Is your strength training going to get results?

Are you getting results?  How would you know?  Maybe you’ve been training consistently for a few months, but you can’t see any difference.

Are you training hard enough?  Are you training too hard?  Again, how would you know?

When you lift, do you chase the burn?  Are you chasing muscle soreness?  Many people train intuitively, especially in the beginning.  But if you are relying on intuition, you’re leaving tons of progress on the table.    

In this article, I’ll share two strength training principles every lifter needs to know.  Not only will it help you get results, it will also give you a reliable way to measure progress.

Let’s start by clearing away some common misconceptions.

Muscle burn

When you lift weights, you often feel a burning sensation in your muscles.  It’s common to equate that sensation with effectiveness.  Most people do exactly that. They rate the effectiveness of their training by the amount of burn they feel. 

Well, the burn is a symptom of metabolic stress.  As you work, the body builds up metabolic waste products, and as they build up, you feel a burn.  It feels like work. 

The science can get complicated, but the practical application is that metabolic stress has little direct correlation with getting stronger or building muscle.

Muscle soreness

Similarly muscle soreness, doesn’t guarantee progress.  When you get started, it’s normal to feel sore.  It’s called Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness (DOMS).  

It typically goes away in a couple of weeks.  Your muscles adapt.  They become resistant to damage, and they learn to recover faster.

It’s a very specific adaptation, so every time you try a new exercise or change how many times you work a muscle, you’re likely to feel sore.  For example if you’re used to squatting and try some Bulgarian split squats for the first time, it’s going to hurt.

So here again, DOMs doesn’t mean gains.

If your goal is strength or muscles, then feeling a burn or being sore the next day has little to do with the effectiveness of your training.  It’s a fundamentally flawed measure of effectiveness. 

Is there a better way? 

Yes, and it starts with an understanding of progressive overload.

Principle 1: Progressive Overload

How do you build muscle?

The answer lies in the concept known as progressive overload.  When you lift something heavy, it creates a significant challenge for your muscles.  In response to that challenge, your muscles grow bigger and your nervous system becomes more efficient.  You get stronger.

There’s an ancient example of this process.  Perhaps you’ve heard of Milo of Croton.  He lived in the 6th-century BC and was a very accomplished wrestler.  As the legend goes, he built his incredible strength by carrying a newborn calf.  He carried it every day for four years.  As the calf grew, he did too.  After four years, he was no longer carrying a newborn calf but a 4-year-old bull. 

So far so good.

But here’s the problem for many lifters.  As your muscles grow bigger, the heavy things you’re lifting stop being heavy enough.  It may feel heavy enough.  You probably don’t enjoy lifting it.  It may even feel like work, but for your muscles, it has stopped being a reason to get bigger.

In other words, if you lift the same weight for the same number of reps week after week and month after month, you are not building muscle. 

Progressive overload is central to success.  To get bigger, you need to lift heavier and heavier things.

How do you make progress?

For most people, a repetition range progression is often ideal.  Here’s an example.  Suppose you’re setting up to do some squats.  You’re going to lift 100 pounds.  You have a rep range of 10-15.  After a warm up, you do your first working set and hit 13 reps.  You write down those numbers.  100 pounds and 13 reps.  That first set is your benchmark set.  It’s the number to beat.

The next time you squat (probably a week later), you set up with 100 pounds and strive to beat 13 reps.  When you hit 15 reps, you increase the weight.  You progress just like that from session to session.  You always increase either the number of reps or the weight.

The rep range won’t necessarily be 10-15.  It will vary depending on the exercise and your program.

You can use a similar process for body weight training.  For example, let’s say you’re working towards a one-arm-pushup, and you’re currently doing regular pushups.  You can set a progression standard of 20 pushups.  You keep adding more pushups from session to session until you hit 20.  When you hit 20, you might move on to a deficit pushup and then a lever pushup.   You don’t progress to the next movement until you hit 20 reps on your first working set.

It’s important to find reasonable progressions.  It won’t work to jump straight from pushups to one-arm-pushups.  Each progression needs to be a small increase in difficulty.

Relatedly you don’t want to go above 30 reps unless your goal is muscle endurance.  Once you go above 30 reps, you are no longer training strength but rather endurance. 

Progressive overload is a simple and ancient practice that can be adapted to almost any training.  If you’re determined to get stronger, be determined to steadily lift heavier weight.

