Day Three – Strength Training
Strength training refers to your ability to generate force. Having raw strength to push, pull and move things safely is the foundation of an athletic body.
The best exercises to build overall ‘functional’ strength are the ones that work the biggest muscles and activate the most muscle fibres. I would argue that Romanian Deadlifts, the Front Squat, The Bench Press, the Pull-Up and Bent Over rows are the five fundamental movement patterns we should all be doing.
A caveat. When sculpting your body for a precise aesthetic, you must modify some of these big five moves and add in some extra strength (& conditioning) exercises. You can get strong and lean simultaneously; in fact, I’ve had several catwalk model clients bust out multiple reps of 100kg+ Romanian Deadlifts as part of their programming. Later in this course, there are two very detailed lessons and additional free resources to help you achieve the exact look you want while maintaining a holistic and athletic approach to life.
How many sets & reps?
Muscles get toned/firm/strong by putting them under the right amount of stress and recovering (with rest, sleep & good nutrition). Using a weight/exercise variation between 5-10 reps is generally considered best. This means that when you push it, you still have just about do five reps with excellent form but can only do an absolute maximum of 10 reps.
Yes, picking weights a bit too light and doing three hard reps or 15 reps will still give strength benefits… but it won’t quite be as effective. (or maybe it will; some interesting evidence came out in 2021 to suggest that rep range isn’t as important as we used to think.. but I think it’s a bit too early to ditch the conventional wisdom)
For strength, my general rules are to utilise a 5-10 rep range and do 3-4 sets per exercise with 90 seconds of rest between each set. Doing 300-500 reps per major muscle group in any given week is about the right to build strength.
How hard do you go?
Muscles like being pushed, but to stay injury-free, we need to train our body and mind so we can train ‘better’, i.e. maintaining form at a high level of intensity. For the first ten years of my career, I worked in the world of elite strength & conditioning, helping athletes in many different disciplines. I learned first-hand that out of all the exercise and dietary variables. It was their attitude, shown by their tolerance for being in discomfort, their focus and the resilience to do those nasty last few reps… which made the biggest difference to their gym and sporting performances.
My take on high-performance living life requires you to think and act like an athlete. When you train hard and train smart in the way I will be sharing, your attitude/mindset, mental toughness, resilience, humility, and focus will not only be cultivated to make you better at fitness but will spill over into all areas of your life. Lesson 18 will explore this side of fitness in more detail.
A challenge for you
A hard strength session is very exposing! I want you to do something I ALWAYS do in my initial assessment session with private clients. New clients think that this exercise is a test for their upper strength. Nope… I’m assessing their attitude.
Do as many press-ups as you can. That’s it. Just one set, please. Don’t stop when it hurts, don’t stop when your arms wobble. Don’t count reps… just zen-out and let your body do as many as you can. (No, you can’t put your knees on the floor, but yes, you can have your hands raised on bench/sofa if you want).
Well done… so let me ask, could you do one more press-up if your family’s life depended on it? If the answer is yes, then rest for a minute, and do another set, and this time really gets to your limit, please. Focus on the process, on the sensation, and on breathing out every time you push up. Just as with meditation, stay so focused on the ‘now’ that the ego can’t engage. Lose yourself in the process. If you ever want to practice ‘mindfulness’, then exercise is the perfect opportunity.
On a physiological level, this level of intensity gets better results because muscles develop (and all body changes happen). After all, we have an incredibly efficient stress-adapt response built into our DNA. However, you must create enough stress to invoke changes; that’s why the last few reps of any strength exercise are the most important. More interesting is the psychological effect; You are developing your character when you push through your perceived limit in anything in life.
The principle of progressive overload
To continue to get stronger, you must keep on increasing the stress on the muscle, so this may mean doing heavier weights, changing grip placement, playing with tempo, pre-fatiguing or doing eccentrics. There are a whole host of techniques to play with, but you have to keep making it harder somehow!
For existentialists or Greek myth scholars reading this, strength training can sometimes make you feel like Sisyphus, who the gods condemned to roll a boulder up a mountain for eternity, but like anything in life, strength training is kind of fun the better you get. Competence breeds confidence.
How to hire a Strength Coach
If you are looking for an actual 1-2-1 trainer to help you with your strength gains, the vast majority of personal trainers can help, but when in doubt, my advice is to pay for specialist expertise and hire an actual Strength & Conditioning Coach. Someone with the letters CSCS after their name is a very safe bet. It stands for certified strength & conditioning specialist from the NSCA (USA’s National Strength & Conditioning Association), and for the last 20 years, It’s been the gold-standard qualification in the field of strength & Conditioning for athletes. I’ve done it.. and it’s way harder/better than personal training qualifications.
Having a coach is not essential, but it makes learning quicker and easier. Personally, whenever I want to learn something new, I don’t want to waste any time, so I’ll always hire the best person I can find to help me. In addition, as I will talk about later.. if you stumble across a truly great coach/teacher (in any discipline) always hire them!
p.s Some of these early lessons have to be a bit technical. Stay with me! This course gets more fun as we go on!
p.p.s If you do fancy a bit more technical info – read this interesting feature about the different types of hypertrophy