Introduction to scientific principles of Strength Training
“How do I get stronger?” Is one of the most common questions I get asked when working with clients. There probably isn’t a human on earth that didn’t wish that they were stronger. However, if you don’t have experience training, the answer on how to get stronger might not be so simple. Nobody wants to spend hours and hours at the gym only to yield minimal strength gains. Which is why we should approach the question of “How do I get stronger?” using the 7 key scientific principles of strength training.
Importance of Strength Training
Before we even get started, why is strength training important? The answer to that question is very simple. The stronger you are the easier it will be for you to accomplish a wide variety of physical tasks during the day. For example, if you are strength training regularly it will be much easier for you to work a physical job lifting heavy objects. Or perhaps you train martial arts and are often disadvantaged due to your lack of strength, strength training will help combat that. Maybe you just like looking like a beast in the gym.
One of the biggest, and in my opinion most important reasons to strength train regularly, is to limit muscular atrophy as we age. When we get older our bodies will at a certain point begin to reduce the amount of hormones that it produces. Hormones like testosterone and HGH (Human Growth Hormone), that are the building blocks for muscular growth, will begin to decline slowly in and around our mid 30’s to early 40’s. But, strength training regularly throughout your life will help offset this big-time, helping you maintain strength as you get older. Imagine being in your late 60’s but still able to move around easily and pick up large objects without hurting yourself. Sounds pretty great to me!
The Role of Scientific Principles in Maximizing Results
Before you run to the gym and start ego lifting by picking up the biggest weights you can find and slam them onto the ground, let’s try to approach this as scientifically as we can. Mindlessly lifting weights without any real plan might work in the early stages (newbie gains), but this is not going to be productive long-term.
To help you develop a plan for your own training routine, let’s analyze these seven key scientific principles of strength training:
- Progressive Overload
- Specificity
- Individual Differences
- Variation
- Recovery and Rest
- Nutrition and Hydration
- Monitoring and Adaptation
Principle 1: Progressive Overload
Progressive overload is one of the most fundamental and rudimentary aspects of strength training. Without it, it will be near impossible for you to get stronger.
Understanding the Concept of Progressive Overload
Ever been to the gym and seen a guy bench pressing 315 pounds? If it’s your first time setting foot in a gym you might look at that and think that is completely unachievable! How are some people able to do that with such ease!? I’ll tell you right now, they didn’t come out of the womb able to do that. Strength is built slowly over a long period of time. Odds are, at some point in their life they were only able to bench the bar. Slowly, and over a long period of time, they gradually increased the weight and their training volume week by week until benching 315 became possible.
To more definitively explain, progressive overload involves “gradually increasing the volume and intensity of your workouts over a long period of time.”
How to Implement Progressive Overload Safely and Effectively
Start by picking a resistance training exercise and performing that exercise with 8-12 repetitions, and aim for 4 sets. To know you are lifting the right amount of weight, you should be able to perform all 8-12 repetitions as you approach failure on your last repetition. To safely and effectively utilize the method of progressive overload, you should aim to increase the total volume of that strength training exercise by no more than 10% per week. It is important to not let your ego get the best of you, think in the long term gains, not the short term. It takes years to become strong!
Principle 2: Specificity
Specificity can be thought of as “If I spend time training a specific movement, how will training that movement be useful to me?” In other words, if you become really good at deadlifting, does this translate to a real world application? In this example, yes it does. If you become a really strong deadlifter, this can translate to a real world strength gain that is applicable to any case where you would need to bend down and pick something heavy up.
Identifying the Relevance of Specificity in Strength Training
You might be thinking, “Well wait a minute, wouldn’t all strength building exercises translate to some amount of functional use?” Yes, but also no. Every strength building exercise has some translation to real world application, but are you using them all? Probably not. The goal should be try to tailor your strength building exercises towards specific muscle groups for specific reasons.
Tailoring Your Workouts for Targeted Muscle Development
Let’s use specificity to help tailor a strength-building workout plan for a fictional athlete that participates in Jiu Jitsu competitions. Jiu Jitsu frequently uses the motion of bridging the hips in order to off-balance an opponent. This motion is controlled by our glutes.
For our example, we will name our fictional athlete Gordon. Gordon is having a difficult time bridging his hips against larger opponents, resulting in him being unable to escape from bottom position. To help Gordon increase his strength in this movement, an exercise he could use is barbell hip thrusts. This exercise is extremely effective in loading the glutes. If Gordon practices barbell hip thrusts over the course of a few weeks to a few months while also utilizing progressive overload, he should see a functional difference in the ability to bridge his hips against opponents that weigh more than him.
Now maybe you don’t participate in any other sports, so you might be having a hard time using specificity to tailor your own workout routines. This is ok! You are not always going to have a specific use as clear as Gordon’s Jiu Jitsu. Not all strength training has to translate to sport. Let’s say you work at a moving company for example, you could do squats and deadlifts and this will simulate lifting heavy loads with your legs. These are just a few examples of specificity, but it can best be thought of as “what relevance does this exercise have?”
Principle 3: Individual Differences
When it comes to building strength, everyone is going to be vastly different from one another. There are many different factors (genetics, time previously spent training, sex, etc.) that determine how strong an individual can be in a particular movement. Genetics are huge factor!
Acknowledging the Unique Traits of Individuals in Strength Training
Take for instance, someone who has very long arms. People with long arms can be disadvantaged initially when building strength because their arms have to travel much further to accomplish certain movements. It is much easier for someone with shorter arms to lift the same amount of weight due to the lesser amount of distance that the weight must travel. This isn’t to say that people with long arms are doomed to build strength, it just means they are slightly disadvantaged and it might take them longer to increase strength in certain movements.