HERE ARE SOME KEY POINTS TO KEEP IN MIND.

• Progressive Overload: The goal is to make some progress every session.  If you lift the same weight for the same number of reps week after week and month after month, you are not building muscle.

• The first set of each exercise is your benchmark.  Every time you set up for that first set, you must strive to beat your last session. 

• As a rule, you can expect a little gain every single session.  It will be small, but it’s there.  And it needs to add up.

• Each exercise will have a rep range.  When you reach the top of the rep range, it’s time to add more weight.

• Some exercises lend themselves to constant increases in weight.  For example if you squat 200 pounds, you can add a couple pounds session after session. 

Principle 2: Proximity to Failure

Are you training hard enough?  Are you training too hard?  Here again intuition is not a good guide.  Instead, you need to build your awareness of your proximity to failure.  Here’s how that works.

Failure is the point where you cannot do another repetition of a given exercise.  For example, if you are doing pullups, failure is when you cannot do another pullup.  It isn’t the point when you don’t want to do another pull up.  It’s the point when you are physically incapable of doing another pull up.

You know when you are at failure in one of three ways.  First, you know it when you hit it.  When you hit true failure, there isn’t any real question about doing another repetition.  That’s that.  You’re done for that set. 

Most people don’t hit true failure unless they’ve been lifting for a while.  It takes a lot of motivation and is easily influenced by your beliefs.  If you’re relatively new to training, keep this in mind.  You can probably progress faster and lift more than you think.

Second, with experience you can feel failure coming.  For example, you may be on your 8th pull up and you can tell you only have two or three more pullups left in you.  You know the feeling, because you’ve failed enough times in the past.

A good sign that you’re close to failure is slowing down.  You become less explosive.  It takes longer to do each rep.

Third, as you approach failure your form will start to break down.  Again, pullups provide an obvious example.  A good pullup should end with your chest at the bar.  As fatigue sets in, you’ll struggle to reach the same range of motion.  There’s a temptation to cheat and keep going, but technically, you started failing reps the moment you stopped touching the bar with your chest.

 SO WHEN SHOULD YOU STOP?

Hitting failure is not ideal.  It’s ok once in a while.  In fact, it’s probably necessary once in a while just so you know where failure is.  Will you hit failure at 10 reps or is it 15?  You need to have a pretty good idea.  But as a rule, you don’t want to constantly hit failure.

Here’s why. 

When you hit true failure, it induces a ton of fatigue.  Hitting failure sucks, and it takes a long time to recover.  And yet, it only induces a tiny bit of extra growth.  If you avoid constantly hitting true failure, you can train more often.    Ultimately, that last brutal rep is almost all fatigue and barely any growth.  It’s a bad trade.

Of course, there is another side to the story.  If you are more than 5 reps from failure, that’s no good either.  If you can do 20 pushups before you hit failure but only do 14, you’re not building much strength or muscle. 

You can take some advice and inspiration from Arnold.

"The last three or four reps is what makes the muscle grow. This area of pain divides the champion from someone else who is not a champion. That's what most people lack, having the guts to go on and just say they'll go through the pain no matter what happens."  --Arnold Schwarzenegger

In other words, those last two or three uncomfortable reps are gold.  That’s where all the growth is. 

Consequently, the best place to stop seems to be between 1 and 3 reps from failing. You want to finish a set of movements with 1-3 reps left in the tank.  So if you’re doing an exercise, stop each set when you can only do 1-3 more lifts.  

HERE ARE SOME KEY POINTS TO KEEP IN MIND.

• Proximity to Failure: Failure is the point where you cannot do another repetition of a given exercise.  So if you are doing pullups, failure is when you cannot do another pullup.

• It’s ok to occasionally fail a rep.  In fact it’s probably necessary so you can get a feel for where failure is.

• You’ll likely notice that your last reps are slower than your first reps.  As you approach failure, you will get less explosive. 

• If you’re new to strength training, you may be surprised how hard it is to hit true failure.

FINAL THOUGHTS

If strength means anything, it means the capacity to lift heavy things.  By definition, the stronger person should be able to lift more.  Consequently, to maintain growth you must strive to increase the challenge.  You need to lift more from one week to the next.  Unless you’re advanced, anything less than that is a waste of time.

So go out there and get after it.