistance. Basic exercise movements like these can be a great way to start:
Squats
Push-ups
Sit-ups
Pull-ups
Lunges
Good mornings
Glute bridges
These are just a few of the hundreds of movements you can use to increase your overall strength. A simple way to program these movements into a workout for yourself is to start with a certain amount of repetitions for each one and steadily, over time, increase the amount you do to increase the capacity of your body and muscles. Maybe you start with 1 set of 10 repetitions for each movement. Once that feels moderately easy, then either increase the number of repetitions per set or add more sets. However you decide to do it, the goal should be to increase your capacity for work, which will increase your muscles' strength. Eventually, you can scale these movements to be more difficult by adding pauses at certain points or adding time for each repetition. This is called time under tension (TUT). Increasing your TUT will lead to your muscles performing more work per repetition. For instance, if each bodyweight squat takes 1 second, then a set of 10 would be 10 seconds of work. Now if you perform those with a slower descent, and each rep is now 3 seconds, and you do 10 repetitions, then in theory, you have done 30 seconds of work tripling your TUT and total work.
Resistance Training
Resistance training is a method of training that uses an external load other than your body weight to perform a movement. This resistance usually comes in the form of a dumbbell, kettlebell, med-ball, or barbell. This type of training tends to be more intense because you expend more energy to move yourself and the external load. This is not to discourage anyone from doing it, but it should be understood that performing is much more difficult. If we take that same list of bodyweight exercises but now add external resistance, we can then greatly improve our strength levels by using heavier resistance.
Squats
Push-ups
Sit-ups
Pull-ups
Lunges
Good mornings
Glute bridges
A similar progression as we started with for bodyweight before will work very well with resistance. Start with a certain amount of repetitions, say 10 repetitions. Increase resistance until you can no longer perform 10 reps for each exercise. The following week, try to add some repetitions at that same weight or even add a set of reps at that same weight. Continue this until you have reached a point where you can no longer get any more reps at that weight. Once you have exhausted that rep scheme. Try dropping the number of reps from 10 to 8 and see if you can add more weight to the movement. The previous method of TUT can also work really well with resistance training. Performing reps with increased TUT can also lead to increases in strength. Continue finding the max amount of weight you can safely perform at each repetition range until you get to a 1-repetition maximum. Once you have reached this point, you can then restart your rep ranges and adjust your resistance as necessary. In theory, you could lift more the next time you try 10 reps than what you did before.
The chart on the left shows a measurement of the maximum repetitions for each percentage of your one repetition maximum. For simplicity let’s say your best squat is 100 lbs one rep. This chart would then tell you in theory that you could perform 4 repetitions at 90% or 90 lbs for repetition maximum. The chart on the right shows the estimated amount of work you could perform at various amounts of repetitions. Say you go into the gym and you decide to perform 4 sets of 5 reps at 75% of your 1 repetition maximum. This would be a good rep scheme to build strength over time. For each rep scheme never spend more than 2-4 weeks at each one. The reason being is your body can adjust to stimuli very quickly meaning that a certain percentage of work will feel less effective in a short amount of time.
Wherever you decide to begin, understand that training for strength takes time to build and patience is required to get to where you want. As long as you can maintain consistency with your training and be able to modify when you need to, then you will see improvement in your strength and overall health.
If strength training is something you’ve been interested in but have been initimidated by, check out some of our new Small Group Training Courses!