Personalizing Training Approaches for Optimal Gains
Let’s say that you were born with really skinny legs, but your upper body is naturally built pretty well. It might be most worth your time in the gym to put more focus and more emphasis on building your lower body. If you were to just continue working out your upper body every time you went to the gym, this would only re-enforce the imbalance you have been genetically predisposed to, resulting in an unbalanced physique. This might not be the best example because the focus is on size/shape rather than strength, but the approach is fundamentally the same. Find the areas you are most weak in, and improve them!
Principle 4: Variation
Often times when you are sticking to a training routine, you will end up favoring certain movements over others. You may tend to craft your workout routines to only feature those particular movements after a while, resulting in a plateau. The best thing that you can do to get past a plateau is to change it up! Variety is the spice of life!
Incorporating Different Exercises and Techniques to Avoid Plateaus
For this example, let’s say you are working on training your bench press and you have come to a plateau. What we can do to push past the plateau is to use variations of the bench press movement, to help target different areas of the muscle group. So instead of training flat bench all of the time, let’s change it up and train incline bench press maybe for a few weeks to target the upper chest.
Or we could train decline bench to target the lower part of the chest. Maybe we feel that our triceps are the limiting factor, so we reduce the weight on the bar and move our hands closer together to target our triceps more. There are a ton of different options we have at our disposal to increase strength in particular movements! If you feel stuck, start changing things up every once and a while, you will notice it makes a huge difference.
Principle 5: Recovery and Rest
When it comes to building strength, rest and recovery both play a vital role in muscle protein synthesis, the underlying metabolic process responsible for building muscle size and strength.
Understanding the Role of Rest and Recovery in Muscle Repair
Every time you lift weights, you are putting stress on your muscle that causes micro-tears in the muscle that you are training. After your workout is over your body works on repairing these small micro-tears with protein, and the muscle grows slightly bigger and stronger than before. This process is known as muscle protein synthesis.
If you don’t give your body enough time to recover from the exercises that you performed, it will severely limit the amount of muscle protein synthesis that can occur. Overtraining can be largely detrimental to strength training if not carefully mitigated.
Strategies for Enhancing Recovery and Preventing Overtraining
One of the best ways to mitigate overtraining if you are strength training several times a week is to split your training up by muscle groups. Dedicate one day to chest/tricep, one for back/biceps, one for shoulders, and one for legs. There are a few other variations of strength training splits but this is among the most common. Make sure that you have rest days dedicated to rest and recovery, otherwise you could actually be losing muscle instead of gaining it!
Principle 6: Nutrition and Hydration
Both hydration and nutrition play a vital role in our quest to gain strength. You have heard the phrase “you are what you eat” and that couldn’t be more true. If you eat like garbage you are likely going to feel like garbage. But if you eat like a warrior, chances are you will look and feel like a warrior.
Examining the Crucial Impact of Nutrition on Strength Training
When it comes to nutrition there is so much direct involvement with strength training that it deserves its own article. However, I will try to keep things short and simple to help us maintain the overall topic of this article.
Everything that we eat is made up of macronutrients. Each of these are vital to the muscle building process. Protein is directly responsible for the repair and growth of muscle tissue, carbs are responsible for delivery of energy to the muscles during movement, and fats help us absorb vitamins which help us produce the energy and hormones required to build muscle. Depending on your goals in the gym, the macronutrient ratio you might require could be different. For a general recommendation of the macronutrient ratio that you should be targeting, you can view this page.
When looking to gain muscle and strength you should also be in a caloric surplus. But you don’t want to over-do it. Large caloric surpluses can make you gain a disproportionate amount of fat. Instead of a larger caloric surplus, aim for 100-200 calories above maintenance levels. This should allow you to slowly gain muscle without gaining a bunch of fat along the way. It’s going to feel like slow progress, but strength training is all about long term progress, and you don’t want to end up looking fat for the sake of being strong. Take it slow, eat clean, and enforce good dietary habits.
The Role of Hydration in Maximizing Performance and Recovery
Hydration plays a huge role in strength training. When you are de-hydrated your body is not effectively able to use carbohydrates (carbo-hydrate – hey wait a minute) in order to deliver the energy that is required for a muscle to work. It is also important to point out that just drinking water is not enough. You need to make sure your body is getting the required amount of electrolytes (sodium, potassium, magnesium, etc.) in order to effectively retain water.
Principle 7: Monitoring and Adaptation
Once you have effectively implemented the other 6 scientific principles of strength training, you now have to carefully monitor your training and make adjustments as needed. If you just robotically follow the other 6 principles you could be neglecting areas that need attention.
The Significance of Tracking Progress and Results
One good surefire way to track progress is to write down all of your training programs in a notebook. Write down all of the exercises that you did, the amount of sets/reps performed, and the amount of weight lifted. In the future you might feel like you are not making progress, but go back and check the book. Even small progress is still progress, and chances are you will still see some amount of progress.
How to Adapt Your Training Program Based on Feedback
If you look back a month later and you literally haven’t made any progress at all, it may be time to change things up. Hey wait a minute, that is principle number 4 (variation)! See what changes you can make to your training program to progressively overload and make your next small gain. You could increase your overall volume, maybe add a new exercise, try a variation of a certain movement. There are many options, but having all of your lifts documented are going to be key in identifying your weak points!
Conclusion – Scientific Principles of strength training
If you are looking to build strength I highly recommend to use these 7 scientific principles of strength training. Strength training does not mean going into the gym and throwing weights up and down until you are completely exhausted, there is a scientific approach to improving. Be careful and meticulous in crafting your plan, and remember not to do too much at once. The task of building strength can be daunting, but just remember to make one small improvement at a time. Over the course of a much longer period of time is where you will see the most success!
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