Strength: It’s the good stuff.
I mentioned a couple of weeks back that the single biggest game changer I experienced in terms my building my physical capability was discovering barbell strength training. In particular, it’s ‘Thiccening’ effect on my torso and its ability to transmit force and endure punishment.
On the back of that, I’d now like to argue that when starting out on anything, you should consider making general strength your first priority.
By ‘starting out’, I mean that I’m assuming that you are new to the thing, currently untrained and considerably weaker than you could be. You’ve decided that you’re going to start training in the gym to improve your physical ability and performance doing the thing.
If you’re undertrained and a Novice (read this to see if you’re a Novice…you probably are), doing pretty much anything will work until you become adapted to it; it’s literally called the “Novice Effect”. But rather than get just a little more physically able by accident and then stall out with no idea why, following an actual training plan is going to be a better approach. Are we agreed so far?
My suggestion is that you invest in 3-6 months of learning and exploiting the barbell squat, bench press, deadlift and overhead press with a few additional movements depending on a few of your capabilities such as age, injuries and the nature of the intended ‘thing’.
You’ll train 2-3 times per week and steadily add small increments of weight workout by workout until you can’t any more. It’s simple, hard and works a treat at getting people significantly, if not incredibly, stronger than they were at the start.
But so what?
You'll learn how to move dat body baby. I see a lot of personal trainers and coaches selling needlessly complex 90-day programmes with a whole bunch of unnecessary things like 1RM testing for beginners and ‘cycles’ where movement patterns change week to week. If you want to get strong, you need to build it up progressively in small bite-sized chunks. You need to improve your co-ordination, develop trust in the movement pattern and create consistency rep by rep to train the greatest amount of muscle, through the greatest effective range of motion, within the constraints of the individual in order to lift the greatest amount of load possible. In short; you need to practice. Limiting your efforts to 4-6 compound movements will allow ALL of those things You’ll be moving safely and effectively. Changing movements every week is going to slow that process right down…needlessly.
Being stronger builds your whole foundation generally. You might be aware that ‘fitness’ is often broken down into components of which strength is just one. Strength being the ability to proceed force against an external resistance. Then there’s cardiovascular fitness (aerobic and anaerobic), muscular endurance, flexibility, speed, power, co-ordination, agility & balance et all. Developing your strength will bleed across and spread into all of these other areas. But wait, lifting weights isn’t cardiovascular training is it? I would simply suggestion that anyone who claims that strength training is not a cardiovascular event has never actually experienced a heavy set of 5 reps under the bar. I’m not suggesting for a moment that these lifts will FIX all of your weaknesses in these areas, but it will go some of the way. For example with balance, pressing heavy overhead and NOT falling over will become pretty damned important. Figuring out how to get someone to squat to depth or hinge over will go a long way to improving co-ordination, flexibility and agility. But I know from my own experience that balancing on one leg is still hard for me despite all my squats. But more focussed, specific interventions can come later. This stuff is GENERAL.
Learn how to do hard things. In my opinion, this is one of the greatest bi-products of this style of training. Initially, you’ll be in a “Goldilocks” phase where you’re adding weight every session, recovering and adapting before your next bout. But eventually it will take more and more guts to get under the bar as well as more rest between sets. The threat of not being able to stand back up under the bar for 3-5 reps will gnaw at you from the inside. But you can trust the process and keep performing these acts of physical development again and again if you let yourself. You’ll unlock a level of mental robustness and resilience you didn’t know you possessed and suddenly all other daily tasks will appear less daunting that what you just achieved in the gym.
Be less susceptible to injury. It’s not just the production of force and muscle building that’s important. What do muscles do? They move the bones of the body around by pulling around joints. Your body will adapt to these heavy compound (multi-joint) movements by creating thicker, stronger tendons and connective tissues around the joints, making them more stable and resilient to physical insult. You can absorb way more punishment than before and spend less time suffering or recovering from injury.
Apply more force. What is strength all about? It’s about getting your available muscle fibres to contract and produce force. The more weight you can move around, the stronger you are. The stronger you are, the more force you can apply. Think of kicking or throwing further or more often than you were able to before. The faster you can swing your club or racquet, the further you can send a projectile towards its target.
Identify weak spots. The barbell lifts are also very useful diagnostic tools and they can expose movement issues that can be resolved either by conforming to the movement model or pointing the coach towards other interventions that will help in the long run. If it’s not possible, to do the lift in a text-book fashion, there will always be a regression we can fall back on and get stronger in THAT range of motion.
Plan ahead. The months you spent training like this will allow you and/or your coach to have a road map of how you trained. What went as planned, what had to be addressed and treated, where you are strong and have advantage, where you are weak and need further work. This will lead from the early generalised training to more specific directions depending on what each individual needs. Knowledge is power and knowing a lifter’s history and pathway is invaluable.
It’s highly likely that after this phase of training you’ll be considerably more physically capable and resilient than before. You’ll know your body better and you’ll have a clearer idea of what work needs to be done next. All from keeping it simple. But remember, this is still early days. You’ve invested wisely and you can now exploit your new levels of strength and power doing the thing. You’ll get more out of it. Not all of your issues will have been addressed but you’ll be in a much consolidated position from which to go experiment and play; go forth with confidence and an open mind.
By way of a parting shot, if you were to take 2 comparable athletes in any discipline, age, sex, experience, height, weight etc. I’ll put money on the one who invested in strength training as the winner every time.
