Strength Training Principles

Understanding the Strength Training Principles is the key to building an effective strength training routine.  Let's start with the basics.

What is Strength?

Strength is your ability to exert a force. It is NOT the same as the size of your muscles. The two may be related, but they are not the same thing. You can build extreme strength without gaining much (or any) muscle mass. You can build a lot of muscle without much increase in strength. You can also build muscle and strength at the same time.

Building bigger muscles increases your strength because you have more muscle fibres to lift any given weight. So how can you get stronger if you don’t add muscle mass?

Well, whenever you lift a given weight, you never activate actually activate all the muscle fibres in the working muscle. How much of your muscle you activate depends on the strength of the neural connection that sends the “contract” signal to your muscle fibres.

The primary aim of strength training is to train the nervous system, not the muscles – by strengthening these neural pathways, you are able to activate a larger percentage of the muscle fibre you already have.

Thus, your muscles contract with more force, enabling you to lift heavier weights. Strength training is the most efficient way to build strength (surprise!).

Strength Training Principle #1

• Lift heavy weight!

This one’s obvious. Strength is developed when you train in the 1-5 rep range. Higher rep ranges (6-10) are better suited to hypertrophy. You’ll get stronger more quickly by doing sets of 5 reps with a heavier weight, than sets of 10 with a lighter one.

Strength Training Principle #2

• Avoid muscular failure

Muscle can still be built when you push yourself to the limit on every set. Strength training however requires that you stop short of failure.

If you’re pushing yourself so hard that it takes 10 seconds to complete the final rep of every exercise, then your central nervous system is going to burn out within a couple of weeks and you’ll wind up getting weaker.

To build strength in the long term you must stay well away from failure. Coach Rippetoe, a leading authority on strength training, suggests that you rack the weight once the bar speed starts to slow down.

If you’re used to a muscle building workout, this might feel premature. If it does, that’s good – it means you’re training in the right way to build strength consistently.

Strength Training Principle #3

• Train fairly frequently.

Many bodybuilding routines have the trainee hitting each muscle group once per week. That may work for certain types of muscle building, but it’s too infrequent to develop strength – strength training requires repeated frequent action. Training each lift every 3 or 4 days is optimal.

• Do the right exercises.

Exercise selection is so important if you want to build functional strength. 

Exercises that look the same on the surface and feel like they work the same muscles may actually have totally different long-term effects. 

One may build real functional strength, and the other may do next to nothing (and this might be the case even if you’re adding weight to the bar and building size with both exercises)

So, which exercises? The answer is heavy compound lifts, and bodyweight exercises (with extra weight attached if need be). These are the strength builders. Machines and cables are leagues behind in their capacity to build strength that carries over to real-world activities and sports.

The leg press is out, barbell squats are in. Lat pulldowns – no, pullups – yes.  You get the picture!

Now that you know what strength is and how to develop it, check back in at the Strength Training Workouts to start piecing together your routine.

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